Blurring Boundaries’ 4 Questions

I have created a self-imposed deadline of this Friday to finish my Blurring Boundaries book proposal and send off to my agent, Danielle Svetcoff who will undoubtedly ask some tough and challenging questions. That's how she helps me write better books.

Meanwhile, I've developed four tough questions of my own that the book will try to answer. It may take all 80,000 words to address them:

1. Where’s the ROI in social media?

Social media in business is about ten years old. Any business advocate of a social media program has heard this question, and chance are likely, was frustrated in trying to answer it.

But at the end of the day, all business is about financial issues. The question, as toug as it is to be answered, needs to be answered. I am not absolutely certain that I will show a direct corellation between social media and the bottom line.

But I have a decent amount of evidence that shows big companies like IBM, Intuit and SAP are making money because of social media. If there is no clear bottom line equation, there is a great deal of evidence that big businesses are making money at the top line through the conversational technologies.

The business value case has become irrefutable, or so it seems to me.

2. If businesses are supposed to relinquish command and control  what is it's new role?

Social media champions have spent a decade telling managers, lawyers and marketing departments to let go of presumed command and control. Fine, but if companies are to host and manage social media, including large online communities, just what is their new role?

Surely they are not supposed to just sit on the sidelines or go fetch the coffee. Blurring Boundaries will report on how several companies have replaced themselves from the center of social media programs with their customers.

They have not done so, out of a sense of altruism. It has proven to be a smart and financially rewarding business tactic.

3. Where does social media go on the org chart?

Most enterprise social media programs began a skunkworks--little experiments--that were allowed to take hold outside labyrinthine enterprise bureaucracies.

Now they are reaching critical mass. Some online enterprise communities have millions of users. It has become time for social media workgroups to get  integrated back into the enterprise organization, where it will have to conform to enterprise practices and systems , just like HR, ot IT or marketing.

Inside many companies today, there is heated debate as to where social media belongs in the organization. Whoever runs SM will shape SM. If it is marketing, than marketing social media may flourish at the expense of recruiting, or IT.

Blurring Boundaries will argue the case for a social media department--not answering to marketing or any other department--but equal to it, with it's own budget and measurable quarterly goals to attain.

4. If social media gets braided into the enterprise, who does it change the enterprise and how does that enterprise change social media?

Predictions are always a little dangerous because guesswork is involved, but I see the use of social media in business as becoming an everyday practice, as about unique or newsworthy as using a telephone.

Social media is at the end of a disruptive period and just now entering an Era of Normalization, where people will stop talking about the new conversational tools and just start using them to do their jobs with the same diversity as they use email.

A good chunk of this book will examine five companies: IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. But I am looking for stories from companies of over 1000 employees that will help me answer these questions for readers of my book.

If you have a suggestion, please email me.