<p>We're in a social business bubble. CIOs are buying social software by the pound, hoping internal managers will figure out how to use it. Interactive marketing departments are frantically accumulating fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter, praying the CEO will not ask too many questions about value produced. Even sedate HR people are lobbying for social enterprise initiatives because it is about people, isn't it? And of course, large hordes of software suppliers' salespeople are calling on everybody, promoting the new distributed power of cloud and mobile technologies, and stoking the collective fear of missing out on the Big Data opportunity.</p><p>Unavoidably, the bubble will burst. When it does, the true revolution inside the bubble will be revealed: the new connections developing between internal employees on one end and customers, suppliers, and partners on the other that are allowing them to co-create new relationships and offerings and reinvent the operating model of each firm.</p><p>The problem is that this co-creation requires some a priori conceptualization of which internal and external people need to work together, what they want to do together, and what value they will create as a new community. This is no easy task since by its very nature, co-creation requires mobilizing people across department and company boundaries. Sadly, most social business initiatives are naive, technology-driven ones without any planning or cross-organizational mobilization. The result: a disjointed flow of mediocre ideas, leading a large number of social projects to be dead on arrival.</p><p>To avoid this unenviable fate, a good place for companies to start is to connect their internal sales and service people with customers and their communities on social media. Burberry, the iconic British luxury-brand purveyor of clothing, fragrances, and fashion accessories, offers a good illustration of this strategic yet pragmatic approach. Angela Ahrendts, Burberry's CEO, has a grand vision of her company as a social enterprise where all employees, customers, and suppliers share the same experience of the Burberry brand, whether through physical stores or digital platforms ("Burberry World").</p><p><a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/12/co-creation_the_real_social-me.html">Keep reading...</a></p>