I’ve just finished working on a major report for Sociagility, which looks at 50 of the world’s most valuable brands and re-ranks them according to their ‘social brand value’. No prizes for guessing that Google comes out on top, but some quite revealing insight into the others, including:

• Disney fares pretty well, ranking 2nd overall but being the most consistent performer across all the attributes we evaluated.
• Way down the ranking at 13th, Johnson & Johnson actually cleans up when it comes to receptiveness – an indicator of the more ‘emotional’ side of health care and pharmaceuticals, perhaps?
• The technology brands in the top 50 – including Apple, BlackBerry, Google and Microsoft – risk a perception of arrogance, having above average popularity scores combined with below average receptiveness scores.
• Financial services brands (VISA, Goldman Sachs and J P Morgan Chase) are amongst the worst performing brands, but the big surprise is that telecoms brands (Deutsche Telekom, Movistar and China Mobile) are down there too.

A summary report can be downloaded from our website, or you can register to download the full version containing additional data and insight.

I’m working on a report for my new consultancy, Sociagility, on the internal and external challenges organisations are facing from social media. It looks at how organisations of different sizes and in different sectors and geographies think they are doing against different challenges, and how important these are.

You can contribute to the research by taking this survey. At the end, you can request to see your own report, benchmarking your organisation against others, and can sign up to have the report emailed to you when it goes live.

At the heart of this research is understanding the importance that organisations place on key contributors towards becoming ‘socially advanced’, and how well different types of companies and markets are performing against these. We feel that it’s critical for anyone responsible for social media initiatives in their organisation to know that they are doing the most important things well, but equally there is little point spending time on effort on things that aren’t important, as this could be better directed elsewhere.

This is where we need your help. In order to survey and benchmark the importance and performance of socially advanced organisations, we need to know how and what you think. We are interested in all different points of view, but especially want to hear from corporate social strategists and senior marketing and communications executives in medium to large companies across the globe.

To get you in the mood, here are some early findings so far (and here’s a bit more of the detail):

• The biggest gap between importance and performance is in the area of metrics and return of investment.
• Internal issues rank highly – many organisations rate their own social media policies low on the scale, even though most think they are one of the most important elements of becoming socially advanced.
• Being true to the brand is becoming an increasingly important characteristic – although many organisations don’t think they are achieving it.

Take the survey here – it consist of just 5 questions that should take no more than 10-15 minutes.

And please spread the word too. We’d like as broad a participation as possible across different organisation sizes, sectors and geographies in order for it to be relevant and valuable to as many of you as possible.

Thanks in advance.

Like it or loathe it, the term ‘social business’ looks like it’s here to stay – if judged by the increasing number of infographics appearing online. So I thought it would be worth rounding them up and picking out the most salient points. Here goes…

Read my original post at http://www.sociagility.com/2011/08/a-round-up-of-social-business-infographics/

Good to see enterprise social networking getting its due mention in the business pages of the venerable Financial Times, courtesy of Geoff Nairn’s Connected Business column.

He points out what many vendors and buyers of enterprise social networking solutions are discovering – sometimes to their cost – already (my emphasis):

The trials and tribulations of these consumer social networking sites may seem of marginal relevance to mainstream businesses. But the enterprise social networking industry is currently enjoying a boom similar to that experienced by consumer social networking pioneers five years earlier. A shake-out for these business-focused sites may be further out, but business decision-makers need to be aware today of the consequences of backing the wrong social networking horse.

Personally I think we are going to see a few trends in this space over the next 12-18 months:

1. More fall-out and consolidation amongst enterprise social networking software vendors;
2. Greater demand from business decision-makers for research and analysis of the options they face;
3. Growth in the number of independent consultants providing evaluation, implementation and adoption services to ensure companies don’t back the wrong horse.

Well look what arrived in the post today:

Friend and connection Antony Mayfield pointed me to his talk at TEDxBrighton on 21 January. Titled SuperSkills he eloquently and, at times, amusingly outlines the three new skills that humanity is going to require as a direct result of the billions of connections that that web has made – and continues to make – possible.

The recording of his talk is 18 and  a half minutes of your time very well spent, if only to extrapolate what these news skills – networks, sharing and focus & flow – might mean to the knowledge workers of the future. More importantly in my eyes, though, is who needs to be responsible for teaching these new skills: the education system; employers; or the individuals themselves.

The footage appears below, but I also encourage you to view Antony’s post which provides much more context and useful links to his notes, slides and more TEDxBrighton talks.

Update 23 Feb 2011: What the hell, everyone who left a comment can have a copy! Will start contacting you all now.

It’s now almost two years since Enterprise 2.0 was published, and a lot has happened in the enterprise social networking and social business spheres since then. And if recent numbers are anything to go by, people are finding just as relevant today.

What I’ve been pleasantly surprised by is the sales of the PDF eBook I put on lulu.com. Today it hit 100 sales, and to celebrate I’m going to send ten people a copy of the eBook absolutely free.

To be in with a chance, leave a comment below with a link to your Twitter account or website, and at 9.00am UK time on Wednesday 23 February 2011, ten commenters will be chosen at random and contacted with their prize.

Feel free to spread the word far and wide.

OK, so you can tell I’m still grappling with this, but regardless of what ‘it’ is called we need an idea of what ‘it’ actually is, right?

Personally, here is the best description of social business that I’ve seen so far (my emphasis):

Social business isn’t a state, it’s an acknowledgement that culture and technology has changed, and that organizations can leverage these changes to solve the same business problems that they have always had and will always have.

It comes from a slide presentation authored by Jacob Morgan. Unlike other quotes in his slides, it’s unattributed so I assume it’s his own. The rest of the presentation isn’t too sloppy either:

The thing that still doesn’t sit quite right with me, though, is the apparent amalgamation of the internal and external aspects that these changes bring about, and that seems to be where ‘social business’ is increasingly positioning itself. Whilst I completely support that one impacts the other and often an external problem requires an internal solution, I don’t think that they always have to be part of the same equation. It seems more like land grab from social business consultants and consultancies attempting to expand their remits.

One of the problems with social business (or whatever we want to call it at the moment) is that people take the disruptive characteristics of social media and scare the hell out of business leaders with them. They talk about hierarchies being flattened, corporate culture being changed overnight, centralized functions getting decentralized, and so on.

It is true that many of these things may happen, but they’re not going to occur overnight in any organization with more than about 25 employees (it’s unlikely that it would happen overnight for those with under that number either).

Stealthmode’s Francine Hardaway says that she can’t advise her enterprise clients about social media “because they are terrified about transparency”. Paraphrasing, she argues that these companies can never achieve the kind of real time collaboration amongst employees or with customers because everything has to go through legal, the CMO, CFO or even CEO.

Now I’m certainly familiar with this scenario, but I would have to add a couple of points:

• Some aspects of social business are more disruptive than others. Almost no company is going to agree to unleash havoc overnight, and many will be willing to listen to small ideas that could make a big difference to the way in which they attract, grow and retain staff and customers.
• Changes don’t need to made before attempting to become more social; they usually happen as a result of doing so. That approach helps organizations to start small yet build the confidence for the bigger challenges and changes.

So let’s remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and take time to help our companies find those small, unassuming changes that we can implement under the radar (trojan mice, I like to call them), build adoption, and create value one step at a time. It’s time we stopped scaring CxOs about the perils social business and started enthusing them about the opportunities instead.

When I wrote one of the first books about what was then referred to as Enterprise 2.0, it was because I saw a trend whereby the social collaboration that was emerging on the web would move inside the firewall as companies strove for greater and better communication, cooperation, collaboration and connections amongst employees.

Fast forward a couple of years, and some of those early entrepreneurs that helped me with quotes, case studies and insight, such as Headshift’s Lee Bryant, have turned it into good business (Headshift was acquired by Jeff Dachis’ Dachis Group in September 2009, and the group has since acquired many others).

With the maturity of the industry, there has also been a change in how it gets referred to. Out goes ‘Enterprise 2.0′ (“too narrow, too corporate and too managerial!” says Euan Semple) and in comes ‘Social Business’ (there’s a good primer by Dion Hinchcliffe on ZDNet).

As I reflect on what I wrote two years ago, and recall the debates I had in my own head about the pros and cons of using the ‘Enterprise 2.0′ monicker as the title for the book, I can’t help but feel the same way about ‘Social Business’.

The fundamental problem for me is that fact that – in the UK at least – social business already means something else; a different industry of, according to the venerable Wikipedia, “non-loss, non-dividend companies designed to address a social objective.” The social objectives in this case are not how you get employees to share knowledge using micro-blogs, though. They are societal objectives such as health, housing, sanitation and nutrition.

So, social business, whilst certainly softer and less “corporate” than Enterprise 2.0, still doesn’t work for me. We need to find a new descriptor for this growing industry – one that distinguishes it from externally-facing ‘social media’ and cause-based ‘social enterprise’.

Answers on a postcard, please…