Dachis Group’s 2012 Social Business Summit seven city global tour kicked off in Austin last week (the Summit comes to our part of the world on the 26th July, where it will touch down in Singapore). Now into its third year, the Social Business Summit continues to be the best place to get an insight to the state of Social Business – covering Performance Brand Marketing, Connected Company, and Social Business Intelligence.

The Austin event featured some of Dachis Group’s own thought leaders – Jeff Dachis, Peter Kim, Dave Gray, Erik Huddleston and Dion Hinchcliffe – and an awesome line of other presenters: Sandy Carter (IBM), Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), David Armano (Edelman Digital), Sherri Maxson (US Cellular), Bonin Bough (Kraft Foods), Steve Furman (Discover Financial Services), Clara Shih (Hearsay Social) and Melissa Lavigne-Delville (NBC Universal).

Writing in Forbes magazine, Christine Crandell wrote a great summary of the event – I particularly like her point about the philosophy of the Social Business Summit:

Held at the “W” hotel in Austin, there was none of the deep bass, heart reverberating production with rock star –status seeking CEOs and their entourage of cult fans so prevalent at many vendor conferences. Instead, Dachis borrowed the format from TED with 30 minute presentations, no Q&A, and plenty of networking time. No one talked about PPC, SEO/SEM, social selling on Facebook, or painted lofty visions of social media.  The conference focused on what it meant to be a social business and practical strategies for becoming one. Theories were balanced with realism and lessons learned.

One of my favourite sound bites from the Summit is Sherri Maxson’s update to a Peter Drucker quote:

I was also intrigued by the mention of Walmart’s Social Supply Chain:

While we all continue to explore what Social Business means for brand performance and workforce collaboration, until recently scalable Social Business Intelligence was the missing pillar in the Social Business stack. I expect to see a great deal of discussion across all the Summits this year about the role of Social Business Intelligence and how we integrate it more deeply into the value chain. Related to this, I also enjoyed Ellen Kolsto’s post about Erik Huddelston’s presentation on “authentic engagement”.

Interested in attending the Social Business Summit in 2012? Don’t forget to request your invitation to attend one of the remaining six events taking place around the world.

Image credits:


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may also like

6 years ago

The State of Social Business in Australia 2012

To help provide some local context to the social business stories explored in the new Social Business by Design book,…

Read more

13 years ago

Putting Facebook to Work Effectively: Lessons from Over 300 Campaigns

We are now releasing video recordings from this year’s Social Business Summit (see recordings from Austin and Sydney over on…

Read more

13 years ago

Don’t Miss the Bigger Picture

I’ve said before, that its interesting how people latch on to ‘Social Business’ but not ‘Social Business Design’. It reminds…

Read more

13 years ago

Social Business Summit 2011 – Twitter Accounts

A list of Social Business Summit #sbs2011 presenters and their Twitter accounts. Dachis Group presenters are listed at the end.…

Read more