A Social Business isn’t a company that just has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Social Business means that every department, from HR to marketing to product development to customer service to sales, uses social media the way it uses any other tool and channel to do its job. It’s an organization that uses social networking tools fluently to communicate with people inside and outside the company. It’s a strategic approach to shaping a business culture, highly dependent upon executive leadership and corporate strategy, including business process design, risk management, leadership development, financial controls and use of business analytics. Becoming a Social Business can help an organization deepen customer relationships, generate new ideas faster, identify expertise and enable a more effective workforce.
Sandy Carter, Vice President of Social Business Evangelism of IBM explains Social Business. She has also written a book called;Get Bold: Using Social Media to Create a New Type of Social Business.
Some of Her ideas abaout Social Business:
Companies around the world are now focused on becoming Social Businesses, estimated to be a $100B market by 2015. But perhaps the most daunting part of becoming a social business is how to start the journey. That’s where creating an AGENDA plays a vital role. In order to become successful in social business, an organization needs to create its own personalized Social Business Agenda that addresses the company’s culture, trust between management and employees and the organization and its constituencies, engagement behind and outside of the firewall, risk management, and of course, measurement.
Measuring social success depends on how social media serves other campaigns and business processes. Social media’s impact from a marketing perspective has created a lot of buzz and measurement is still being fine tuned. Does having 100,000 Twitter followers help to drive sales? Still a difficult figure to measure.
But, with social business there are several areas where the adoption of social impacts the business and measurement is much less convoluted.