Now that social media has redefined our social lives and the way in which we communicate with each other, it’s time for us to recognize that social business is the next realm of global change. At first unsure of what the social revolution had to offer them, businesses have still only engaged with social media as primarily a new set of marketing tools. But this use is only a small piece of the potential for improving the way businesses act and interact with internal and external stakeholders
Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM, described this brave new world in a recent blog post on Fast Company. “Social media is about media and people, which is one dimension of the overall world of business,” he writes. “With social business you start to look at the way people are interacting in digital experiences and apply the insights derived to a wide variety of different business processes.”
One example of how social innovations are affecting business is in the way employees communicate with each other. Email was a very powerful innovation and completely changed internal communication in business environments over the last 15 years or so. But the problem with email is that it tends to create silos of information – conversations are limited to only the individuals directly addressed and important knowledge isn’t shared with other parties that could make use of it. Social technology opens up the possibility of online collaborative communication portals that the company can learn from, with powerful filtering and analysis mechanisms to share key information with anyone who might be able to make use of it. Such a solution would also allow management to more quickly identify problems as or before they arise and address them sooner rather than later.
Social business practices and technologies, focused as they are on collaboration and sharing, will allow companies to gain a better and faster understanding of their customers, employees and partners, using that understanding to better drive the way they do business.
