Figure 3.1 McKinsey's Reported Benefits of Social Business
Source: McKinsey & Company
Chapter 3
Who's Winning in Social Business and Why
Those who are looking at social business for the first time through the lens of how they do things now often have difficulty seeing how it could be a repeatable and reliable way of working, much less that it would be effective. However, social business tenets diligently applied throughout the organization become useful and yield transformative results. Unlike the early days of social media, results are not the problem; managing the richness and sheer scale of outcomes presents the greater business challenge. Not only will organizations that engage in social business be able to achieve dramatic improvements in output and productivity, they will generally reap rewards that will be almost too numerous to count. The riches include superior innovation, lower defect rates, cost reductions, higher quality, faster market response, and more. In exchange, organizations must change how they work and move beyond their current assumptions that determine how goals are met, what work is done, and where value comes from.
The performance benefits of social business have been the subject of thorough study and analysis by some of the world's leading management organizations. For example, in December 2010 the respected management consultancy McKinsey & Company released the remarkable results of a detailed statistical analysis of companies engaging in various types of social business activities: firms that engaged more systematically in social business processes and approaches had 24 percent higher revenue (see Figure 3.1).1 Consulting firm Frost and Sullivan has confirmed similar results in its own studies, showing companies that deployed social tools saw improved performance in innovation (68 percent versus 39 percent that didn't deploy), sales growth (76 percent versus 50 percent that didn't deploy), and profit growth (71 percent versus 45 percent that didn't deploy). The numbers are quite impressive and consistent across the board.2
Despite this proof of success, issues of control, trust, and risk continue to dominate the social business discussion in most large organizations. However, the aspect that makes companies so uncomfortable—opening up their processes widely to participation from all constituents through social media—nearly always makes those business activities far richer, more relevant, and more cost-effective. Organizations that engage fully in social business can routinely see order-of-magnitude increases in output or reduction in capital expenditure. These seemingly incredible results are possible because they're not incremental improvements but a fundamental rethinking of the way we operate our businesses, how we engage in work, and how to create, harness, and curate shared and open business activity into actionable value. In particular, the notion of curation is an important and vital social business activity that describes how those engaging in social media evaluate, select, and recommend the content and knowledge they encounter and that resonates with them. This recognition of particularly interesting or valuable contributions lies at the core of building shared value and community in online systems.
At this point, you may be thinking that if social business could routinely create results this impressive and repeatable, it would be the top story in every issue of Harvard Business Review or Forbes. In fact, that's exactly what has been happening, though in incremental pieces that often fail to see the big picture, break through the noise, or tell a complete and compelling narrative. The business world's transition to more social and participative business methods is a complex story. The challenge is to look at what the methods of social business offer through a strategic lens that illuminates the full potential of outcomes, laid out in a way that lets businesses systemically activate the methods. Fortunately, most organizations can now rely on the lessons learned by hundreds of companies that have gone before them.
Proof lies with evidence and our understanding of what early adopters have achieved by these methods. In this chapter we take a look at representative stories that show how social business methods work and extrapolate the next level of detail that allows us to begin assembling a rigorous framework that can then be applied to most businesses, large and small, in a repeatable, reliable fashion.
In the summer of 2010, an executive at MillerCoors, one of the world's largest brewing companies with $7.5 billion in revenue and eighty-five hundred employees, noticed a disturbing trend: female sales executives were departing the company at a much higher rate than their male counterparts. The gender ratio of employees across the company was becoming a concern too, with about a quarter of workers being female compared to 48 percent for the Fortune 100 as a whole. The company wanted to be representative of the best talent and of the marketplace, but with such an imbalance, the challenge was a large one.
MillerCoors started by investigating the root causes of its growing gender imbalance. Focusing on the loss of female sales executives as the most urgent issue, the company discovered that working alone was too isolating for some women, and others, parents in particular, were having trouble with the unpredictable hours that required participating in team and customer meetings at night or even on weekends.
With this information, the company turned to social networking technology designed especially for businesses as a solution to connect workers, provide mutual peer support, and form the basis of an innovative and comprehensive mentoring program designed to retain and help address the needs of top employees. In October 2010, MillerCoors initiated the Women of Sales mentoring program.3 Forty-five female sales representatives were divided into three groups of fifteen each. Each group was assigned two mentors, either female executives or other leaders from within the company.
Members of each group participated in a private social network to form peer relationships and generate discussion topics, such as sales tactics, personal branding, and work/life balance. They also shared documents or articles pertaining to their discussion threads. The result was an immediate decrease in the rate of attrition. The social tools had enabled connections that were difficult to establish with previous methods, and most of the executives reported that they learned a great deal from their peers that they wouldn't have otherwise.
MillerCoors shows a key lesson in social business: virtual connections drive real-life results. Making it easier to find and connect with coworkers built a sense of community and cohesion that had been lost in a highly mobile and physically fragmented workforce. Social engagement breaks down the isolation that remote workers in large, geographically dispersed companies experience. In addition, the people-oriented connections of social business, although enabled by technology, are very real and can be as effective as in-person relationships.
This lesson appears again and again in social business stories: decentralized, peer-created value assisted by centralized, dedicated resources at headquarters. And it illustrates tenets 1 and 2 of social business: anyone can contribute, and those contributions can and should be designed to increase the value of the entire community.
In summer 2011, Teva Canada, a large pharmaceutical firm, publicly reported that it had achieved an unheard-of level of orders fulfilled on time: an impressive 95 percent. It also claimed its manufacturing cycle time had been cut in half, to an average of less than forty days.4 Teva achieved this high level of operational accomplishment because of a key acquisition the year before: Ratiopharm, a German pharmaceutical company. The new firm brought with it some novel supply chain management methods that employed social media to resolve a set of long-standing supply chain issues.
A few years prior to being acquired, Ratiopharm vice president for supply chain Antonio Martins, facing continued challenges in improving the performance of its supply chain, decided to introduce new collaborative tools to the company's operations center. It began as an experiment that started with a well-known enterprise collaboration tool, Microsoft SharePoint. Martins then added another tool, Strategy-Nets, and finally incorporated a third, Moxie, to fine-tune the outcome. The resulting mix of ad hoc and social media–based collaboration tools, situated within business processes that previously did not have either enough information about what was happening in the supply chain or rapid enough flow of on-the-ground knowledge, ended up resolving many long-standing communication problems. The result of applying open and free-flowing tools of social media to previously information-starved business processes ultimately improved Ratiofarm's internal operations and almost completely fixed its recurring supply chain problems.
Initially Ratiopharm provided workers in the supply chain with a collaborative environment based on SharePoint. Anyone who experienced operations problems would post a description of those problems immediately to the social environment for all to see. Other employees in the supply chain would see the problem report and could reply with solutions and troubleshoot in near real-time. This produced the combined benefit of providing supply chain workers with a matching problem-and-solution notification system, one that had a fast-response loop and rapid, effective access to a wider range of internal experts than they had before.
After this social business process was introduced, the three-month average reaction time to manufacturing interruptions was slashed to two to four weeks. Martins said at the time, “It's easier to get people to chime in on something like a collaboration tool. It's harder to get them to attend and participate in meetings.”5 Connecting people immediately and putting a human face on the work increased engagement with daily activities across the supply chain. It also employed the key social business tenet that anyone can participate in terms of who could report problems and who could solve them.
To improve the efficiency of the social supply chain process even more, Martins selected another solution, Strategy-Nets, to expand collaboration well beyond the supply chain into the marketing, sales, and customer service departments. Connecting supply chain workers to these departments gave managers a better sense of what to expect in terms of orders and product flow and what problems were occurring, and allowed better planning and optimization of business flow. The improved visibility across departments also ensured that customer needs were better met. Martins soon found that the Ratiopharm supply chain now operated more efficiently than he had anticipated.
Once Strategy-Nets was in place, Ratiopharm decided to add the final social component, Moxie, a social tool, enabling real-time conversations and supporting traditional social media such as blogs, wikis, and shared document editing. In this way, a rich tapestry of contributed information was formed around the entire supply chain, as well as other parts of the organization, to fully engage the workforce with social business capabilities.
When Teva acquired Ratiopharm in 2011, the generic drug maker had a service level well below 90 percent and a manufacturing cycle time of approximately eighty days. Once integrated into the parent organization, Martins applied Moxie's collaboration software to Teva's operations, rapidly boosting service levels and lowering manufacturing cycle time. Teva believes, based on the sustained results so far, that further improvements will emerge as workers gain even more experience with the social business environment and refine their use of its capabilities.6
As with the MillersCoors story, the fact that anyone could share problems with the supply chain and anyone else could help solve these problems left behind a reusable and growing trail of knowledge aimed at better business outcomes. This story illustrates all three of the tenets of social business and how they generated sustainable success for the organization.
IBM remains one of the largest enterprises and well-known brands in the world. With hundreds of thousands of workers in over a hundred countries, IBM has long used emerging communications technologies to connect its employees. In 2009, it realized that the methods and tools it was using were no longer as effective as they once were. As work became more virtual for this technology leader, it was often difficult for workers to keep abreast of what was taking place, find the information they needed, or locate experts in their organization. Customers often felt the same way about IBM.
At the time, the world outside IBM was in the midst of major and generational demographic changes. For the first time in almost two decades, e-mail was no longer the primary way that consumers were staying in touch with each other. In July 2009, the leading Internet traffic measurement firm Comscore reported a sea change: social networks were the primary way that most of the world communicated, eclipsing e-mail for the first time.
Although IBM was not exactly facing an immediate crisis, its response to these changes in the marketplace set it apart from most of its competitors. Seeking to adapt to these new worker and marketplace dynamics, IBM deliberately and systematically reacted to these changes by projecting trends forward and designing new communication approaches, with matching technical capabilities, which were based on where the world of social business was heading. This approach, far more than just dropping powerful new tools into the hands of its workers, was unique for a company of its size.
Once a strategy was in place, IBM deployed its own social business platforms, encouraging workers to use them in addition to public platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
The combined results after several years of social business adoption are impressive. As of 2011, more than 130 communities of IBM professionals around the world were collaborating internally daily using social business tools. Internal research that measures the outcomes of IBM's social business transformation effort has shown a series of benefits: 30 percent reduction in project completion time, 50 percent increased reuse of critical software assets, and an estimated 33 percent reduction in component costs. This does not take into account harder-to-quantify benefits such as increases in employee satisfaction, development of new internal and external relationships, or expertise retention and location. IBM also reported a 29 percent drop in overall e-mail volume during its transition to social business.
IBM has been successful in getting many of its workers to adopt social business activities. As of July 2011 over 25,000 IBM employees were actively using Twitter and 300,000 IBM employees were on LinkedIn, with over 198,000 on Facebook.7
As we examine these early adopters, we see that social business organizations that are nimble, driven, willing to experiment at the edges, and push successes toward the center of the organization have important results. IBM's subsequent response to the changing communication landscape was comprehensive and globally coordinated, and it ultimately affected nearly every one of its workers. In 2011, IBM reported that it had successfully become a social business by systematically incorporating new social processes and tools, primarily based on the proven concepts of consumer social media, into the way it engaged with its workers, partners, customers, and ultimately, the whole world.8
Financial media and news firm Bloomberg is an extremely competitive data provider for equity trading customers around the world. Since its business relies on having the up-to-the-minute, cutting-edge data, Bloomberg realized that the flow of conversations through social media could provide early insights into market directions. After much research, Bloomberg offered traders social media analysis tools as a real-time sentiment indicator for stocks whose prices closely reflect consumer opinion.
Seeking to put the power of social media insight into the hands of stock traders and equity fund managers, Bloomberg's news and information group partnered with a syndicated data provider, WiseWindow, to use a real-time consumer sentiment analysis technology dubbed Mobi in conjunction with Bloomberg's network of over 300,000 desktop terminals in financial services companies around the world. Mobi's social media analytics technology provided a three-week leading indicator of stock performance in key industry verticals, in addition to a consumer sentiment index for the airline industry and targeted indexes for customer service, pricing, and scheduling. Mobi's use is applicable in many fields and covers a number of key industries, including health care, consumer electronics, and automotive.
Using Mobi, trading firms Derwent Capital and WallStreetBirds mined Twitter chatter for sentiment analysis. They used Mobi's capabilities to scan the Web for consumer opinion across a range of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, online communities, and other likely places where opinions about the companies would be expressed. The intent was to identify, aggregate, and analyze openly shared social media conversations such that the collective activity could be aggregated and then analyzed for positive and negative feelings. Then the results could be directed at business objectives—in this case, whether a stock was going to do well.
The chief executive officer of WiseWindow, Sid Mohasseb, realized the value of looking at the many competing opinions held and expressed in social media: “No single source of online opinions, be it Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. is as predictive on its own. Only the aggregate opinions from all sources are truly predictive of an industry's stock prices.”9
The research that Mohasseb conducted also showed that opinions expressed in social media on specific industry topics are even more predictive than less specific conversation: “Test cases using the automotive industry found opinions about car problems, car quality/reliability/durability and rebates are especially well-correlated with Ford and GM stock prices. Analysis from a top Wall Street investment bank and an independent source confirmed our correlations with weekly automotive sales data.” When people talk about companies in social media, the information matches their offline behavior, indicating that social media analysis is particularly effective for business uses like Mobi's correlated market intelligence.
To confirm this, an independent analytics firm, Emerald Logic, conducted a study in 2010 to verify the impact of social media data on equity trading results. The results were remarkable. Patrick Lilley, the firm's chief executive officer, discovered this:
We tested for the first six months of 2011 on GM, Ford, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, all of which declined during this period. A simple momentum trading program beat the market, but adding WiseWindow's [social media] data boosted returns by over 30 percent on an annualised basis for GM, Ford, and Southwest Airlines. For American Airlines, the uplift was 65 percent annualised. Volatility of returns was also significantly reduced.10
Because of its ability to tap into the collective zeitgeist, social media analytics is quickly advancing to the leading edge of social business. Products like Mobi are making strategic insights available that can change markets, drive profits, and tap into the global brain in a way that's possible only with the open, transparent, and participative channels of social media. That's not to say there aren't challenges and that unscrupulous individuals and organizations won't find ways to influence tools like Mobi. Instead, this story shows an important early success in turning the mass of seemingly unconnected conversations into powerful business tools.11
We will examine social business intelligence in more detail, including how to establish it as a potent force for achieving significant new business outcomes similar to what Mobi is accomplishing. To support the case for social business, the three tenets were important in a unique way: by watching everyone's contribution, anyone could be a potential contributor. Broadcast in public social networks, conversations are generally open for all to see, and every contribution can potentially provide value to the Mobi effort, aimed specifically at improving the financial returns of financial industry traders.
Mountain Equipment Co-Op (MEC) is a Canadian consumers' cooperative that sells outdoor recreation gear and clothing to its members. Started in 1971, the retail co-op has successfully grown to over 3 million members and counts more than fifteen hundred employees and fourteen retail locations. The workers driving MEC's recent growth hail from a connected and increasingly digital generation who expect to use the same user-friendly tools available in their personal lives in order to communicate with each other at work. Thus, MEC decided to make its existing intranet, the internal Web sites that contain the company's internal information, more social and participative.
Its original intranet, like most other typical corporate intranets, was infrequently updated and information was often out of date, discouraging its use. MEC hoped that opening up the intranet to anyone to add information to share or coordinate with other stores inside the company could improve communication efficiency and raise productivity.
MEC considered its options and selected social intranet tools that were appropriate to its size, mainly a social platform from ThoughtFarmer known as Mondo for coordinating schedules, requesting time off, and reordering fresh stock. The company used it for a while and it worked well, but its leaders realized they wanted even more collaboration between staff to tap into the higher level of performance they thought was possible. Once workers' needs and behaviors were better understood, the new social intranet became the home of highly popular and quickly viral forums and interest groups within the company.
The intranet administrators at MEC concluded that the combination of social tools, which encourage communication, and the analysis and resulting customization to encourage useful business outcomes made MEC's intranet much more effective than it was before. Two contributing factors to the outcome stand out: encouragement for all employees to use the intranet and making certain that commonplace communications were open and efficient. Executives found that workers were engaged much more deeply than before, and intranet use has led to rewarding outcomes that they hadn't imagined at the outset.
Most technology professionals have long known that intranets have struggled as centers of communication and collaboration, so MEC was careful to focus improvements on the most frequently occurring and highest-value worker activities. These results, while harder to quantify, were a marked contrast from the sleepy MEC intranet of old. Going from a handful of pages updated each month, users from October to March 2011 alone created over ninety-four hundred intranet pages, contributed seventy-nine hundred discussion comments, and attached thirty-one hundred documents. The results were definitive: engagement on the company's intranet, which had been occasional at best, now averaged 85 percent of all employees.12
MEC isn't content to declare victory and continues to make improvements and tweaks to the social features. “We're constantly modifying it,” explained Joey Dubuc, the administrator of MEC's new social capabilities. “Your information architecture can always be a little better. We try to figure out what people are using, what they aren't using, and why there aren't using it.” MEC found that continuing to adjust the intranet's participative features based on analysis of user participation produced better results.
Businesses can have some challenges getting their social environment started, and MEC was no exception. Initially there was minor difficulty in getting conversations started and useful information flowing in from workers in the new social channels. It was Dubuc who was responsible for monitoring what users did and adapted the new intranet functions to the most productive activities at MEC. By watching how staff members worked day-to-day, he discovered a key strategy for behavior change and better engagement: “People are used to the never-ending pile of email. So it's a cultural shift to go to the site. Once you get a department into using the site and they get the hang of it, it starts to go viral to an extent. It really takes one person to say, ‘I saw that on the intranet,’ and people get curious about this communication happening on the site instead of email.”13
Another strategy presented itself as well. Communities have long known that the public actions of its leaders, particularly well-regarded ones, set needed examples of desired behaviors. Dubuc discovered that the same principle applies to communities in social media: “The most important thing was support for Mondo from the top down. Getting senior management involved in the use of Mondo was important for engagement for the rest of the staff. Their online presence encouraged staff to get using the site.”
Another problem soon became apparent, however: the people who work in stores like MEC don't spend much of their day on computers, other than a point-of-sale system, making it hard for them to engage in workplace innovations like MEC's social intranet. Yet these workers have vital knowledge of what's actually taking place in the stores and with customers. MEC intranet designers wanted to find a way to get MEC's staff to use the system efficiently during the day from the stores without taking too much time from their jobs. The solution ended up being simpler than expected: they moved key processes and information, including shift scheduling and vacation requests, frequently used human resource forms, and companywide announcements, to the new social intranet. These seeds then drew in retail workers to the new intranet, provided important work precedents, and fostered new habits, such as engaging with others in the communities they quickly discovered there.14
The engagement resulting from these adoption strategies spread to other employees in different cities across the chain. Employees started reading others' profiles and exchanged comments in forums and interest groups, making them familiar with each other. Soon these contacts became trusted sources of knowledge and insight, helping to improve collaboration and efficiency. MEC is particularly proud of its distinctive culture founded on environmental sustainability, close community cooperation, and an abiding passion for the outdoors. These values made the new social intranet even more effective: employees began using it as a way to connect with each about common interests, such as climbing, hiking, camping, and other recreational activities. That these activities were also aligned with the company's purpose made it an even more unifying experience among workers and company leaders and their subsequent work together.
One of the key lessons MEC learned was that successfully encouraging people to move away from e-mail and other productivity applications to an intranet is not a trivial task. Sustained uptake and adoption of the new social intranet were finally achieved by taking a careful, business-focused approach that also took advantage of the company's culture and employee behavior patterns, and then building on early successes when something worked particularly well. Ultimately MEC experienced the same core patterns of social business that recur in all the social business stories presented in this book.
At their root, rewards came to MEC by breaking down the barriers to participation (anyone can contribute), enlisting all workers as sources of valuable knowledge and teamwork (network effects), and focusing on useful business functions. By opening up the intranet to everyone and encouraging them to share their work and interests, MEC finally became a social business.
In 2007, well-known accounting software services firm Intuit realized that it had a real conundrum on its hands. The company provides tax filing services to millions of customers in North America using self-guided software that replaces the services of a costly expert tax preparer. Known as TurboTax, the software had long been popular for helping tens of millions of people to prepare their tax returns quickly and with minimum hassle.
But TurboTax had a signature challenge: competing with its primary rival and industry leader at the time, H&R Block. By using live workers and maintaining a network of over twelve thousand office locations, H&R Block could provide better support to customers than a software-based solution could. In fact, this was central to the value proposition TurboTax offered to its customers: it was often several times cheaper to use than hiring an expert tax preparer. However, this also meant that when a customer was unsure of how to complete his or her tax return, limited options for obtaining help were available.
Intuit counted on its software being sophisticated enough to assist customers through most of the tax return process. If they needed help, the cost of providing timely support over the phone or by e-mail was prohibitive. Increasingly, given that Intuit could afford a certain level of responsiveness in only its call center in order to compete effectively with the H&R Block and other tax preparers, product abandonment became a real issue. When customers weren't able to get an answer quickly or easily about how to complete their tax returns, they would take their tax returns to a human tax preparer.
After years of ranking as an industry leader, yet second choice compared to traditional tax preparers, Intuit realized it needed to come up with a better way to assist its users than its aging customer support techniques. Given the hard deadlines of tax preparation and tens of millions of users all trying to complete their filing by April 15, packing whole floors of buildings with temporary call center staff armed with knowledge bases wasn't necessarily cost-effective. It also wouldn't scale up if Intuit's products became more popular. Moreover, given that most call center workers were not knowledgeable tax experts, it wasn't likely to give customers what they needed: the best answer possible.15
Like SAP and Microsoft, Intuit came to understand that it had to come up with an entirely different way to tackle the problem of supporting its customers in the highly time-sensitive windows right before taxes were due. As more and more companies are realizing as they look at social business solutions, Intuit came to a remarkable conclusion: its single largest and most valuable asset wasn't its brand, its state-of-the-art facilities, or even its thousands of workers. It was its customers. They were the millions who had to file tax returns every year and had been through every possible tax situation.
Perhaps those customers could be used to support other Intuit customers. Intuit looked at a number of options and soon settled on the use of a general-purpose online support community that would allow customers to ask questions and receive replies from Intuit or other customers as needed. This worked well enough but didn't have the impact that Intuit was looking for. It didn't have years to wait for users to learn about the community and populate different subject threads with content. Worse, unlike the sustained customer communities of SAP and Microsoft, the TurboTax product was used only once a year, so people weren't likely to want to spend the time learning how to use the community or invest the effort in becoming members. In the end, these realities made the first attempt at applying social media to Intuit's customer support challenges less successful than its leaders had hoped.
Intuit realized that it needed to make social customer care much easier and more focused on specific support problems. As a result, it created a system called Live Community. Live Community was not a general-purpose discussion forum where people could ask questions in any format, which made it hard to organize and find what customers were looking for. Rather, Live Community was far more focused and transactional. Intuit also took the key step of integrating the Live Community social support experience directly into the TurboTax product itself, which greatly reduced the difficulty in finding the support community and made it easy for anyone to ask a question about a step of the tax return process while in it. And the key to making it work? Intuit also made it possible for anyone to answer any question they saw in the Live Community panel on each screen of the TurboTax product.
How could this work? While some customers might know the answer to a problem, wouldn't a lot of inaccurate answers result? Would enough people actually contribute? More important, could Live Community possibly make enough of a difference to have a substantial impact on Intuit's support challenges?
As it turned out, a social business approach better tailored to Intuit's unique business requirements and its customer-specific needs made a real difference. Live Community quickly proved to be surprisingly effective in providing timely support to customers. Because it wasn't a free-form environment for social chatter and was focused on a specific question-and-answer format, people could quickly access direct answers to their issues. Moreover, it was easy for users to rate answers and remove inaccurate and irrelevant contributions.
Live Community eventually proved to be instrumental to improving customer support and satisfaction. The year after its inception, TurboTax's growth significantly outperformed that of H&R Block, much of it attributable to the better customer support and lower product abandonment due to its innovative and targeted social business support solution.16 By 2011, Intuit had achieved over twice the market share of its competitor and was becoming the definitive market leader.17
By tapping into a much larger source of tax knowledge, allowing open contributions from anyone willing to participate, and making sure those contributions benefited everyone, Intuit was able to scale the support of TurboTax using a far cheaper source of help while also reducing the amount of traditional support it provided. The results of applying social business to customer care had a major competitive impact and changed the complexion of the entire tax preparation industry.
The vast, fast-moving arena of social media is a dizzying blend of global and local communities, viral conversations, and a growing array of new social technologies. Services like Facebook, Twitter, and hundreds of new social services appear every year and continuously evolve, add features, and change how they work according to what their users expect from them in a tight feedback loop. Keeping up with it all and extrapolating what works best for the enterprise has become the signature challenge for business leaders and workers alike who seek to benefit from using social media.
However, whether social media are used to energize a marketing campaign, dramatically improve how workers interact and collaborate, or transform how products are developed or customers are supported, the underlying principles remain constant: allow the freest and most open input process the business situation allows, ensure accumulation of value for stakeholders involved to the fullest extent, and ensure that a primary focus of the input process points toward a desired business outcome.
To understand the application of social business ideas, however, we must look at how the world is changing, how social media seem to be directly connected to much of these changes, and how this paints a picture of opportunity for those who wish to apply social business.