FreshNetworks Blog

“Social business” – what does it mean? We’ll be exploring the concept of a social business in a series of blog posts over the coming weeks.

What is social business?

The term “social business” predates social media (referring to “a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective” – Wikipedia).

However, in the context of social media we define it as: the implementation of the unique communicative properties of social media across all levels of a business.

Examples of social business integration would be:

• Collaboration tools – allowing colleagues to work on a project simultaneously and remotely.
• Customer service – responding to questions, complaints and suggestions made on social networks. This can be handled collaboratively such as BestBuy’s Twelpforce.
• Internal communication – intuitive messaging that is free from fragmentary nature of email.
• Social CRM (SCRM) – customers will increasingly expect consistency and awareness of their social history with a company, no matter who or what department they interact with.

Why should I be interested in social business?

While the marketing potential of social media is well known, social business offers smoother internal workflows for employees, as information is passed and updated in a fast and intuitive manner.

Consumer social media is important for communicating with the public, but Facebook or Twitter are not always suitable for internal use by enterprise, and so specialised software and tools are required. While these may have a Facebook-like “feel” to them for easy employee adoption, enterprises have to be prepared to roll out new platforms, as integration across the entire organisation is essential.

So why are companies not using social business yet?

Fundamentally it’s because businesses are daunted by the implications of making fundamental changes to their operation. While social business is designed to be scalable,  the first step  requires a desire and understanding of its importance from the top-down.

Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter has written on the topic of the “social maturity” of an organisation, and similarly their progression through a variety of organisational models. We will consider these models, and the future of social business, in the later posts of this series.