Simplifying Social Business

Social business is a paradigm shift. It requires a higher level of sophistication than a transactional-based business model. It will take time to plan for and adopt. The place to start is with people. Take a good look at your corporate culture and processes. Determine where your company already has social-centricity and what’s getting in your way. Pave the way for a paradigm shift by preparing your strategic plan to stimulate and embrace the changes needed to make the adoption of social business a success. These will center on culture, processes and technology, in that order. Expect to re-engineer some processes. Also expect to implement social technology to complement or replace your existing technology platforms. 

For example, social CRM is still part of CRM. You don’t throw the latter out. Collecting transactional information about customers and partners (and employees too) is still important to business.  Look for step-change ways to layer in the social components so you also gain the value of unstructured data.