The secret to winning in this economy is a high SEQ score — and to model your company after a futuristic smash-hit movie.

The economic meltdown coupled with advances in technology has birthed a new species of businesses classified as Social Enterprises. Companies of all sizes that adopt this New Normal are winning with their customers as well as their balance sheets.

WHAT IS A SOCIAL ENTERPRISE

An organization with a transparent leader who fuses strategically chosen social technologies into the corporate culture, business model and systems. The result is improved economic value for employees, customers, partners and community.

SOCIAL ENTERPRISE QUOTIENT (SEQ)

Your SEQ pinpoints your location on the social enterprise spectrum. That location becomes your starting point to develop your strategic playbook. The higher your score is the greater the propensity for economic success. There are seven elements of the SEQ, including ecosystem, business model, culture, brand, customers, partners and competitors.

(1) ECOSYSTEM

Measuring the health of your ecosystem is the first step to SEQ. Let’s take, for example, the movie “Avatar.” Pandora, the moon on which the movie took place, was the environment where the Na’vi lived and worked. Similar to how we overlooked the last few decades of irresponsible fiscal policy, the Na’vi did not stop the RDA Corp. — a mining company from Earth — in time to prevent their ecosystem from collapse.

(2) BUSINESS MODEL

Does your current model work in the New Normal? Where are the bottlenecks? What metrics are you tracking?  The Na’vi’s business model included the main ingredient in any social enterprise, the “Tree of Souls.” James Cameron, the director of “Avatar,” referred to it as “a big input-output station.” The Na’vi were connected to this web of information all the time. Social enterprise companies have comparative systems. They tie data from the Internet and their internal databases, and mine new data from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other sources to touch their customers where they are located.

(3) BRAND

How do you leverage your brand with social technologies to reach new customers? The Na’vi were known for being great warriors who cared greatly for their ecosystem. They had high influence and respect. Their brand was well defined and easy to follow because they were connected to all their constituents in real time.

(4) CULTURE

Is your CEO transparent and does he or she foster an environment of collaboration, plus have a project-management mentality? The Na’vi were open, trusting and collaborated on everything, and even with competitors.

(5) CUSTOMERS

Do you who and where your raving fans are? How do you nurture and sustain them? A segment from the SEQ asks a simple question: Are you for us or against us? The objective is to move as many bystanders to the Raving For and Influencer For columns.

(6) PARTNERS

Do you know which of your vendors, investors, friends, affiliates and others are prominent online, and with whom you could be leveraging your relationships? Since the Na’vi were connected to their network, they were able to draw on those relationships and defeat their arch rival, the RDA Corp.

(7) COMPETITORS

Which of your competitors are influential, and how are they using social technologies? What are they saying, and how successful are they?

Editor’s note: Mark A. Carbone is FirstMonday’s resident “technology catalyst.” Follow him on Twitter @MarkACarbone or e-mail mark@marksnewnormal.com.

What people are saying about you happens now in 60-second cycles.  What can you do to influence it?

The ability for Google and Bing to now show an angry tweet or Facebook comment that a customer posted minutes ago can rank higher on search engines than your company’s Web site. This is a game-changer for all who want to thrive in the emerging Conversation Economy.

Take the Tiger Woods Test: Even though it’s been nearly two months since the story broke, his online reputation and sentiment is bogeying in real-time. The adjacent screenshot lists posts and comments made within a 20-second time span — 20. They range from claims of steroid use and total conquests to pleas of forgiveness.

This is an extreme example. Yet, only weeks ago he was regarded as one of the most respected public figures on the planet and the biggest human brand in history, worth more than $1 billion in marketing dollars.

Celebrities have a lot of laundry aired out regularly, but in this new normal, you may soon have your share of “transgressions” aired on the Internet.

There are free as well as paid tools online that measure sentiment and what you and others are saying.  Go to www.SocialMention.com and give it a try. A key component of reputation is your “Sentiment Score” — the measure of positive, neutral and negative conversations about you.  To see this in action, go to www.TweetFeel.com, a fun Twitter tool to watch sentiment in real time about any topic, person or company. Another site, www.NewsSift.com, is better for business.

Why does reputation matter now more than ever? As social technologies continue to disrupt the status quo and we move from producer-controlled messaging to consumer-truth finding, our business models need disruptive overhauls. Case in point: I went to a new restaurant recently and asked the owner what he thought about www.yelp.com.  After he finished cursing me and anyone who’s ever used Yelp, I realized he was stuck in old-business-model thinking.  He’s been receiving poor reviews based on his prices and is choosing to ignore his real-time negative reputation.

Instead, he could be engaging those users, learning from them and encouraging his raving fans to post positive reviews to combat the negative.

We need a new model, one that can adapt to real-time reputation issues and much more. That new model is “Social Enterprise.”

In future articles, I’ll share how to become a social enterprise.

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What Can You Start Doing?

1. Gather your personal tools.

• Fortitude. This is not easy.  Becoming cyber savvy takes discipline and time.
• Smart Phone. iPhone, Blackberry, Nexus One or Droid.
• Browser.  FireFox is the best because of the powerful plug-ins.
• Twitter account. Use www.TweetDeck.com for greater ease.

2. Get strategic. Conduct a Social Enterprise Assessment of your company.  What is your SEQ — Social Enterprise Quotient? Come back in February to download your free SEQ.

3. Review your current business model. Incorporate a new communication strategy internally and externally into the new model.  Also, include a way to find and sustain raving fans to propel your message. Revisit your companies compelling story and improve and condense it to a one-minute video.

4. Become a blog reader. Being able to gather and read a lot of information quickly is key to success. (Google Reader is a great tool for this at www.google.com/reader.)

5. Start tracking your reputation and the reputation of others. There are hundreds of tools available.  You only need a few:

• www.google.com/alerts (basic alerts)
• www.newssift.com (great business tool)
• socialmention.com (holistic listening tool)
• www.ubervu.com (general listening tool)
• www.blogpulse.com (blog specific)
• www.peoplebrowsr.com (paid service that’s well worth the $5 a month)
• www.twendz.com (measures Twitter Trends)
• www.twitalyzer.com (Twitter specific)

Editor’s note: Mark A. Carbone is FirstMonday’s resident “technology catalyst.” Follow him on Twitter @MarkACarbone or email mark@marksnewnormal.com.

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