At the 7th version of The Social Conference we’ll be focusing on social business and how companies should transform to get there. We are proud to introduce one of the brightest minds in social business: Peter Kim (). Peter will be sharing a keynote session on the topic “Social Business and Beyond” based on his book on social business as well as his vision and work at R/GA, the agency that is responsible for the consumer experience ecosystem at Nike.

 

When Peter is not writing books, which is most of the time, he’s responsible as VP and Managing Director for Business Transformation at R/GA (multi-award winning “Agency for the Digital Age”). Before that he has worked as Chief Strategy Officer with consultancy firms Dachis Group and Forrester Research and started as head of global marketing at Puma.

 

Peter is co-author of Social Business by Design introduced as “The definitive management book on how to rethink the modern organization in the social media era”.

First, let’s share a preview of his thinking, as seen in the book.

 

Next Generation Business: Open, Social, Self Service

Kim and co-author Hinchcliffe argue that old media have been deeply impacted by the rise of social media and the software industry has been profoundly changed by open source software, created through peer production by thousands of experts in communities. But that’s not where it stops:

In his vision of the near future financial services, education, consulting and government will be disrupted by social business. It may take some years of overcoming legacy structures and market imperfections, but ultimately everything that can be social, will be social. With the case of reCaptcha he explains the next generation business model.

Post-Great-Recession Business Models

In the chapter on “How business will make the transition” Kim states 11 drivers for social business. Just the first one is interesting enough to debate for an hour: strategic control over peer-produced community data drives marketing dominance. Interesting enough we are of course curious how this relates to his.

Functional Integration at Apple and Nike

I am really interested in hearing about his recent work at R/GA. The agency is responsible for designing the new customer experience for Nike. Peter has promised me to share more about the concept of functional integration, with of course special attention for the role of the social web.

In short, functional integration means: building products around a consumer, that are somehow related through technology, in such a way that consumers experience increasing value and use more rather then less of the products. In this video, R/GA founder Bob Greenberg explains what functional integration means, with the example of Apple.

But if you own more than half the dots in this picture, you have experienced functional integration.

Share your questions for Peter Kim!

Feel free to post questions for Peter Kim in the comments. We will select one question that we will ask Peter at February 14th.

Or better, you can ask it yourself. Tickets are still available at The Social Conference website.