SOCIAL BUSINESS

The Ingredients for Social Business Success

Salvatore Salamone | Date: 02-20-12 | Comments

Crowdsourcing is increasingly influencing all forms of buying and business decisions. Consumers have unprecedented power over how brands are perceived and purchases are made. And employees are demanding social tools in the workplace, and are actively sidestepping established hierarchies and IT processes to use them. To be successful in this dynamic environment, companies must embrace these changes and become social businesses.

To be successful in today�s business world, companies must become social businesses. Making the transformation to a social business can yield three key business benefits.

First, it can deepen customer relationships. Successful social businesses embrace an open dialogue with customers through social tools to involve them in both internal processes, like product development, and external processes, such as promotion and customer service.

Second, becoming a social business can drive operational efficiencies. Social tools can be used to build focused communities that help improve the quality and speed of gathering business insights and generating ideas to develop the business.

And third, a social business can optimize its workforce to better compete in today�s rapidly changing world market. For example, workers can leverage social tools to coordinate activities such as completing projects or tasks, reporting status, keeping managers up to date, and getting help and helping others

Unfortunately, becoming a social business requires more than just rolling out social tools to employees and customers. There needs to be a philosophical change in the way a business operates.

To reap the benefits of social tools, companies must become:

Engaged: A social business enables individuals � whether customers, partners or employees � to form networks to generate new sources of innovation and foster creativity. It empowers these networks with the collaborative, gaming, and analytical tools needed for members to engage each other and creatively solve business challenges.

Transparent: A social business must remove unnecessary boundaries between experts inside the company and experts in the marketplace. It must use the social tools to capture knowledge and insight from many sources, allowing the company to quickly sense changes in customer mood, employee sentiment, or process efficiencies.

Nimble: A social business leverages social networks to speed up business, gaining real-time insight to make quicker and better decisions. It gets information to customers and partners in new ways -- faster.

Companies that adopt these practices and transform themselves into social businesses enable their employees and customers to more easily find information and the expertise they need to make decisions. Social tools also help groups of people bind together into communities of shared interest and coordinate their efforts to deliver better business results faster.

All of this is needed to be a successful business today.

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