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?

Web 1.0 to Web 3.0

Just as you’ve become used to updating your blog and tweeting about the quality of your lunch salad, a scary new term is bouncing around the Internet, Web 3.0. Users were consumers in 1.0, producers in 2.0, and are now optimizers in 3.0. Instead of telling your siblings who don’t care about your salad, in 3.0 you’ll be telling all the salad connoisseurs who work near your office. A truly great link here with several non-Powerpoint slideshows explaining the next step in your Internet.

http://www.labnol.org/internet/web-3-concepts-explained/8908/