Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Welcoming Powered to our Ecosystem







What better occasion to hop back on the blog than our acquisition of Powered, today! As Peter Kim mentions, this acquisition makes us the largest Social Business consultancy in the world.

Many will be quick to note that Powered is a social media agency-- "helping brands realize the potential of social media programs to drive tangible business results." I will just as quickly point out the emphasis on the latter half of the sentence (business results) over the former (social media). While their services span platforms marketers are intimately familiar with, (i.e., Facebook and Twitter), they are highly relevant to the "other side" which we so often fool ourselves into thinking is an alternate universe, E2.0.

After having gone to an all-girls school for the first 10 years of my life, I vividly remember my first class with boys. This was quickly proceeded by my first lunch in the cafeteria with said foreigners. I remember being shocked when I realized how similar they were... how they talked about the same exact things as we did, in the same way. I had this same realization at my first E2.0 conference when I realized that marketers and IT professionals too speak the same language.

This is important to understand when thinking about our recent acquisition: Dachis Group is a Social Business consultancy. Many of the Social Business constructs we talk about today transcend divisions between marketing and IT.

While this acquisition directly expands our customer engagement practice, keep in mind we're all "listening" to various stakeholders. We're all interested in seeding, feeding, and weeding our communities. We all need governance, education, and playbooks as we migrate to new platforms. We all need to evolve our thinking around measurement. We all need social strategies-- and the methodologies by which we arrive there are in fact quite similar for 'E2.0' and 'Social Media'.

We welcome Powered, and its subsidiaries, Crayon, StepChange, and Drillteam to the Dachis Group family and look forward to designing better, social businesses across both of these worlds.

Welcome to our ecosystem, Powered!