Nominate a social business innovator

It's March. So it must be time for the next (the second!) monthly Social Business Innovation Award.
And, just as last month, they can't happen without you.
Right now we need to work together on nominations; making them and attracting suggestions from others. Later in the month we'll need to join together to vote.

Last month found a worthy winner in BusinessCard2.0.

This month let's focus on businesses and organisations which have created,, or significantly improved, their products or services using digital social tools - from forums, microblogs, blogs and ideas platforms to social networks, email and SMS.

As last month, please nominate, with any relevant links, by posting a comment below.
Those that appear in the final nominees list will be entitled to display the badge you see here.

Please call on your friends to join in.

What are these awards all about?

Social business innovation: Efficiency and tranformation through the use of social tools.

We have the best set of tools in history for people to find each other and act together to create and improve on the things that matter to them.

What are we doing with them?

Some businesses and organisations are grasping them to wikifix their products and services, to deliver best-fit R&D and NPD and join in waste-free people-powered communications and marketing. The wikifixing of the world has begun.

Those engaging in the process reach new levels of efficiency thanks to an ever-better fit with the needs of their partners - those formerly known as the customer. (By way of disclosure, that's what we at 90:10 Group help organisations with).

I hope you will join with me to celebrate the best of them - and through this find a path to the communities-of-purpose-driven future of the organisation.

So each month this blog will host a Social Business Innovation of The Month award, nominated by you and voted on by you. The format is very much inspired by Neil Perkin's ThinkTank.

The awards are to recognise great work in open/social business/organisational design/innovation/tranformation/efficiency using social technologies.

The winners will enter a case-study Hall of Fame to be shared with all - and in which the winners can revel in the glory of their peers' admiration ;-). More importantly, we can all get inspiration and guidance.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Announcing: Social Business Innovation Awards (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• Social Business Innovation Awards (stoweboyd.com)
• BusinessCard2 Wins Social Business Innovation Award (prweb.com)

Social Business: The Show

Great to see my good friend Stowe Boyd responding to the blooming and booming interest in the world-changing stuff of social business with a new kind of event.

Social Business Edge is a 'show' not a conference. And it's powered by a cast of great minds (see The Swarm here). I'm delighted to say Stowe has asked me to join that Swarm.

Stowe himself is directing, Jeff Pulver (140conf) is producing.

It's on in New York on April 19, 2010.

As I keep saying, social business (and organisation) innovation is what the money has been waiting to follow; it's what our social tools are for.

It's how we are changing the world niche by niche.

And that deserves a great show. I'm sure Stowe will do it proud.

While you're thinking about such matters, a quick reminder that the Social Business Innovation Awards are now open for nominations.

Maybe the show should get one?

To whet your appetite, here's Stowe himself talking about social business in October last year at the LA 140conf.

"The Social Business will be more like a village than an army... where reputation is more important than title... connections more important than rank and authority derived from connections not from control."

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social Business Online Panel: Stowe Boyd, Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang, and Joshua-Michele Ross (stoweboyd.com)
• Jeff Dachis, Social Business (conversationagent.com)
• A Call for Speakers (and Characters): The 140 Characters Conference: April 20/21 in NYC (pulverblog.pulver.com)
• Real Time Really Disruptive Media Conference in Stockholm (stoweboyd.com)

Announcing: Social Business Innovation Awards

Social business innovation: Efficiency and tranformation through the use of social tools.

We have the best set of tools in history for people to find each other and act together to create and improve on the things that matter to them.

What are we doing with them?

Some businesses and organisations are grasping them to wikifix their products and services, to deliver best-fit R&D and NPD and join in waste-free people-powered communications and marketing. The wikifixing of the world has begun.

Those engaging in the process reach new levels of efficiency thanks to an ever-better fit with the needs of their partners - those formerly known as the customer. (By way of disclosure, that's what we at 90:10 Group help organisations with).

I hope you will join with me to celebrate the best of them - and through this find a path to the communities-of-purpose-driven future of the organisation.

So each month this blog will host a Social Business Innovation of The Month award, nominated by you and voted on by you. The format is very much inspired by Neil Perkin's ThinkTank.

The awards are to recognise great work in open/social business/organisational design/innovation/tranformation/efficiency using social technologies.

The winners will enter a case-study Hall of Fame to be shared with all - and in which the winners can revel in the glory of their peers' admiration ;-). More importantly, we can all get inspiration and guidance.

We'll have some (digital) badges for nominees and winners too (logos etc in production, and if you want to contribute ideas/creative talent please drop my 90:10 colleague Ilkut a line. Make them better than my hastily assembled effort.)

I'm less concerned at this stage about the niceties of defining specific rules (they will emerge), more with encouraging your participation - and that of those you know will care.

So at this stage, let's just nominate what we think is great from anything that's been done right up until now.

I hope one of the side effects will be discovery for those of us working, or planning on working, in this space, too.

But, before we get a chance to vote, we need some nominations.

Just post yours as a comment with a link to anything relevant (slidedeck, blogpost, video etc) and at the end of January we'll open the voting.

Please share with those who will care.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 3 Phase Approach To Creating A "Social" Business Culture (liveactivecultures.net)
• The message is, it's not about the message (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• Vote for social production (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

Vote for social production

Great deck from my chum John Willshire on the subject of social production (communities of purpose; innovation through collaboration and all that good stuff). It has already won one vote - help it score another over on Neil Perkin's blog

Social Production

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

Related articles by Zemanta

• IPA Social (neilperkin.typepad.com)
• Publishing in the Flow (onemanandhisblog.com)
• We, The Makers (farisyakob.typepad.com)

Social + Media = Change

Let's deconstruct the phrase 'social media' and try social + media instead.

It helps me understand where the focus should be: 90% on the social, 10% on media.

That doesn't mean there's no role for the media side. It plays a critical one, without which the social doesn't get to happen - but it does reflect where the value lays, who creates it and how.

Social =

• The social technologies that connect us
  
• People
• Groups
• Hands and feet
• Action
  
• What we choose to do together

Media =

• That which flows through social technologies
  
• Content
• Distribution
• Mouths and ears
  
• Conversation
  
• What they would seek to do to us/get us to do

The media side is where we pass on messages from one to another, do the viral thing, create content and publish it - in social networks and on blogs and in tweets.

It is where we fulfil those mutliple roles that once were the sole domain of the media industry - we publish, we advertise and market (to our peers). We provide the distribution through peer-to-peer pass on. We do it all in networks rather than channels, in real-time rather than their time and many-to-many rather than broadcast from one-to-many, with the one at the centre.

It is a CRITICAL part of the mix. You don't get the social without the media. The Eighth Mass Media. Us.

To recap on The Eight Mass Media:

• We are the distribution
• We are the content
• We are the user journey
• We are how messages are transmitted
• We are the medium and the media carried within it
• We are the connections AND how the connections are made

In this Eighth Mass Media element we find each other - we discover those we didn't know we needed to know, we come together to serve a common purpose. We become communities of purpose.

And there is a great deal of value in this. We recommend stuff - our friends buy it or buy into it.

But the greater value lies in the new, fast, user-centric, efficiencies of the 'social' part of the phrase.

That is, that all our media-like activity brings us together with people seeking to solve the same problem or improve the same experience

And this is where the efficiencies happen.

A very small-scale example:

• A social technology (Twitter) is created (social)
• I (social) tweet a complaint about a brand (media)
• A person (social) representing the brand uses social technology to discover this (social)
• The person (social) contacts me (media)
• We engage in conversation (media)
• My problem is resolved (social)
• The person representing the brand (social) discovers a way to improve their current system - making it more efficient for brand and consumer (social)
• I (social) tweet my peers to say how pleased I am with the outcome (media)
• I (social) recommend the brand representative to my peers (social)

How does that scale?

Remember: The people who can make most difference to your organisation don't work for it. Adapting to the network means that they can.

So broadening the listening for what's wrong with your brand, as experienced by end-users, effectively delivers crowd-sourced improvements - R&D and NPD - in rapid iteration and at small cost.

Make no mistake - there is much more to this than reputation management.

Social + Media generates low-cost NPD, R&D, P2P Marketing, Advertising, Recruitment and all that reputation management warmth, too.

The process adapts the org to the expressed needs of the network (people) - it transforms your organisation into one in which the greater part of its energy is generated from beyond the organisation - and one in which that increased energy nourishes a growing, changing and responding org.

Catch-up: Causing a stir on BlogTalk Radio

Jon Hansen was kind enough to invite me to be his guest on his BlogTalk Radio show yesterday. It was broadcast live at 5:30-6:15pm UK time on October 8.

I very much enjoyed and - and Jon's invited me back to do another show in the near future - which I'm going to take him up on.

Apparently, yesterday's caused a bit of a stir:

This from Jon's blog:

"...today’s show regarding the differences between traditional media such as newspapers and the emerging social media world, delivered an incredibly insightful and powerful message in terms the future of these paradoxical mediums.
"Unexpected . . . certainly not given guest David Cushman’s level of expertise regarding the subject matter.  "What was surprising is the level of interaction within the confines of the show’s on-line chat room which even had one listener post a note asking me to take callers earlier in the show.
"While there have been segments in which I have had 19 or 20 people in the live chat room at the same time, the activity was noticeably brisk during today’s segment.
"It was also considerably more active than it was during the 90-Minute Buy American Special that featured a brief interview with Canada’s Trade Minister.  Perhaps Dave should run for public office."

Listen to it for yourself using the player, below.