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Two significant events last fortnight might seed the beginning of a new type of social media company: a social business strategy firm.

First, Altimeter Group founder Charlene Li (@charleneli) announced the addition of Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), Deborah Schultz (@debs), and Ray Wang (@rwang0) to her emerging technology consulting team. Charlene, Jeremiah, Deborah and Ray will focus on leadership, customer strategy, innovation and enterprise strategy respectively.

Charlene says that Altimeter will “provide an integrated and strategic approach to integrating emerging technologies” “by bringing together a rich, diverse, and ever-changing ecosystem of technology vendors and start-ups, service providers like agencies, and business end users”.

Then, Dachis Group (started by Razorfish co-founder Jeffery Dachis (@jeffdachis)) acquired enterprise 2.0 consulting firm Headshift to form a social business design practice spread across London, Sydney and Austin.

Dachis Group defines social business design as “the intentional creation of a dynamic business culture” and “a shift towards distributed, collaborative and agile organizations”.

Headshift defines social business design as the use of social technologies within the enterprise to reduce the costs of collaboration and co-ordination, and support business change. It also clearly differentiates it from social media, which is more about how brands engage with customers.

Dachis Group partners Peter Kim (@peterkim), Kate Niederhoffer (@katenieder), Jevon Macdonald (@jevon) and David Armano (@armano) have also shared interesting perspectives on the concept of social business design. In essence, the Dachis Group version of social business design consists of four archetypes — Ecosystem (or community), Hivemind (or mental models), Dynamic Signal (or means of collaboration) and Metafilter (or filtering mechanism) — applied to the areas of business partner optimization, workforce collaboration and customer participation. Headshift CEO Lee Brynat (@leebryant) also shares an interesting perspective on the merging of web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0.

These two big announcements have created a lot of buzz and posts by Luis Suarez, Jason Falls, Shel Israel and Sage Circle are especially worth reading.

As I have mentioned before, I want to model 20:20 Social on the Altimeter Group and the Dachis Group, because they share our philosophy of using emerging social technologies for transforming businesses, instead of merely reaching out to customers.

I have also been wondering if we should change the 20:20 Social tagline from “social media research and strategy” to “social business strategy”, as it positions us as a strategy firm (which we are), instead of a digital agency (which we aren’t). I think we will decide soon enough.

Posted via email from gauravonomics’s posterous

Update: Here is the position paper Dave Evans and I have written on the 20:20 Social Approach to Social Business Strategy.

Related posts:

1. Decoding Social Media Marketing and Social Business Strategy
2. Dachis Group’s David Armano on Social Business by Design
3. Position Paper: The 20:20 Social Approach to Social Business Strategy
4. Seven Social Technology Firms I Admire
5. Social Media Strategy is Business Strategy Plus Technology Plus Sociology