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c h a p t e r3 :BUILD A SOCIAL BUSINESS■What Is Social Business?
Social business—the application of social technologies as a formal component of busi-
ness 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 tradi-
tionally organized and managed firm. This may occur through participation in a social
community, a support or discussion forum, or any of a variety of other social applica-
tions 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) custom-
ers, employees, or stakeholders within community or similar social applications.
An important point to note here is that when social business practices are
approached and implemented correctly, everyone wins. By bringing customers into the
business, or directly involving stakeholders in the design and operation of the organi-
zations with which they are associated, a steady flow of ultimately constructive ideas
emerges. One of the biggest misconceptions about social media and the Social Web as
regards business commentary is that it’s all negative, that the participants are all com-
plainers and whiners. Not so.
In a 2007 Zenith Optimedia study, of the 3 billion or so word of mouth conver-
sations that occur worldwide, every day, about 2/3 of them involve or reference a prod-
uct, brand, or piece of media. Moreover, positive mentions significantly outweighed
negatives. The fact is, unless your business strategy is to generate negative comments—
I can think of a few outfits for whom that might actually be the case—the Social Web
very likely presents significant opportunity for building your business and improving it
over time.
Building a social business starts with establishing a community or other social
presence around or in which your brand fits naturally—whether through a casual pres-
ence on Twitter, a more involved Facebook business presence, or your own community
built for suppliers, partners, or customers. Element 14, an Indian electronics com-
ponents supplier, offers engineers using its catalog a community that facilitates idea