The answer is YES…to both.
The term 'social business' is the latest evolution in the terminology used to describe how the application of social and collaborative technologies is transforming how we do business. I won’t go all the way back to the early wave of internal enterprise collaboration tools like Lotus Notes. This string of buzzword bingo really started when Tim O’Reilly held a conference in 2004 and called it the Web 2.0 Conference and off we went…any emerging web technology that had anything to do with social, collaboration or SaaS was categorized as ‘Web 2.0’.
But this was all about the Internet; customer facing, outside the enterprise. So, then we brought social, collaboration, SaaS to bear as an internal, enterprise collaboration solution.
Ta Da…it’s now ‘Enterprise 2.0’. And it’s all about making businesses run better, employees be more productive, improving communication and collaboration. Enterprise 2.0 was internally focused with very little or no connection to outside the enterprise.
And then blogging became 'micro blogging' and the social network sites found their audience. It seems like the Internet had became one giant social network.
With these developments, everybody got focused on ‘social media’ and how it could be used to engage customers. Today all big brands and most large enterprises have someone on staff that is managing, watching, engaging in social media and there's a social media guru on every corner…but this obsession with social media is pointed outside the enterprise.
With Social Business, we are now moving the conversation to where it should have been all along. Talking about how we can help our customers and employees work better together. How businesses can get better at enagaging the customer and driving customer input inside the enterprise to suface that customer input in an environment of internal collaboration and productivity. All to help the people in the enterprise respond to the customer.
This conversation is the core of ‘Social Business’.
Customer engagement and conversations that create value and transparency for both the customer and the company, that's Social Business. Employees that are empowered and encouraged to communicate and collaborate across all segments of a company, that's Social Business. Company leadership that values ideas and unrestricted input from both customers and employees, that's Social Business.
But most of all, Social Business is the realization that business is driven by the needs of the customers, the value of the employees and the commitment to an open flow of input and inspiration from both.