Introducing the Social Business

People don’t do business with companies; they do business with people.

Naturally, humans are social beings-they love to socialise and are designed to collaborate. Long before the Internet and social media dominated the business world, people did business in social ways. They would ask friends and family for advice on products and talk about their experiences with each other over the garden fence or write letters to firms when products failed to meet their expectations. Today, the Internet and social media has radically changed the way that consumers share information and interact with each other and with the businesses they care about.

An impersonal, faceless organisation is not a fruitful approach in a socially-connected world. The benefits of personal customer service are well established, and in order to implement a personal approach, it is necessary for businesses to be more ‘social’. However a social business is not just having Facebook page and Twitter account, it involves a philosophy which embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organisation, both internally and externally.

A social business is:

• Engaged with its customers, employees and partners to build deeper relationships,
• Transparent with no boundaries to information-there are no secrets, and
• Nimble to anticipate and address change

Although social media enables businesses to listen to online social conversations, gain valuable information and keep track of what is being said about their brand and their competitors, being ‘social’ also means getting involved with these online communities, by directly interacting and responding to their conversations. It means recognising the need for employees to become “digital citizens”. In doing so, more personal and long-term relationships are fostered.

So how do businesses become socially engaged, and profit from it? Firstly, they learn how to use social media effectively and secondly, they integrate social media with existing business processes, such as CRM. We will look at these two factors in the following posts.