BusinessDigital Marketing

Build a Social Business

What Is Social Business?

Social business the application of social technologies as a formal component of business processes revolves around understanding how your customers or stakeholders connect to your business and how you reshape your business to understand, accept, and innovate based on their involvement.

Social business is about integrating all of your business functions: customer support, marketing, the executive team, and more. It means doing this for the purpose of creating collaborative innovation and engagement at meaningful, measurable levels tied clearly and directly to your company’s business objectives.

Social Businesses Are Participative

Ultimately, social business is about participation with and by your customers and stakeholders in pursuit of an organization that is strongly connected to them through participative and collaborative processes. As a result, a social business is often better able to respond to marketplace dynamics and competitive opportunities than a traditionally organized and managed firm.

This may occur through participation in a social community, a support or discussion forum, or any of a variety of other social applications and contexts. The efforts leading to the creation of a social business often begin with identifying or creating an opportunity for participation with (or between) customers, employees, or stakeholders within community or similar social applications.

Build Around Customer Participation

Regardless of who the community is intended to serve, strong communities are best built around the things that matter deeply to the members of the community: passions, lifestyles, causes, and similar fundamentally aligned needs. This applies whether the audience is primarily business B2B communities like Element 14’s engineering community or Dell’s Take Your Path small business owners community form around very specific shared needs common to small business owners—or a personal-interest B2C or nonprofit or cause-related community.

In Search of a Higher Calling

The surest way to avoid this trap is to appeal to passion, lifestyle, or cause in other words, to anchor your initiatives in something larger than your brand, product, or service: Appeal to a higher calling, in a manner of speaking, one that is carefully selected to both attract the people you want to associate with and to provide a natural home or connection to your brand, product, or service.

hows an evolved view of business and the beginning of a move away from a purely transactional view of the customer: The customer receives (or consumes) marketing messages, for example, buys the product or service, or enrolls in your organization, but then also goes on to provide feedback, whether directly through a survey card, via CRM or similar or through a listening program that collects and analyzes conversations

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