The Great Discussion: Social Media to Social Business

It’s the most talked about topic in the social media space — the evolution of social from ‘media’ to ‘business’. In essence, the transformation has been occuring for the past few years. During my tenure at IBM, we had realized that the optimal interaction channels are organic and human. The best strategy to encourage that flow of information between the business and the ecosystem is via social.

It is still human and it is still personal. However, it is taking focus away from ‘likes and follows’ to ‘business results’ and ‘value output’. What is my audience and network benefiting from this? And What and Where am I benefiting from this?

Seth Godin recently talked about the fact that organizations by design cannot care. But employees within the organizations do care and are human. The future of Economy 2.0 is in social collaboration and delivering value. Less quanitity and more quality.

It’s not a new concept. It’s just a new term. The evolution from ‘top down static approaches to two way social to social business framework’ arised organically and I predict that it will only lead to a socially enabled digital experience in the near future.

I am glad that we are now at a point where we are aggregating, curating and filtering noise to generate value of the social medium. We are improving how we align our external and internal processes in an efficent manner. We are moving away from noise and egos to delivering real value and building earned networks.

In the social media councils that I’ve led over the years, we have always talked about this evolution in this space and how it will lead to an evolved personal digital web experience in the coming few years. Away from PR/Marketing noise to real valued networking.

Ultimately, it is about delivering an enhanced and improved customer experience throughout the business ecosystem.

With that being said, it is easy to preach than to implement. If you are an executive at a firm which has only functioned in a factory (command and control) manner for the past 60 years, it can definitely be a daunting experience. The customer and even your employee expectations have evolved and that has an impact throughout your org. (I’ll share some of my work in the near future on this — practical and actionable tips to enabling a social business framework).

In the mean time, What does a Social Business mean to you?

The journey beyond IBM

“The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.”

Don Williams, Jr

As some of you already know, with mixed emotions, I’ve recently left IBM to join Bell Canada’s Business Markets Division. It was definitely not an easy decision to make as I’ve made many friends over the past 4+ years at IBM and outside of IBM and I will miss them dearly.

Over the past few years, working closely with our valuable family of partners, bloggers, developers and IBMers, we have evolved our products faster — together with you, product launch cycles become shorter, business become open and transparent and improved customer centric focus all across our portfolio.

We have closed deals faster. We developed real relationships. We listened and we cared. Heck, we even changed how we approached marketing. And that is a major feat for a Fortune 500 like IBM. I am grateful to the smart inspirational business partners, superb developers and even more amazing intuitive folks at IBM and outside of IBM who have helped me poke the box and be different.

Over the years, IBM has provided me with an opportunity to speak at events (keynotes even), lead,  experiment, pursue my passions and learn from the smartest people on the planet. From the conception of Lotus Foundations to the worldwide launch of Lotus Knows campaign to the Project Northstar to IBM Software to Groundswell Award for DevleoperWorks to upcoming killer apps for the social web generation. (You would have to kill me to get that out!)

These past few years have been a blast and I look forward to changing a thing or two at Bell Canada as the Associate Director of Marketing, Social/Digital at Bell Canada.  I fully plan to keep in touch with my friends and as always, I am just a tweet away.

As again, thank you for everything and let’s change this world for the better together.

@BilalJaffery // linkedin // email: bilal at jaffery dot ca (Canadian eh)