I couldn’t have said this any better than my friend Olivier Blanchard and I highly recommend spending some time going through the slides below. It’s 51 in total but let me summarize really quickly my key takeaways.
I said this before but it’s worth repeating.
Social Business transformation will only be successful if employees at all levels change their behaviors. Communication with colleagues and customers, opening purchases orders and other operational functions, team meetings, working relationships with partners through the supply chain and all the processes and workflows in between; and yes, all the marketing messages, campaigns and tactics need to change. A change in behavior happens only after we change the way we think.
In my opinion, a few outputs of a social business are the following:
- More innovative thinking
- The birth of new and improved processes and products
- Closer employee and partner relationships
- Increase in morale and job satisfaction
- Faster “go to market” strategies
- Faster crisis management response times
- Better and more scalable customer engagement
Olivier first describes what a social business isn’t.
- Having a social media presence isn’t a social business
- Having digital content doesn’t make you a social business
- Chasing followers doesn’t make you a social business
And, then he explains the core principles of social business:
- Social is and always have been a core business philosophy
- Social must be a mindset before it can become an operational model
- A CEO who doesn’t care about creating a social company will not accidentally create one
- Social is something you are not something you do
And that’s just the first 10 or so slides. These are gold and I highly recommend spending time and extracting the insights. The key takeaway for me is that social business absolutely requires a culture shift. One company that is doing that today is clearly IBM.
Enjoy the learning.
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