As organizations gain confidence — and comfort — with a social approach to doing business, they will see the merit of including customers in different parts of their company. As Jeremiah Owyang outlines, beyond PR and communication, there are natural extensions to marketing, support and product development. We’ve seen vivid examples with Starbucks VIA, Best Buy Twelpforce, and Dell IdeaStorm. I’ve personally had recruiters contact me via LinkedIn and Yammer does a great job as an internal tool. Executives from various Fortune 500 corps are even on Twitter.

So now that we’re well on our way, what’s next?

Organizational re-alignment. While we have momentum, let’s use it to make some fundamentally important changes to how companies are aligned. Right now, too many companies are stuck in silos that mean nothing to their customers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on a call being transferred from one group to the next, as the buck was being passed around. With an organization that is setup to operate the way a customer would, the experience for them becomes a lot better and they get happier. Pretty simple.

Processes designed around customer thinking. Have you ever tried to return something or get support and are forced to learn that company’s language and way of doing things? Let’s make things as simple as they can be so that each step is intuitive and natural. If I bought something online, let me return it in the store. If I need service or support, assess my technical skill level before throwing a dozen pieces of information at me at once. Put yourself in my shoes.

There are probably more that I’m missing, for sure. Getting companies to where customers are going is hard work. The key, like Wayne Gretzky said, is to “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.“  Customers are moving very quickly and to go where customers are going will force companies to become more like their customers. And that begins by thinking like them.

The concept of alternative measures isn’t new. Back in b-school, we learned about something called the Balanced Scorecard, a way to determine whether a company’s activities were aligned with its strategic goals. By examining non-financial metrics of business such as operational efficiency, marketing and other components, it brought to light factors that contributed to the bottom line of the company. Ultimately, it helps managers make decisions on what to fix, where to invest and what to do next.

Businesses now live in a hyper-exposed world that demands a new level of transparency and open organizational design. It used to be that companies could force customers to jump through myriad hoops to return a product or get support. Today, that isn’t good enough when a negative experience can be propagated through Facebook, Yelp, YouTube or Twitter within minutes. Some people have been calling social media a fad, but clearly it isn’t going away anytime soon. If anything, it is exposing companies’ shortcomings in customer experience and expectations.

What to do? I propose using something I’ll call the Social Scorecard. It’s a way of indexing how engaged, open and transparent a corporation truly is. It would examine online & offline customer engagement points and assess how well customers are integrated into the company culture. Ultimately, it would include measures that align customer needs into business goals. It can be used as a touchstone for designing customer experiences or even a manifesto for rallying the troops. There would be a whole host of other measures too, such as a company’s adoption of social tools, such as how it uses social networks to find talent or how it uses crowdsourcing to generate product concepts or gather feedback. We could also look at the level of transparency in terms of how it treats its employees, vendors and suppliers and factor in what it’s doing to create a sustainably profitable operation. Collectively, these measures provide added perspective on how to run your business, perspective that can bring value in ways you didn’t realize.

As it turns out, there is something called the Dunbar’s number, 150, which according to Wikipedia “is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.” This has come out of hundreds of years of communities developing and growing. Once they reach around 150, they need to split off and form new ones. This principle has been applied to many different areas of business, including organizational design and company growth patterns. Companies like Intel and Microsoft  have taken this to heart, which explains how their corporate campuses consist of many small buildings rather than huge single monoliths.
Enter Scoble’s Number. It is a new way of looking at social interactions. Instead of the focus on “stable social relationships” it is more about setting up types of relationships and having different levels of engagement and expectations for each. This dramatically expands the absolute number of people you potentially communicate with. So, unless you allocate more time to maintaining your network, this setup reduces the amount of interaction you have with each of them — something has got to give.

Perhaps this is the way forward; segment the type of connections you have and maintain a larger set of weaker connections for a diversity of opinion. As social networks continue to expand, this may well be the future. [Update: Check out David Armano’s recent thoughts on social becoming “to look less social.”

A recent post on Mashable got me wondering about the effect of diluting proprietary intellectual property when it’s shared through social networks, Twitter and the like. It used to be that quality of original thought determined whether or not you were making a valuable contribution, particularly in academia. This was valued above all else – and it generally still is – but today, what you decide to share and what idea you encourage through reposting, linking, retweeting and such, is another facet of value. Shifting from being strictly content creators to being content curators and sharers as well is a new responsibility that falls in our laps.

The question now is, what goes into determining the quality of what you share? I would say it involves the following:

Timeliness: Spread content that is fresh in people’s minds. It doesn’t need to be minutes after it happens, but do try to share it if it’s made the news or has reached critical mass on blogs/Twitter. A week after it hits the web is probably too late for anyone to care about.

Quality: Try to do a bit of due diligence before randomly re-tweeting or passing along blog posts. It behooves you to at least read to what’s being linked to if only to see if the link still works. Making sure it’s “safe for work” is also part of good sharing etiquette. Unless of course, you want to punk your audience.

Frequency: Regular posting is also important. Aim to share something good once/day for a couple of reasons. First, it keeps you in the minds of others, but also because it becomes habitual for you. If you’re on the web enough, there should be no shortage of valuable content to share and the hard part is actually editing it down to the few impactful items.

Relevance: Please, please, please describe why someone should be clicking on a link to a piece of content be it a blog post, news article, image or video. A dozen or so words to contextualize something will often save a lot of time and frustration.

There are probably more criteria I could add, but let’s use these for starters.

In the meantime, I’ve lost track of all the apps I have running to keep track of everyone. Let’s see what I typically have running in the background:

Trillian: Work and personal MSN, AIM, YIM
TweetDeck: Twitter, Facebook status updates
Yammer client: Work-related “yams”
MS Communicator: Work colleague IM’s

Whoa, talk about application overload. (Maybe this is why my computer is so slow.) But this doesn’t even cover Flickr or RSS feeds. I’ve been thinking that it’d be nice to have a SINGLE multi-platform (read Adobe Air) app that could rule them all and have an open architecture that could extend to future uses.

Fallon, the advertising agency, has come up with something close called Skimmer. They call it a “lifestreaming thing” and it’s a great effort at trying to consolidate your social life into a single app. Worth taking a look at if you’re looking to simplify your life.

The writers covered many of the issues that face the U.S. from the economy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, energy and so forth. What struck me though, was the final two paragraphs that simultaneously praised Obama’s use of technology and took a dig at blogs:

Mr. Obama rode to the White House partly on his savvy use of new technology, and he has a staff-written blog on his presidential Web site. Even so, he said he did not find blogs to be reliable, citing the economy as one example.

“Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs,” he said, “is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another — well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine.”

A few points of interpretations of this statement:

• The NY Times is trying to convey that it still has more journalistic integrity and accuracy. This is a fair point and not to be taken lightly. Journalists are held to a higher standard while bloggers generally are not. Yet, when it comes to influence, many bloggers enjoy broad audiences who may think the blogger has done a “good enough” job doing due diligence.
• I wonder how bloggers go about establishing credibility. Once a blogger has established a sizable audience, accuracy and validity seem to be assumed and taken for granted. Obama’s comments suggests bloggers need to apply more analytical rigor to their analyses and before he will be take them more seriously. If the problems the U.S. faces were really that straightforward as some bloggers illustrate, there would be straightforward answers. Clearly, this is not the case.
• Bloggers are not necessarily problem solvers. It’s kind of like how critics are not the creators or restaurant reviewers are not chefs. Unless a blogger has actually tried to fix some of these issues, he or she would understand the complex landmines on the road to any successful resolution. Talking the talk ain’t walking the walk.

Whether or not Obama’s right by ignoring the blogs isn’t the point. What he is asking for is legitimate analysis and thoughtful proposals. Those don’t come out of thin air or armchair CEO-ing. But I think it ought to begin with bloggers pledging to take a fair and honest approach and even some sort of oath or accreditation. Sure, people will balk and cry foul but this is a win-win for everyone. Readers get better content and bloggers get more credibility. In a future post, how a bloggers oath might play out.

A recent post on Mashable caught my attention, a how-to guide on measuring online influence. It begins with a dictionary-type definition of influence followed by the requisite discussion of personal branding and what it means online. Where things get interesting is how the author dives into mathematical formulae of how to measure influence with the following equations:

Influence = (Personal Brand * Trust * Expertise)

Of course, since Expertise = (Knowledge * Trust), we can further refine the equation to:

Influence = (Personal Brand * Knowledge * Trust2)

I am all for quantifying results but how does one come to these conclusions and more importantly, how does one make these calculations? Whatever happened to integers and real values? I will agree that influence is made up of these components, but to stating it in these terms isn’t helpful nor is it actionable. Some units would be a start.

The next part of the article delves into measuring influence by looking at tings like traffic, connections, track record and so forth. All interesting and valuable metrics. But where the article falls short is defining how these are related  and what to do with the metrics. They are data points without a story to wrap them up in a logical way. They’re sort of like ingredients without a recipe; they’re all important but without knowing what to do with them, they’re just ingredients. I admire the author for putting these ideas together but at the same time, let’s be careful not to position it as a how-to guide when the step-by-step part of it is missing.

I mentioned in an earlier post that quantifying things with rigor is the way to go and in this economy, clients are increasingly expecting this. If it were easy to do, it would have already been done. There are no clearcut accepted ways of doing this yet, so I’m all ears for looking at new methodologies and approaches. Some will work, others won’t. But shying away from facing reality isn’t going to cut the mustard these days. This is something we will be hearing more and more of, so I’ll be revisiting this topic in the future.

Talk about a hot-button topic!

Highly influential bloggers pride themselves on building a following by being truthful and objective, increasingly rare qualities in a world of “advertorials” and non-branded sites that blur the line between honest to goodness content and marketing collateral. It’s fascinating how it is so divisive. As the social world gains momentum, we’re going to see more and more of it so I’d suggest getting comfortable with the idea.

It’s fair to assume that consumers appreciate it when authoritative voices are up front and disclose potentially relevant conflicts of interest as it takes the moral high ground. When you hear financial analysts talk about companies they cover, they are required to disclose if they or their families have any stock positions in these companies. It’s not so cut and dried though, because the financial relationship is the exact opposite — analysts may own stock that they pay for themselves. But if we look at an example closer to the web world, does anyone remember search engines pre-advertising and pre-AdSense? The digerati were up in arms when Google first introduced AdSense but then we realized that it worked because they were trying to help us by delivering contextualized relevance.

Jeremiah Owyang’s recent piece on sponsored conversations has caused a bit of a stir. Essentially, it’s compensating bloggers to write about your company. He is bang-on about how they need to be done “ethically and is sustainable for the long run” and that the topic is pretty controversial. How can it work?

• If bloggers disclose they are being compensated
• If bloggers are free to speak their minds

These rules seem designed to protect the bloggers’ reputations which is fair. But I’d like to see something like a Hippocratic Oath for bloggers who engage in sponsored conversations so that companies can have some peace of mind too. Specifically, I’d include the following:

• Bloggers must speak truthfully about their experience and not have a hidden agenda
• Bloggers must disclose if they have any relationships with competitors
• Bloggers must disclose if they own stock in the company or competitors

That’s about it. If I were a lawyer, I’d add hundreds of other conditions, but my job is to enable conversation and engagement, not put up roadblocks. I think this is a just a start, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below.

Since the outset, there has been furious debate as to whether Twitter can become a sustainable business. How could a company run for over 2 years without any revenue or a sustainable business model? It defied the business strategist side of me, especially when they they turned down a $500MM offer from Facebook. There was even a “Twitter business model contest” to see who could come up with one. Part of the challenge comes from the fact that Twitter has evolved from a single-purpose status bar into a very efficient and direct 1:1  or 1:many communication platform. Increasingly, it’s how I find things out before it hits the news (anyone remember Flight 1549 that crashed in the Hudson? It was reported by Twitterers on the scene within minutes and a full 15 minutes before any major news organization).

In the nearly 3 years since its inception, the service has had its ups and downs — with serious downtime that comes with rapid expansion. Despite the growing pains, users put up with it because it was so addictively satisfying and to some, it represented the bleeding edge of social interaction.

Recently Twitter closed a $35MM series C round of funding which tells me there are indeed people who think there’s a viable revenue model in the works. As we saw with the CNN + Facebook status integration for Obama’s inauguration, there are opportunities for Twitter to do the same — or better — by integrating into other real-time events. Think about it: Twitter attracts super social people who want to share and what better way for brands to connect than via people who will spread the message because they want to? For them, it is less about the brand and more about the social interaction that they would normally do on their own. The question now is, how can Twitter monetize these activities without alienating its users (ahem, Facebook)?

When Google started out back in what seems like an eternity now (1998), one of their mantras was to “do no evil.” No one really knew what that meant, but for better or for worse, at the time it seemed anti-Microsoft and that resonated with many. The search wars were waged, Google won and rose to prominence. While the Myspace/Facebook rivalry plays out, the topic of “do no evil” comes back into discussion. First it was Beacon, the controversial ad service that Facebookers rejected. Then came the design changes that we live with now.

The recent controversy over Facebook’s new terms of service (ToS) essentially gave them extraordinary power: “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers)….” Yes, it’s lawyerspeak but it certainly doesn’t sound enticing to me or any potential new user.

Needless to say, the public balked and Facebook caved and went back to its previous ToS. Now, the company seems to be backing away from its authoritarian stance, taking a more democratic approach by inviting users to craft the privacy policy. In a way, this is somewhat akin to the government asking its citizens to rewrite its laws. The question now is, how can Facebook monetize its massive traffic in a way that its users can accept and what value will users get in return?