When did your organization make the move from practicing Social Media to practicing Social Business? In most cases, you can’t say when it happened. But it has.
The more important question is: What are you going to do about it?Separating the concept of Social Business from Social Media is not about semantics or buzzwords. It’s an acknowledgement that Social Media impacts many areas and disciplines within your organization, and a concerted effort to account for this trend across the organization.
Oddly enough, this understanding is frequently arrived at as a result of the law of unintended consequences.
Most companies decide that the best way to test into social media is in Marketing and PR. The reasons are easy to understand, the benefits are transparent, and it feels like a low risk/high reward proposition. Often they launch their blog, set up their Facebook and LinkedIn Pages, begin generating content and driving their audience to it – all good things in the realm of marketing.
Then something interesting happens: The instant that first social mention appears which your marketing department is incapable of responding to; the first time that your social media team is aware of product feedback before your R&D team is; when Customer Service becomes aware of a dissatisfied customer through social instead of the phone lines, you've graduated to Social Business. Congratulations.
With this step come an entirely new set of business challenges to deal with. Very quickly, new levels of coordination become critical, content generation becomes a focus, roles such as the Community Director become central, and a proper portfolio of social management tools become vital.
These examples represent the 4 key aspects that we examine when developing Social Business strategy for clients: Structure, Methods, Resources, Software. This infographic is intended to shed some light on a topic that many of our clients are asking about.
