What Is Social Business?
Social business application of social technologies as a formal component of business processes—revolves around understanding how your customers or stakeholders connect to your business and how you reshape your business to understand, accept, and innovate based on their involvement. Social business is about integrating all of your business functions: customer support, marketing, the executive team, and more. It means doing this for the purpose of creating collaborative innovation and engagement at meaningful, measurable levels tied clearly and directly to your company’s business objectives.
Social Businesses Are Participative
Ultimately, social business is about participation with and by your customers and stakeholders in pursuit of an organization that is strongly connected to them through participative and collaborative processes. As a result, a social business is often better able to respond to marketplace dynamics and competitive opportunities than a traditionally organized and managed firm.
This may occur through participation in a social community, support or discussion forum, or any of a variety of other social applications and contexts. The efforts leading to the creation of a social business often begin with identifying or creating an opportunity for participation with (or between) customers, employees, or stakeholders within the community or similar social applications.
Build Around Customer Participation
Regardless of who the community is intended to serve, strong communities are best built around the things that matter deeply to the members of the community: passions, lifestyles, causes, and similar fundamentally aligned needs. This applies whether the audience is primarily business B2B communities like Element 14’s engineering community or Dell’s “Take Your Path” small business owners community formed around very specific shared needs common to small business owners or a personal-interest B2C or nonprofit or cause-related community.
Participation Is Driven by Passion
Getting the activity focused on something larger than your brand, product, or service is critical to the successful development of social behavior within the customer stakeholder base and as well within the firm or organization itself. After all, if narrowly defined business interests take center stage if the social interaction is built purely around business objectives, then what will the customers of that business find useful? What’s in it for them?
$pend Your Way to a Social Presence
The appeal to a higher calling to a lifestyle, passion, or cause is what drives organic participation and growth in online social communities. The payoffs are lower ongoing expenses and a higher degree of stickiness and participation and advocacy for the community. Given the central role established for the higher social object, a question arises here: What is it that powers social marketing applications, communities, and sites which lack a cause, passion, or lifestyle connection as seen in programs like Pepsi’s The Juice?
