Face­book, Twit­ter & Co

o. Di­lut­ing the Mean­ing of So­cial ‘So­cial Busi­ness’ and ‘So­cial In­flu­ence’ had a very spe­cific mean­ing a few years back. Now they’re in­creas­ingly used in the sim­ple con­text of us­ing Face­book, Twit­ter and other ‘so­cial sites.’ +Mari Smith started a lively dis­cus­sion on the shift of mean­ing. Lots of in­ter­est­ing com­ments there.
https://plus.google.com/112707199408484711520/posts/fjp4tiUdV4d

Re­shared post from +Mari Smith

Ques­tion: What is your un­der­stand­ing of the term „So­cial Business?”

1) A com­pany fully in­te­grat­ing „so­cial” in­ter­nally and externally.
2) A com­pany (for profit) de­signed to ad­dress a so­cial objective.
3) Or both? Or?

I like to use the term „so­cial busi­ness” pre­dom­i­nantly with de­f­i­n­i­tion #1 per what IBM is do­ing - see more on this below.

How­ever, „so­cial busi­ness” was first de­fined by No­bel Peace Prize lau­re­ate Prof. +Muham­mad Yunus to mean #2. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_business

[Up­date: and see also https://www.socialbusiness.org/]

To me, a so­cial busi­ness is a com­pany that is fully in­te­grat­ing so­cial net­work­ing and re­la­tion­ship build­ing both in­ter­nally and ex­ter­nally. It’s a com­pany that GETS what it means to be so­cial and is not afraid to em­brace open com­mu­ni­ca­tion among em­ploy­ees, man­age­ment, ven­dors and cus­tomers. So­cial busi­nesses are more suc­cess­ful at ex­ter­nal so­cial me­dia mar­ket­ing be­cause of their in­ter­nal co­he­sive­ness and con­nec­tions be­tween all employees.

More and more, we’re hear­ing about „so­cial me­dia” evolv­ing into „so­cial busi­ness”. It’s not a stand­alone com­po­nent of mar­ket­ing. Com­pa­nies like +IBM are lead­ing the way with their train­ing, ini­tia­tives and this ex­plana­tory sec­tion on their web­site: https://ibm.com/socialbusiness. I like IB­M’s de­f­i­n­i­tion of so­cial busi­ness - ex­cerpted from their site:

A so­cial busi­ness is­n’t just a com­pany that has a Face­book page and a Twit­ter han­dle. A so­cial busi­ness is one that em­braces and cul­ti­vates a spirit of col­lab­o­ra­tion and com­mu­nity through­out its organization—both in­ter­nally and externally.
IBM has iden­ti­fied three dis­tinct char­ac­ter­is­tics of a so­cial business:
En­gaged —deeply con­nect­ing peo­ple, in­clud­ing cus­tomers, em­ploy­ees, and part­ners, to be in­volved in pro­duc­tive, ef­fi­cient ways.
Trans­par­ent —re­mov­ing bound­aries to in­for­ma­tion, ex­perts and as­sets, help­ing peo­ple align every ac­tion to drive busi­ness results.
Nim­ble —speed­ing up busi­ness with in­for­ma­tion and in­sight to an­tic­i­pate and ad­dress evolv­ing opportunities.

Your thoughts?

Em­bed­ded Link

IBM - Smarter Planet - So­cial busi­ness - Overview - United States
IBM has iden­ti­fied three dis­tinct char­ac­ter­is­tics of a So­cial Busi­ness: a so­cial busi­ness is en­gaged, a so­cial busi­ness is trans­par­ent, a so­cial busi­ness is nimble