In my opinion, a social business is built upon 3 pillars – people (culture), process and technology. If you were a CEO of a company, where would you prioritize your time, energy and budget investments first? See below for more info on each pillar. I would greatly appreciate it if you can share this with your friends and colleagues. (note: I couldn’t find a polling application that allows for the ranking of answers, which is why I asked only about the first priority.)
Took down the poll. Blog Polls was slowing the site down.
The first and most important pillar deals with the enterprise’s most valuable asset, its culture. It addresses the need to drive organizational change in an effort to shift employee behavior, communicate more effectively and tear down organizational silos. These change management initiatives have to be driven by organizational leadership and practiced at every level in the organization. The end result is an increase in trust of employees and empowering them to engage externally; an increase in budget investments to social business initiatives, collaboration and more effective social organization models.
The second pillar deals with process. This means that organizations need to create processes and frameworks that will help facilitate the chaos that exists from behind the firewall – i.e. employees sharing sensitive material externally, social media ownership, crisis management and product feedback workflows; and ensuring there is one measurement philosophy that the entire organization is bought into and using for reporting. Additionally, training initiatives, social media policies and guidelines, moderation policies, global expansion must be documented, approved and then rolled up into a co-created governance model.
The third pillar deals with technology. Organizations have to invest in technology applications that facilitate internal collaboration, social listening, measurement, social relationship management and social CRM.
I write at length about this very topic in my upcoming book , Smart Business, Social Business: A Playbook for Social Media in Your Organization scheduled to be released in July 2011. You can pre-order by clicking on the below social business book cover. Thank you for your support.
