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Social Business: Social Media Meets Enterprise 2.0

Technology Industry White Paper (April 2015)

For several years, my clients have been asking me about the increasing marketing noise of Social Business.

As a result, I decided to prepare this quick white paper to illustrate and explain that Social Business is not new. As a matter of fact, Social Business has been, at the very least, 15 years in the making.

Some people may remember the eBusiness era from the early 2000’s right around the dot.com bust. EBusiness was all about business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-employee (B2E).

Though the trend never really launched with rapid adoption, this legacy quickly morphed into the Portals era which included the redefinition of eBusiness into Intranet, Internet, and Extranet technologies.

Fast forward to current day, almost every relevant company has an intranet site (employee portal), an internet presence (customer .com site), and an extranet capability for their vendors and business partners.

As the Portals era matured in a short couple of years, this phase quickly evolved into the Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 technologies which introduced the ability for enhanced personalization, online collaboration, ubiquitous knowledge and document management and sharing, user groups and communities, and the access to streaming media and rich content.

From herein and with the rapid mainstream consumer adoption of Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.), the leading software vendors have all rebranded their technologies to ‘Social Business’ as the next phase of their go-to-market product strategy and software lifecycle.

In essence, I summarize Social Business as “Social Media meets Enterprise 2.0 where the best-in-class features of Social Media converge with the established and proven capabilities of Enterprise 2.0.”

Social Business virtually removes the corporate firewall to allow employees to directly and instantaneously connect with their customers and vendors in a socially engaging environment. Social Business introduces the real time element of dynamic online two-way business communications and interactions. Social Business is the next highly transformative evolution for a company’s standard business operations since the days of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), circa 1990 to 2000’s. Despite the software vendors rebranding and remarketing of their software, Social Business is not about the technology. Social Business is about the transformation of a corporate culture and the organizational change in operational mentality that involves the strategic realignment of business processes integrated into the social value chain. If your company is well along the Social Business journey but constantly facing deployment and adoption challenges, it may be time to rethink and re-strategize your Social Business mission and objectives. Regardless, Social Business is here to stay. If your company does not have a social business initiative under way, what are you waiting for?