Figure 16.1 Social Business Initiative: Key Artifacts
Chapter 16
Building a Social Business Strategy
The Outputs
From the early years of experimentation and initial success stories, the first broad outlines of a genuine body of knowledge are emerging on how to make social business work effectively. So-called best practices and effective fundamental techniques have been identified and understood. Ideally, in addition to understanding the scope of comprehensive social business strategy, understanding how best to manage the upside while dealing with any potential downsides is necessary. New approaches and techniques for conducting business ultimately are codified into frameworks or methodologies, that is, systematic ways of identifying and applying methods for a given discipline. Operationalizing lessons helps new adopters identify and organize practices in a way that takes advantage of the experiences of pioneers and ensures that new efforts build safely on top of a tested body of community knowledge.
The first social business methods are now beginning to emerge, some explicitly but most implicitly, as practitioners assess their early successes and try to understand what worked well and what didn't occur as hoped.
We have introduced two major sets of social business concepts. The first are the ten tenets of social business, the ground rules for being successful regardless of the business activity, industry, audience, or demographic. The second is the process of social business transformation introduced in Chapter Thirteen. Combining the top-down and bottom-up drivers of social business transformation produces a set of core artifacts for communicating, guiding, and documenting the process. These are set out in Figure 16.1. Many organizations use social business tools to create and maintain these artifacts, with community participants keeping them updated, relevant, and alive.
Figure 16.1 Social Business Initiative: Key Artifacts
There are many secondary artifacts to any project: detailed requirements lists, software designs, coordination and project plans, testing reports, support cases, and others. But the key artifacts that are instrumental to the success of a social business effort are further explained in Figure 16.2. In particular, the ad hoc opportunities and social business narrative are explicit attempts at focusing on and extracting the most out of unique capabilities that set social business design apart from many prior innovations: emergent and peer-produced aspects leading to significant results. Not all social business efforts routinely apply all of these artifacts, even when they are successful. Social business strategies must tailor these artifacts for their needs and the requirements of local culture within an organization.
