Social Business–The Next Step in Social Media

Social media expert and consultant Peter Kim delivered the opening keynote at the J. Boye Philadelphia 2010 conference on ’social business’–the integration of social media and social technology to create what is likely to be one of the most important innovations of the coming decade.

Why Social Business?

Despite the newness of social media, there are already problems in practice. Social media doesn’t always scale well–it’s wonderful if your CEO sends tweets, but what does she do when 100,000 fans of your brand want to tweet back? Social media can also be hard to control. Who gets to start a Facebook group in your company, and who decides what it says? And what about privacy issues and identity theft? How do you get your arms around all of this?

Integrate With Social Business

According to Pete, social business can integrate the myriad of social media and technology options and answer questions about rules and governance. To do this, it’s important to keep four things in mind: connections, culture, communications, and content. Who are you connecting to? Do you have a culture that supports openness, or are you more siloed? What methods are you using, or would like to use, to communicate your message? Last but certainly not least, what is your message?

How to Get it Done

So how do you put this into practice? As always, the best starting place is to ask the right questions.

1. First and foremost, why do you want to get into social at all? In other words, how does conducting social business specifically help your business reach its goals? ‘Because everyone else is doing it’ is probably not the best answer.
2. What is your ‘listening landscape’? In other words, what are people already saying about you? Companies are often afraid of negative comments…but different comments may be more tricky. Suppose you think of your shoe brand as about extreme fun…and your fans just want to talk about how comfortable your products are. How will this affect you and your efforts?
3. What are your competitors doing? More importantly, how is this actually working for them? A little digging can work wonders here.
4. Who will own the social business? What kinds of rules and governance need to be set up?
5. Who gets to make final decisions in case of a dispute? Can anyone start a Facebook group? If not, how will this affect your communication?
6. How will these efforts be measured, and what will be measured? This may be the most difficult, and yet the most rewarding, question of all.
7. Finally, what kind of technology will help you to bring all this about? What should you own and what should you lease or outsource?

As the world gets increasingly networked and computers become smaller and vastly more powerful, social media will continue its explosive growth. Managing this well will be a lasting competitive advantage in the next decade. Social business is the place to start.