The next big Social Business event in Europe is the Social Business Forum in Milan on 4th and 5th June.  The Forum will cover advanced projects in the areas of Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM and Collaborative Innovation. I am delighted that I will be speaking at the Forum on the subject of “The Social CEO”, addressing the issue of how to get CEO commitment to and involvement in implementing Social Business.

There are well over than 50 confirmed international speakers, including many of the great names in Social Business.  You will meet the thought-leaders that are proving how companies can reap measurable business benefits by collaborating with the entire company’s ecosystem of employees, clients, partners and suppliers.

Speakers include:

- John Hagel – Co-Chairman at the Center for the Edge of Deloitte & Touche, author of the Shift Index and of The Power of Pull among the most profound resources to understand where business will be heading in the next decade or so.

- Frank Eliason – SVP Social Media at CitiGroup also named Mr.@YourService, the man who guided @Comcastcares reinventing through social channels, in less than 3 years, the Customer service at one of the largest provider in the USA

- Steve Denning – Independent management consultant and author of The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management where he describes how to rethink the future and inner working of organizations through a totally new mental model for managers

- Ray Wang – CEO and Principal Analyst at the Constellation Research Group. Former co-founder at Altimeter and VP at Forrester Research. Ray is one of the global authorities regarding the application of new technologies and business models to the strategy and role of senior managers in large organizations

- John Stepper – MD Collaboration and Social Media at Deutsche Bank or the manager who is changing the work behavior of 100K colleagues in a bank fonded in 1870 through collaboration and communities of practice with saving in the million of dollars. Other than being a reference for the banking world, his blog is a constant inspiration for those managers willing to humanize and make more profitable their organizations

- Rawn Shah – Social Business Strategist at IBM, blogger on the Connected Business at Forbes.com and author of 7 books including the recent Social Networking for Business

And the list goes on!

- Among the first hand experiences: Deutsche Bank will be joined by British Telecom, Alcatel Lucent, Pernod Ricard, Sanofi Brazil, Luxottica, Amadori, J&J, 3M, BNP Paribas, Pirelli, Legrand, Scania, Corepla, Seat Pagine Gialle and many others

- Among the European and American experts that will multiply the value of our agenda, you cannot miss Mark Tamis, Esteban Kolsky, Sameer Patel, Luis Suarez, Megan Murray, Oscar Berg, Laurence Lock Lee, Lluis Font, Ram Menon, Mike Gotta, Christian Finn.

You can attend most of the content for free, so if you haven’t already blocked your seat, do so now at http://www.socialbusinessforum.com/registration/register-now/ .

This is a huge opportunity to connect the members of the group, so looking forward to meeting all of you in Milan!

David Demetrius (@demeto)

We at Fyronic are delighted to announce that we have agreed with Ross Dawson for him to give a presentation in Brussels lunchtime (12:30 to 14:00) on Friday 4th May!

He will speak on the forces shaping the future of work and organisations, the growing role of crowds and crowdsourcing, and the steps that organisations need to take to tap the power of internal and external crowds to create value.

Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author.

He is Founding Chairman of four companies: international consulting and ventures firm Advanced Human Technologies, futures think-tank Future Exploration Network, leading events company The Insight Exchange, and online start-up Repyoot.

Strong demand for Ross’s expertise has seen him deliver keynote speeches across six continents and consult to leading organizations worldwide such as Ernst & Young, Macquarie Bank, Microsoft, News Corporation, Procter & Gamble and many others.

He is author of the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, now out in its second edition, the acclaimed book Living Networks, which foresaw the social networking revolution, and the highly successful Implementing Enterprise 2.0. He also writes the highly influential Trends in the Living Networks blog, has written White Papers for organizations including SAP and Microsoft, and has published over 100 articles in leading publications worldwide.

Ross’s frequent media appearances include CNN, Bloomberg TV, SkyNews, European Business Network, Channel News Asia, ABC TV, Today and Sunrise shows, New York Times, The Guardian and many others. Ross was recently named by Digital Media magazine as one of the 40 biggest players in Australia’s digital age.

Attendance, which will include a sandwich lunch, is € 25 per person.  Attendees will each receive a free copy of Ross’s latest book, “Getting results from crowds”.

The event will be held at the offices of the British Chamber of Commerce in Belgium, Bischoffsheim 11, 1000 Brussels.

If you wish to register, please send an email to dav...@fyronic.com or  a tweet or direct message to @demeto or @f_redant.

See you there!

David  Demetrius   (@demeto)

Paris on Tuesday!  I can’t wait!

I hope sincerely that all my Twitter and blog friends will be there too, so that we can enjoy a few drinks together, not to mention attending the host of superb presentations.

This is one of the first major Enterprise 2.0 event of 2012 and it will be extremely interesting to hear the opinions of the many experts on what 2012 holds for E20 adoption.  My colleague, Franky Redant, and I are definitely seeing an increasing level of interest in the topic.  Whilst the main supporters of E20 were until recently primarly IT professionals, we are now seeing an increasing number of CEOs and other non-IT managers attending our seminars and asking for our advice on E20 implementation.

One  side effect of the move towards involvement by general management is an increasing concern about the risks and perils of Social Business.  The benefits have been extremely well hyped, but the risks (which are largely much less than as perceievd by management) need covering in more depth than has been the case in the past.

Hopefully this area will be addressed by some of the speakers in Paris next week.

See you there!

David Demetrius
@demeto

The above three areas of excellence are all covered in the upcoming superb Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris next week!  Check it out at http://www.e20summit.com

The individual topics cover such areas as adoption strategies, internal communications,  knowledge sharing, strengthening collaboration, social business analytics and open innovation, to list just a few.  Add that to the list of speakers, which includes many of the great thinkers in the field (Dion Hinchclife, Bertrand Duperrin, Emanuele Quintarelli, Richard Collin, Luis Suarez, …. The list goes on and on!!) and you will see why we all have to be there.

If any of my followers on Twitter have not yet signed up, make sure you do now.

See you there.

David Demetrius
@demeto

I have been surprised recently by the number of my contacts, who are very active in Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business, who are not yet registered for the Paris Summit on the 7th and 8th of February.  Clearly they have not looked at the site (http://www.e20summit.com/index.html) or watched the videos (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2EF3A8CB6BE667A1), otherwise they would have registered immediately!

Quite apart from the exceptional list of speakers, I am very  much looking forward to catching up with good friends, many of whom I’ve met at other conferences, as well as putting a face to the Twitter name of some that I feel like I know, but have never met.

It is not too late to register, so can I suggest that you do so now.  Use my specal reduction code, e20ambassadordd, and you will get a reduced fee.

See you there.

David Demetrius

@demeto

Is this a scenario you recognize?

You deliver a free seminar for about an hour to a group of managers that you believe could really do with using social media (Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, call it what you will) to sustain and grow their business(es).  You show them the benefits of the various platforms.  You explain what is available (the ones they know such as LinkedIn, Facebook, as well as another fifty or so they’ve never heard of.  You outline the potential risks of choosing the wrong platform or of failing to put in place the appropriate policies and controls.  When you finish, your audience claps, cheers, congratulates you on a very enlightening presentation and for your command of the subject.

So what’s the problem with all that?

What happens next is that these newly enlightened managers rush back to their offices and look around for a young member of staff who is on Facebook and say “I’ve just learnt all about social media for business.  We need to do that.  You’re on Facebook, so you’ll know all about it.  I’m assigning you to set up what we need.”

When, after six months, they have not seen any of the promised benefits, they shelve the project and decide it was a bad idea and that they should never have listened to you!!

(David Demetrius @demeto)

There are many, many reasons why I don’t like emails.  I strive constantly, so far without success, to achieve the success in getting them out of my life that my good friend, Luis Suarez (@elsua) has managed.

But top of the list of my pet hates concerning emails is the problem of “email tennis”.

I’m sure you have all experienced it.  You write an email to someone with a perfectly polite message, such as:  ”I thought your presentation at the meeting yesterday was good”.  Then it starts.  The dialogue goes something like this.

“What do you mean, it was good. I worked on that for two weeks and all you can say is it was good.” (cc: your boss)

“For God’s sake. I try and compliment you and you can’t even be grateful.” (cc: your boss and the other guy’s boss)

“Typical of you. Trying to make it look like I’m the one being unreasonable, not you.” (cc: half the staff in the department)

And so it goes on, back and forth over the net until by the end of the day the whole company and a few hundred other people who have been copied in are all in the loop and all throwing their own comments in as well for good measure.  And you were just trying to compliment someone!

Now if that had been by phone or face to face your tone of voice in the original message would have conveyed your sincerity and the dialogue would have gone as follows:

“I thought your presentation at the meeting yesterday was good”

“Gee thanks!”

End of conversation!

No misunderstanding and a couple of man-days of effort saved!!!

(@Demeto)

At the recent Switch conference in Porto, I touched briefly on whether entrepreneurialism is compatible with the collaborative nature of Social Media and Enterprise 2.0.  It seems to me that there is an inherent clash between the two approaches.

Although there are of course exceptions, an entrepreneur tends typically to be someone who:

• has their own clear ideas of where they should be taking the organisation
• is working towards a relatively long-term strategic goal
• only shares their knowledge to the extent necessary to achieve their goals
• tends to have a hierarchical attitude towards organisational structure
• launches a business very locally and perhaps later spreads to other geographic regions

The above attributes do not marry well with the collaborative nature of Social Business, wherein:

• strategy is often the result of crowdsourcing ideas
• the web is usually used to identify the next incremental step, not the long-term goal
• information is shared openly with complete strangers
• organisations tend to be very flat and relatively unstructured
• from the outset, businesses tend to be global

To succeed in this highly interconnected world, a new breed of entrepreneur is needed.  Entrepreneurs of the future will need to be:

• less self-centred and more open to others’ ideas
• more prepared to share their own ideas with the world
• less convinced of their own superior status in the organisation

But there are definitely some attributes that have always been important for an entrepreneur that do not change in this Web 2.0 world.  They must always:

• have enormous drive to succeed
• be prepared to work very long hours  often to the detriment of their personal life
• believe in their goal
• look after and support their team

and above all have the humility to accept that they don’t know everything and can always learn more from those around them.

I’m sure that many readers will disagree with my comments here, so your thoughts on the subject would be very welcome.

@demeto

CONSIDERING THE VALUE OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE TOOLS

With companies’ recent attempts to engage employees and customers through advanced software solutions and collaboration tools, IT departments often have difficulties deciding which platforms to use and justifying the investments made. In this respect, it is vital to the planning process and the decision-making process to perform a thorough cost-benefit study and preferably to understand the Return on Investment (“ROI”) of the platform, before embarking on the project.

Given that the results of these collaboration tools, which are sometimes intangible in nature, often are not directly measurable, simple ROI techniques are insufficiently appropriate for capturing the (long-term) results of these tools.

Below we provide an overview of how the Value Measuring Methodology (“VMM”) developed by Booz Allen Hamilton, in conjunction with Harvard University can be applied to social software tools. Much of this overview is based on valuable insights from the ‘Highlights on VMM’ by the Best Practices Committee of the Federal CIO Council (October 2002).

The need for measurable results

According to a recent study by Bazaarvoice and the CMO Club, the true expectation of chief marketing officers is that they want measurable results from social media.

In most organisations, the following requirements tend to apply when embarking on new ventures and projects:

• Senior management should be provided with the information necessary to communicate priorities and to establish consistent measures for evaluating existing or proposed initiatives;
• The venturers and project managers should have visibility of the relevant needs and priorities of stakeholders and customers;
• Risk and risk mitigation should be considered early in the development process, before other alternatives are defined; and
• Value measures should be provided (including metrics and targets) that capture project value, guide definition of alternatives, and facilitate on-going performance and results-based management.

How to achieve measurement

Given the complexities of accounting for costs and identifying risk in traditional ROI calculations, the VMM offers a solution for measuring value in technologically advanced systems, such as software solutions built using Web 2.0 and developed in order to benefit from social collaboration.

THE VALUE MEASURING METHODOLOGY

Background

In order to define, capture and measure value associated with electronic services, Booz Allen Hamilton together with Harvard University in January 2002 published the first version of VMM. Following its publication VMM has been improved and tested in a real-world environment. Given the complexities of accounting for costs and identifying risk in traditional ROI calculations, VMM offers a solution for measuring value in technologically advanced systems, such as software solutions built using Web 2.0 and developed in order to benefit from social collaboration.

Purpose and approach

VMM was designed to be used by governmental organisations, for example in e-Government initiatives, but it can be applied by organisations wishing to maximise shareholder value as well, when deciding whether to invest in electronic services. The purpose is to demonstrate the benefits of a project to a variety of stakeholders.

According to the Best Practices Committee of the Federal CIO Council (2002), whilst it is preferred to use VMM at the start of a new project, it may also be used in later phases, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the project, or to decide on the feasibility of its continuation. All through the lifecycle of a project, VMM can be used in order to justify spending, re-evaluate objectives and performance, or validate management controls. During this process, employees from across all functions and decision-making levels should be involved.

VMM is based on public and private sector business and economic analysis theories and best practices. It provides the structure, tools and techniques for comprehensive quantitative analysis and comparison of value (benefits), cost and risk at the appropriate level of detail. VMM produces an outline, guiding the process for the selection, design analysis and management of an investment.

A method for quantifying and comparing value, cost and risk

VMM is a solid foundation for a project and offers insight into the possible alternatives. According to the Best Practices Committee of the Federal CIO Council (2002) in their analysis of the value proposition, VMM:

• Allows measurement and comparison of baseline and ongoing evaluations of value, risk and cost;
• Provides a quantitative understanding of value through calculation of metrics, including ROI;
• Provides a clear picture of how value and cost are affected by risk;
• Allows strategic selection of initiatives to include in an organisation’s investment portfolio;
• Provides insight into the interrelationships of value, cost and risk;
• Produces quantified measures of value, cost and risk to guide the continuing selection, management and evaluation of an investment;
• Provides a better understanding of variables to justify an investment or alternative course of action;
• Addresses the needs of stakeholders, including the public through analysis of alternatives; and
• Supports development of an IT investment portfolio that balances value, cost and risk.

For social software tools, VMM offers a complete and quantitative approach to capturing their value and deciding on investment and feasibility. It focuses on all stakeholders and takes into account the possible alternatives. Also, VMM considers the effects of uncertainty (risk) on the outcome of the project.

IMPLEMENTATION OF VMM

The basic steps involved in implementing VMM are:

• develop a decision framework;
• alternatives analysis;
• pull the information together; and
• communicate and document.

We have developed in Fyronic a structured approach and methodology for these four steps, which will be of assistance to organisations that are embedding Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 tools in their strategy for engagement and collaboration with their various stakeholders.

We would very much welcome comments on this approach.  We can be contacted at by email at Fyronic or via Twitter.

David Demetrius (@Demeto) & Chris Demetrius (@Chris_LD)

Authors: David Demetrius (@demeto) & Franky Redant (@f_redant)