MOVE OVER SOCIAL MEDIA

MOVE OVER SOCIAL MEDIA; HERE COMES SOCIAL BUSINESS

It takes extraordinary chutzpah to promote a vision before it can be fully realized by your audience, let alone your company. IBM did just that in 1997 when it introduced the notion of e-business. Fourteen years later, it is doing it again with a concept they call social business. Given its prescience about e-business, a concept that radically transformed how companies buy and sell their products, it is hard to dismiss their latest idée fixe. That said, getting your arms around this grandiose idea is not easy. Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM, spent the better part of an hour with me explaining the ins and outs while providing specific examples of how IBM is testing various social business approaches both internally and externally. In the end, I came away with these seven reasons why just about every company should be thinking about becoming a social business.

Social media will be dwarfed by social business

While social media has helped many companies become more customer-centric, it is treated primarily as a modestly effective marketing tool. McCarty explained, "Social media is about media and people, which is one dimension of the overall world of business. With social business you start to look at the way people are interacting in digital experiences and apply the insights derived to a wide variety of different business processes."

People do business with people, not companies

One of the notions behind becoming a social business is that your employees should be front and center in your digital activities. "Since IBM no longer sells consumer products, the brand experience for IBM is an experience with an IBMer," an experience that is increasingly happening online, McCarty said. To support this idea, IBM recently started adding IBM "experts" to various web pages—an action that in A/B testing dramatically improved page performance and revealed increased confidence and trust in IBM in focus groups

Your employees need to be digital citizens, too

Becoming a social business means recognizing the need for your employees to become "digital citizens" and providing the training for them to manage their digital reputations. Accordingly, IBM not only trains its experts extensively, it is now building out "personal dashboards" to help them see the impact of their various interactions. "Good conversation creates good outcomes and that brings value to the organization and to the individual," McCarty said.

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