Social Business: The Difference Between Survival and Extinction #socbiz

Social business used to be a buzzword.

Today, it’s a must-have survival tool. Consider this: As many as 93% of marketers now use social media for business, and 67% use social technology for marketing strategies.

Social business is a journey of change spanning the entire business model. It’s a people-centric movement founded on social relationships and focused on transparency, engagement, open information exchange and above all, human interaction. It permeates all levels and functions across the enterprise.

Why all the fuss about being a social business? Is it really such a big deal?

This isn’t hype. For starters, social business transformation offers three significant benefits:

1. Employee Engagement: Motivated, happy employees create happy customers. Their voice (i.e. content) is the marketing. The culture is the brand. When employees are empowered, tech-enabled and actively encouraged to engage through social, they become the company’s strongest advocates.

2. Enterprise-wide Collaboration: Social business success is defined by carving your own ecosystem, a network of networks, via:

• Activating branded communities across social channels.
• Identifying brand advocates– internal and external.
• Building social capital, influence and thought leadership.

Social business puts the vital framework of technology and social relationships in place, which enables collaboration at scale.

3. Smarter Information Management: In a network of social business relationships, an idea for innovation, a new project, or a customer lead can come from anyone, anywhere, 24/7. An open “receive and share” culture optimizes resources (knowledge, talent, content) and streamlines business processes leading to marked improvements in productivity, problem-solving, insight generation and customer service.

According to ExactTarget’s 2014 State of Marketing survey, more than 60% of CMOs plan to increase spending on data/analytics and marketing automation technology this year. Social business is the evolution of social media, a logical next step for your business.

How do we get started? Where does social business begin?

Social business is a marathon, not a sprint. The transformation begins on the inside and gradually grows out. For that to happen, basically you need:

• Social Infrastructure: For social relationships to flourish, a good, scalable infrastructure is critical. Your social technology should seamlessly integrate key functions (marketing, sales, CRM, IT, HR, R&D, CX), analyze data across various touch points via social listening, and intuitively generate insights from customer intelligence.
• Social Employees: Training and empowering employees to leverage social technology should be embedded into workflows within the enterprise, community and beyond. While relationship-building skills are paramount, a flair for strategy, analytics and content marketing are invaluable as well. A good place to start would be to appoint a social strategist.

In a nutshell, social business is about future-proofing your business. It could be the difference between survival and extinction.

---

About the author:
Amar Trivedi is a Management Strategy Consultant with international experience in Marketing and Communications across cultures, markets and brands. Passionate about helping companies achieve success via social business, he advises leadership teams to deploy social technology to build collaborative relationships, leverage content marketing, and create memorable customer experiences. A blogger, copywriter, storyteller, speaker, Amar champions fun, creativity and happiness in the workplace. He tweets as himself @Mr_Madness

Gratitude

It's true. We live in a conversation economy. I experienced it. A comment I wrote on Jeremy Epstein's blog led to a conversation which led to an invitation to write a blog on social business.

I consider myself privileged to share my thoughts on a subject I'm passionate about via Sprinklr - Experience Management | Social at Scale. I'm fortunate the blog post attracted intelligent comments from leading marketers and social business experts - from around the world.

A lot goes into producing a blog. To give credit where credit is due, I have many amazing Sprinklr-ites to thank for the above post. Many Thanks to:

• Jeremy Epstein - for the invitation
• Uyen Nguyen - for overall supervision
• Jessica Rodriguez - for content distribution
• Kara Lee - for content management
• Brad Hess - for content coordination
• Esteban Contreras - for social awesomeness :)
• Darren Garnick - for editing and proofing

To sign-off on a smile, a cartoon from The Geekly Group: