I rencently mentioned the word “socialnomics“. Whatt’s the interest ? In an interconnected world (not only by the net…a world were everything can impact everything, it’s essential to understand the context to define the systems (enterprise, project, organization, management) we have to implement. So let’s try to summarize things.

- the world is full of stakeholders. You already knew for your shareholders, your employees. For your partners and clients too. Now even your non-clients are a part of the game, they all have expectations, they all thave things to say about your products, why they trust your or not, they can all be the cause of a mass reaction that may impact your business, either positively or negatively.

- stakeholders matter as much as shareholders : it becomes harder everyday to satisfy the ones while neglecting the others. Worse, sometimes you have to listen to the first to satisfy the second.

- value is a flow. It does not self generate in the till or when a contract is signed but though a flow (many people already got that) that has its source outside the company, go through it and ends outside.

- localization is obsolete. People recently start to understand that interactions between the enterprise and its stakeholders did not depend anymore on where each was physically located but have moved online.  But “online” does not mean the corporate website anymore, it could be anywhere, depending on the blogs or social networks people use to read/use. Businesses can’t afford to wait for customers to join them, they have to join them where they are.

- the way business is done is at least as important for performance than operations. It’s a matter of values, of culture (what a company like Danone has identified and turned into a key asset years ago) but also (for how long ?) of ethics.

- The famous “to” in B2C, B2B…. and its “one way” connotationis being replaced by a bijective “with”.

- vertical hierarchy won’t disappear but articulates with an horizontal one. As a matter of fact the above mentioned flow does not advance by itself. It is fed by noise that has to be turned into information, then in decisions, then in actions that have to be monitored. It implies an horizontal decision making model in organizations that are structured for vertical decisions making only. So the organization has to be rethought in order not only to obey to “people from above” but also to “next door colleagues”.

- the value chain becomes social. Processes too.

- la chaine de valeur devient “sociale”, les processus également.

- in an information econmy, the only things that businesses can value is what the public can’t create alone, without them.

- what matters in communication (both internal or external is not how much information is pushed but the level of gained attention.

That won’t go without some challenges such as :

- implementboth the process and the “human factors” that will help to embed stakeholder’s creativity and knowledge into products, services, operations.

- manage employee’s schizophrenia. They are a part of the ecosystem, of the stakeholders, but often have radically opposite behaviors depending on whether they wear their corporate or their customer suit.

- rethink the enterprise, still as a production driven organization, but not as a push engine anymore, rather as the industrial element of the market to market loop.

- offer only products, information, services that mass collaboration between internauts can not produce.

- separate the wheat from the chaff in all the social noise and not go to the opposite extreme what would be like a “social submission” with inconsistent actions and unreadable

chaine de valeur, création de valeur, Innovation, Management, marketing, parties prenantes, social crm, socialisation, socialnomics, valeur, .