This is what the money has been waiting to follow

I'm pleased to see Dachis extolling the notion of 'social business design', expanding into Europe through acquisition and picking up mainstream media coverage for it.

As I commented on Dave Armano's blog (Dave is part of the Dachis revolution), I'm delighted to see social business design (and all other descriptions of making business more efficient through crowd-sourced solutions) being legitimised. (Image courtesy)

I've always seen business transformation as the end goal of any organisation's involvement in social media. (It ain't social media if it doesn't change your business). It's behind presentations such as 'Adapting Brands to the Networked World'.

This is true for all forms of organisation - from businesses to institutions.

And I have a growing sense that this is what the money has been waiting to follow.

Because this adaptation of business to the networked world shows direct return on investment - it streamlines businesses, creates new orders of efficiency in everything from product development, to marketing, to recruitment, to you name it...

It delivers business models (and businesses) adapted to the networked world. It enables businesses to exist in a rapidly transforming world.

One small example: The people who can make the biggest difference to your company don't work for it. Adapting to the network means they can.

If there is a part of your business that can't be disrupted by adhoc communities of purpose (forming online to improve on what you currently do) you are in an extremely enviable position.

The social business design thang (and I'm not sure that'll be how we end up describing efficiency through social technologies, but it's a neat short-form for now) is a cost-effective launch model, too.

To deliver you don't need millions of users on 'your' platform , a gazzillion servers and more bandwidth than Twitter when a celeb dies, before some fantasised micro-payment model starts paying back the millions sunk by scale-fixated VCs.

That's why I think investors will find this 'use' of (we really mean participation in) social technologies so much more exciting and potentially rewarding than throwing cash at the next Facebook or Twitter.

So that just leaves one question for me... who is going to pay for the tools and platforms which deliver the real-time, beyond-silo, connections on which social business design relies (the next Facebook or Twitter)?

Perhaps that leads us back to my previous post....

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