Somesso London 2010 - The Social Business Summit

Conference time again. This time it’s Somesso – The Social Business Summit 2010.

Jeff Dachis of the Dachis group kicked off with some interesting observation that he and he team came up with15 years ago when he founded Razorfish in New York.: everything that could be digital would be, because it makes things better, faster and cheaper.

And things have shifted that way, but there have been road bumps along the way. One major example was marketers co-opting the dotcom boom, and creating a  whole lot of business that shouldn’t have existed at the time.

Marketers took one way messages and tried to push them into an environment that was designed for more interactive and social communications – and he’s suggesting that the same is happening to social media..

Indeed, marketers took something of a bashing in Jeff’s talk. “Social media marketing is largely ineffective and incremental at best,” he suggested. And it’s still not very significant – only 0.5% of digital marketing spend is social media.

And thus, this is not a discussion about marketing, but social business – about using social tools to connect everybody in the chain that business involves. And, under Reed’s Law, as the number of people in that network grows, so does the value of that network.

And the purpose of today is to try and address some of those issues:

How do we take an industrial/assembly line model and move it to a sharing network?

What is it about our culture that we don’t want to connect and share and communicate and how can we change that?

Busy day ahead…