Mastering Twitter can be tricky and most organizations are playing defense. They are playing an intense game without rules, where new players can arrive on the scene at any time, and where one mistake can set the organization back for months. But those that have mastered Twitter are creating extraordinary opportunities for their organizations and they include such juggernauts as Walt Disney, ESPN, NBA, MTV and NASA.

These companies and the 25 others listed below understand the power of engagement. In order to find them, Nestivity (Twitter communities) asked InfiniGraph Co-founder Chase McMichael and Dr. Natalie Petouhoff to conduct the research, “The 30 day analysis is based on the InfiniGraph Engagement Analysis Platform, which compared the average number of re tweets (RT) per post from February 2nd to March 5th 2013, using proprietary algorithms for determining Twitter responses, content trend scores and clicks on links and other content,” McMichael told us.

But high engagement isn’t limited to the big companies.

Number 1 on the list @Notebook is owned by Branden Hampton of the Influential Media Group. Hampton serves as a sort of Zen master for brands that want high Twitter engagement. While most companies are struggling to create any sort of meaningful engagement on Twitter, Hampton has Twitter profiles that are outcompeting large brands with millions of customers. “Because we understand how to create engagement in our niche categories, we have a fitness page, that’s more engaged than Nike,” Hampton told me.

In an article I wrote last year titled “Why Every Company Needs to be More Like IBM and Less Like Apple”, I compared the cultures of both companies and how over the past 25 years they had flipped: “Today’s Big Blue is the antithesis of Big Brother. It’s ‘Big Open’. A transparent, nimble, collaborative organization known more for listening and engaging customers than for dictating to them. While ironically, some say Apple now resembles Big Brother given their propensity for tight controls.”

The path to becoming a social business, one which has a more engaged workforce, customer-base and supply chain, is one which ultimately leads to greater business success. What components, however, do you need to consider putting in place from a strategic standpoint?

My graphic below attempts to put each of the components I feel any organisation should consider implementing or integrating into their social collaboration environment.

The Path to Social Business
(C) 2013 alanghamilton.com

I know, we are now in 2013, and announcing anything for a past date falls short from being a prediction. But as we are struggling to help organizations transform to adapt to uncertainty, I often find myself thinking that we already did that and went there before, when considering where social business is heading to. Whether on the technological or on the conceptual side, much buzz is made which takes us back from the future. There are many reasons for that, the simplest one being the necessity to survive in present industrial logic while setting the basis to allow businesses to thrive in a wirearchy. New technologies and emergent behaviors must make their way into our dominant top-down, production-based, model before being able to give birth to a model well-suited to complexity and to a knowledge-based era. Yet, most of the trends which shape the social business landscape seem to pull us back into a “déjà vu” draped in new clothes, like a jay dressed in peacock feather. Predicting sometimes looks like diving deeper into a dull past… This article will deal with the technological aspect of this shilly-shallying, while I will consider the conceptual side in another post.

As I began collecting ideas for this post, Bertrand Duperrin published...

Reconciling Organizational Improvement and Reinvention Through Social Business Design

This post is the second of a two-parts article on innovation and social business co-written with Ralph-Christian Ohr (@ralph_ohr).

A striking change of focus in the social business arena occurred during the last five years. Despite the fact that Andrew McAfee’s original definition specified its scope as «within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers», infant Enterprise 2.0 was mainly concerned by internal collaboration. The teaser from one of the major events of this early period, the Boston 2007 Enterprise 2.0 Conference, talked about “(…) the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email“.

This somehow navel-gazing vision of firms, obsessed by internal processes and employees’ performance, has shifted toward a customer-centric attitude. Apart from acknowledging that organizations more and more see the benefits, if not the imperative, to operate as connected ecosystems, including partners, suppliers, customers, and even competitors, in their value creation mechanisms, this profound change mirrors the evolution of our understanding of the way business is done in our hyper-connected era. Yet, putting such a strong emphasis on customers, on their needs and expectations, is at risk of obscuring the role played by...

If you have been following my series, 10 Easy Steps to Social Business, so far then hopefully you’ve gained an understanding of:

1. Embedding social techniques into your business processes with some examples (more to come).
2. The need for customization of your social business solution.
3. Things to think about when preparing a Social Business Governance Plan.

Many thanks for the kind feedback and comments I’ve received so far.  Steps 4 – 6 of the plan will be coming soon.  In the meantime let me keep you busy with my infographic which summarizes the first three steps:

Summary of the first three steps

I was lucky enough to attend the IBM Leadership Alliance conference last week in Boston.  This is an annual gathering of a large number of senior IBM execs, IBM Champions, key customers and a some hangers-on like me.  The entire event is covered by a non-disclosure agreement as the IBMers share their product plans and seek feedback on their plans from the audience.

So much of the public discussion of social media monitoring and analysis focus on commercially available platforms that are more or less ready to go to work. Somebody has to set up the queries, and there may be some dashboard configuration, but the tools are generally pay-and-go propositions. A recent article points out that some companies are going for something much more customized to their needs.

In its big list issue on companies doing IT well, Information Week mentioned Toyota's new social media and CRM tool:

The tool took 60 hours to develop, largely using software Toyota already had. Oracle Endeca Discovery handles data discovery and search analytics, WiseWindow and DataSift aggregate social data, and Lexalytics analyzes sentiment.

Toyota is using the tool to improve customer service, product forecasting and quality, and lead generation. It plans to feed information to dealers in the future.

If the usual model is off the rack—software-as-a-service from a single vendor, up and running with minimal configuration in minutes, hours, or days—this is