Voices about Dachis Group acquiring Headshift

The news that Dachis Group is aquiring Headshift is big news in the Enterprise 2.0 / social business area (but maybe not that big outside of it). Here are some voices about it:

Lee Bryant, cofounder of Headshift that has been acquired by Dachis Group:

We are ready to move beyond the experimental phase to create real business transformation. Leaving behind the niche world of enterprise 2.0, we are ready to work with businesses at a senior level to run change programmes aimed at bringing their processes, internal IT and communications into the Twenty-First Century. It has never been cheaper or easier to collaborate online. It has never been easier to harness people power to drive business performance. It has never been easier to engage with customers and business partners. Yet, as we know, most companies have come to accept an overly bureaucratic, process-heavy high-cost model of doing business as the norm. They need credible partners who can operate across technology, organisational design and business analysis to help meet this challenge, not just evangelists or technology vendors. That's our role.

Euan Semple, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media authority:

...Which chimes with my own post a few days ago:

"People have always needed help on how to best run businesses taking into account the prevailing social and technological environments and that is all we are doing now. Not a movement, not a fad, not a revolution. Just the ongoing evolution of how to do stuff well given the tools currently at our disposal."

Larry Hawes, analyst/consultant:

Today’s announcement that the two companies are joining forces is huge for a number of reasons:

• It promises to define the relationship between Enterprise 2.0 (internal-facing), Social Media (customer-facing) and the use of social software to collaborate with business partners
• It brings together some of the brightest minds in all three of those areas
• Their potential community of existing clients could provide powerful adoption data and case studies that the market has demanded, but not received
• The combined company will have a strong global presence

Jevon MacDonald, partner at Dachis Group:

We believe that organizations across the globe will begin to view “social media” as social business and when this happens, integration, scale and adoption will become complex issues which will only be solved through a purposeful act of coordinated activities built upon a solid strategic foundation. Enter social business design as a systematic comprehensive approach that orchestrates social business across three core areas: business partner optimization, workforce collaboration and customer participation.

Steven Walling, ReadWriteEnterprise:

Dachis Group is a top consultant group in the U.S. advising companies about social technology adoption, and they've served big name corporations in many different verticals. Headshift has been the European counterpart to the Dachis Group (or vice versa, depending on which side of the pond you're looking from). "Headshift's street cred matched with Dachis' vision yields a formidable talent combination," said IT industry veteran Susan Scrupski, "This acquisition validates a maturing market."

Though various sources have called both groups "social media agencies" at various times (including during news of the acquisition), this is not the kind of social media guru/expert you might have in mind. Headshift consultants aren't out there acting as company representatives on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Rather than fishing for companies, Dachis and Headshift are teaching them how to fish for themselves. "It is time for companies to move beyond the hype and toward delivering concrete, sustainable, and measurable value from their social media activities," said Headshift co-founder Livio Hughes in a statement.