Tagged: social media

Attenzi – a social business story

Attenzi – a social business story shines a light on social business that goes beyond the all too typical homages to social media. It’s a relatively short and easy read intended to help readers explore what social business means for their organization, marketplace, communities and career.

The story is designed to galvanize the organization.

As the tale unfolds, you’ll consider aspects of organizational design, business performance management, marketing, public relations, branding, complexity, and the imminent empowerment of the individuals that make up any and all organizations. In fact, although you’ll likely be reading the book in a professional capacity, you’ll be noting the implications for your other roles in life too.

Perhaps most controversially, the story begins to explore the evolution of the customer-centric mindset that has dominated management thinking for the past two decades.

It’s free and available in HTML (this website, just keep clicking ‘Next‘), PDF, EPUB, Kindle .mobi, Kindle .azw3 and iBooks formats. And at Scribd. Hyperlinks in the ebook take you to the same section on this website for questions, observations and discussion.

I hope you’ll let me and each other know what you make of it.

Best wishes, Philip Sheldrake.

15th May 2013.

I met Adam Pisoni shortly after finishing the first edition of this book and found someone equally enthusiastic for the wide and deep potential of social business. I invited him to write the foreword, and he kindly agreed. Thanks Adam.

And I met Robin Carey who suggested we publish a second edition, September 2013, in association with Social Media Today. And I invited Robin to help set the scene too … Next

Fifty one

“@eliappel What do you think of this? #savenorthstreet ow.ly/____”

I followed the link at the end of Rachel’s tweet to the website of an international urban design consultancy, to a page dedicated to a concise analysis of the North Street Skate Park problem, and two schemas that didn’t require the park’s closure.

I read on.

It seems the consultancy had noticed the noise the Defenders were making online and had decided to contribute some time to the debate free of charge. They listed caveats to their contribution (they’d need to undertake a more diligent consultation before committing professionally to either schema) and reserved the right to negotiate appropriate commercial fees for their consultancy if they were invited to input further in an official capacity. Regardless, they still encouraged visitors to ask questions and leave comments.

I thought this was awesome. I bookmarked the website for that day in the not too distant future, I hoped, when Attenzi would need to expand its production facilities, possibly by acquiring the units either side with no small alteration to the park’s layout.

I retweeted of course, appending “<< awesome”.

I wondered if this was an example of #socbiz in action. Or just #socialmedia? I guess it depends on how the consultancy in question is adapting its structure, culture, policies and processes – the journey we’d embarked on – yet no one can determine that from simply looking at a website and tweet stream.

On that point, it seemed to me that the Twitter community frequently considered #socbiz and #socialmedia synonymously. We do not as you know. Language is the output of a complex system of course, so it will be interesting to see how history records the eventual definitions, and I wonder whether Attenzi might influence that outcome.

Fourteen (i)

Rachel was staying with me that following weekend. And it was only then for some reason that social media really hit me hard. Perhaps, given everything going on at work, I was just in the mindset to question all my assumptions. Perhaps now that Rachel and I no longer lived under the same roof seven days a week I paid closer attention during the time we did have together.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m computer-savvy. I bought a laptop when a 100MB hard disk drive was considered massive (for younger readers, that’s not a typo). I unpacked it listening to Wu-Tang Clan on my new personal CD player feeling very ‘with it’.

The Fugees’ The Score was my soundtrack as I got on email and began to browse the nascent World Wide Web with Netscape Navigator. Upgrading from a 28.8 to 56 kbit/sec modem felt liberating! The day I got my first Motorola, I phoned Dom from an Eminem concert, tapping his number in from memory.

Now, plugged into my iPod or Android phone, I’m at ease checking in with family, friends, colleagues and professional peers online.

So I’ll be honest with you, in keeping abreast of the social media revolution in the press, by attending social media conferences and by getting myself on every social network going, I had assumed I ‘got’ social media.

These days, Muse, Nicki Minaj and Adele fight for attention alongside Led Zeppelin, Marc Cohn, Johnny Cash, Charles Mingus and Albinoni. The past gets hooks in you. Yet it’s perhaps not too simplistic to say that the younger generation lives entirely in the moment. To Rachel, the Web has always existed. Computers have always been connected. Adults have always had mobile phones and they’ve always been smart – the phones that is, not adults – and she got her first one for her 13th. Music has always been mp3. TV has always been on-demand. She has a completely fresh perspective.

“Dad, email doesn’t work very well does it?”

Now what do you say to that?

That weekend I watched Rachel gliding from laptop to desktop, from desktop to mobile, from mobile to tablet. From text to image to video to games to voice. From interacting one-to-one, and interacting amongst many. From leading the conversation, to observing more passively. From homework collaboration to sharing fashion finds, from DJing music amongst her friends to planning a sleepover, from comedic videos to hanging out in multi-player games. And her expectations of the experience are so high and so ingrained that the only comment she made in this respect was to tell me Mom had just got ‘Smart TV’. Her inference was not lost on me.