Facing new challenges: designing strategy
I’m a designer. Initially I designed the way interactive products (like CD ROMs, kiosks and later websites) looked. Then I started focusing on how they worked – how they were experienced by the people who used them, and how that reflected on the business or brand providing the product.
Doing this properly required me to really get under the skin of my clients’ businesses – their products, their internal processes, their ethos. As more and more of our clients recognise the need to be more social – in the way they communicate and in the tools they use to do so – it’s become clear that in order to fully respond to the feedback these new communication loops encourage, most businesses need to redesign themselves internally.
This calls into question the general understanding of the remit of social ‘media’. As David Armano wrote in a recent blog post over on HarvardBusiness.org:
“Media” limits our view of the movement, and brings with it the baggage of decades of advertising. Marketers are only too happy to view the social web as a new array of channels to market their goods in some shape or fashion. That’s because it’s a model they’ve used since the beginning.
He (and the majority of the commenters on that post) believes that:
It may be time to approach social business by design. This means moving beyond our current definition of “social media” as a PR tool and thinking of it as something that can evolve the way we work, communicate, interact and collaborate at a core business level.
This is certainly borne out by our experience as we help clients find their way in the social realm. It isn’t simply a matter of starting a Twitter account – for businesses to really engage with their customers they need a sound strategic approach to enable them to embrace the feedback culture that Will outlined recently. This can be a challenging process, one that needs to be recognised and afforded importance from the highest levels of the management team.
In effect organisations need to redesign themselves strategically and functionally to make the most of the new opportunities afforded by the socialisation of customer (and employee) relationships.
Helping our clients successfully make this transition is my new design challenge – and the reason I’m sporting a shiny new job title :)
* thanks to Flickr user brownphoto for the image
Jenni wrote this on 07.08.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Business, NixonMcInnes, Strategy box
