The fascinating post in the Read Write Web outlines a new trend, “Relocalization” or the inevitable “Local 2.0″ that’s a backlash against malls, industrial “retail” and online “community.” It predicts a resurgence of “face to face” interaction, and people paying a premium for locally produced products and “townish” community.

It’s a new synthesis: people increasingly don’t believe in commuting, and many workers are accustomed to working “from home” or in Starbucks or other public coworking spaces. Local 2.0 carries a strong green, anti-carbon tinge as well. And it’s not at all incompatible with periodic jetsetting, everything can interoperate. Definitely worth watching!

In case you missed it, this seminal post from the New York Times shows a startling example of “big data” hitting retail. Data collection and mining have enabled Target, for example, to predict what degree of pregancy young mothers are in—based on the kind of things they buy.

Although Valley visionaries and enterprise data engineers have been talking about “big data” for years, this post brings it down to the personal retail level. Due to the growing appreciation of social data and behavior, data scientists and marketers now have the glue to use data to increase relevance to customers and clients.

In this post’s main example, data engineers analyzed purchase behavior of pregnant mothers, sifting through voluminous retail data, and they found plenty of patterns that indicated that women were pregnant, down to the trimester! Obviously, enterprises have a large responsibility to use data in ways that won’t violate trust, and many will make mistakes in their efforts to pump up quarterly numbers.Put another way, buying transactions are *very* social, so retailers, whether bricks and mortar or ecommerce, will unleash tremendous intelligence in the next 3-5 years. The value of big data intelligence will be increased by an order of magnitude when combined with social network data.

Sam Fiorella, writing in The Social CMO, put together some fresh thinking on how to disrupt publishing, drawing some parallels with the music business in Open Letter to Media Publishers. Since their comments are turned off, I’ll offer some additional thoughts here.

Sam, thanks for one of the most intelligent posts I’ve read on the disruption of print I’ve seen in ages. Reading between the lines, I’ll offer this iteration.

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Customers Are Smarter and Want A New Relationship | The New Economics of Business Reputation

While preparing to launch Social Business Services for B2B Sales in January 2012, I have been engaged in its Ecosystem Audit. I have plumbed online conversations about B2B Sales and Marketing adoption of social business (erstwhile social media). I have been struck by a recurring realization: a large part of Marketing and Sales as we know them is significantly out of alignment with B2B customers. Social business is permeating customer networks throughout the economy and changing customer behavior and expectations. This has created a rare opportunity for B2B marketing and sales people who understand and respond ahead of the market. If I’m right, this could be one of the most important posts you read this year.

Two quick examples of misalignment: one of Marketing’s underlying assumptions is that it is not economically feasible to have large-scale one-on-one customer conversations, so marketing must achieve scale through secondary research (and remain isolated from the customer). One of Sales’ key assumptions is that it must rely on primary one-on-one prospect/customer communications to drive value. Both of these are increasingly false, so I’ll drill down on them before offering practical recommendations for how Marketing and Sales can explore social business at a new level. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently participated in a discussion in which we debated how size of brand or firm should affect social business strategy, so I’ll dive deeper into the issues here because they are an excellent opportunity to show how strategy and execution are connected and how they differ. I’ll compare how startups and enterprises approach four areas of executing a social business initiative: team, collaboration, learning and scaling. Read the rest of this entry »

Must read post speculating on whether Google will integrate Google+ with Docs to make an enterprise play, disrupting Yammer, Socialtext and other lightweight social enterprise players. This is exactly how to think and why most people miss the true significance of Google+: it’s a social infrastructure into which users will be able to plug many of their other Web activities (such as using Google Docs, Gmail, Payments, etc.). This makes it far more significant that "another social network." Thx @jowyang #fb

“Social media monitoring” is one of the trappings of social business, and most organizations are bewildered by the various approaches they could use to “listen to the ecosystem.” No one argues that a key part of social business governance is determining meaningful metrics to measure the impact of interacting in social venues, but how you use metrics to listen and measure is far from obvious, so here I’ll share some insights I’ve developed based on helping clients through the process of selecting a “listening solution” as well as the process that we have used. Based on these experiences, I have developed an offering by templating the processes, but I won’t go into detail about that here.

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Fantastic Story + A Smart Business Idea

Blake Mycoskie is a gifted storyteller in his own right, and, in this South by Southwest 2011 keynote, he entertained the audience with the story of TOMS Shoes while imparting a simple but profound principle of 21st century business: discovering the meaning and potential of giving. Here are the highlights of TOMS story, which will help you appreciate the context of the blockbuster business idea.

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Josh Williams shared his insights about geosocial at this South by Southwest 2011 session as well as his thoughts about how to approach it to serve customers better. Williams was passionate about orienting geosocial functions around storytelling and travel, which he illustrated by describing Gowalla’s approach to adding value.

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The Maple Leaf Digital Lounge has selected the Social Network Roadmap(SM) to build the social presence behind its launch, and CSRA has been working with their team for a few weeks. The Maple Leaf Digital Lounge (“MLDLCA”) is a virtual ecosystem that promotes discovery and collaboration among Canadian digital startups, foreign and Canadian investors and other enablers. Their mission is to facilitate cross-border high tech deals. “The Lounge” has two incarnations: several online venues combined with periodic physical events. Their launch event will happen on March 12 at the South by Southwest Interactive (“SxSW”) conference.

Read on for my insights from working with them so far: it’s interesting because their use-case for the SNR is quite different from that most of CSRA’s clients.

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