Now’s a good moment to define social business . Here is my definition. It’s simple and I think liberating. Social business is about what my colleague Nick Vitalari refers to as instantaneous connectivity. I prefer the term instantaneous, ubiquitous communications.
Social business is the discipline of working out all the societal and business impacts of instantaneous, ubiquitous communications.
Now that we can communicate with anyone at any time from anywhere, and we can communicate and create knowledge from communications between a growing array of devices we are liberated to do business much, much faster, to seek the most appropriate people to do business with, and to explore new limits in human potential.
All that starts with instantaneous, ubiquitous communications. If you want to develop a social business strategy you start there, not with a software platform and a vendor implementation plan.
Speed of communications has long been recognised for its economic potency. From canal to train, train to road, road to air, telegraph to telephone. Communications drives novelty and innovation. Now it is instant, so easy and it embraces a fast evolving global economy with a shared culture of entrepreneurism.
There are many many implications of this connectivity – and it might be your organization only needs the lightest possible touch of technology to reap the benefits. Essentially what you see before you in your workforce is a group of people who can communicate to anywhere in the world, develop relationships with people you had not imagined matter to your business, create new opportunities, accelerate new ideas to market, distill many global actions into succinct knowledge, spot new technologies and opportunities, partner, and generally act in a more entrepreneurial way either on your behalf or theirs.
If you want to give them badges, go ahead, watch them under-perform. If you want to impose one more software platform on them, that too is your right. But my advice is to spend some strategic time with what social business really is – instantaneous, ubiquitous communications, for everyone, all on the same terms.
What it is clearly also leading to is a change in societal values, a re-set of what we can expect of each other for our respective contributions at work and home. This is not an empowered workforce or a break for freedom but it is dramatic. It requires a new social contract.
