Social Business is About Conversations

By John Newton (@johnnewton) Feb 29, 2012

For so many years, the round trip of information between company and customer has been an arduous process of exchanges from designer, to engineer, to manufacturer, to marketer, to sales person, to customer, to market research and back to the designer.

Each step in this process was fraught with Chinese whispers that corrupted the intended message. This wasn't so much a conversation, more a rickety chain of ideas.

The Internet, high performance public networks, cheap and plentiful devices and a new generation of software delivered through the Internet have changed our perception of how these conversations should be conducted. Genuine conversation and great technology can make amazing things possible. If only we would let it happen in the business world the way it has happened in the consumer world.
Emerging from all the concurrent transformations is the concept of “social business.” As technology, businesses, and workforces evolve, it’s clear that social business is all about conversations and people, not just the technology that manages them.

What Is a Social Business & Where Did It Come From?

A social business is one that facilitates conversations between employees, between employees and customers, between employees and partners, and raises the awareness of their market as a result of those conversations.

A social business harnesses new technologies both inside the firewall and outside to enable those conversations whether people are in the same location or not.

A social business preserves and shares those conversations to constantly learn new ways of doing business, to eliminate bad business practices and introduce new and improving business practices.

A social business focuses the energy of these conversations to solve business problems. The focus is on solutions for employees, customers and channels rather than on mere socialization.

Finally, a social business rewards this behavior and gives recognition to those who contribute the most to these important conversations.

Social businesses are likely to be both technologically experimental and demographically young. The technology stack of a decade ago may have seemed sufficient to build anything — portals, data stores, structured access, security and massive plumbing. However, these stacks have rarely played a role in the social side of business, instead being deployed in the Systems of Record that preserved and controlled existing business data.

Consumerization of IT

The Consumerization of IT that pulls technology from the outside in has introduced new social ways of looking at technology rather than enabling the creation of new solutions on old technology. Put another way, Consumerization of IT, along with a new generation of open source tools for rapidly creating web and mobile applications, introduced a new generation of products that social businesses adopted as the basis for their solutions.

These tools also are more accommodating of mobile devices and helped bridge the gap for the non-standard, post-PC devices of the "Bring Your Own Device" culture. Social businesses, seeking to exploit the friendliness of social sites and immediacy of mobile technology, are usually seeking the technology solutions that meet their needs rather than going with the biggest brand, or trusted name.

Digitally Savvy Workers

Compounding that trend is the new generation of workers that is replacing older workers of the Baby Boomer generation. With a wave of entrants, the Baby Boomers are no longer in the majority and these new workers have grown up with digital technologies. Having never known, or at least recognized, hierarchical authority in the workplace, the new generation are not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom, thus setting the scene for newer ways of collaborating.