Often I have found over the past three or four years that we've been "doing" social media, whenever I've encountered some terrific insight, some thorough piece of research, or just some well-informed social marketing strategy, Francois Gossieaux has been behind it. We've shamelessly, if transparently, picked his considerable brain about everything from our business model to how we measure success. And we're not alone: clients from Deloitte to Microsoft to Fedex to Intuit have engaged him and his considerable insights since he started his consulting practice, Beeline Labs.
But now he's on to something even bigger and potentially even better. As he interviewed CMO's of leading companies and finds out which ones are doing great things with online community, blogging, and other forms of social marketing, Francois considered that his own business model was, paradoxically enough, pretty grounded in the past. Now that's changed, with the official launch of Human 1.0, his socially-integrated and broadly networked consulting-online community-execution social media company.
When I asked about what this means, Francois told me: "The big vision is that we found that companies that are successful in leveraging the social wave of innovation are turning their social processes into business processes.... In a way that is not that different from what we used to do. But the big difference is that I'm drinking my own Kool-Aid...." Which means that he's brought together some of the best minds in the business (you'll recognize many of their photographs on the web site) to help both specific client problems in a collaborative fashion, as well as engage clients in long-term operational over-haul.
There's much more to the story, so I invite you to read Francois' post on the site. But we wish him well... and are looking forward to more great ideas to incorporate into our own endeavors.