Today’s guest post comes from Tim Aldiss, Operations & Accounts Director at No Pork Pies. Tim writes for Bloom Social Business and in partnership with Brandwatch, the social media monitoring tool. In this post Tim looks at the rise of the Social Business. What’s that you ask? You’ll have to read on to find out. If you’re not up to scratch with social, you’ll be missing out on all the benefits Tim lists at the end of the post – call us on 01273 622272 to find out how our social media training workshop can help you and your business.

Just as the industrial era heralded the rise of a value chain with a tangible output of product, so the information era heralds the rise of a value chain based on knowledge and connections.

Social business is a misnomer. There are three definitions on Wikipedia. In its first incarnation, a social business was a non-loss, non-dividend company that retained a certain self-sufficiency; then came organisations that were socially minded and cared for their workforce; but the definition that has won through is the one that defines businesses as a network of people.

Traditional business strategy was all about top down control and structures built on hierarchy and need-to-know access levels. Career ascendancy was easily planned and followed a path of aspiration to succeed seniors, whose loftier roles came with a good dose of secrecy and intrigue! Today typical business structure has been turned on its head and all practices and functions are laid bare.

Thanks primarily to the rise and proliferation of cheaper technology, the information age is most easily classified by the one that allowed ease and speed of information distribution, and with this ability, the inherent human desire to share, changed the definitions of privacy, and through brute force brought down those ivory towers put up by the 20^th century’s business leaders.

Social business requires businesses to have a completely different set of rules. As much as possible, hierarchies are flattened. Workers are to be seen as associates and bosses as sponsors. The understanding and use of social media channels (and what can be learned from them) is crucial in all business operations. Indeed, it’s now understood that to succeed, business should be turned inside out.

Business embracing social media and people’s inherent desire to share can benefit in all sorts of ways:

• Better market and customer research
• Better fit with customer needs
• Accelerated and more successful innovation
• Evidence-based decision making
• New access to capital
• More effective knowledge management
• Internal and external collaboration and idea generation
• Lower (distributed) risk through partners
• Do business that benefits society
• Customer and employee ownership
• Trust, loyalty and satisfaction
• Attraction and retention of staff and customers

Social media is relevant to all business functions: marketing, sales, public relations and customer service, operations and product development, human resources, information technology, finance and accounting (…OK so maybe not finance and accounting!)

Embracing social media is more than just a complementary activity – it reflects a much broader base of background information and data and is therefore a huge step forward in every regard.

Social business strategy is the new business strategy. Without figuring out the how and why of all this, large real-time data businesses will inevitably fall behind those that have the new rules baked in to how things get done.

When we are socially aware at every level of business, we can make much better decisions about getting things done and be much more realistic about what type of output is important, but we can also be much more in control of what is good and bad business, and how good or bad that is for the world we live in.

Photo credit IronRodArt – Royce Bair

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21st century business, business, business strategy, embracing social media, guest post, social business

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