Social Business Ain't Going Nowhere: The Experts Have Spoken

By Siobhan Fagan (@cmswireSiobhan) Feb 24, 2012

While the end of February, and with it, CMSWire’s focus on Social Business is drawing to a close, our experts are still going strong sharing their insights into a concept you can’t afford to ignore (if you still are). From the sounds of this past week’s Tweet Jam, there are as many thoughts about what makes a business a social business as there are practitioners, but the consensus is that it's time to stop treating this as a separate entity, and just look at it as the new way we work.

Another phenomena that can't be ignored? Big Data. And don't worry SharePoint, we didn't forget you.

It's Not too Late to Get Started

Getting Started with Social Business: Building the Culture

Hyoun Park @hyounpark_AG: In my previous article, we discussed the five key drivers for adopting Social Business. With this follow up, we will what companies have done who have been most successful in creating an optimal culture for Social Business deployments. By understanding the processes, skillsets and organizational structures associated with business value, we will see how companies have prepared themselves for collaborative success.
To recap, the five key drivers for adopting Social Business are:

Effective partner/supplier collaboration
Need to increase innovation
Identifying new market opportunities
Increasing employee cohesiveness on a global/enterprise-wide scale
Fear of losing proprietary and institutional knowledge

Each of these profiles had different strategies and focus areas for their social deployments.

What Matters in Social Business

Peter Kim @peterkim: There's no doubt that social business has arrived. In three short years, we've adopted this umbrella concept to encompass function-specific concepts like word of mouth marketing, consumer advocacy and Enterprise 2.0. But what exactly is social business?

As a definition, a social business harnesses fundamental tendencies in human behavior via emerging technology to improve strategic and tactical outcomes. There's a lot more to unpack in support of that statement — so let's talk about what matters in social business.

Knowledge Management & Social Business: The New World of Work

Kevin Conroy @seattlerooster: “The reports of my death are an exaggeration,” the great Mark Twain famously remarked in 1897 upon hearing accounts of his own passing.

I’ve been fascinated by recent posts here on CMSWire assessing the health (or lack thereof) of “knowledge management” and debating whether it is dead, dying or will morph entirely with what most people in the CMSWire community have come to label and know as “social business.”

As some have noted, one of the underlying challenges associated with even having this discussion is that definitions around the terms “knowledge management” and “social business” are broad, fluid and in regular flux. That being said, the ongoing debate has been interesting to read and I wanted to throw my hat in the ring, based on some direct perspectives from the front lines: