We have distilled our years of experience navigating the seas of digital change into one overall approach for helping organisations reinvent their processes, products, and tools for a new digitally social world To make a long story short, our approach consists of three elements: Navigate, Create, and Anchor:

Navigate

A central part of our work is helping organizations gain insight and understanding into the new online participatory culture: What does it mean that markets are conversations? What are the changes that organizations face regarding their presence on the Internet?

Thus, we help organizations navigate by providing the knowledge necessary to understand these new tools and help them to see how these tools – such as wikis, weblogs and social networks – can turn the social web into an asset, rather than a liability.

A central aspect of this is understanding how the client organization works in order to help them. Thus, we focus on research methods: Through anthropological fieldwork and interviews – both on-line and in-person among both the internal and external stakeholders of the organization – we seek to gather a nuanced view of the needs of organization.
We combine this with solid desk research in order to keep up with the latest research on social media and technological developments in order to help organizations build a solid strategy for their use of social media.

Create

When the strategy drawn up and the course is set, we get ready to create.

Designing social platforms is a lot different from what your average web designer does. You need to design for participation, for different user motivations – maybe even for differing social skills. We have years of experience in the field of social design. When we create, we focus on reinventing the website to build a social platform that allows for idea generation and conversation. Perhaps through tools such as weblogs, wikis or social networks.

Anchor

In order to become successful, any social application needs to be anchored in the organization in which it is intended to function. Having the realization that social media can solve problems in your organization is not enough unless your organization is willing to embrace it. The social life on a blog or in a social network doesn’t come with the technology – it comes with the people who are blogging or sharing knowledge through these tools.

Thus, we help anchor the new technology within organizations by listening and helping the people who will be using it: Through workshops, teaching, talks, personal coaching, and continuous evaluation of the tools and process involved, we seek to help the new online participatory culture into the organization.

We know from experience that this phase is crucial in most organizations, and we work hard to ensure that the integration of the new social media takes place as smoothly and painlessly as possible.