Jinfo: Jumping on the social business bandwagon

Jumping on the social business bandwagon
Jinfo Blog

24th April 2012

Abstract

Social business is a term that IT and Information Professionals have been looking at closely for a while. But what does it actually mean for an organisation and what is the difference between social media and social business?

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So what is a social business? Run a Google search for "What is social business" and you'll return a lot of results, all of which will provide different definitions of the concept "social business". Ultimately it depends on your perspective, so an information manager's take on social business might be that the organisation is trying to reap the benefits of using social media tools inside the enterprise. On the other hand, a Chief Operating Officer might be looking at how the organisation can reduce costs and become more agile.

Social media versus social business

The biggest difference between social media and social business is that social media tools provide the platform and the technologies that people use to communicate and create content. Social media is usually used to describe technologies used outside of an organisation by individuals such asTwitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Social business on the other hand is the process and result of optimising internal business processes using social media tools. Social business also means applying social concepts and technology internally to create collaboration, sharing, innovation and engagement opportunities. Creating a social business usually means applying social media tools to business processes, but it's not a requirement; an organisation can be described as being social without necessarily using social media tools.

Social business in reality

For most organisations, the heart of any social activity (business) will be the intranet. Sadly a lot of intranets tend to be under-resourced, so you might be thinking that integrating social business features will be expensive. Thankfully there are a number of inexpensive ways in which information managers can integrate elements of social business into an intranet.

Part of a social business strategy is encouraging individuals to engage more openly. A great way to do so is to create an executive or management blog, which is published to the intranet. This will allow individuals to respond with their own comments. Blogs are also a great way to demonstrate that senior individuals are committed to social business activities and lead by example. Increasing employee engagement by allowing them to comment on content that has been created is one of the key aims of a social business.

If your organisation encourages comments and dialogue either on an intranet or within a wiki, this demonstrates that the organisation is interested in hearing what its employees have to say and wants to engage in dialogue, rather than just pushing out communications via email.

If your intranet doesn't support comments, then it might be worth investing in wiki software. Not only are wikis empowering (content is driven by ALL employees rather than a few individuals) they can also be created by anyone and demonstrate that the organisation is open to employees collaborating in this manner.

Another way to improve collaboration and engagement within an organisation is to improve the enterprise search. An intranet or enterprise search is usually the "glue" that holds everything else together, essentially because it's usually the one place where multiple content sets can be drawn together. Making improvements to this tool will ultimately lead to greater usage and more surfacing of useful content.

If you're interested in finding out more about social business then the links below provide some useful introductions to this subject.

Other resources: