Social Business: Why You Should Care
The Advantages
There are many advantages to becoming a social business:
Internally these organizations often have better business performance, are more efficient, have better insights and knowledge, are more aware of new opportunities, have better collaboration, more efficient processes and avoid duplication of efforts.
Externally they can have lower customer care costs, better customer satisfaction and loyalty, lower marketing and sales costs, better brand reputations and lower product development costs.
It is difficult for any organization to go from being an isolated entity to being social business, although few organizations are really totally isolated any more. Organizations need to develop the strategies and tools that will enable them to move along this continuum. They must go from having an inside-out point of view to an outside-in point of view and they must use technologies that enable collaboration and the sharing of insights and knowledge.
While increasing employee and customer engagement is usually welcome, not every social business initiative will succeed and it is important that an organization experiments with new approaches, learns from mistakes and moves on when something doesn’t work. Having leaders who are not afraid to take risks is one important step. Having employees who know how to be digital citizens is another. Employees must have the training necessary to understand how to behave and manage their own reputations and that of their employers.
Although social businesses may be relatively new entities, the number of social businesses is growing. A 2011 social business survey by International Data Corporation (IDC) showed that 41 percent of respondents have some sort of social business initiative underway. What they found, however, is that these projects vary greatly. They ranged from grassroots bottom-up employee initiatives to sophisticated and strategic social customer engagement programs.
So while there is no “one size fits all” way to be a social business, the message is clear; if you run a business, you should think about where you are on the continuum from isolation to integration to stakeholder optimization and develop a plan to transform your organization into a social one. Otherwise your business risks being endangered.
