Defining Social Business

Neal Schaffer: 0:00

Take it take take take enjoyment. Welcome to Social Business unplugged, helping you understand in plain English how to best leverage social media for your business. And now, here's the founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody this is Neal Schaffer. And welcome to our third edition of this social business unplugged podcast. And as I promised you in my first podcast, I want to now tackle this definition of social business that you have probably been hearing a lot more in the world of social media, the name of this podcast obviously uses that term. And you'll see throughout social media, a lot of talk about this term, some call it BS, because every social media consultant seems to be causing themselves social business consultants. On the other hand, there are others who have provided definitions. But to define social business, I want to offer two different perspectives here. One is sort of the official line, really, the official definition of social business was defined by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus. He's written books about it. This was several years ago, his definition of a social business, which is the traditional definition. And I'm quoting from Wikipedia, sorry, it was just the most convenient thing to do a social business as a non loss, non dividend company designed to address a social objective within the highly regulated marketplace of today. Obviously, if you're interested in reading more about this, there's plenty of resources out there on the internet, I'm just trying to give you a very, very simple overview here. Interesting thing is that in Wikipedia, there is another variant on the social business model, which is a term applied to businesses that have adopted social networking tools and practices for internal and external functions across their organizations, my definition is going to be close to that variant, but it's going to be a little bit different. And it's based on what I have seen evolve in social media, just based on my own social media consultant experience. And to give you the second point, which is my own personal perspective, based on my history, doing social media consulting, let me begin with how I began. And anybody who knows me personally knows that I never plan to monetize my social media knowledge and experience. It just happened organically in January of 2010, where over the course of two weeks, four different local companies reached out to me for help in social media, can we hire you on a consulting basis? And I thought really hard as to what should my role be in working with these companies? Did I want to do social media on their behalf? No, did I want to help them navigate and utilize social media in what I believe would be the right way in terms of best practices? And in helping achieve their objectives? Absolutely, yes, what was needed in order to help them do that, and this is where I sort of created my own business model. In essence, I realized that companies needed to be consulted, and I needed to provide them the following two things. Number one is strategy. You can do a lot with social media, what exactly do you want to achieve? How can we map what is possible on social media with your corporate objectives? And number two is education and education really starts at the top with the executive team and working our way down, I needed to make sure that my clients were up to speed as quickly as possible as to what was possible on social media. What were the best practices? In other words, how can I best replicate my knowledge and really give them a customized brain dump for their own situation? To be honest with you, it was more of a management consulting job than a social media marketing gig. I say that because my professional experience is in b2b sales, business development and marketing, where I launched sales organizations from scratch in Asia for a few different organizations. And I'll tell you, anyone who has been like a country manager, like I was, I was a regional VP of Asia Pacific, you wear a lot of hats. Yes, you have a profit and loss statement. At the end of the day, what are the sales, what's the profit, but in addition to sales, you got to do the marketing, you got to hire people, customer service, legal issues, administrative issues, it all falls on your responsibility. And that is the experience that if you really want to be a social business consultant, that's the experience you need. And the reason is, as social media permeates industry, it also permeates corporate discipline. One of my first clients wanted to use social media for customer service. This is back in the day, not something yesterday or the day before but you know, companies very early on, we're trying to think of how they can utilize it throughout the organization, social recruiting social media for legal departments, you know, how do you deal with regulated industries and disclosure and compliance but also this issue of social media policies and how to protect, in essence, the company and worst case scenarios that we've already seen happening? What about, you know, social media for product development, getting product feedback? My aha moment was when I was doing one social media strategy consulting project, I told my client for the first meeting to kick this off, and we need to have every internal stakeholder doing anything related to social media, we need to have them come to our first meeting and get their input and try to make this as mutually collaborative of an effort as possible. There were like 15 people who came to that first meeting, basically representing every major department within the organization. That is How far social media has evolved. So when we talk about that social business variant that's defined in Wikipedia of using networking tools for external and internal functions, yes, but what most people don't see. And what I would add to the definition is social media began as really an outbound focus, either by marketing and or public relations, to engage with others. But it was primarily a one way broadcast. And we all know that social media is to a communication. Well, what's happened over time, obviously, through complaints that people make in social media through questions that they asked brands comments they make, we now know that obviously, the more engagement that brands and businesses do with social media users, the more feedback they get. And now I would say my definition of social business would be it's not just the outbound, and it's not just receiving the feedback, but it's actually the input of that feedback into everything your business does. Now, I would say very, very few businesses are there. But it's companies that are starting to make business decisions based on what feedback they've received in social media. I'm gonna elaborate on this definition. When I write my blog posts, look for it on women networking.com the next week or two, but I hope that gives you some food for thought in the next week, where in your organization you can utilize social media, think outside of the box, bring everybody in to your social media strategy, and I think your company will be the better for it. Thanks for listening. Thanks for subscribing. Make it a great week. Bye bye. You've been listening to social business unplugged with Miele shaper, social media author, consultant, speaker and university professor. If you'd like any specific topics covered on future episodes, or if you'd like to be interviewed for this podcast, please connect with me by email. Neal at windmill networking.com on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/neal Schaffer and on Twitter at Neal Schaffer. Please also visit windmill networking.com for daily Social Media for Business updates. Thanks for listening and make it a great day.