All organizations are created equal. But the best are social by design.
Social by design: an approach to growth, efficiency, and increasing market impact by deliberately empowering the people you serve — online, offline, wherever they happen to be. It’s premised on the notion that growth in the new socially networked economy largely depends on your ability to enable people to engage and perform. Great idea – it’s a market category called “social business”– and there’s more than ample proof that it works. But to do this requires you know what business opportunity you are trying to design for – e.g., sales, marketing, product innovation — which people you need to empower, and which tools and environments – digital, mobile, physical space — you need to get the job done. Working with pioneers in social science, strategic communications, and organizational consulting, we have developed a simple yet adaptable method for helping organizations move swiftly from insight (discovery) strategy (design) to implementation (delivery).
Blog Article
Why Offline Matters. Read our blog post in Forbes, The Power of Place.
We audit key stakeholders in the company’s ecosystem, conduct an industry benchmark to evaluate competitors and peers, and identify opportunities and desired outcomes.
Based on what we learn in the first phase, we then develop an engagement program designed to achieve the desired outcomes (i.e., market growth, organizational agility, product/service adoption).
We then execute the plan along several dimensions: technology implementation, education and training, marketing execution and measurement.
Here are just a few engagement scenarios that past and current clients are facing:
Consumer
How do you serve the connected consumer in the age of digital, social and mobile?
In today’s socially networked economy, the empowered consumer has challenged marketers to rethink their entire engagement strategy. If you are a consumer goods marketer, what’s your most effective strategy for competing in a world where consumers inform themselves on purchasing decisions? If you are a retailer, what’s the role of the in-store experience in a world that’s increasingly being Amazoned? If you are a media company, how do you navigate the increasingly diverse world of multicultural, transnational communications? What is the role of analytics at a time when the marketing industry can’t stop buzzing about big data, personal data, and consumer privacy protection?
Working with brands such as Best Buy, Unilever, and a wide range of consumer technology companies, leaders on the SocialxDesign team have developed a number of unique approaches and POV’s to accelerate your engagement into these and other markets.
Services:- Stakeholder Research
- Product Positioning
- Engagement Strategy and Marketing Plan Development
- Technology Development and Integration
- Marketing Program Implementation
Enterprise
How do you navigate the new ecosystem in which your business competes today?
Today, large organizations – whether they are consumer-focused, B2B, or in the public sector – have an opportunity to leverage the power of people which digital, social and mobile technologies are helping to illuminate. What’s the role of social and enterprise data in helping organizations to see these networks better? What are the best approaches to enterprise social networking and collaboration – the rules, the tools, and best practices? How can an organization reposition and repurpose itself for more foundational and profitable role in new and emerging supplier, vendor and partner ecosystems?
Having worked on such questions with enterprise leaders such as SAP, Alcatel-Lucent, HP, and Verizon Wireless, the SocialxDesign leadership has a flexible framework for enabling businesses to retool themselves for more effective engagement in traditional and emerging markets.
Services:- Stakeholder Research
- Program Messaging and Positioning
- Strategy and Engagement Plan Development
- Technology Development and Integration
- Innovation Lab Development (Enterprise Startups)
Startups
How is value created in the startup economy?
If you are the leader of a startup, how does strategic positioning help increase valuation in markets that are highly networked? If you are a large company, what’s the best strategy for funding and supporting innovation in health-tech, green-tech, gov-tech, and mobile (just to name a few)? There are many ways to begin answering these questions, and the leadership at SocialxDesign has decades of collective experience helping big and small companies alike to create value by engaging a complex array of market participants that can accelerate the adoption of new products and services.
We have helped to position startups and mid-staged companies for more than $5 billion in exits, and have assisted scores of companies with their merger, acquisition, and innovation strategies.
Services:- Stakeholder Research
- Company and Product Positioning
- Social Technology Development and Integration
- Engagement Strategy and Marketing Plan Development
- Marketing Program Implementation
- Ecosystem Research (Enterprise Startups)
- Innovation Lab Development (Enterprise Startups)
Events
How do you bridge the worlds of online management and offline experience?
As a firm that has committed itself to bridging online and offline, naturally we’d have an opinion – and experience – about live events. And we do. Over the years, we have helped to develop and support innovative event strategies at conferences such as CES, Web 2.0, SxSW and many others…from blogger lounges, to hacker lounges, to meet-ups with market-makers. And we have first-hand experience working on one of the most innovative experiments in event design in the public sector: The White House Hispanic Initiative, which is now seen as a model for citizen engagement in age where you sometimes need to go into communities to discover and connect with key constituencies.
How do you design an experience to enable customers, partners, and citizens to get more during an event, and do more after the event? What is the role of technology in supporting live experience? How can you important best practices from this arena into the workplace and the retail world … the next big theater for industry disruption?
Services:- Experience Design Strategy and Plan Development
- Technology Development and Integration
- Program Implementation
Public Sector
How can you leverage citizen engagement to increase the impact – and manage the costs – of government?
Whether you are on the left side of the aisle, or the other, you no doubt agree that the mandate of the electorate is to increase the effectiveness – and the efficiency — of funded government programs. Increasingly, leaders in the public sector are discovering that there’s a way to do this. We call it “democracy by design” – an approach to scaling the impact of programs by empowering citizens to participate in the government process. How do government leaders more effectively engage with people who have been traditionally left out of the process but who represent the future? What is the role of digital, social, and mobile technologies when engaging multicultural populations? What is the role of offline events for educating current and future citizen/participants? How can businesses partner with local, state, and federal entities to fund mission-critical services (the emerging market for public-private partnerships (PPP)).
With recent experiences in ground-breaking experiments sponsored by The White House, the U.S. State Department, and the European Commission, SocialxDesign has developed a repeatable model for citizen engagement for a time when government efficacy and efficiency are as in much in demand as fresh approaches to democratic inclusion.
Services:- Stakeholder Research
- Program Messaging and Positioning
- Engagement Strategy and Outreach Program Development
- Technology Development and Integration
- Program Implementation