Applying social to business

Sometimes words and the baggage those words naturally carry can really get in the way of explaining new ideas. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that issue is one of the biggest barriers to the current discussion of social business. I’ve consistently tried to drive home the concept that social business is about transforming business culture and not about new technology. Unfortunately when I try to drill into the structure of this new culture I’ve fallen back to my software roots and used enterprise terms that lead people down the wrong path. I realized that clearly this week during my social business track at IDC Directions. We have to come up with a better way to analyze social business and explain it in ways that help people understand where we’re going, not where we’ve been. So to that end, I’m going to move away, at least for now, from software terms like CRM, PLM, ERP, etc. and start to think about a different framework.

Social business touches all areas of a business. Underlying technology will of course be needed to enable the connections and scaleability but the focus is on business functions. New business approaches that incorporate social concepts can impact customers, employees, partners and suppliers. The framework then, is built around these business areas: 1. customer engagement, 2. employee empowerment, 3. partner enablement and 4. supplier engagement. This Prezi fleshes out this framework a little more:

Social Business Framework on Prezi