Introduction
Ask just about anyone today about social media, and they will probably acknowledge using Facebook, knowing something about Twitter, and admit that social media are a widespread, perhaps even global, trend. Push them a bit further, and they will affirm that social media are genuinely significant somehow, but they might have a hard time pinning down exactly how or why. If you probe deeper yet and ask them if or how social media will transform the way businesses work, most people won't have a clear answer at all. This is entirely understandable, given that the digital world has virtually remade the means and tools of digital communication in just a few years.
Keeping track of changes and catching up to the pace of change has been hard for even the most dogged marketing manager, product engineer, customer care lead, information technology manager, or C-level executive. As a recipe for making operations difficult for businesses to effectively engage their customers, workers, and the broader market in the new digital landscape, it's almost a perfect storm. Fortunately, it no longer has to be this way. As the understanding of the changes in our pervasively networked, digital world grows, we believe that organizations can, by design, make their way into the future by incorporating the powerful new ways of working that social media represent deeply into the primary functions of their business.
The shift to social media is happening all around us every day. A broad demographic change in the way that people connect and communicate, as well as work and live together, began in the mid-2000s. The change has been labeled with many names: social networking, Enterprise 2.0, crowdsourcing, customer community, social media marketing, and any of the other catchphrases that we explore in this book. Because of social media's different way of getting results, the exact nature of changes that they cause in businesses, organizations, government, and even our personal lives has sometimes been hard to pin down. However, they can be much more precisely and elegantly defined than even a couple of years ago. What's more, the key operating principles of social media can be synthesized into simple, easy-to-understand tenets to apply to work. These tenets are presented here for the first time.
In this book, we show exactly why and how organizations must change to survive. Among the many reasons are better financial performance, improved competitive positioning, and long-term sustainability. But accepting the importance of social media is no longer an act of faith: we lay out clear evidence in the chapters that follow that social media are not only transformational to most aspects of enterprises, but also truly better, higher-performing new ways of doing business. In Parts One and Two, we present cutting-edge data matched with eye-opening examples that show how social media, when applied to the way we work, are becoming something known as “social business.”
There is occasionally concern in some quarters that social media are technology-driven phenomena and that primarily technology-oriented companies are best at adopting the new digital ways of working. The evidence here shows that this worry is overblown: virtually all organizations can access the benefits of social business, and although some of the early examples we present here are from technology companies that blazed trails, many of the best examples come from those that are as far from the technology industry as can be imagined such as consumer packaged goods company Procter & Gamble and MillerCoors, the well-known beverage conglomerate.
What then do organizations need to understand in order to begin the process of becoming a social business by design? We think it's a clear appreciation of the basic ideas, distilled in a way that's eminently comprehensible. Distributed across the first ten chapters are the clearest declaration yet of what social business fundamentally consists of, collected and organized here as ten core tenets of social business. Studying, understanding, and absorbing these ideas, designed to be approachable by anyone in the business world, free from tools, technologies, or situation, must be the objective of anyone who intends to deeply understand the subject and drive social business transformation in their organization.
We have been fortunate enough to have seen and helped many organizations start down the road of social business, and the journey certainly can be long and arduous. Yet it's also often highly rewarding. The biggest obstacle is the encouragement and realization of real change. The hard-won lesson is that becoming a social business requires cultural, operational, and technology changes. Of the three, the first two are by far the most time-consuming and challenging to realize, although all three require sustained, conscientious effort. Yet the examples in this book make clear that the same set of strategic changes needs to be made by all companies, even as organizations often discover they already have dozens—and sometimes hundreds—of individual social media efforts, large and small, each trying to drive the same type of transformation.
Many organizations have begun centralizing their efforts, organizing at a high level around many of the thorniest and most difficult aspects, while allowing everyone in the organization to become a social businessperson. Parts One and Two of this book lay out the strongest possible case that organizations must begin the process of moving to social business; Part Three then explores how to make it happen functionally and throughout the enterprise. Getting to social business is a deliberate, conscious process—at least for now. It's also the core idea behind this book. More and more businesses want to get there, but encouraging and enabling is really all they can do. The rest is up to the universe of participants, and that's where the story gets most interesting.
Organizations that want to take the shortest route to becoming social businesses can arm themselves with the data, examples, and approaches we present in this book, which are distilled in an actionable way as never before. We hope that your social business will become a highly successful organization that you codesign with the world.