Foreword

Everything that can be social will be.

I firmly believe that's the mantra of twenty-first-century business and the key concept that we must all internalize to achieve our best possible futures. Operating our businesses through a social lens presents a profound new way of thinking. Some of you will know that this trend is something now called social business. Most companies are taking steps toward social business, some slowly and some more rapidly. Yet virtually all organizations today need a way to make the changes on their own terms, in a way that gives them a safe path forward that ensures success. Social Business by Design offers you that guided route forward, step by step.

When I cofounded Razorfish as the first major digital agency back in the 1990s, it quickly became clear to me that dramatic change was difficult for large companies; it's never easy making the first move toward a fundamentally new, better way of working, thinking, and living. Fortunately, the case for why and how to effectively adopt social business is definitively and compellingly explored in these pages by my industry colleagues, as well as friends and coworkers, Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim. I've seen both of them grapple with the enormity of the task that lies ahead of virtually all organizations today: to connect business clients with the whole of the developed world using social media, engage deeply with customers and partners in potent new—yet unfamiliar—ways, and innovate and cocreate a more effective way of working that's not just novel but more satisfying, richer, and, yes, profitable for all concerned.

Uncertain economic times can have a chilling effect on innovation and the readiness for the bold moves required to lead an industry in this century. Many companies also have a hard time making the leap to new digital business models. For every SAP, IBM, or Amazon, a hundred companies are struggling in the shadows. But the writing is on the wall. I can read it clearly as a CEO, as can most of my peers in organizations large and small around the world: as you read this, the way we run our organizations is in the midst of changing dramatically.

The implications for social business transformation are writ large. Customer engagement is moving from relatively isolated market transactions to deeply connected and sustained social relationships. This basic change in how we do business will make an impact on just about everything we do. It affects where sustainable creativity and ingenuity are sourced. It defines how productive and rewarding results are created in the form of break-out new products, services, and operational constructs. And for the CxO in all of us, it also means that we now possess major new ways of driving growth, revenue, and margin. Distributed technologies operating in an open ecosystem and placed in the hands of constituents can be leveraged to create and capitalize on emergent outcomes.

It's clear to me that social media have moved far beyond a means of staying in touch with old friends and colleagues. They have become how business gets done. They have also created a highly competitive weapon in the arsenal of those who want to achieve dramatically better marketing, sales, customer service, product development, and worker productivity. The comprehensive vision that Dion and Pete lay out in this book explains exactly why organizations need to commit to the path of social business in order to survive and thrive in the very different conditions of this new millennium.

In these pages, you'll see how successful companies go outside their comfort zones to embrace new consumer methods of social media and social networking, enabling them to accomplish business objectives in revolutionary new ways that are much more scalable, efficient, and robust than in the past. Some of these featured companies are the most respected names in their industry, and others are disrupting industries and starting their own rise. Yet these stories will also be your stories, and it's how you'll get there too: by a process of deliberate, intentional transformation.

For our part, Dachis Group believes strongly in the full-strength vision of social business as the way that organizations will work now and in the future. I invite you, after reading Social Business by Design, to continue your explorations of this topic in our Social Business Council and track your organization's progress as it makes the transformation to the twenty-first century using our Social Business Index, our strategic online service that helps companies measure how effective their business is at being social. It can be found at http://socialbusinessindex.com. These are very exciting times indeed, for organizations that are prepared to build the road ahead.

Jeff Dachis

Austin, Texas

February 2012