In the last article on this subject – Social Cohesion – It’s all coming together – we concluded that cohesion resolved the use of the Societal Web across and throughout the organisation. I think that it is possible to go much further than that too.
Businesses that are collaborating and perhaps sharing much of their client, suppliers, and experience and knowledge bases with each other also need to consider processes to ensure that the communication, distribution, and operation of the businesses when using social media is effective at all levels within all the companies of a collaborative group. Common policies and practices and brand control has long been the bugbear of many large organisations who sense that the requirements to ensure consistency across a large group actually stifled innovation and destroyed the ability of a large company to act swiftly or with effective agility in a rapidly changing market.
That’s true, and so making a socially cohesive Societal Web company effective means avoiding those pitfalls too. It means distributing your brand knowledge across the Societal Web so that people don’t have to learn or decide or seek approval for what they do, but that they naturally act in a way which is consistent with those brand values and consistent with the operation that you are seeking for that collaborative group. The speed with which things can be communicated through the Societal Web means that it’s easy to pick up inconsistencies and correct them quickly provided the right processes are in place, and socially cohesive businesses that do that well will outperform their peers by a country mile.
The Societal Web Journey
Our journey from becoming aware of the opportunities that exist in social media to engaging in conversation with others, building relationships, understanding and knowledge, led us to a social, co-operative model where small groups of people form loose groups that help each other to learn and to develop their businesses through co-operation from which a number of people, groups, and business, will form tighter and tighter links, ultimately collaborating effectively from a common target market delivering ideal customer service, products, and services generally, to that market.
Mergers, shareholding swaps, acquisitions, and all of the normal business processes that take place in that collaborative environment ensure that the focus on the end goal remains fixed whilst not losing the agility and the ability to adapt to a changing world.
Finally, we’ve talked about building processes within the Societal Web to guarantee that continued agility whilst making the business, or businesses, cohesive in their use of the tools. That’s the Societal Web journey.
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