Tag: Altimeter Group

If innovation is the most overused word of 2014 , then “social business” must be the most misappropriated term.

Every other organisation I come across is claiming to be one. But what does it mean to be a social business?

Altimeter Group defines it as:

“The deep integration of social media and social methodologies into the organisation to drive business impact.”

Indeed Brian Solis has written about the need to distinguish the two:

A social business is more than social media and the Likes of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, et al. Yet, it’s a term that’s often confused with social media strategy. But, there’s an important difference between a social business and a social media strategy.

Social business is a philosophy; a way of business where social technologies supported by new approaches facilitate a more open, engaged, collaborative foundation for how we work.

 I also really like this description from Andrew Grill

A social business is an organisation whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value.

I’m lucky as I get to talk about social business with lots of people , and the ones who ask my advice almost always mention culture as the main organisational barrier to the adoption of social and digital technology.

We all want to be a social , collaborative business. How do we know when we’ve achieved it?

Here are 20 signs that we’re probably not there yet:

1. Internal meetings happen behind closed doors rather than being distributed and networked.
2. You are doing nothing about email. You just add more of it everyday.
3. People have to seek permission to have a social media presence.
4. You can only talk about work stuff on social media. You can’t be human.
5. You measure followers , fans, likes and web hits rather than relationships.
6. People put time in the diary to “do social media”.
7. Your social media accounts switch off at 5pm and weekends.
8. You don’t turn internal reports into publicly available blogs , videos and infographics.
9. You think it’s job done as your CEO has a twitter account.
10. There’s no evidence of social removing hierarchy.
11. Most of the people who like your Facebook page work for the company.
12. Social media is treated a channel of its own rather than part of an integrated whole.
13. You just promote your own organisation rather than being a generous sharer of other peoples knowledge and content.
14. You borrowed someone else’s digital services plan and copied that rather than think of your own.
15. Your Comms team runs social media. Because it’s just a Comms thing.
16. You still say things like “Not many of our customers use Twitter”.
17. You still say “Our customers are quite elderly – they don’t use social”.
18. You don’t know who are the influential members of your social community.
19. You don’t follow customers and potential customers back and get to know them.
20. Your organisation still exists in departments –  HR, IT, Operations. Knowledge is sorted accordingly. Compartmentalised. Siloed.

Truth be told – very few of us work for a truly social business.

We are all on this journey together.

What would you add to the list? I’ll add any suggestions to a special Haiku Deck!