In case anyone is wondering if Social Media is having an impact on Wall Street, they need not look any further than the cover of the New York Times.  Here is a story from the August 31st edition about banks that step away from no-brainer money making business venture because of the social risks to their reputations and therefore, their bottom line.

It is obvious that new sources of energy will be hugely lucrative  in the future – except when strip mining pristine Appalachian mountains or releasing vast CO2 emissions cracking oil from Canadian sands – both perfectly legal enterprises.

In the past, the struggle between those in favor and those opposed to a Coal extraction project played out largely in private and was heavily biased toward those with the deepest pockets.   The irony is that, in the past, the developers had an advantage of huge money reserves to wage legal battles, political wrangling, and public relations campaigns against the lowly community action members.  Now, this fountain of money may dry up in the future if banks step away, politicians become wary, and the public becomes increasingly informed of the true value of all alternatives.

“We’re taking a much closer look at a much broader variety of issues, not all of which are captured under state and local laws,” said Stephanie Rico, a spokeswoman for the environmental affairs group at Wells Fargo.

These dynamics are converging on something called a “True Value” Calculation. The True Value Calculation is the expanded ROI of a business venture which includes the positive and negative impacts on a much wider body of stakeholders in the sum total of viability.  In the very near future, we may find the the True Value Calculation will become the rational basis of our democracy as social media aspires to the role of social vetting mechanism and politicians become increasingly irrelevant to anyone but each other.

Tax payers expect police, national guard, and military to provide “real” security. Government expects the private sector to provide the lion’s share of security investment. Is there a business case that can help the private sector rationalize the investment and bridge the expectation gap?

Join us Friday, 3 September, at 12h00 EDT for the Mission Intangible Monthly Briefing. Sean Lyon, principal, R.I.S.C. International (Ireland), corporate defense pioneer and the architect of the emerging cross-functional discipline of corporate defense management (CDM) in conversation with Robert Liscouski, member of the Board, Implant Sciences (NASDAQ:IMSC) and former Assistant Secretary, US Department of Homeland Security will explore the business case.

Registration, as always, is complimentary. Slides and an exemplary downloadable program are posted on the EVENTS tab (Link to our Summer 2010 News page, our new RepuStars composite indices, and other content below). Mary Adams, I-Capital Advisors, moderates.

If you are a senior executive, a board member, or have a financial interest in any publicly traded security, you (or a colleague Send to a Friend) won’t want to miss this event. Learn more.

The Patent system is slow, static, and expensive. Sure it’s great for corporations and wealthy institutions, but what about the rest of us? How do we get paid for our intellectual property? We make rapid fire decisions every day that can make or break markets – who’s got time, money, or influence to patent when you are trying to save your home from foreclosure?

Social capitalism is the new game in town.

Or maybe the last thing that Wall Street wants is for engineers, designers, creative, social, and intellectual people to get “royalties” on their work. Wall Street is quite happy collecting the royalties on the creativity of the American people – those people who actually produce something real and tangible.  And, pathetically, we just give it to them.  Social media drives social contracts and Intellectual Property is our tangible currency. Hello.

In next installment of discussions exploring the state and future of social media, Chris Beck, founder of 26dottwo (@26dottwo) and I review how relationships online are evolving from social networks to social “nicheworks” or contextual networks.

In social media, how we connect with one another reflects our interests as well as our contacts. We’re adapting our definition of relationships to now also include a new, thinner layer of “relations” in order to refine our online experience as well as how we learn, discover, and share. In doing so, we create a social silhouette that outlines our interests, concerns, views, and potential,which ultimately is reflected in how we architect and cultivate our social graph. Over time we transform social graphs into interest graphs. For those brands, organizations, and individuals looking to associate with relevant groups, having one recipe or formula is no longer effective to suit the tastes of these disparate, yet influential nicheworks.

If businesses or anyone for that matter have any hope of earning prominence within these important communities, relevance and engagement become paramount. The art and science of all we do from here on out will determine our stature within each network and more importantly, the resonance and endurance of what we introduce into social streams.

Information knows no boundaries, but attention and relevance become the barriers to pervasiveness. How will you revise your engagement and content strategies to stimulate resonance?

#R.R.S.

This series was filmed at the new video studio at KickLabs SF where I spend time as an entrepreneur in residence.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Facebook
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Please consider reading, Engage!: It will help you find answers to your questions…

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Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:

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This Video series celebrates upcoming National Bulk Foods Day, happening on October 23, 2010

08.18.2010 – Portland, Ore.– Appealing to the soccer mom and the penny-pinching couple alike, shopping in the bulk foods aisle has quickly become one of 2010’s hottest trends, according to the Wall Street Journal. Celebrating this boom in bulk shopping and upcoming National Bulk Foods Day on October 23, 2010, the Bulk is Green Council is proud to announce the launch of the first of a series of two YouTube videos that follow everyday shoppers on a trip to their neighborhood grocery store, documenting how they save time and money while shopping green.

“Budgets are tight and people are thinking twice about how far their dollar takes them,” said Bart McKnight, founding council member and Category Manager for Trade Fixtures. “We decided to document the experiences of real people to better understand how Americans are getting creative with their purchasing decisions, and we think that these videos will teach people a thing or two about to how to make cost-effective, eco-friendly choices at the grocery store.”

The first YouTube video, which can be viewed at www.youtube.com/BulkisGreenCouncil follows a 40-something man and a mom and her son on their quest to gather the 11 ingredients needed to make a wholesome natural snack. The man shops in the regular aisles of the grocery store, while the mom and child shop exclusively in the bulk foods aisle. The drastic difference in total cost and time required of each is then compared. 

The second video in the series follows a different set of shoppers who are prepping a gourmet dinner for a group of friends, and will be launched in time for the first-ever National Bulk Foods Day on October 23.

“The videos reveal some interesting information about how people shop for food today,” said Clint Landis, founding member of the Bulk is Green Council and Chief Marketing Officer for Frontier Natural Products Co-Op. “We suspected that the mother and child shopping natural in bulk would save money – anywhere from 30 to 96 percent – but we were surprised to see the little boy had fun selecting all the ingredients from one aisle. He actually taught his mom how to shop in bulk, while the single man shopping in the regular aisles had to run all around the store to find what he needed and ended up pretty frustrated.”

The Bulk is Green Council launched the YouTube campaign as part of an ongoing effort to educate people on the environmental and economic benefits of shopping natural and organic in bulk. Founded in 2008, the council includes industry leadersHain Celestial Group, SunRidge Farms, Frontier Natural Products Co-Op, Trade Fixtures, and Lundberg Family Farms.

The Bulk is Green Council invites YouTube viewers to share their own experience shopping in bulk by posting their story in the video’s comments section athttp://www.youtube.com/BulkisGreenCouncil, or by contacting the council atwww.BulkisGreen.org.

Google has stated that the “market of conversations” are growing to a point that businesses will either jump in or fall out. The way Google positions the need for enterprises to engage is in their statement which says  “Bottom line: More and more business is going to transact via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other applications yet to be developed.  This train is too important to miss.”

Has Google Failed?

Social media is here to stay. More personal communications are being sent via social media than email, which is mindboggling. Technological developments are on the horizon. Google has launched numerous “social trial balloons and many have failed. Failure is part of success. The determining factor is learning from failure and moving to new ground using lessons learned from your failure and others. Google is nothing more than a great big incubator of “trial and error” and they use their failures, and that of others, to predict market behavior. However their predictions are not based on past references rather future indicators of “market shifts”.

Again they say :Bottom line: More and more business is going to transact via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other applications yet to be developed. This train is too important to miss. Do you think Google, with all its data, knows where the train is going? It goes where ever the people take it.

A Game Changer…..

Business strategies are indeed a game. Who can predict where are market is going and how can your business be there before the competition. Technology has arisen as the #1 game changer for all industries. Yet, current leaders seem to be out of touch with how the game is changing. Don’t think so then look around and you’ll see trends of change everywhere disrupting old models and ushering in new models all fueled by technology.  While the market of conversation is indeed changing the game leaders are listening to the wrong conversations, their own.

Corporate leaders demand that management follow them. Managers demand that employees follow them. Organizations think the consumer will follow them and their offerings. The game has changed and people are following people rather than brands and institutions. To lead the game or change it you have to hear what the market is saying. Listening to your own rhetoric is not listening to the market. The ROI from social media is called listening and learning to predict based on the conversations of the market.

According to a study conducted by Gartner, the first quarter of 2010 witnessed a whopping 707 percent increase in Android sales. As a result, the sales of the Google Android OS-based smartphones have surpassed the sales of the Microsoft Windows Mobile-based handsets around the world.

And this month I saw a stat that said the sales of Google Android phones in the U.S. are rising so quickly, that they have outsold Apple handsets for the first time on record and it got me thinking.  Could Apple’s decision to sell exclusively through AT&T be the very decision that kills there brand?

Hear me out …

Currently you really have 4 major operating systems in the mobile space (in order of market share trajectory): Blackberry 33% and declining, Android 27% and rising, Apple 23% and declining, and Microsoft 11% and declining (see graphic).  So clearly Android has just vaulted its way into 2nd place over Apple and gaining on Blackberry. Ultimately, I predict you will see Android reach the top spot before the end of the year based on this trajectory. (humm Will 2010 be the Android Christmas?)

But as 4 time owner of the Apple iPhone I still don’t see a reason to switch. Yes I have seen the iPhone4 vs HTC Evo video (hat tip to my life long buddy Steve Schnoll at SuccessFactors for making me watch it!) which cost a Best Buy employee his job for posting it. But I don’t care either.

My advice to Google and the brand group at Android is this – stop advertising the phone and start creating exclusive apps that only are available on the Android platform. Ok I know they already have exclusive apps on the Android platform but I meant ones that I would care about. Call this the Howard Stern theory like when he moved exclusively to Sirius Satellite Radio. Why didn’t FIFA World Cup have an exclusive app that was only available on Andriod – that would get people to start switching to their platform!

AT&T has seen a 50 fold increase in the amount of data flowing over their network but I still don’t feel confident that they can keep up. As a brand manager I would feel constrained by the AT&T brand and be lobbing internally at Apple to set the iPhone free before it’s too late.

We usually look at organizational networks at three levels. The first (described as a knowledge factory) is at a strategic level, built on the high-level inventory of an organization’s intangible capital. Today, I’ll talk about the next takes the perspective of the knowledge factory down one more level of detail (third perspective, personal networks comes tomorrow).

This perspective looks at the roles people play in your organization. This is the Value Network methodology described by Verna Allee in The Future of Knowledge (still one of my favorite books on the knowledge economy and why I pursued certification in this methodology*).

This approach involves mapping a network where a specific task or process occurs. The nodes in this network are “roles.” A role speaks to the specific function that a person is playing. This is not their title on an org chart—it is usually more descriptive—such as advisor, buyer, designer, marketer, mentor, partner, problem solver. It is common for a person to serve in more than one role.

Once you identify the roles, then all the different “exchanges” between roles are catalogued and mapped. An effort is made to identify both tangible and intangible exchanges. Delivery of a product, document or money is a tangible exchange. An intangible exchange is something like the sharing of knowledge, an introduction to someone else or personal support. Generally, the tangible exchanges are more formal. The intangible, while less structured, can be critical in creating trust and facilitating better communication in an organization.

This is an excerpt of a Value Network map. It was developed to improve the process for handling complex technology repairs at a large utility company. The excerpt shows the sequence of activity that takes over once a problem has been reported and documented. Solid arrows show tangible exchanges and dotted line arrows show intangible exchanges. The first step is for the Service Coordinator to send the Field Technician a dispatch ticket (tangible) and suggestions on the potential solution (intangible) based on information the coordinator has obtained from the customer. The Senior Tech Advisor also gets a copy of the dispatch ticket (tangible) and provides advisory (tangible) to the Field Tech and the Service Coordinator. The Field Tech provides the service (tangible) to the Customer Tech Manager. If all goes well, the Customer Tech Manager and the Service Coordinator exchange completion documentation and the process ends. If not, the field tech informs the field manager that an escalation may be necessary and a new phase of the process kicks in.

The full version of this map includes upfront agreements as to customer expectations and commitments on service level agreements. There is also a set of procedures for escalating problems that cannot be resolved through the initial work of the field tech. The analysis found a number of places in the process where responsibility shifted from one person to another but the person receiving the hand-off wasn’t getting full information. Communication flows for these hand-offs was improved. The map also graphically showed that initial service level negotiations were handled without input from the field which often led to agreements that did not work well in reality. Small work groups were able to make dramatic progress in the span of just a few weeks.

The power of this approach is that the map is created by the people that do the work that is being mapped. It helps them think through what actually happens in their everyday work—and how to improve it. Unlike pure process maps, this approach also captures the critical exchanges of information and assistance, the human-centric intangible exchanges that help make the system work. The concept of mapping intangible exchanges helps, we believe, to make sense of the multiplicity of goals and benefits that network participants have in a business setting. It also empowers the people doing the work to improve it themselves. This kind of bottom-up thinking is critical to the optimization of the knowledge enterprise.

We also like Value Networks as a case study for operationalization of knowledge and its 21st century business model. From its beginnings in the mid-1990s, the methodology has been developed into both an open source and commercial offering. There is also a software package that facilitates the analysis and visualization of the network maps. Rather than trying to keep the methodology as a proprietary offering, the group is maximizing its reach and impact by empowering people on the line inside organizations to model and optimize their own work.

Adapted from Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization by Mary Adams and Michael Oleksak.