“you say to-may-to, i say to-mah-to
you eat po-tay-to and i eat po-tah-to
to-may-to, to-mah-to, po-tay-to, po-tah-to
let’s call the whole thing off”

All kidding aside, I had a chance to check out the discussion over enterprise 2.0 and social business that was taking place on quora. For the uninitiated, quora is an online “knowledge market” where users ask questions and share answers. In particular, I was following two conversation threads: What are the distinctions between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0? and “If Enterprise 2.0″ and “Social Business” are the same concept, why did we need to create the phrase “Social Business”?

My summary is not all inclusive, but it does attempt to organize some of the thoughts along broader themes.

To me, the only thing that’s clear is the level of confusion about that these terms and their relevance across the enterprise. Some (not me) may argue that the battle of names is a cynical ploy to create more business for consultants. While still in its formative stage, social business seems to capture the transformative impact of social media on external and internal interactions and relationship across the enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 seems more narrowly focused on collaborative efforts inside an organization.

That being said, has”social” taken on the status that “e” had in the early web days when e-business and e-commerce were all the rage?

I only wonder in time whether the “social” moniker  (as in social business, social media, social CRM) will be disappear – replaced by a completely different term or deemed unnecessary or redundant.

So check out the categories.  Are they accurate? incomplete?

Boundaries

Enterprise 2.0

• Enterprise 2.0 represents a set of technologies and methodologies for IT implementation inside the enterprise. (Jevon MacDonald)
• Enterprise 2.0 describes the collaborative use of Web 2.0 tools inside a company. (Greg Lowe)
• Enterprise 2.0 is generally used to represent the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies — like cloud computing, social media, wikis, etc. (Stowe Boyd)
• Enterprise 2.0 – 1) The application of Web 2.0 and other collaboration technologies to enhance organizational performance. 2) Establishing the organizational structures and processes that will drive success in the intensely competitive connected economy of today and the future. (Ross Dawson)
• “Enterprise 2.0″ is much more limited and primarily represents interactions of internal employees using social technologies. It’s only a subset of Social Business. (Jeremiah Owyang)

Social Business

• “Social Business” spans all customer interactions, employee interactions, partner interactions, and prospect interactions in social technologies. It’s the whole ecosystem. (Jeremiah Owyang)
• Social business is more expansive and includes functions such as marketing and communications. (David Armano)
• Social Business goes beyond the traditional boundaries of what we define as the Enterprise by including the customer in the conversation about what direction the company should take. (Mark Tamis)
• A Social Business uses Enterprise 2.0 software to implement internal social process but also accounts for things such as: external social presence, supporting process, HR issues, policy development and governance. (Jevon MacDonald)
• Social Business really encompasses much more than tools. It’s really about integrating the social aspect into all areas of your business not just behind the firewall. (Mark Tamis)
• For me the term “social business” means using social technologies in all aspects and therefore combines “Social Media Marketing” + “social CRM” and “Enterprise 2.0″ (Gautam Ghosh)
• A social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web, including social media, social networks, and a long list of other advances. (Stowe Boyd)

Evolutionary or Revolutionary

• Enterprise 2.0 seems to be transformational, while Social Business seems to be evolutionary. (Greg Lowe)
• Enterprise 2.0 is principally a technology adoption issue, and not a reconceptualization of business operations. (Stowe Boyd)
• Both signify a shift in how large business will function moving forward (affecting people, process and technologies) and will likely require new investments (just as when businesses changed when we went digital). (David Armano)
• Social Business is the evolutionary step when Social Media, Social CRM, and Enterprise 2.0 gel into one common concept — but it is no more than a foundation where the business changes the culture, their processes, and their technology to become more collaborative. The argument has been made before by — well, me among others, that the social business is an interim step in the evolution towards becoming a collaborative enterprise (Esteban Kolsky)

Relevance

• These terms are used mostly by vendors and practitioners. Most corporate leaders prefer to speak in business terms referring to professional networking, collaboration, or online communities, among other generic terms. I seldom hear the terms Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business among business executives. (Jim Worth)
• Whether you call it Social Business or Enterprise 2.0, the work centers on the strategic and decisive use to collaborative constructs to improve employee, partner and customer performance. I’ve never heard any CXO mention either term to describe the business benefit of new enterprise social computing innovation. (Sameer Patel)
• Executives have little knowledge or care about the phrase Enterprise 2.0, Social Media. All they want to understand is how does this new “techie” stuff help drive revenue..aka BUSINESS! (Richard Rashty)
• Right now, “social business” is more of an empty container term rather than a substantive idea. Let’s see what takes shape within it, as people fight over the rights to designate this or that feature as the truly essential aspects. (Venkatesh Rao)

Here’s the final key insight from PR+MKTG Camp East: From Listening to Predicting: Trends in Measuring the Business Impact of Collaboration

A. Measuring Impact:

A major focus at PR+MKTG Camp East was the role of collaboration in executing an integrated engagement strategy.

Intuitively most of us know aligning marketing, PR, customer service and sales should positively influence engagement strategies. But while greater collaboration for its own sake can benefit an organization, its true value (and the greatest challenge) is impacting business performance and objectives.

Many variables can influence the performance of your engagement strategy including:

• Quality of the implementation of your engagement strategy
• Quality of your service/product (the purpose for engagement)
• Company culture (what is the tone have you set to encourage customers to engage, and how so?)
• Target audience (how receptive is the target audience you want to have promote or discuss your product/service)

To better measure collaboration’s direct impact on engagement, we need to better understand how these variables interact with each other and function independently of one another.

Listening tools

And that’s where our brand monitoring and listening tools come in. They are the first step in the analytical process of determining the interplay of engagement and collaboration.

Listening is a critical component of any engagement strategy. Companies like Radian6, Alterian and PR Newswire are investing in social media analytics tools to understand efforts to bring customers into the conversation. They also serve to help companies follow collaboration’s impact on enhancing brand/reputation, increasing sales and improving the customer experience.

Consider metrics like sentiment, content, influence and willingness of customers to tell others about your brand, product or service. Companies can track the progress of their internal collaborative efforts by measuring changes in these performance indicators.

B. Predicting

Listening is the first phase in measuring performance. The next phase is making predictions based on the listening.

Ayush Agarwal, CoTweet

That was the point of Ayush Agarwal. He is Head of Products for CoTweet, which helps teams manage one or more Twitter accounts by providing tweet assignments, notes, and on duty status. He was also a speaker in the PR+MKTG Camp East session that explored ways to measure the business impact of integrated communications. He believes that:

1) Five years from now, social organization analytics are going to dominate all data for companies.

2) Going forward, social media outlets are going to be predictive.

Predictive analytics is not new. The discipline optimizes marketing campaigns and website behavior to increase customer responses, conversions and clicks. It’s about predicting future probabilities and trends, by applying a filter to users’ online interactions. Predictive models exploit patterns found in historical and transactional data to identify risks and opportunities.

Ayush sees the day when such tools will help in making real time predictions – exploiting both historical and trending data to spot problems before they become crises, or better yet, identify opportunities ahead of the competition. Think of it as correctly guessing where stocks are heading in real time before the rest of the market goes on a frantic buying or selling spree.

Predictive analysis puts an even higher premium on listening. Ultimately, it’s about impacting ROI as it happens.

It will really get interesting when companies can apply predictive analysis to collaboration and determine which collaborative efforts will most directly benefit engagement strategies and how.

Today I offer up insight number IV from PR+MKTG Camp East -

Patterns of Response: Building a 360 View of Engagement

It’s important to recognize that engagement is about content creation, distribution and managing the response.

Brands are both a manifestation of our positioning and how customers interact with marketing efforts. Customer feedback – often immediate – can become extremely valuable in determining a brand’s next step.

Customer responses can be unpredictable and head in unintended directions. But these tangents may just offer us indications or set a precedent for future engagement.

It’s important to listen, and social media has made listening a much higher priority. Kodak even has a CLO – Chief Listening Officer.

But as Sandra Fathi, President & Founder, Affect Strategies and PR+MKTG Camp Speaker said, “If you are listening in a vacuum without participating, you are only doing half the job.” It’s hard to act quickly and separate out the listening function.”

Joe Moran, Collaboration Solutions Architect at Cisco Systems and a speaker at PR+MKTG Camp East, talked about “patterns of response” in helping marketing understand, organize and predict customer/public feedback. These patterns reflect past interactions with customers/audience and help in planning an engagement strategy and allocating resources.

Patterns of response help organizations process data and then formulate engagement strategies that align with their overall business objectives.

Agile Organizations

Marketers must be agile. They need to be skilled at analyzing the sources of these responses and then processing this feedback internally. Evaluating the quality of the feedback, what to do with the information and whom to pass it onto are critical considerations.

Siloed organizations can undermine this process. Companies can benefit from a flexible collaborative architecture that helps them share feedback across different business units.

Building this collaborative framework is no an easy task. Organizations should understand how collaboration fits into the engagement process.

Moran has found organizations are less likely to maximize results when they focus on technology solutions and not the people and objectives driving the business.

Yet when properly understood, patterns of response can help companies reduce the time it takes to develop products, increase customer satisfaction, identify areas for future revenue growth, and increase brand visibility.

III. Social Media Engagement: Who Owns It?

The question, “Who owns social media?” always generates heated debate. PR+MKTG Camp East was no exception.

The case can be made for any department within and even outside of the organization.  Is it?:

• Marketing – They manage the brand and research.
• Customer service – They are the conduit to serve customers.
• PR – They oversee the message and relationships with influencers.
• Sales – They directly influence purchasing decisions.
• Digital Communications – They understand and manage the communications technologies.
• Product – They have the best understanding of the products.
• HR/Legal – They dictate the policies that govern what people can say.
• Everyone – It’s a company wide affair that everyone is using.
• No one – The customer owns social media.

Perhaps a more appropriate question is not who, but when? In positive times, marketing and sales can make a strong argument – especially as they use social media as part of the program to drive promotions and brand. In times of crisis, PR may be best equipped to manage message and conduct damage control.

Or maybe the question is who owns the social media budget, not its implementation.

Or is the question moot? As social media becomes more accepted or pervasive, it may be like asking who owns email or IM.

Ownership Vs Management

The debate underscores the need for inter-departmental collaboration in building an engagement strategy. Regardless of the owner, alignment is critical when communications channels crisscross and roles and responsibilities overlap.

Marketing, PR, sales and customer service need to learn how their functions are growing more similar – especially when reporters are customers, and customers can wield the power of a reporter with a series of well-placed and well-timed tweets, Facebook wall and status updates, or blog posts.

Rather than looking at ownership, the focus should be how should social media be managed across your company?

“You need governance; you need coordination, structure, and policy – a bit of a symphonic orchestration. How we will play towards a collective goal? That’s the role of someone or some set of people who leads the way into social media. He or she is more like the captain of a baseball team than the leader of organization.” Jonathan Kopp - Partner / Global Director, Ketchum Digital and PR+MKTG Camp East Speaker

Consider the role of cross-functional teams. It’s an opportunity for key stakeholders to convene regularly to share insights on key issues including:

• Customer Relationships (what is your relationship to your customer within your organization)
• Engagement Practices (what is the message, who is the messenger, what’s off limits and how do you communicate)
• Hand off Procedures (how are data and leads collected and information distributed)
• Follow up Processes (how quickly is the customer served)
• Shared Performance Metrics (what constitutes success and how is it shared)

Formalized cross-functional teams are well positioned to help reduce confusion, clarify roles and responsibilities and allow organizations to take advantage of sales opportunities.

“We have a content calendar on a weekly call with an oversight committee as well as the various regions. Our big issue is avoiding brand confusion with all our employees. It’s managed chaos, like conducting traffic in Bombay, but somehow it works.” Jeff Simmermon – Director of Digital Communication, Time Warner Cable and PR+MKTG Camp East Speaker

Ultimately, it’s not about which department does what, but how they work together to deliver a superior customer experience.

And here’s the point:

“Silos exist but customers see a company as a whole.” Frank Eliason – Senior Vice President of Social Media, Citibank and PR+MKTG Camp Speaker

Organizations would be well served by looking past the ownership issue. Departments may have turf wars, but customers don’t care; they just want their needs met and their problems solved – in real time.

Yesterday I shared the first key insight from PR+MKTG Camp™ East held late October. The conference brought together marketing and PR professionals from leading brands and agencies.

We addressed integrated engagement and how marketing and PR can align more effectively with sales and customer service to better manage the message, build the brand, and measure the results.

Here is the second:

II. CEO as Media Point Person: Respect, Control and the Power of the Personal in Driving Engagement

Here are quotes from three speakers at PR+MKTG Camp East:

• “Think of the past; the CEO and CMO were unapproachable. Now everyone has a voice. Now we can send a CMO a tweet and see pictures of a CEO running around with little kids.” Peter Blacker – Telemundo Executive Vice President

• “I don’t know if people really want to hear from CEOs; the CEO is not their experience.” Gigi Peterkin – formerly Associate Director, Interactive Media, AstraZeneca

• “The hardest thing in the world is to just find the right story, the right person in the organization to tell it and the best place to tell it.” Jeff Simmermon – Director of Digital Communication, Time Warner

Increasingly, companies are opting for multiple voices to drive their engagement strategies even as the CEO continues to serve as the primary public face of the company.

So in the age of Twitter and Facebook, what is a CEO’s role in helping maximize communications opportunities and minimize risks? How can CEOs leverage social media to further their positions as thought leaders and brand authorities?

These questions provided much discussion at PR+MKTG Camp East – especially when CEOs have become celebrities, and customers are looking to have a more personal, interactive relationship with brands.

Managing the Message/Image

Let’s start with a CEO’s level of control over the image and message. Most social media advocates reject the idea of control. But consider the following actual CEOs.

• One keeps extremely tight controls on the message and channels of communication and has achieved near cult like status;

• One tried to keep extremely tight controls on the message and channels of communication during a time of crisis to the point that the media dubbed him “the most hated man in America;”

• And one so actively embraces open, honest communications that he is beloved and has become a poster child of CEO leadership in the social media age.

Their names respectively: Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, former BP CEO Tony Hayward and Zappos (now part of amazon.com) CEO Tony Hsieh.

Each was or is the face of a global, highly visible brand. But each represented a company that has taken or took a different path in managing the message and the image. No clear rule applies. As their experiences indicate, the level of control that a CEO exerts on the message does not dictate how well the public will perceive his or her company.

The Power of the Personal

So let’s look at the “power of the personal;” it’s another tenet social media advocates espouse. Does it matter?

Hsieh, looking for market position, understands this power. Social media is the perfect platform for his open, all-embracing communications style. He resonates with his audience and has successfully used social media to amplify his company’s value proposition.

Hayward misread his American audience and failed to understand how a personal perspective could have lessened the anger, frustration and shock most Americans felt as millions of barrels of oil gushed into the Gulf.

They wanted honest, straightforward conversation.

But being personal is not always clear-cut either. Declaring “I want my life back” as Hayward did is not the kind of personal expression that wins supporters.

On the other hand, Steve Jobs and Apple are not about personal, open communications and have succeeded quite well. Fortunately, their products speak for themselves. Nor has Apple faced the kind of crisis that requires companies to become more personal and open. Remember how Dell changed its tone and became more open when it experienced the backlash to its computers – known as “Dell Hell.”

R-E-S-P-E-C-T Your Audience

So why have Jobs and Hsieh succeeded where Hayward failed? It’s not only that BP experienced a crisis of epic proportions. Companies have survived and even flourished during challenging times. Nor is it specifically the CEO’s personality or his or her communications style.

Ultimately, it’s about having respect for your audience. Steve Jobs is passionate about design and is maniacally devoted to the user experience; Tom Hsieh’s commitment to customer service is legendary. And then there is Tony Hayward whose perceived arrogance and indifference translated into disrespect.

For better or worse, the CEO helps to centralize the message and delivers a perspective that no other employee can provide. Social media can amplify that role. But the success or failure of your CEO is only as strong as the corporate culture that he or she embodies.

In today’s communications environment, it is not necessary for the CEO to use Twitter or Facebook. They don’t even have to be personal, but they must respect their audience.

I wanted to share 5 key insights from PR+MKTG Camp™ East held this past fall.

The conference brought together marketing and PR professionals from leading brands and agencies in cities from Boston and New York to Philadelphia and Miami.

Its focus was integrated engagement and how marketing and PR can align more effectively with sales and customer service to better manage the  message, build the brand, and measure the results.

Continuing the spirit of previous camps held in Atlanta, New York, Chicago and Seattle, PR+MKTG Camp East was a forum to share ideas and discover solutions.

Todays insight:

I. Building Trust in 140 Characters: Message Consistency in the Social Media Age

Message consistency has long been a central tenet of reputation management and brand building; it’s also a direct benefit when an organization’s communications and engagement strategies are in alignment.

But is consistency desirable or even possible in today’s social media environment? That question was a key point of discussion in PR+MKTG Camp East’s industry panel discussion on health care, engagement and transparency featuring Digitas Health’s Carly Kuper, AstraZeneca’s Gigi Peterkin (now at Edelman), the Alzheimer’s Association’s Harriet Hennigan, and Lemonade Life’s Allison Blass.

The Case for Message Consistency

For advocates of message discipline, consistency eliminates confusion, conflicting signals and potential legal complications – especially in the case of a regulated industry.  It keeps everyone on the same page and reduces the chances that employees – or those to whom the messages or campaigns are directed — will misinterpret the company’s mission.

Message consistency engenders trust; it breeds familiarity. Seeing the same message in multiple places – on websites, blogs, Google search results, Twitter, Facebook, and in legacy print and other media – reinforces brand recognition and raises consumer comfort levels.

The Case against Message Consistency

Alternatively, there are social media advocates who dismiss the value of message consistency on several counts.

Corporate Speak: Consumers want authenticity. Message consistency leads to pat responses, sterile language and corporate speak; As Allison Blass, Lemonade Life Blogger and PR+MKTG Camp East Speaker asked in regards to drug company marketing, “The information patients get online is limited and dry. How will this really affect my life? How will it change the way I live? I need constant feedback from people experiencing something similar.”

Media Saturation: Consumers are simply tuning out messaging.  As Matt Rosenhaft, Social Gastronomy Founder and PR+MKTG Camp East Speaker said, “Messaging is so cheap that we overwhelmed with messages. People don’t believe in it anymore. No one is paying attention to out press release or tweets.”

Multiple Information Sources: Users consume a media-rich diet from multiple sources and multiple perspectives from nearly anywhere in the world. Marketing and PR can’t contain how and where consumers receive and retransmit their messaging.

Ownership: Message consistency is a form of ownership. It’s tough to “own” the brand and message when it rests increasingly in the hands of customers who will share it and repurpose it.

The Personal Dimension: Multiple employees (perhaps even some no longer with the company) can set up accounts on different social media or other sites that bridge both personal and professional personas – making consistency more challenging.

The overlap of professional and personal in the connected world can add an extra layer of authenticity to your messaging. It can help brands reach a wider, richer network of users.  But maintaining clear boundaries is difficult for companies to enforce and underscores the importance of internal controls, standards and practices.

Finding a Middle Ground

In today’s communications environment, social media puts more of the message into the hands of the customer, but it does not eliminate marketing’s and PR’s ability to deliver consistency.

The challenge, of course, is developing authentic messaging that others feel compelled to pass along, and then leveraging a network or channel where they will propagate it for you. There must be a reason to share it; it has to be relevant, insightful or funny and must be appropriate for the particular channel.

Self-serving or duplicitous messages will inevitably fail either by being ignored or becoming the source of ridicule or an online firestorm.

What we need is a new definition of consistency to fit a new way of communicating; and we are going to have to work harder to deliver it.

Consistency is less about repetitive language and more about the message behind the words. It’s also about managing the channels where we transmit the message or where consumers choose to engage with our brands.

In terms of the message, today’s marketing and PR professionals need to ask:  Does the message empower the market to act?  Does it evoke trust?  How will it mature over the course of a campaign? Does it encourage independent conversation?

In terms of the specific channel, we need to ask: Is it something others will want link to, comment on or about in blogs, retweet or share on Facebook? Will word of mouth, critical analysis or discussion be maintained? Have we taken into account in the planning and production phases for online video especially when viewer comments can be easily attached, and forwarded or emailed – increasing the likelihood that the message can gain greater viral strength?

In general, message consistency corresponds to its authenticity – the more authentic your messaging, the more likely consumers will perceive its value and trust the messenger.

Implementing an effective collaboration strategy was the focus of Rhonda Lowry’s discussion this past week at the TAG Enterprise 2.0 Society monthly meeting in Atlanta.

Rhonda is vice president of social media technologies at Turner Broadcasting System and plays a critical role in helping the network embrace new technologies and implement change.

Here are some insights she shared:

1. Networks Connect Humans – In fostering successful collaboration, it can’t just be about tools and technology; relationships still matter. Consider  the concept of gifting. It’s a central tenet of collaboration and a driving force in social media. In a collaborative culture, the goal is sharing information to benefit the recipient and not what you will get in return.

2. Bricolage – Successful collaboration is based on the invention of resources from available material to make new things i.e. making the most of what you’ve got, not starting from scratch. It also means working within your existing corporate culture and understanding your organization’s social dynamics.  Is your organization based on command and control or is it comfortable with decentralized authority?  How much of a gap is there between technical and human skills?  What kind of premium does your company place on relationship building?  Your answers will impact how you build a collaborative social enterprise strategy.

3. Intellectual Nudity – Quoting Ephraim Freed “Effective Social Intranet Users are Intellectual Nudists.” Collaboration succeeds in an environment where employees are open, transparent and willing to embrace new ways of communicating. That of course is not an easy task in a tightly managed, siloed corporate culture. And not everyone is a nudist. Organizations must find ways for nudists and non nudists to coexist – which underscores the whole notion that networks are about connecting people not tools.

4. Rewards – Everyone thrives on rewards. But in a collaborative culture, rewards are rarely financial or based on the task at hand. The reward (and motivation) to participate must be intrinsic or inner focused for those willing to share.

5. Storms – And of course there are perfect storms, where external events and internal developments come together to transform an organization.  Consider the marriage of Facebook, CNN.com and President Obama’s Inauguration. It was a phenomenal success for CNN as viewer reactions became a central part of the story.  Or a picture of a squirrel  on a hot day in Seattle that helped launch iReport and change the way CNN thinks about and delivers the news.

Added bonuses:

For slides related to her talk, check out this previous deck on SlideShare.

Two books Rhonda recommends checking out:

The Starfish and the Spider by by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom

Drive by Daniel Pink

Attendees to this Thursday’s PR+MKTG Camp East in midtown New York will get a workbook to help them build an integrated social media engagement strategy. It includes chapters with questions on assessing your current performance, creating a vision, executing a strategy and measuring results.

I have attached the first chapter to give you a sense of the types discussions we plan to have with leading brands and agencies. Integration is critical in helping PR an marketing professionals work more effectively with sales, customer service and community moderation teams to reach their target customers and key influencers.  The challenges are particularly acute given that we are now using the same channels and engaging with the same audiences.

You can still register for the final spots. I hope you can make it, but even if you can’t I hope you fid this workbook useful and please give me your feedback.

This week’s featured posts on who should lead your company’s social media and alignment efforts and how to do it tees up nicely with discussions we will hold at PR+MKTG Camp East in New York City this Thursday, Oct 28. They extend the discussion about what works and doesn’t that Kristin English and I have been exploring for a while.

Founder of The CMO CLUB (@thecmoclub)Peter Krainik writes in Forbes Magazine about the need for alignment between PR and marketing. We’ve heard this time and time again, but the statistics presented in this post from a survey by The CMO Club and Hill and Knowlton show that it’s just not happening. Krainik highlights several important points including “PR and Corporate Communications is not about media and bloggers, it’s about product/service, customer service and responsiveness excellence.”

He also suggests it should be CMOs who take the lead role in customer service. A few weeks ago, we featured a post by Dr. Natalie Petouhoff who wrote that customer service department should take the lead.

Another important point Krainik makes is if we’re serious about alignment, we should be writing joint objectives, reviews and performance measures. How does this fit with Dr. Petauhoff’s concerns regarding which objectives are most important?

Who should be in charge of customer service interactions? What’s your perspective on having joint objectives, reviews and performance measures?

Who should lead is a popular question in many areas of social enterprise, collaboration and engagement. Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) breaks down the various elements of this discussion in his post – Who should be in charge of Enterprise 2.0?

He explores the challenges of implementation and if we really need a dedicated corporate level leader for collaboration activities. The conclusion comes down to spreading out the responsibilities throughout the four main levels of leadership, senior management, middle management, senior staff and emergent leadership.

Where does PR and marketing fit within this structure? From Hinchcliffe’s post, it seems like we are within the middle management and senior staff levels. While it’s useful to identify those charged with collaboration within the larger structure, do we need further delineation? PR and marketing functions frequently overlap and more specific structures may provide a clearer picture of everyone’s expectations.

What do you think? Do these structures work or do we need further clarification?

One response to Dion Hinchcliffe’s post is Larry Hawes (@lehawes) piece entitled You Are Your Organization’s Chief Collaboration Officer. Hawes posits it should not be one person, but rather a Collaboration Board charged with the governance of collaboration. These individuals would evaluate and prescribe tools, policies and best practices.

The question for PR and marketing professionals is how to ensure they are represented on this board. Another question is what other departments are crucial to collaboration. Hawes’ main point is that collaboration is everyone’s responsibility. This argument makes sense because without each individual participating, collaboration doesn’t function properly. PR and marketing departments know these principles already and can be ready to lead efforts for more collaboration.

Do you think these collaboration boards could work?