Joining the discussion was Alistair Rennie, General Manager, Social Business, IBM; Andrew Carusone, Director of Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) and Community Governance, Lowe's Home Improvement; and Ric Fulop, of North Bridge Venture Partners. Each of them had a very different perspective on social business. I thought it might be helpful to summarize for those who couldn't attend.
Alistair from IBM spoke first about how social starts with the most basic idea of networks of people trying to get something done. According to Alistair, traditional command-and-control management doesn't work in today's social business world. Today, collective intelligence is social business. It's no longer about the tools, it's about using people and a connected, trusted network as a platform for a business advantage.
Andrew from Lowe's was next and I'm pretty sure you guessed that the audience had a LOT of questions for him. What I took away from this was how Lowe's has embraced social business. Andrew spoke a lot about experiences and how providing the best experience fulfilled Lowe's most basic concept - that home improvement should be simple. Everything Lowe's does is about making home improvement simple and creating a simple experience - starting with employees. For me the most important thing Andrew discussed was how social isn't about the technology, it's about performance and about breaking out of the silos that exist to create an inspired workforce (and I agree with everything Andrew was talking about). The rationale for Lowe's for becoming a social business can be summed up this way: "What if Lowe's (the organization) knew what Lowe's (the people) knew."
Last up was Ric Fulop who spoke about three trends he was seeing with social. First he discussed the consumerization of entertainment, which can be easily described as how social affects what we consume in our everyday lives. For example, going to a restaurant and getting crowdsourced recommendations on what dinners are popular. He also talked about the conversational web and how conversation creates community, as well as optimization 2.0, which to him means no IT involvement, but rather quick, easy-to-use tools to make the social web work.
Overall it was a great panel, but my favorite comment came from Andrew at Lowe's when he was asked about ROI and analytics and more specifically, what Lowe's has realized from their social investment. His reply was, "In the end it's like measuring love." You can't measure by counting stuff; the people are the platform to get a better business performance.
SMC Boston's website will soon have video and photos of the event if you want to hear or see more.
P.S. Thanks Todd, for calling me a visionary at the beginning of the night. : )