The Future of Social Business: Domo's Experiment
Domo's social business experiment and the evolution of social enterprise software.
title: "The Future of Social Business: Domo's Experiment" slug: "future-social-business-domos-experiment" description: "Domo's social business experiment and the evolution of social enterprise software." datePublished: "2012-09-17" dateModified: "2026-03-15" category: "Data Strategy" tags: ["social business", "Domo", "enterprise", "social media"] tier: 3 originalUrl: "http://www.applieddatalabs.com/content/future-social-business-domos-experiment" waybackUrl: "https://web.archive.org/web/20120917061530/http://www.applieddatalabs.com:80/content/future-social-business-domos-experiment"
The Future of Social Business: Domo's Experiment
In 2012, Domo's CEO Josh James launched something called the "Domosocial experiment." For eight weeks, every employee at the company had to dive into social media and build their personal online presence. They tracked scores with Klout (remember Klout?), offered cash prizes and extra days off to top performers, and James declared that "for new employees, social savvy will be a pre-requisite. For current employees, it will be a condition of employment."
We called it at the time: "Our prediction: Domo is an early adopter of a future trend." We were half right. The social business trend went in a direction nobody expected, and Domo's own story became a cautionary tale about hype versus execution.
What Domo Was Selling
Domo was a business intelligence startup based in Utah, offering cloud-based dashboards that let executives see their business data in real time. Josh James had previously founded Omniture (acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion), so he had credibility and ambition. The Domosocial experiment was partly about employee engagement and partly about marketing -- get hundreds of employees tweeting about your brand and see what happens.
The experiment was interesting because Domo practiced what it preached. They were a data analytics company trying to use data (Klout scores, social engagement metrics) to optimize their own social media presence. It was meta in a way that felt very 2012.
The Domo Roller Coaster
What happened to Domo after our article tells a story about the gap between hype and sustainable business. The company raised over $700 million in private funding at a peak valuation of $2 billion. James spent lavishly on marketing, including Super Bowl commercials. Domo finally went public in 2018 at a $600 million market cap -- significantly below its private valuation. The stock struggled. By 2023, the company went private again in a deal that valued it at roughly $1 billion.
Domo raised $700 million, ran Super Bowl ads, and went public. Then it went private again at half its peak valuation. The BI market didn't disappear. Domo just got outrun by Snowflake, Databricks, and the cloud platforms.
Domo wasn't a bad product. It did what it promised: real-time dashboards for executives. But the market moved underneath it. Snowflake, Databricks, Power BI, and Looker (acquired by Google) all offered similar or better capabilities with deeper integrations. The standalone BI dashboard company, which seemed like such a strong idea in 2012, got squeezed from every direction.
Social Business Became Something Else
The "social business" concept we wrote about evolved, but not in the way James predicted. Requiring employees to build social media presence didn't become standard practice. What happened instead was the rise of enterprise collaboration platforms -- Slack (launched 2013), Microsoft Teams (launched 2017), and the integration of AI into both.
The real successor to Domo's social experiment isn't a Klout score requirement. It's Microsoft Copilot sitting inside Teams, summarizing meetings, drafting responses, and querying business data through conversation. It's Slack's AI features that search across channels and surface relevant information. The "social" part of social business turned out to be less about Twitter followers and more about how teams share information and make decisions together.
In 2026, the idea that a company would require employees to build personal social media brands feels like it belongs to a different era. Enterprise communication has moved firmly toward internal AI-augmented collaboration rather than external social presence. The data that matters isn't your Klout score -- it's whether your AI tools can access and synthesize your organization's institutional knowledge.
The Lesson Worth Keeping
There's a thread from 2012 that still holds. James was right that companies need to be data-driven in how they communicate and collaborate. He was right that ignoring new communication channels was risky. Where he went wrong was in the specific mechanism -- Twitter presence -- and in assuming that individual social media activity would translate directly to business value.
The operational AI equivalent today would be: don't force every employee to become a prompt engineer. Instead, embed AI into the workflows people already use and measure whether it actually improves outcomes. The lesson from Domo's experiment isn't about social media. It's about the difference between adopting technology for its own sake and adopting technology that solves a real problem.