The run-up to Facebook’s IPO reminds me a bit of a wedding: everyone’s attention is on the big day (expected to be Friday May 18), without much regard for the weeks, months and years afterward. Charlene Li, Rebecca Lieb, and I sat down to discuss some of the implications of a newly public Facebook: on shareholders, business and Facebook itself. — SE  (Cross-posted from altimetergroup.com.)

Whether or not Facebook’s IPO ends up being one of the world’s largest (this Washington Post article places it 6th, between AT&T Wireless and Kraft Foods), it will certainly earn a respectable position in the history of the public markets, a lofty spot for an eight-year-old company in a relatively unproven business.

We identified ten areas where we are watching Facebook closely, as an indication of its success in the future.  We picked these topics because they intrigue us, because they provoke discussion and, ultimately, because we believe they are the issues most central to Facebook’s future.

#1. Leadership

 In a media frenzy in which anything (such as, for example, wearing a hoodie on a road show) can spark a news cycle, it’s to be expected that Mark Zuckerberg would have kept the lowest possible profile during Facebook’s quiet period. But now during the roadshow, on the first day of trading, and afterwards, he’ll need to step out, step up and set the tone for how he will lead this company into its next major phase. Can he pull it off?

The decision Zuckerberg must make, as a CEO who’s famous for his a “go away; we’re working on it” attitude, is whether he will use this milestone as an opportunity to cultivate his newest constituency: investors. As CEO, Zuckerberg needs to be accountable to his shareholders–not to a stock price per se, but to their faith in him. We will start to see clues to this decision during the first earnings call (a trial by fire for any CEO of any newly public company).

Of course, it’s all fun and games until there is a major hit to the stock price.  We know, generally speaking, what the triggers will be: a new, poorly received product, a privacy issue, slowing user growth–the registration statement is full of examples.  When this happens, Zuckerberg will have to demonstrate a completely new level of leadership. He’s chosen his executive team wisely in that both COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman are strong, respected executives who have been through this process before. And, despite his youth, Zuckerberg has learned from previous missteps like member revolts, privacy, and Beacon.  If you still wonder if Zuckerberg is ready for prime time, imagine how you’d react if a major, highly unflattering motion picture had been made about you while you were still in your twenties. The issue isn’t if he can avoid controversy, but how well he can quell the concerns of skittish investors.

#2. Innovation

 Facebook has a hacker culture; its development mantra, “done is better than perfect,” is at the root of both its growth and its biggest failures. Given the massive number of monthly active users (901 million according to the latest released numbers) the strategy has been to release product to the market and learn as it goes.

But as a public company, Facebook will need to choose whether it will continue to release products the way it has in the past or take a more cautious approach.  How will it behave when it’s not just the pundits on Twitter, but the shareholders who react?

Although they’d hate the comparison, there’s a strong role model in Google, which, even as a public company has managed to maintain its agile development strategy. Granted, there’s always the risk of a Buzz (Google) or Beacon (Facebook), but Facebook has demonstrated considerably more focus from the start than Google.  Furthermore, the company sent a strong signal in its last quarterly statement that it will continue to make investments for long-term growth, even at the cost of short-term profits. It’s setting expectations that it’s investing for the future, not just for the quarter.

#3. Brands

 Will brands buy what Facebook’s selling? Facebook is, after all, a media company, and while it has other sources of income through partnerships, brand dollars are what will ultimately make not only the IPO, but the company itself, succeed or fail. With close to a billion users, Facebook is the biggest media company that’s ever existed, in any medium, ever. Advertisers go where the eyeballs are, which is Facebook’s undisputed advantage. After that, it gets a bit trickier.

Facebook is at the vanguard of developing products that merge and conflate advertising and marketing, that blend content, conversation, paid, earned and owned media with media buys. Advertising is media buying, but those other aspects: owned media (premium brand pages) and earned media (the conversations and comments and interactions brands have with their fans, users and yes, detractors) are part and parcel of what Facebook is working to monetize. It’s still experimental. Brands are still testing the waters and are far from establishing best practices or firm models in a “brand” new environment.

#4. Data

Facebook is also in a position, thanks to its staggering user base, to possess and be able to leverage data on a scale we’ve never before seen. Likes, affinities, social graphs, recent behaviors – it’s all there, together with the basic demographic information. Again, the ability to package, parse, productize, make understandable and actionable this vast quantity of data is as formidable a challenge for Facebook as it will be for the media agencies who buy against these very new models. Facebook’s potential as a marketing data juggernaut is very real, and can potentially take advertising to new levels, if the company succeeds in making that data useful.

#5. Mobile

 Most of the coverage around mobile has been focused on Facebook’s “lousy” mobile applications. But we believe this is a red herring – the core issue revolves around the slow development of mobile advertising and marketing. The S-1 says it best in the section on risks related to advertising:

§  “…increased user access to and engagement with Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently directly generate meaningful revenue, particularly to the extent that mobile engagement is substituted for engagement with Facebook on personal computers where we monetize usage by displaying ads and other commercial content…”

But with 85% of revenue coming from advertising as of the end of 2011, the more effective Facebook is at appealing to its mobile users, the more it risks shifting revenues from the Web platform where it can monetize users, to the mobile one where it can’t — at least not immediately.  So the real question becomes how Facebook will balance creating mobile user value against driving shareholder value.

Facebook can’t risk waiting too long before moving aggressively into the mobile space, but also needs to buy time to help mobile advertising develop. Given this significant risk, the purchase of Instagram represents $1B of earnest money that Facebook is focused on the long term.  With the war chest Facebook will have accumulated post-IPO, building a great iPad app and upgrading the smartphone experience is a foregone conclusion. The bigger issue to watch is how well Facebook can develop the mobile advertising market with that experience, in a similar way that it created social media marketing.

#6. Investors

 The first earning call is always rough for a first time CEO, and Facebook will likely not be any exception. But what we are watching closely is if Facebook will develop a different kind of relationship with its shareholders. The company is, at its essence, about sharing: will a newly public Facebook use its own platform to share more information with investors?  Facebook has an unprecedented opportunity to change the way that it handles investor relations. Will it take this opportunity, or will it stick with the tried and true?  We’d love to see Facebook use its own platform as a way to engage with and provide greater transparency to its newest stakeholders: the public markets.

#7. Mergers & Acquisitions

 Thanks to Instagram, every venture-backed start-up has dreams of meeting with Facebook’s M&A team. Will Facebook focus on smaller acquisitions to acquire talent or smart ideas, or will it make major deals to really move the ball forward?

One of the more interesting areas of speculation lately is what would happen if Facebook were to buy Bing from Microsoft. With Google arguably its most formidable competitor, the addition of search would give Facebook advertisers a direct response medium they could not get before on Facebook. Google is, at its essence, a search company that has struggled with social. Facebook is a social company that needs search. A Bing acquisition would up the ante in a significant way between Facebook and Google.

Looks good on paper, but acquiring Bing would also be a huge distraction and a departure from Facebook and Zuckerberg’s legendary ability to focus on social sharing. A more likely scenario is that Facebook and Microsoft continue their long-term strategic partnership, integrating Bing deeply into the Facebook search experience.

Regardless of whether it buys Bing or another organization, few companies do the “merger” part of M&A well. We expect that Facebook will focus on smaller acquisitions that it can absorb and leverage quickly, while any large acquisitions like Instagram will be kept running separately, in much the way that Google ran YouTube as a separate entity for years. Again, a focus on the long term gives Facebook the ability to look at M&A in a very different way than traditional companies who much justify every single penny spent on a company.

#8. Culture

 Facebook is a private company in many respects (one of which is about to change dramatically), but the internal culture has always been very open. It has invested heavily to create this open culture, and it has slowly but surely been reducing the amount of information shared internally in the run-up to the IPO.

This will only increase, as the company will now be beholden to even more securities industry regulations intended to protect investors from selective disclosure. So again the balancing act, this time between employees (and openness) and shareholders (and fiduciary responsibility). Which leads us to…

#9. Talent

 Once it goes public, how will Facebook retain talent, especially top talent?  Expect to see the usual exodus as people wait to vest, then cash out (the Bay Area housing market is already bracing for impact).  But, again like Google, Facebook will retain its cachet for some time to come, and some will be motivated by the opportunity to change the world from within Facebook rather than from without. Where else can you find a platform of 900M people to try out your next great idea?

#10. Privacy

 Zuckerberg has said that increased sharing is core to Facebook’s growth. But with greater sharing also come increased pressures on and threats to user privacy.

Over the past eight years, Facebook has mastered the art of trial and error when it comes to privacy. There have been huge missteps (Beacon), significant improvements (to privacy settings) and escalating tensions as the company has continually pushed its users to share more, and more often, frequently beyond their comfort zones. The company has accumulated a great deal of resilience along the way, and has tried to balance giving people a granular degree of control (at the risk of confusing them) with offering a simplified experience (at the risk of alienating them).

The addition of Timeline, and the emergence of “passive sharing,” raise the bar yet again. A few months ago I installed the Washington Post Social Reader on my Timeline. Now I know that it involves social sharing, but one day when I was in need of a little “mental floss,” I clicked on a story about Snooki’s recent weight loss. I didn’t think anything of it until a bunch of friends and work colleagues started teasing me. There it was, along with comments: “Susan Etlinger read an article: “Snooki Finally Reaches Goal Weight of 98 Pounds – But Has She Gone Too Far?” I was, frankly, mortified. I’d forgotten I was “in public,” and I am someone who is supposed to know better.

Wherever your stance on Facebook’s privacy record, privacy will continue to be a litmus test issue for Facebook. User outrage is one thing; shareholder outrage is quite another. We will watch to see how Facebook balances continued innovation against privacy. Where will Facebook stand when and if privacy issues affect the stock price — will they pull back or forge ahead?

As always, we’d love your thoughts on these issues. What are you watching as Facebook heads into its IPO?

A key challenge is how to build the control and security foundation for a mobile business strategy. Chris and I will be hosting an open, no-cost webinar on Wed March 28th at 10am PT/1pm ET that will discuss the key elements of the mobile control layer, its importance, and how both the technologies and leadership elements should come together to provide a foundation for a coherent enterprise mobility strategy.

The Mobile Control Plane Should Underlie All Mobile Strategy

Having business leaders take the reigns in mobile is a growing trend and a change in strategy that ensure the people who know the needs of the mobile workforce are driving strategy. This strategic shift, however, still relies on IT having put in place a mobile control layer that provides security, management and overall policy to govern mobile as it spreads across the organization. This foundation, which underlies all of the business-driven use of mobile, is comprised of many pieces and goes well beyond mobile device management (MDM) the increasingly catch-all phrase that vendors are using to insinuate themselves onto shortlists of mobility partners.

• What are the steps I must take before I can hand my line of business managers (sales, support, products) the reigns to deploy the mobile strategy that’s right for them?
• What is IT’s role vs. the business management’s role in making mobility an element of strategy that positively impacts the business?
• What technologies and strategies should be in my “plan” to enact mobility? Isn’t MDM enough?

The webinar will take place on Wednesday March 28th at 1PM Eastern/10AM Pacific time.

Register today at: http://bit.ly/mobilecontrol

1. Encourage sharing.
2. Capture knowledge.
3. Enable action.
4. Empower employees.

This is the first of two reports on enterprise social networks, with this one focused on how it creates value for organizations. The next report will focus on maturity models and the future of enterprise social networks.

Data HighlightsThe report also includes input from 13 technology providers, 185 end users, and surveyed 81 ESN decision makers from companies with over 250 employees (see below in Related Resources for links to the data). A few of the findings and graphics from the report are included below. There was only moderate impact on business goals. On a scale of 1 to 4, the highest impact seen – improving collaboration between departments/teams — scored only a 2.91 (see Figure 5 below).

A key reason for this is that there were few metrics used to gauge effectiveness. Most metrics were engagement-oriented in nature and not necessarily tied to business impact. For example, the top three metrics used were 1) More/faster collaboration across the company; 2) Frequency of use; and 3) Engagement across the company (% of employees using it) (see Figure 6-1 below).

In fact, no organization surveyed believed they measure ESNs very well, and only 31% felt they measured ESN impact somewhat well. A quarter admitted that they didn’t measure at all! (see Figure 6-2 below).

Related resources. In the spirit of Open Research — and to spur further discussion on the topic of enterprise social networks, we are also making available a PDF summary of all questions asked in the survey, a PowerPoint of the graphics, and the full data set. If you discover additional insights, we ask that you share back your findings with the community.

Webinar. I’ll be doing a Webinar on Thursday, February 22nd, 2012 at 10am PST on the report with Socialcast’s CEO Tim Young. More information and registration is available at http://t.co/1XI8nMkp. It will also be recorded and available for playback on Socialcast’s site.

Stay in touch. Would you like to be notified about upcoming reports or even participate in our research via surveys or interviews? Please let us know by filling out this form.

Open Research This independent research report was 100% funded by Altimeter Group. This report is published under the principle of Open Research and is intended to advance the industry at no cost. This report is intended for you to read, utilize, and share with others; if you do so, please provide attribution to Altimeter Group.

My frustration is reflected in the findings of my colleague Chris Silva‘s new report, entitled “Make An App For That: Mobile Strategies For Retailers“. Of particular value is that Chris pivots the report around two major strategies retails can use when it comes to mobile:

• Enrich: These strategies are focused on driving transactions and measured in total purchases, purchase size or frequency, and purchase-per-store metrics. The ROImodel is simple — engage mobile buyers and grow the business.
• Engage: Engage strategies are not as transaction-centric as enrich strategies and are aimed at improving user interaction and brand affinity. Engage strategies can provide product information, post-purchase support, or help to provide a presence for retailersand brands with a fully online presence. The focus is on bringing shoppers closer to the brand to drive interaction, not just spend.

The problem is that most retailers approach mobile for mobile’s sake and miss the mark when it comes to delivering value for the mobile consumer. For example, Chris points out that Abercrombie & Fitch’s mobile app doesn’t actually show any of it’s clothing while Longhorn Restaurant’s app has a cool 3D app that lets me cook a steak — but I can’t directions to the nearest restaurant.

What’s Your Mobile App Strategy?

One of the things I love about this report is that it is jam packed with highly actionable advice. Below is an example of a decision matrix which maps our your mobile app strategy options based on type of product and your goals.

Chris lays out four types of mobile apps that retailers can build, and makes the call on when to use which by writing, “As a rule of thumb, informational applications and Buy/Ship applications are most oftendesigned to build interaction with users and engage new buyers. In some of the strategiesamong brands that have been successful, the winning ingredient in the application is theinformation source the user turns to, which builds trust and engagement with that user todevelop a “go-to” relationship. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, augmenting and, perhaps, fundamentally changing and improving the user’s buying experience can reap vastrewards for the company while solving a real user pain. Regardless of the application choice,the need for a novel tool that solves an actual user’s problem is key to driving customer use.”

But my favorite part is at the end, where there is 1) an assessment tool to help you determine your mobile app maturity, and 2) recommendations on what to do first, second, and next based on the findings from the maturity assessment. I’ve included the recommendation graphic here but you’ll need to link over to the report to see the assessment tool.

Want To Learn More?

Here are a few things to do:

• Read the report. I’ve embedded it below and it’s also at http://bit.ly/zuMYZb.
• Attend a webinar Chris is doing on the report on Friday, March 2nd at 10am PT. Here’s the link to register.
• Follow Chris on Twitter at @802dotchris.
• Read blog posts about the report from my Altimeter colleagues. I’ve included links to them below.

But all good things come to pass. With the arrival of Scott Thompson as the new CEO of Yahoo!, it makes sense that Scott be given a clean slate upon which to write the future of Yahoo!. This is very much the norm for incoming CEOs, where founders are asked to take a diminished role or expected to leave the company completely.

This is the case with Jerry all the more so, as he was (is?) a vehement supporter of Yahoo! remaining independent. Regardless of Jerry’s real or perceived position toward independence or selling off assets such as Alibaba or Yahoo! Japan, it’s still all baggage hanging on from a previous era. Scott and Yahoo! need the  freedom to set the vision and strategy for Yahoo!, unencumbered by the past. The last thing Scott needed was the ghost of Yahoo! Past — embodied in the very real, very smart, founder and former CEO of Yahoo! — sitting at the boardroom table.

So what does the future bring for Yahoo!? While many people have written off Yahoo! but I’m less inclined to do so for the following reasons:

• Loyal users. It’s amazing to me that Yahoo! attracts 700 million unique and very loyal users each month. That’s somewhat less than Facebook’s 800 million users, but it’s huge by any standard. Through thick and thin, they have stuck with Yahoo!, despite having a plethora of other options available to them. But how there continues to be continued erosion so Yahoo! will have to invest in it’s “front doors” of Mail, MyYahoo!, and Home Page, as well as new offerings around it’s user engagement vision. As my colleague Rebecca Lieb commented in this article, “”Yahoo is a very vaguely defined company strategically,” Lieb said. “It has a million or zero identities. It’s everything and nothing.”
• Access to implicit social and interest graphs. The emails and address books of those 700 million users create an implicit social graph, similar to the one that Google is trying to tap via Google+. Front page content reading leads to tremendous data about what those 700 million people are interested in. This is gold for future targeted advertising, but Yahoo! has done little to develop or market these capabilities.
• Advertisers wanting to reach those users. Yahoo! will generate about $5 billion in revenue this year, most of it from advertisers with whom it has a direct relationship. But those revenues are declining as other options are growing.
• Technology chops. Yahoo! has had the ability to be ahead of the market, from purchasing Flickr and Delicious to starting an early form of a social network in Yahoo! 360 back in 2005. I continue to admire and use Yahoo! Pipes and it’s developer APIs remain excellent. What it’s lacked is a clear vision of how those investments tie into a coherent vision and strategy for Yahoo’s relationships with users and advertisers.

Prediction #3: Connected leaders and employees will create sustained competitive advantages through a culture of sharing. This year will see some companies pull ahead of others because they are able to collaborate, innovate and execute better and faster thanks to an ingrained culture of sharing.

This is the year that companies get serious about investing in their internal social business capabilities, simply because it helps create and sustain a fast-moving, innovative and collaborative culture. It’s one thing to have a Facebook or Twitter presence run by a small social media team in your organization. It’s a totally different ball game that truly social businesses are playing when thousands of employees are connected externally as well as internally.

Culture is often dismissed as the “soft” underbelly of business. But as business leaders like Jack Welch (GE), Howard Schultz (Starbucks), and Herb Kelleher (Southwest) have written, culture is what creates and sustains a great company. And while a company can be successful with a “command and control” culture, I believe that companies that embrace openness (see my book “Open Leadership” for details) and encourage a culture of sharing will be much better positioned in the long run.

There are two ways I see culture changing because of increased sharing enabled by social technologies. The first revolves around connecting your biggest advocates – your employees — with your customers. The second is connecting your employees with each other.

Empowering Your Employees To Connect With Customers

No matter how many people you have on your social media team, it won’t be enough to meet the groundswell of customer interaction demand. To do that, you have to create your own internal groundswell, embodied in your employees.

Let’s go back to Dell. In my first prediction, we saw Dell dealing with flaming notebooks in the summer of 2006. Since that time, Dell has made it a mission to get closer to customers. One way they’ve done this is to train employees on how to use social media on Dell’s behalf. To date, over 5,400 Dell employees have taken one or more social media certification class and more than 2,000 have taken the full 8+ hours of classes to become fully “social media certified”.

According to Altimeter’s benchmarking surveys, advanced social businesses have roughly 20 people working on their social media efforts. That means that Dell effectively has 100 times more people engaged in social media than the most advanced social businesses.

This means that Dell understands customer needs at 100 times more points throughout the organizations, and has 100 times more people poised to jump in and support customers. It’s also 100 times more people looking at ways to improve and innovate the business on multiple fronts.

Many organizations will look at the immense costs (and risks) of training even a significant minority of employees and take a pass. It’s beyond their ability to comprehend so many people freely speaking on behalf of the company, beyond the grasp and control of corporate communications.

But look at the huge benefit to companies that do make that investment. Dell is building a competitive advantage deep into the organization that will difficult for competitors to emulate. It doesn’t replace great products but in the long run, 2,000 points of connection will give Dell a better way to facilitate faster agile design processes.

What’s the actual cost/benefit of social media training and empowerment? Here’s a back of the envelope calculation. Let’s assume that those 2,000 Dell employees had 8 hours of training at the opportunity cost of $50/hour. Add in trainer time and being generous, it’s roughly $1 million or about $500 per employee. I’m pretty sure Dell is realizing at least $500 in value just this year from the engagement of those connected employees.

And what if you are worried about something going wrong? Two ways to get your mind around this. First, your employees already interact each and every day with your customers – and you train and trust them to do the right thing and exercise good judgement. Second, things always and inevitably go wrong. To my first prediction about practicing every day transparency, you have to be able to feel comfortable with this new level of openness in order to have the confidence to empower your employees.

Connecting Employees Throughout The Organization

A hot trend right now is the adoption of “enterprise social networking” (ESN) where a company uses software to connect employees socially within the enterprise. This can be either as a standalone service (like Yammer or Socialcast) or integrated into a collaboration platform or suite (like Salesforce.com’s Chatter, IBM Connections, or Sharepoint with Newsgator). Think of it as Facebook-like status updates behind the firewall.

I’m finishing up a report that looks at these ESNs and one of the most interesting findings is that it’s increasingly the leaders of the organization that are behind the adoption of these technologies. The reason: They see it as a way to transform their organizations, simply by creating the opportunity for people to share.

The result of sharing is that barriers between departments fall. Silos get broken down and the power distance between leaders/managers and front line employees becomes smaller. And it also creates opportunity for new leaders to emerge, where they are defined not by their title or how much budget they control, but seen as a leaders simply because they have amassed followers.

In the end, culture is defined simply the by the values, norms, and practices of how we get work done each and every day. The intractable nature of some cultures means that in order for culture transformations to happen – and to happen quickly – the new norms and mindsets not only have to established and trained, but also reinforced over and over again. Here are just a few ways that a culture of sharing can help achieve real business results:

• Share information about a project to reduce duplication.
• Find experts who have solved a similar problem before.
• Solve problems together, faster.
• Streamline processes in real time.
• Identify innovations, big and especially small. And just as importantly, execute them quickly.
• Gain confidence in distributed decision making because of greater information sharing and transparency.

These benefits as well as action plans will be included in the ESN report (sign up to be notified about the report when it is published).

The crucial action for leaders in 2012 is to make the commitment to these ESNs and to participate by simply sharing *how* you achieving your business goals. The practice of leadership requires constant focus on the important while addressing the urgent. Culture is important and can’t become a sidecar to the pursuit of hard goals. It’s just the other way around – culture becomes the foundation through which you will achieve those crucial goals today and in the long run.

So if you have these tools in house, share something every single day to support and grow your culture of sharing. And if you don’t have an ESN yet, look into how you can quickly get one in place

Your Social Business Journey

That’s it for my 2012 predictions and priorities. To summarize:

Prediction #1: Consumers will reward transparent companies with their loyalty. Companies must get courageous with transparency and make it an every day occurrence. Or they will face the wrath of outraged customers.

Prediction #2: Your customers want to be known. Your customers don’t merely want you to understand their needs or pain points. They want you to know them as individuals anywhere and anytime they engage with you.

Prediction #3: Connected leaders and employees will create sustained competitive advantages through a culture of sharing. This year will see some companies pull ahead of others because they are able to collaborate, innovate and execute better and faster thanks to an ingrained culture of sharing.

One thing I hope you see is that becoming a success social business has at its core being a successful business, period. The tactics and etiquette of social business may be unique, but the foundations are rooted in solid business strategy and practice.

All the best to you in 2012 and be sure to share examples of how you are doing on your social business journey. We will all benefit from your generosity and insight.

Request: Please contribute to Altimeter’s Open Research by taking this survey. You can sign up at the end to have the report emailed to you when the report goes live. Spread the word on this survey too — we want to have broad participation and also share our research findings with the broader market.

At the core of the research is understanding the goals that companies hope to achieve with the most basic fundamentals of a social network — the ability to have a profile, post an update, and receive notifications. While initially the goals of early deployments were simple – “Let’s connect everyone!” – the space as evolved.

Now we are finding that executive support — and mandates — are some of the strongest drivers of organizational adoption of these platforms, regardless of industry. But a key problem remains measuring and valuing the impact – few organizations use anything beyond basic engagement metrics to measure the value of these platforms.

Why is this important? When I was writing “Open Leadership”, I was struck by the potential of these technologies to transform organizations company. From the CEO and CIO to department heads, leaders are eager to increase productivity, effectiveness, and resilience. So this is not a report that evaluates technology platform features, but rather, asks a more basic and fundamental question — what results should you expect when you deploy an enterprise social networking solution?

This is where we need your help. We would like to survey and benchmark the impact of enterprise social networks. How is your organization using enterprise social networks to meet business goals? How engaged are your executives? What kind of impact is it having – and how are you measuring it? While we welcome any user of enterprise social networking to complete the survey, we are especially eager to hear from people who were instrumental in choosing and deploying these solutions.

To whet your appetite, here are some early findings so far from our research:

• Creating a “watercooler” is still the most common reason for deploying — but these suffer because of lack of adoption and more importantly, purpose.
• Companies are beginning to deploy enterprise social networks with specific business goals in mind, ranging from optimizing a business process like sales to supporting a change in strategic direction.
• Metrics, however, are lacking. Most deployment focus on engagement metrics around adoption and usage, rather than tying efforts to business goals.
• Some larger organizations are linking adoption and use of enterprise social networks to employee retention — engaged employees tend to be happy employees.

Also, we are also looking for companies willing to be interviewed as case studies and for best practices. We won’t cite you or your company by name without permission. So don’t be shy! This space is still nascent so we welcome the opportunity hear first-hand about your experience.  If you are interested in being interviewed, please my colleague Jon Cifuentes at jon@altimetergroup.com. Thank you in advance!

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This is not a book about how to use social media. Read Brian’s last book, “Engage” as it’s an excellent primer with detailed how-tos. Rather, “End of Business” seeks to explain to executives and leaders who aren’t engaged in social media how connected customers are transforming business as we know it.

Written from the point of view of the connected consumer, the first half of the book looks at phenomenons ranging from the evolution of social networks into personal operating systems to the rise of social commerce. If you read Brian’s blog, you’ll recognize Brian’s fingerprints all over these chapters — rich examples, clear explanations, and always a sense that Brian is at your side as a trusted guide.

But I found the most valuable insights in the second half of the book where Brian becomes prescriptive about how businesses need to approach business differently. In particular, Brian makes the case that you must evolve your business to become “adaptive” to the connected consumer. He’s evolved his call to action from “Engage or Die!” to “Adapt of Die!”. I quote from the book on what is different today:

“The pivot of any business is not whether it can reach consumers, it’s the reality of whether consumers, especially connected customers, wish to connect with them now and over time.”

Brian lays out how a business needs to rewire for this new reality, one that turns away from being internally driven by a strategic plan to one that is guided by an entire organization centered on creating a magical customer experience — and importantly, customer relationship — with these connected consumers. Thus the hallmark of an adaptive business is that it will shift and evolve as an organization, from top to bottom, to be responsive to customers. The last three chapters resonated the most with me, as they layout the framework for an adaptive business, how to evolve your business to shift from rigid to adaptive, and the future evolution into predictive businesses.

You can read more about the book at endofbusiness.com. Other resources:

YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DZ9XAzwhlA

Brian’s post: http://www.briansolis.com/2011/10/announcing-the-end-of-business-as-usual-the-new-book-is-available-now/

Jeremiah Owyang’s post: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2011/10/18/adapting-to-radical-changes-in-business