Social Business Strategies

This is probably the work-in-progress section to this chapter. I’ve been working with a few brands for the past 12 months to re-engineer how their models work and to open up additional revenue streams as well as reconnect them (in both a passive and active way) to their audience. However, in my experience, social business is not about having a single model. As with social media in a communications perspective, there is no silver bullet.

One of the most important aspects of conducting a project that is this ambitious is ensuring that the project is manned by T-shaped people. Nathan Williams, a senior consultant at Wolff Olins, introduced me to the concept of the T-shaped person more than a year ago and it has stuck with me ever since. The T-shape approach was coined by Bill Moggridge, the CEO of IDEO, and it describes people with a breadth of multiple skills (the horizontal aspect of the T) but also with a specialist core passion (the vertical aspect of the T). In my opinion, this type of person should be perfectly suited to working with organizations to create a social business strategy.