I was able to attend the Dachis Groups inaugural Social Business Summit 2010 yesterday, in Austin TX, and it contained a pretty stacked line-up of social business thinkers. Rather then writing some kind of review of the experience, I thought it would be more useful for me to just say that I really enjoyed myself, shout out to Peter Kim, and to highlight some of the key things I took away from some of the various speakers:
The Good Stuff
There was a lot of good stuff at the conference. The following are the big themes that really resonated with me, and got me excited that they were being talked about:
Doug Rushkoff – @rushkoff
“The way for companies to make money is to actually be good at something.”
I think that it’s easy for organizations to look at something like social media and think that it could possibly substitute for a solid product and decent customer service… it can’t. Doug sums it up rather nicely.
Charlene Li – @charleneli
“Social Business is hard because management must be able to give up the need to control, while being able to command.”
Spot on. The need to control is exactly the challenge that most large organizations are facing. After sitting through the conference, it became apparent that command means having documented strategy and policies that people can be held accountable against. Control means saying no.
Jamie Punishill – @jpunishill
“It is very hard to adjust a company’s bio-rhythms to align with the social web.”
Totally agree. Massive bureaucracy in approval processes and meetings are real time killers. Allowing everybody to have a say, means that you’re not going to be able to capitalize on things as they happen… Which is key because the half life of a story on-line is somewhere between two to four hours.
Frank Eliason – @comcastcares
“Personalizing customer stories and sharing internally with customer care associates drive reaction.”
The point being that working stiffs, like me, look at data all day long. But it isn’t until you see an actual personal story from somebody before it gets personal for the people in the Ivory Tower. Frank’s team started sharing customer blog posts, good and bad, so that everyone in the company can find out what’s going on.
We’re All In This Thing
It was really good to find out that the people working in large organizations were facing the same challenges as I have faced, and that there are some external organizations that understand those challenges are equipping themselves to help us brave this new frontier.
Good times.
:
There are many Chris Hall's in this world. This one blogs and tweets under the code name: hallicious.
