sociALCHEMY

We help groups, organizations and businesses discover the potential of their social assets – their employees, their customers and partners.

We offer clients knowledge gained through 25 years working with what’s now called “social media,” plus another 12 years of immersion in what’s still called “intentional community.” We don’t pretend to know it all, but we’ve formed a professional social network that includes some of the brightest and insightful experts in the broad spectrum that now encompasses social media, 21st century business practice and sustainability strategies.

We work with clients using whatever combination of modern and traditional media is appropriate. We spend a lot of time listening, and believe in iterative prototyping – trying different solutions, allowing clients to try them on for size, tweaking them for a better fit, then mapping the path forward while keeping the prototyping perspective alive. Our advice is aimed at building a light-on-your-feet posture because things change too fast these days to risk committing fully to dead-end paths or betting everything on today’s technologies and business practices.

We tend to remain engaged with clients even after our contract is finished and our deliverables delivered. We also tend to work with clients whose missions are aligned with our own.

My take on communities

Experience counts for something, even if it’s simply having lived long enough to understand that what’s old often becomes new again.

So it is with the formation of communities. The technology changes – and in many cases improves – while the social dynamics of people finding one another according to interests, professions, tasks, tastes, values and needs remains pretty much the same. Over the past 40 years that I’ve been paying attention to community and its variations, we’ve seen huge leaps forward in the communications technologies that help people interact and discover their commonalities and differences.

Communities still exist in their natural state – as people living in close proximity with one another – but exist as well in many other more modern configurations: workplace, cohorts, distributed organizations, and increasingly in virtual meeting places.

Communities form (and expire) more rapidly today than at any time in human history. People can now imagine themselves to be part of communities of thousands or more, though in reality these are more extended social networks than true communities.

Communities are small enough to give meaning to the relationships between people. Social networks are defined by indirect relationships that, if tested, may not prove to hold much meaning or trust.

Today, it’s in the interest of organizations and businesses to find, attract and engage both communities and social networks. The Internet is the only practical way to approach such goals, but it’s also the only reason that such goals can be imagined. New tools are constantly being invented to fill perceived gaps in communications effectiveness. New software companies appear and launch new products at a staggering rate, but only a few tools catch on with enough people to change the game. You know most of their names: eBay, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter.

But it’s not the tools that engage the communities; it’s the purpose for their formation and the leadership of a few key individuals that catalyze community. My work focuses on clarifying purpose and finding leaders. With those two elements in hand, I can perform the social alchemy that seeds communities that can get work done and sustain themselves.

Get in touch with me and we’ll talk.

fig@well.com

Twitter: cfigallo