SAN FRANCISCO—Technology public relations firm Eastwick has launched SocialxDesign (read as “Social by Design”), a new strategy consulting firm focused on helping businesses, government agencies and NGOs remake themselves for the socially networked economy.

SocialxDesign aims to enable organizations to grow, reduce costs, and increase their market value by engaging and empowering people in their ecosystems—customers, employees, industry partners—to take an active part in remaking the enterprise.

It will be led by experts from diverse disciplines including strategic marketing, politics and public-sector advocacy and backed by a strategic investment and ongoing support from Eastwick.

Initially the firm will provide three core services:
• Discovery: A qualitative and quantitative audit of key stakeholders throughout an organization's ecosystem in order to identify opportunities and desired outcomes.
• Design: The development of an engagement plan—including strategic positioning—designed to achieve the outcomes. 
• Delivery:  Management and execution of the plan along several dimensions: technology implementation, marketing implementation and measurement, and education and training.

“The world is changing, shaped by new ways of marketing and communicating,” says Barbara Bates, co-founder and CEO of Eastwick, who will also serve as COO of the new entity.  “An organization today must not only know how to position itself in competitive markets but understand how to activate and motivate people in active, connected ecosystems.

“The best CMOs, and their counterparts in the public sector, are beginning to understand that social is not a channel. Social creates new and sustainable value by empowering the people who matter most to your organization, whomever they are, wherever they are.”

The SocialxDesign leadership team includes president Giovanni Rodriguez, a former Eastwick partner and social business strategist, and vice president public affairs Toby Chaudhuri. The two met in 2011 as advisors to a White House initiative that employed both online and offline strategies to engage citizens to collaborate with federal and local government officials.

The team also includes Margarita Quihuis, Mark Nelson, and Nic Milagro Chapa, “behavior design” consultants who have worked on research initiatives at Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab.