Is Social Business the Same as Social Media?

The social business meme is very much on the rise. Being good at social media doesn’t necessarily make a business social, so what does? For what it’s worth, I am not a believer in the Salesforce.com social enterprise (too dependent on social media), and for the same reason am mildly sceptical about Brian Solis‘s Pivotcon, the new but annual conference on how businesses will transition from social media to social businesses, even though I agree it is the pivotal discussion forum on the future of social.

Social business has a broad thrust, though. It is much more than social media and doesn’t necessarily need to start with social media.

A couple of days back I got talking with Jeff Schick, VP of social software, about IBM‘s social business, to see what we can learn from one of the bigger social business programs.

In the mid-2000s they tried another paradigm shift around Second Life which truth be told came unstuck. Thousands of IBMers were encouraged to become devotees of virtual world business activity, even as Second Life began a descent into irrelevance.IBM catapulted itself into a predominantly service-based business on the back of its eBusiness strategy back in the mid-1990s. That was when eCommercebecame hot. IBM became the category leader.

With 400,000 + employees though IBM has to catch the wave of new service business paradigms early. It clearly believes it has done this with social business, tracing some of its roots in the area back to 1997 when it first encouraged employees to become active on the web.

I think their strategy breaks down into five areas:

Internal social media

Creating internal social activity is something of a no-brainer and any company that wants to market their social business creds, has to get this right. IBM has some impressive figures. It’s obviously the place for any business serious about social to start.

• 17,000 individual blogs
• 1 million daily page views of internal wikis, internal information storing websites
• 400,000 employee profiles on IBM Connections, IBM’s initial social networking initiative that allows employees to share status updates, collaborate on wikis, blogs and activity, share files.
• 15,000,000 downloads of employee-generated videos/podcasts

The internal social media program allws IBM to use its expertise locator to link people; they’ve moved towards unified communications for better real time comms, and they have initiatives like a Slideshare experts network to help people expose and surface expertise.

The customer ecosystem

The customer ecosystem is much more complex than we yet realise but if you are supporting clients through any kind of social software you need a strong customer ecosystem.

IBM has 8 million people on its Developer Works forums on IBM.com. Maintaining that kind of platform is a serious commitment.

Listening, customer service and social selling

For many companies the experience of socal begins here with listening services. IBM is an avid listener in the broad sense that they have the corporate antenna up and are looking out for opportunity across customer service and social selling. Jeff tells me there are some core uses:

• Divining where the opportunities might lie for IBM
• Refining the company’s messaging in respond to what’s said about IBM and the markets they are in
• Client support
• Gauging risks to IBM, for example by following the activities of hackers who might pose a threat to IBM technologies.

The social selling process also makes use of microblogging – employees blogging their travel plans or their current work interests so that teams can opportunistically get together on client propositions. Recently IBM added web pages for sales personnel with links to their Twitter and Facebook accounts so that they are more accessible and knowable for customers.

Brand articulation

The IBM employee and contract community is intrinsically now part of its brand projection. A social business needs its employees empowered and willing to talk good about the company, engage with clients and understand their responsibilities and limits. IBM has the numbers:

• Over 25,000 IBMers actively tweeting on Twitter and counting
  Approx. 300,00 IBMers on Linkedin, growing at 24%/year and already the largest employee presence of any firm on the platform.
  Approx. 198,000 IBMers on Facebook

Employee transformation

IBM has a big investment in Connections, its E2.0 platform for employee communications but that goes hand in hand with a policy to transfer more responsibility to employees. Like Dell they need their employees out on the Web representing the company. They have web-use guidelines that help employees understand the limits of their authority and which help promote the use of social tools. Jeff underlines the fact that it is part of the Smarter Planet initiative – “smarter people make a smarter planet.”  They have a comprehensive education program on social. Every employee’s social performance is tested once a year.

In an earlier piece I looked at Dell’s social business strategy, which is impressive but incomplete. IBM’s is also comprehensive, but again I think lacks a moral position on the future of business that is essential to the social business.

There’s no question IBM is already a  category leader in social software but as yet we have not fully articulated what the social business category consists of.

As we do I think IBM will have to place more emphasis on transforming the sense of value it creates. Social business is ultimately about creating shared value and we need to codefine that with companies like IBM.

For now though IBM has gone a long way to defining the range of initiatives that make up a good social business infrastructure. Next stop – redefining business values.

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701

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