When Web 2.0 started challenging how we think about business, I realized something had to change. It wasn't just about having a Facebook page or sending tweets anymore. The real game-changer was figuring out how to connect with customers and employees through collaborative processes that actually improved how we operated.
After working with dozens of companies trying to crack this code, I discovered that building a "social business" requires more than just adding social media to your marketing mix. It means fundamentally rethinking how your organization functions.
What Actually Makes a Business "Social"
A social business isn't just a company with social media accounts. It's one that uses social technologies as core components of actual business processes. The difference is huge.
Think of it this way: instead of just broadcasting messages to customers, you're bringing them into your business operations. They help you innovate, solve problems, and improve products. Your employees collaborate across departments in ways that break down those frustrating silos we all know too well.
The companies doing this right see something interesting happen. They become way more responsive to market changes and competitive threats than traditionally structured firms. This happens because they've tapped into something powerful - genuine participation.
Why Participation Actually Works
Here's what I learned about participation: when done correctly, everyone wins. Bringing customers into your business processes or involving stakeholders in organizational design creates a steady flow of constructive ideas.
One of the biggest myths I encountered was that social media conversations are mostly negative complaints. That's completely wrong. A 2007 Zenith Optimedia study looked at the 3 billion daily word-of-mouth conversations happening worldwide. About two-thirds involved products, brands, or media - and positive mentions significantly outweighed negative ones.
Unless your business strategy involves generating negative comments (and I can think of a few companies where that might work), the social web presents massive opportunities for growth and improvement.
Building Around What Customers Actually Care About
The key insight that changed everything for me was this: strong communities form around things that matter deeply to members - their passions, lifestyles, causes, and aligned needs. This works whether you're targeting businesses or consumers.
Take Element 14, an Indian electronics supplier. They created a community for engineers using their catalog that facilitates idea sharing, ratings, and collaboration around hardware solutions. That community became central to their B2B strategy, driving new applications and stronger customer connections.
Dell figured this out too. Their "Take Your Path" community serves small business owners by focusing on the unique challenges they face. Anyone who's met a small business owner knows how passionate they are about their work. Dell tapped into that passion by addressing real needs like financing and hardware investment decisions.
The Digital Nomads Example
Dell's "Digital Nomads" program targets customers who thrive on constant connectivity. These professionals stay productive whether they're in the office or a WiFi-enabled coffee shop, using social applications to update colleagues and stay connected.
What's smart about this approach is that these communities aren't defined by Dell's business objectives. They're built around what participants actually need and want. The business connection comes naturally because Dell hardware powers the lifestyle these professionals want to live.
Finding Your Higher Purpose
This brings me to the most critical lesson: you need to connect to something larger than your brand, product, or service. Appeal to what I call a "higher calling" that attracts the right people and provides a natural connection to what you offer.
Let me show you how this evolution works through three diagrams I use when consulting:
Traditional Business Model: You make something, tell customers about it, they hopefully buy it. This worked fine when traditional media was affordable and could reach your entire market. But TV advertising costs have increased over 250% in the past decade, and reaching your audience now takes 100+ spots versus the 3 it took in 1965.
Evolved Business Model: Same as above, but now there's a feedback mechanism. Customers provide input through surveys, CRM systems, or listening programs. Complaints can be addressed before they turn into frustrated rants.
Higher Calling Model: Both business and customers bond around a shared value or purpose that's larger than the brand itself. This creates powerful connections that transcend basic consumer relationships.
Real Examples That Work
Tupperware parties are a perfect example. As a kid, I thought they were just women talking about plastic containers. I completely missed the point. Tupperware tapped into the basic human need for socialization, providing the perfect occasion to connect that need with their product line.
PepsiCo's "The Juice" campaign on BlogHer shows how this works in social media. The campaign wasn't anchored around Trop50 orange juice - it focused on something larger: women seeking balance, health, and helpful life tips. PepsiCo's product fit naturally within that broader interest.
The Spending Trap vs. Organic Growth
Here's where many companies go wrong: they try to buy their way to a social presence instead of building around genuine passion or lifestyle connections.
Compare Facebook's organic growth with a typical promotional campaign. Facebook grows naturally because people see value in connecting with others and sharing experiences. Members actively encourage friends to join because they understand the benefit of "more members."
Promotional campaigns, on the other hand, require constant spending on contests and advertising to maintain activity. When the promotional budget stops, activity typically dies. This isn't necessarily bad from a marketing perspective, but it's expensive and less likely to generate the collaborative behaviors that define successful social business initiatives.
The Three Levels of Social Presence
Based on work by social media strategist Jake McKee and others, I organize social activities into three layers:
Home Base: Your website, related properties, and microsites - things you own and control.
Outposts: Properties you don't control but where you participate - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. You can have official presences here that integrate with your larger business efforts.
Passports: Places where you're invited to participate - guest blogging programs, blogger outreach initiatives. Just make sure to properly disclose your business connections.
The key is creating an integrated approach across all three levels rather than treating them as separate initiatives.
Measuring What Actually Matters
One thing I learned early: if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Since social business activities happen digitally, you can track them effectively.
Collaboration as the Ultimate Metric
Collaboration sits at the top of the engagement process and provides the clearest measure of success. While marketers often focus on time spent on pages or returning visitors, these don't capture the stronger engagement that defines social business.
True collaboration happens when both parties see value in completing transactions repeatedly. You can directly measure collaborative outputs - like jointly developed solutions in expert communities or shared results. Each indicates participants' willingness to invest effort in the process.
Participation Metrics
Participation is one of the easiest metrics to capture and track. You can use existing measures like content creation, curation, reviews, comments, and posts to assess overall interest and activity levels.
Gaming elements help drive participation. Foursquare uses a point system that rewards users for checking in, adding venues, and leaving tips - exactly the activities that increase community value. These points also serve as useful metrics for the development team.
Applied Knowledge Transfer
Participation alone isn't enough - you need to ensure something useful happens as a result. The key is connecting participation levels to end results: the accumulation of applied knowledge tied to specific business objectives.
Platforms like Salesforce.com's "Ideas" work well because they encourage participation while creating usable bodies of collaboratively gathered knowledge that can be directly applied to business challenges.
Connecting Employees to the Social Process
Getting social business right requires more than understanding customer conversations. You need to connect employees to social processes so they can act on what you learn.
The Healthcare Example
Imagine you work for a major hospital chain and you're monitoring social media. You see positive comments about care quality, photos from facility openings, and complaints about costs and confusing charges.
One day, monitoring Twitter in real time, you notice a patient and spouse checking in. They seem to like your hospital based on their tweets as they move from check-in to the waiting area to pre-op. Then you see this tweet from inside your hospital: "Sitting in pre-op... scared as hell and nobody will tell me what's going on."
What do you do? You could probably locate this person in minutes by checking admittance records. Would you act on this incredible opportunity to make a difference, or let it slip away?
This is where social media marketing stops and social business begins. Billing systems, care standards, and access to health records require policy changes, not marketing programs. Social business extends across the entire organization and typically requires C-suite involvement.
The Knowledge Gap Problem
According to Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield, only 1% of customer conversations result in new organizational knowledge. 9% touch the organization but no learning occurs. 90% never reach the organization at all.
If businesses could capture even a fraction more of these conversations - if every tenth customer rather than every hundredth who offered an idea was actually heard and welcomed as a contributor - the change in workplace and marketplace dynamics would be profound.
Starbucks has been implementing an average of 2 customer-driven innovations per week since 2008. Look at their stock price over that period and ask if these might be related.
Setting Up Internal Collaboration
If knowledge sharing throughout your organization is the goal, you need the right internal infrastructure. Enterprise platforms like Basecamp, Lotus Connections, SharePoint, and Socialtext provide organization-wide implementations that can be adapted for almost any application.
Essential Elements for Success
Clear Policies: Establish who can post, what they can say, and rules of conduct. Employee issues are avoidable with proper policies upfront.
Specific Business Objectives: Define why you're doing this. Without measurable objectives, you'll get a lot of unstructured conversation that's hard to channel toward business good.
Inclusive Rollout: Unlike customers who self-select technologies they're comfortable with, employees don't have a choice. Ensure everyone feels included or the platform may reinforce rather than break down organizational silos.
What This Means for Your Business
Social business isn't about adding social media to your existing marketing mix. It's about fundamentally changing how your organization operates by:
- Connecting customers to your business through collaborative processes
- Breaking down internal silos so employees can share knowledge effectively
- Building communities around customer passions rather than your products
- Measuring collaboration and knowledge transfer, not just engagement metrics
- Responding to customer feedback with organizational change, not just marketing messages
The companies getting this right are seeing measurable improvements in innovation, customer satisfaction, and competitive positioning. They're not just talking about social media - they're using social technologies to become more responsive, collaborative organizations.
The question isn't whether social technologies will change how business operates. The question is whether you'll lead that change in your industry or struggle to catch up later.
