You don’t want to turn your business into a social business
For someone who co-authored a book on how companies that succeed in leveraging this current wave of innovation, powered by the social, do so by turning their business processes into social processes, it may seem contradictory to now hear that you should not turn your business into a social business.
There are several reasons why those two concepts are very different. And most pundits declaring that you should be building social businesses are missing the point.
First off, a social business (see WikiPedia entry) has been defined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus inhis book Creating a World without poverty — Social Business and the future of capitalism as a “non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective within the highly regulated marketplace of today. It is distinct from a non-profit because the business should seek to generate a modest profit but this will be used to expand the company’s reach, improve the product or service or in other ways to subsidise the social mission.”
If you’re GE, IBM, or Pfizer, you may not want to turn your business into a social business.
What you want to do is to power your business processes with humans and the social characteristics that have been innate to them for tens of thousands of years . You want the individuals and their creativity to help you humanize your brand, you want people from outside your R&D department to help you innovate, you want human employees (as opposed to corporate automatons programmed to stay on message with corporate speak) to engage with humans who may want to buy your products or come to work for you.
Companies that found the key to making this work do end up with social benefits — happier employees, happier customers, tighter-nit communities, etc. — but they do not need to become a social-objective driven enterprise to do that.
You want to turn your business into a human-powered enterprise, we called it a Hyper-Social Organizations, not a social enterprise — and therein lies a big difference.
What are your thoughts? I will try to get back to more regular blogging…(and I know you’ve heard that one before 
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Hi Francois,
of course you are right or… maybe you’re not
While there has always been a dangerous reuse of the term “social business” to mean very different concepts, in one of my last posts I tried to explore why those two meanings could be way more connected at a deeper level than what many expect.
Just two points:
- one of the effects of bringing humans back (customers, suppliers, partners, employees, stakeholders) at the center of the business as you explain so well in the HyperSocial Organization is making the org much more adapt to motivating and stimulating individuals to go the extra mile, to collaborate in building the future of the business, to make their life more full and satisfying. In a word, socializing the organization means improving people’s lives.
- on a different level, when facing an hyper-connected, community-embedded, socially-empowered customer, companies should carefully re-evaluate what their decisions imply. You can surely fire thousands of people, behave in unethical ways, treat your employees like cogs but while in the past such actions would have only impacted those employees, today they would probably mean very strong reactions both by internal and external communities with concrete, measurable effects on the value generated by the organization itself, not just on its reputation.
What Michael Porter discussed in his Shared Value article on HBR (http://hbr.org/2011/01/the-big-idea-creating-shared-value) can be well applied to the concept of Social Business reconnecting humanized corporations with corporations that really care about humans.
Does it mean “non-loss, non-dividend companies”? Probably no but it surely touches upon organizations that thrive while building a bigger value for their entire ecosystem and not just for their stakeholders.
The piece is in italian (http://www.socialenterprise.it/index.php/2012/01/15/social-business-e-valore-condiviso/) but you can translate it with a click.
At first, I read the title as “you don’t know what you don’t know”. Welcome back, Francois.
Agreed. Business should benefit from improved social interaction and move away from the Industrial Age model of an employee/customer being but a single cog in a very large wheel.
This is where our culture has evolved. To stay viable to the empowered consumer will require business’ to adapt to the changing needs of their customers.
Thank you Valeria! I also sent you an email.
Francois
[...] You don’t want to turn your business into a social business [...]
Very insightful. Social media has become another “channel” where businesses can have a back and forth conversation with their customers, and where they can more value to the community. But you’re right, they need not to become a social-objective driven enterprise to do that.
Hi Judy — sorry for the delay in getting back with you. I do not think as social as a channel to interact with your customer. It is a place where customers, prospects and detractors interact with one another and where you may (or may not) be able to gain a seat at those conversations.
Also good exchange on same post over here:
http://thecustomercollective.com/fgossieaux/74364/you-don-t-want-turn-your-business-social-business#comment-6113