Talenthouse connects established brands and artists with aspiring creatives to develop internationally showcased collaborative projects. Successfuly crowdsourced collaborations have included projects with Stan Lee (of Marvel Comic fame), Soundgarden, Kylie Minogue and more.  Upcoming project requests vary from designing a new costumer for musician DeadMau5 to new tote bags for Nine West.

As Talenthouse gains momentum, our prediction is that the business application of their service (or start-up competitors) will widen to include a much greater segment, outside of campaigns directed towards creative talent.

Read more about Talenthouse on Tech Crunch here

Today Facebook announced that there are now over 50 million “Likes” per day on their site.  Despite fact that Facebook has almost totally re-purposed the verb “like,” this milestone addresses something far greater about Facebook’s users.  In announcing the 50 million “Like” mark, Facebook has shown the tip of the iceberg in terms of not only their users ability, but also their willingness to interact with entities beyond just their friends while on the site. These “Likes” include Groups, Companies, Charities, Pet Fan Pages and other community moderated pages.

If there was ever a statistic that buoyed Facebook as a relevant outreach and marketing tool for businesses to engage with end-users, they just announced quite an impressive one.

Read more on Facebook’s 50 Million Likes at TechCrunch: http://tcrn.ch/lcgu5U

With a description like that, surely we’re not the only people getting excited.

In the past, we have written extensively on not only social software/technologies, but we’ve also spent a good deal of time discussing the people, networks and culture that make those technologies successful (here, here and here are a few examples).

Which is why a few months back, a blog post from Assetmap on Social Capital caught our eye.  The author of the post uses Silicon Valley legend Ron Conway to make the case that Social Capital (more so than financial capital) has been the hallmark of his investing success.   The author contends that start-ups seek out Conway not for his financial clout, but for the wealth of intellectual resources he is networked into.

As we do with any good blog, we dug deeper in the posts, and sure enough we found another gem.  This time, the blog post offered a great insight into the new debate around “Interest Networks vs. Social Networks.”

The more material we read from Assetmap, the more we think these guys really “get it.”

But, we won’t use up this whole post to review Assetmap blog post or speculate about their product.  Instead, we’re hoping to build some social capital for Orbital RPM, our readers, and our clients by directing them to one of the newest thought leaders in the social software space.  Assetmap – an up and comer to keep your eye on.

As with many (and likely most) reports on Corporate Social Media Budgets, the current level of spending is significantly below what industry experts believe is both an effective level, and a reasonable proportion of the overall corporate budget.

While the report in it’s entirety is a worthwhile read, we’ve put together a few of the relevant high-level points to share:

- Social Strategists have proven to meet integral business imperatives, and have proved themselves beyond “mere experimentation and evangelism.”

- Budget increases should rise in line with the maturation of the social media teams.  As social business teams mature, team sizes grow and spread across the business as  cross-functional teams.

- As Social Business matures, the teams’ structure(s) will evolve to meet cross-functional Social Business needs; most commonly from a centralized team, to a “hub and spoke” model.

- Average Enterprise-Class Social Media Budget – $833,000

The three spending areas which comprise the bulk of this budget are:

1 – Internal Soft Costs: Staff, Education, Training, R&D, etc.
2 – Customer Facing Initiatives: Marketing, Blogger Outreach, etc.
3 – Technology Investments: Social CRM (SCRM), Social Media Management Systems (SMMS), Community Platforms, etc.

Of these areas, Training and Education is the most underfunded, but one of the most integral components “to foster a culture of change management.”

Novice Social Business Programs
Average Team Size: 3.1
Team Members Budget: $66,000

Intermediate Social Business Programs -
Average Team Size: 8.2
Team Members Budget: $1,002,000

Advanced Social Business Programs -
Average Team Size: 20.8
Team Members Budget: $1,364,000

Advanced Social Businesses will soon seek out the following services/initiatives:

- Shift resources to enlist in specialized expertise from “Boutique Agencies”
- Secure technology that “keeps the the conversation on the corporate website”
- Develop an infrastructure for scalable solutions, such as Social Media Monitoring Services (SMMS) and Social CRM (SCRM)
- Engage employees with Social Business initiatives internally and “prepare for social business to permeate the entire enterprise”

In addition to their insightful observations on the current state of affairs, Altimeter has included in this report some valuable insights for businesses looking to understand how to prioritize their Social Media budget, and steer their organizations in a progressive direction.

Check out the full report here: http://slidesha.re/fyXSyB

But beyond that, two very valuable bi-products of data visualization as they relate communities and communication, is the ability to illustrate the “missing data” and contextualize the information.

In 1901, early visualization of international communication had begun.  While these initial visualizations are certainly primitive, ultimately they prove valuable in illustrating bottlenecks in communications, key stakeholders in the networks and opportunities to improve and expand international communication (ie: missing data points).

Some 100 or so years later, Facebook recently provided a visualization of their network connections, as it relates to their growing user base of 500 million individuals.  As the map illustrates, international communication has improved dramatically, and in a very correlative way, so has technological innovation.

As the tools that enable one to one, as well as one to many communication evolve and break down “knowledge silos” it’s no wonder that the world wide adoption of these services have progressed so rapidly.  Consumers are hungry for knowledge, and eager to leverage the communication channels which allow them to tap into these knowledge reserves.

As these technologies have progressed,  they have fundamentally changed how people discover and disseminate knowledge; two components which are foundational to innovation and resourcefulness, regardless of industry or vertical.

But what is really to be drawn from this phenomenon isn’t the ability of “knowledge brokers” to communicate with one another, but in their new found ability to “visualize” where their resources lie and what connections they must tap into to access the information in need.

Internal Communications:

The inherent nimbleness of the consumer allows them to more quickly break down knowledge silos, reinvent their communication mediums, and create industries of innovation at amazing speeds.  The speed and magnitude of these innovations have left many businesses asking themselves “how can we do this too?”

But in order to answer this question, businesses must first ask themselves and understand “What tools, resources and knowledge do we currently have available to us?”

The graphic above illustrates a Social Network Analysis (SNA) of a company with teams working in five international locations.  In order for the teams to distribute information across the organization and promote innovation, they must first utilize this visualization of their organization to ask themselves a series of questions:

1 – How is information currently shared across networks?

2 – Who are the “knowledge brokers” in these networks?

3 – Where (and why) do “information bottlenecks” exist?

4 – What expertise exists in each isolated network?

5 – What tools can we implement to promote communication and knowledge sharing across networks?

6 – What does the ideal SNA look like for our organization, in order to fulfill our needs in innovation, collaboration, etc.?

As with many challenges posed to businesses, the first step is gaining a clear understanding of where one is starting from.  A visual analysis of an organization’s communication map allows them to tap into the “dark matter” necessary to leverage their employees’ knowledge, company resources and collaboration tools to their greatest potential.

I identified the following Macro forces and industry trends that are driving social business software adoption in today’s rapidly changing business environment.

Macro Forces (Kottler/Keller Marketing Management 12th edition)

Demographic | The mindset of younger generations is conditioned to technological advancements.  This technical aptitude is forcing organizations to adapt business operations to stay competitive.

Economic | With market fluctuations, post dot.com era, the recession and global market expansion, organizations have become more focused on core competencies by stream-lining business processes, relying on supplier and partner relations to outsource components that are not core to their business.

Socio-Cultural | Social interaction, flexibility, work-life balance, core values and access to information of the younger generations are driving our customers to consider their overall presence in society.  Companies are much more exposed to viral positive or negative feedback that can affect their image, brand and bottom-line.  Companies must be proactively monitoring and meeting the demands of their customers, partners and suppliers to stay competitive.

Natural/Trends | Because of the large population of baby boomers on the verge of retiring, companies are left with a much smaller population of upper management resources and as a whole they are more technically savvy than their predecessors.  Even with the current economic conditions delaying the baby boomer retirement, companies will be required to do more with less while embracing, facilitating and catering to the younger generations preferred mode of working and learning.  Generation X&Y has a need for instant access to information and responsiveness and this continues to drive the speed at which the industry adapts to the technological advancements.

Technological | Technological advances are driving the knowledge based economy where user generated content (Web 2.0) is overly abundant and it’s now an opportune time for organizations to structure and make available their knowledge to enable the most effective use.  Companies are finding intrinsically motivated employees are self navigating their informal learning within the organization and by setting up internal structures to support this transformation, companies will maximize value, increase innovation, stay better connected to customers, increase productivity, reduce loss of knowledge, capture learning histories and drive value to the extended enterprise resource management of their organizations.

Political-Legal | The industry transformation is also driving a legal market that will provide structures, policies and procedures for the user of social media that could jeopardize competitive advantage, intellectual property and expose organizations to litigation.

When reviewing these trends as a whole it’s apparent that businesses are primed to use social business software not just for IT purposes and social media monitoring, but also to enable and support initiatives in employee engagement, on-boarding, knowledge management, collaboration, innovation, succession planning, leadership development and the list of business imperatives social business software can address is somewhat endless for each organization.

What do you see as potential opportunities when you look at these overarching forces and trends?

We’ve always known our friends at Denver’s Box Studios (http://bit.ly/dHdy0V ) did phenomenal work, and one of their latest projects at the offices of the wildly successful group-buying service GroupOn, is no exception.

Enjoy a few photos of their work at the GroupOn offices here: http://bit.ly/fsAdHZ

For more on GroupOn (collaboration at its best!) check out their recent profile in Forbes: http://bit.ly/ggAHXj

Huddle is building a presence in the increasingly popular Collaboration/Project Management Enterprise space, landing notable clients such as Procter & Gamble, Edelman, Disney and HTC. Cofounder Andy McLoughlin has the described the service as having more functionality than 37Signal’s Basecamp, yet less complexity than Microsoft’s SharePoint (More here).

Huddle shares many similar functional components as other SBS providers, but here are a few interesting features we found:

Integration into Microsoft Office applications (Video)

Built in Web Conference Call functionality (Video)

The “Whiteboard,” a quick wiki-creator (Video)

While the race is far from over in the Enterprise Collaboration Software space, one great characteristic of Huddle is that you can take it for a test ride -  Check out Huddle.