Featured post by Lara Valentine from Green Habits

Today’s Alert Headline from CSR-Wire read “CSRwire Reports Top Corporate Social Responsibility News of 2007:Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize helps validate business case for addressing climate crisis”. The story highlights a report by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors that released a “Carbon Beta” study that gives strong evidence that connects the proactive actions of a corporation on climate change “with strong financial performance.” It goes on to say “Companies increasingly recognize that their responses to the climate crisis may well determine their fates, as demonstrated by the growing number of firms joining the US Carbon Action Partnership (USCAP), which calls on Congress to set a carbon cap.”

If I were a CEO and was considering the options of moving my company into the environmental-sustainability-age I’d be confused on how to move the ship around though. It is clear to me that making this change will have long term benefits however, there aren’t alot of books or actual authorities on “how” to do it. Befuddled comes to mind, with the lack of concrete options in front of me. Where would you start? You could hand pick a group of employees in your company to set up standards or write a plan but where would that get you? Does your staff have the capability to do this kind of work? Would they come up with a plan that includes out of the box thinking or would it be status quo?

I’ve given the answer a lot of thought and here’s what I’ve come up with. I would hire an independent consultant to give a macro overview of options. Before your business can begin to analyze the myriad of options before you, wouldn’t you want to know the universe? To plan first will save time and money. To plan first would help determine the budget, the type of staff who could be best utilized, areas of priority, and areas of least benefit.

The problem of bypassing a consultant is that your staff may be too ingrained in the “way it’s always been done” to see that simple solutions may be of tremendous benefit. To skip over a macro overview could mean that the company only concentrates on one area of change. A consultant of any caliber can analyze operations, facilities, product design, the fleet, the supply chain and the marketing. They can find the points of integration that make the most sense for the type of business. Does switching to an energy star Xerox machine make you a green company? What about just advertising your green product? The FTC doesn’t take kindly to eco advertising without any back up, nor do your customers.

So before you make any decisions, hire an expert to give you direction.
Green Habits can do an energy audit for starters, but the options go much deeper and the change more profound. Let us help to earn your business the reputation it deserves in this world of changing energy and environmental concerns. Check out www.greenhabitsaustin.com for more information.

Featured post by Jay Deragon from LinkToYourWorld.com

Today’s social networks are “train cars” of conversations.People connect to people they perceive as “headed in the same direction they desire to pursue”. The subsequent conversations reflect common threads of interest. The different train tracks represent different conversations, different platforms, different affinities and different transactions.

We’ll define a transaction as an agreement, communication, or movement carried out between different people, entities or objects, often involving the exchange of items of value, such as information, goods, services and money. Today’s social networks are fundamentally connecting people and enabling open conversations, transactions of informational exchange.

The evolution of these transactions will be enhanced through the convergence of technological advancements to “networks” which enable people to increase the value of these transactions economically. The “train cars” are fueled by today’s conversations and they are building speed, momentum and the attention of business. The velocity of these train cars, running on multiple tracks, are moving faster than anything in history and most businesses are not even aware that “the train is coming“.

Will there be a wreck at the intersection of people and business?

Doc Searls writes: “Think of markets as three overlapping circles: Transaction, Conversation and Relationship. Our financial system is Transaction run amok. Metasticized. Optimized at all costs. Impoverished in the Conversation department, and dismissive of Relationship entirely. We’ve been systematically eliminating Relationship for decades, excluding, devaluing and controlling human interaction wherever possible, to maximize efficiency and mechanization.”

With all the attention being given to “social networking” much of the underlying dynamics that drive the adoption of the “networks” are misunderstood. Businesses, analyst, markets and the media again are focusing on the results rather than understanding the systemic nature that produces today’s results. The attraction of over a half a billion individuals engaged in today’s “networks” is a business attraction motivated by economic possibilities. While the economic possibilities are significant the understandings of the dynamics which are creating the possibilities is critical to capturing the economic gains.

If you reflect on Doc Searls comments above you will see a systemic failure of “business” to make progress in the fundamentals of human interaction, relationships. People produce business results and businesses produce relationship results. If we measured the “relationship results” of businesses the scorecard would likely create a failing grade. Businesses have been consumed by financial measures as dictated by public and private markets that measure economics. The social web is creating a new measure of business based on the fundamentals of relationships. The people have known and continue to know how “business has failed them”. It has never been a secret rather business environments have simply controlled the conversations that speak to the relationship issues.

John Maloney, Founder, KM Cluster; Global IT Architectures says: Social networks and SNA are excellent research tools for academics and scientists. They are excellent at showing and understanding relationships. However, from a purely practical sense, a business and economic sense, for driving growth, they fall down badly. Why, again academics, scientist and businesses are measuring and analyzing the wrong thing, results.

Measuring and reacting to results is like trying to play tennis by watching the scoreboard. The results of “social networking” is nothing more than a scoreboard indicating “something is driving people to engage, exchange and connect”. If businesses want to succeed in a “social network” they must engage, exchange and connect with people in order to reap any benefits of social commerce.

The momentum of a train is based on speed and mass. The faster it moves with greater mass the harder it becomes to stop it and anything in its way simply gets runs over.

What say you?

Featured post by Jay Deragon from LinkToYourWorld.com

Many of the conversations in 2007 were about whether social networks will become centric to conducting commerce, B2B, B2C and P2P.While social networks continue to grow exponentially the next growth curve will be driven by the holy grail of economics“, social commerce. Social commerce may actually become the dominant development in 2008 and subsequently turn business models upside down and inside out.

One might ask why?

Simeon Simeonov writes “Consider for a minute how gargantuan the social shopping/merchandising market opportunity is: the current US retail market (excluding home and automotive) is around $4+ TRILLION/year and is supported by $150+ billion in advertising, the bulk of which still goes to TV for immersive, emotionally impactful ads. Capturing the proverbial 1% of that total market would represent over $40 billion/year in transactions which is huge!”

“So, clearly, whomever figures out how to get paid to unlock socially-driven product discovery and merchandising is going to make an astounding amount of money and have a huge impact on net culture.”

Is there consensus on this opportunity?

We recently asked the following questions aimed at adults throughout numerous social networks, “Will businesses and people conduct commerce using social networks?” We asked 2,000 of our contacts the question and received responses from 623 which created a 31% response rate as of December 31, 2007. The responses are still coming in as of the writing of this post. The responses carried many comments, some of which we will be sharing in future post, however the majority, 72%, said absolutely Yes. Obviously these responses are influenced by people who are engaged with the social web and see the opportunity.

On the other end of the spectrum

We were recently at a meeting with executives of a Fortune 500 company and the discussions were centric to the social web. The issue of social commerce was brought up and the opinions of the executives were that people wouldn’t buy things through their social network profiles and businesses wouldn’t engage is making purchases with other businesses via a social network.

When asked how many of the executives were active participants in social networks 100% answered they were not and 40% didn’t even have a profile on Linkedin. When asked how many of their employees (in excess of 20,000 employees) were active in social networks their answers were “We don’t know”.

How can business executives draw conclusions with no experience or understanding of the dynamic of the social web? The answer is they do and they will continue to, right or wrong. The awakening will come when markets move, when competition leads the movement, when executives engage with people who find satisfaction and benefit from engaging with other people, when the world shifts and an alarm ripples through the executive suites.

What are the factors that will drive social commerce?

• Consumer as communication channel: viral in its purest form just carries over a many to many channel an essentially one to many message from a business to its audience.
• Consumer as message author: recommendations and referrals are where the ‘consumer’ is already an ‘employee’ of the business, effectively working for the Marketing department and generating the message in addition to carrying it.
• Consumer as a transaction participant: where the business has found a mechanism to engage the consumer in more than just passing a message, in ‘closing the sale’, processes orders and (why not) takes PayPal payments.
• Consumer as co-creator of the product: from participation in product design R&D with feedback, ideas and recommendations, particularly where the ‘product’ is the message he spreads. Two more jobs: in the R&D and in the Production department of our business.
• Finally, consumer as Investor: already an insider of our business, he confidently buys our stock (and recommends that, too). Clever companies find ways to engage them even better in the share ownership through dedicated schemes.

There’s been a lot of progress made in 2007 in social commerce and 2008 will see new players, new technology and lots of money thrown at the solutions. Social commerce can encompass and influence a wide array of points on the purchase process, both before and after, and markets will move where money moves. Stay tuned for The Emergence of the Relationship Economy!

What say you?

www.relationship-economy.com