The following is an excerpt from "Patterns in Achieving Social Business Success by Leading and Pioneering Organizations," an exclusive whitepaper brought to you by IBM. This whitepaper provides a step-by-step guide for determining your strategy to achieving social business success. It focuses on how organizations can use social business practices and capabilities to transform themselves, and create competitive advantage and substantial new value.
A social business is an organization whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value. Social businesses connect individuals, so they can rapidly share information, knowledge and ideas by having conversations and publishing informal content. They analyze social content from multiple channels and sources, in addition to structured data, to gain insights from both external and internal stakeholders. When those things happen, innovation and business execution rates increase, better decisions are made, and customers and employees are more engaged and satisfied. Social businesses enjoy lower operating costs, faster speed-to-market, improved customer and employee engagement, and increased profitability.
Many organizations do not fully appreciate the magnitude of the value creation potential of social business. One study estimates that as much as $1.3 trillion of potential value could be created by social business - in just four industry sectors! In other words, social business is likely to spawn a level of business value creation similar to that of the adoption of online commerce capabilities (ebusiness) a decade ago. However, the same study found that, as of last year, just three percent of all organizations surveyed are deriving substantial benefit from social across all stakeholders.
There are leaders across specific industries who do understand that social business represents an enormous opportunity to transform their organization and fuel substantial value creation. Those companies are applying their own social capabilities to business processes that connect external and internal stakeholders, including customers, partners and employees. They are transforming key business processes by enabling the human interactions necessary to produce results when the effectiveness of automated process activities has been exhausted.
Exactly how are organizations transforming these processes and becoming social businesses? What best practices have emerged? Those questions are addressed by the social business patterns outlined in the whitepaper. Download your copy now and learn how you can become one of the social business success stories.
(social business / shutterstock)