This is the third in the series of blog posts taken from our recent white paper called The Future of Social Business. You can read the previous posts here or download the report here.
One of the unique features of social business is that, potentially, it involves every stakeholder of an organization – from the CEO and staff to partners, customers and perhaps even prospects. Inevitably, then, ‘Where do we start?’ is often the first question raised during planning discussions. And exactly where to start is a hard-argued point within the industry.
Anyone who understands the dynamics of social media marketing will tell you that social business starts with the customer. The use of social media by businesses has, to date, been dominated by marketing with a strong focus on building communities on social networks – notably Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and exploiting the word of-mouth reach that these enable. Listening to and engaging with customers via social media has become an essential activity for most large organisations, so for many, facilitating faster and more effective communication with these customers is the obvious driver for implementing social business.
While that may make a compelling business case, there is also a strong argument (highlighted by the McKinsey statistic quoted in my first post) that the value of improving information flows and efficiency internally could outweigh any direct commercial benefits generated from improved marketing.
Our panelists agreed. Citing a renowned systems theorist to make his point, Guy Stephens of IBM says:
“In 1956 William Ashby wrote the ‘Introduction to the law of cybernetics’ where he talked about the law of requisite variety. If we put that into social terms, what you do externally – in terms of engaging with customers via social channels – you have to do internally. I think there is a huge onus about getting social right internally without forgetting or ignoring what’s going on outside the organisation”.
And yet, to some extent, the separation of internal and external communities in the digital age is imaginary. In one of our previous webinars Richard Hughes explained how the lines we draw between social networks (external), social extranets (quasi-internal, e.g. customer support communities) and social intranets (internal) are at best fuzzy, and possibly fictitious. You can see his presentation on that here.
Chris Heuer has added his thoughts to this debate:
“It’s about understanding that the boundaries we define inside our organisations, or between our customers and us, or between our partners and us, don’t exist in the real world. We’ve created these artificial constructs to divide us instead of understanding this world of relationships that unite us, how we align with one another and how we are all on the same team”.
Certainly, the trend towards organisations appropriating social media tools and using them for business aims is set to continue. To wrap up this particular debate, Guy Stephens threw down the gauntlet to anyone who isn’t frequently innovating their communications:
“I think the onus is on organisations to accept, to look outwards and say ‘we may not understand Snapchat’ [for example] but is that telling me something about the way in which people are communicating? ‘Is this something that I need to bring into my discussions within my organisation?’ and ‘how does this stack up against my legacy systems?”
You can download the full ‘Future of Social Business’ report here.
Author: Jonty Pearce
Published On: 17th Jun 2014 - Last modified: 29th Jan 2019
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