Defining Social Business: 4 Steps To Your Corporate Spring

About six months ago the language of social business suddenly became corporate hip. It's one of those terms that you hesitate to ask about - you mean you don't know what it means? Hushed laughter. But really, if you are looking around for a simple definition of social business, then it is going to come at you in the shape of a software platform."Social" is dominated by members of the vendor community and what they think it means. The reason social business is so prevalent is because we are on the ramp of a giant vendor-fest. Be warned. You will be sold to.

To make good decisions, however, you need a vendor-neutral understanding of social. I want to give you a working definition, one you can build a strategy around and one you can use to anticipate opportunity. Here's a clue - it is about instant communications - that and that only.

The lifespan of social business, as the term is used here in the pages of Forbes.com, is about six months. Only six months? Isn't that extraordinary?

There is another social business - one which belongs to development economics. That social business originates in capability, the philosophy of investing in people's capability to become  self-sufficient, inventive and entrepreneurial.  That's a 20+ year old movement.

Our social business is not even past its infancy so how come this meme has so much vitality, coverage, support, momentum, diversity, call it what you will? There are two reasons.

I'm going to touch on those briefly before elaborating on that simple definition.

The first reason you see so much momentum behind social business right now is because we are facing an all-out assault by the software vendor community to sell you one of the two dozen or more social business platforms out there. And here's the rub for you the buyer. Most versions of social business are reworked intranets, portals and community software platforms with an activity stream thrown in and a social listening tool of some kind tacked on. They are constructs of what the vendor community thinks your organization needs for your people to become more collaborative.

A large chunk of the social business vendor community is in fact the Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) community with knobs on. E2.0 with a little extra social media. There are exceptions to this. I think of Yammer and Chatter as true social business tools for example. I know I will make myself extremely unpopular by saying this but E2.0 was always an egg waiting for a chicken so it could hatch. E2.0 platforms were driven by a singular philosophy - if people collaborate more at work they will be more productive.

But you only have to stop and think about that for a moment to say it's either obvious or trivial. Of course if people are working better with each other they are going to be more productive. Does it need a software platform?

This community, like the one selling social business, never aired the real problem, at least not in public. If your people are not collaborating, what have you done to them to prevent what should come so naturally? What have you done to create such a dysfunctional organization that people routinely withhold their discretionary effort? How can you unpick that and create a new social contract with your labor force?

Particularly in the United States the unspeakable part of all this is simple to phrase but difficult to air: the workplace all too often became an unpleasant place to be. It became more uncertain, demanded more hours, kept you away from your family, in fact re-engineered family life so that women could also work excessive hours, and yet the employer, the firm, never seemed to get the changes going on in the wider world. Going to work was becoming like walking into George Orwell's 1984. In the real world we had capability. At work not.

It's as if we at home and in the gig economy have been blessed with what social business provided the developing economies - the capability to see, develop and follow our aspirations, to a point.

The bosses? They're just telling us to collaborate more, offering us points and badges if we stick up a profile, giving us more hoops to jump through when we  can just go download Box.net and get the job done our way.

The remarkable thing about the past five years is that employees have sought their own solutions, their own ways of getting a job done, their own form of capability. Employees have been ahead of the curve. And that's the second, legitimate reason you hear about social business. Because social tools give us new capabilities.

You might see that phrased as the "empowered" workforce. Or you might see it expressed as a new form of "freedom". And I think those phrases are part of the problem too.

It makes the current ambiance feel like a breakout when in fact nothing of the sort is happening. Sure there are some great examples of companies creating wealth in new ways - there is a new form of scale available out there. But it is only tangentially related to social. It should be no surprise but there are different strands of change occuring side by side.

In the area of social we are are collectively wrestling with some profound sensibilities about capitalism, the organization of work, what people have a right to expect in the workplace, and the balance between work and home. In other words we are wrestling with fundamental human values.

When you buy a social business platform you're going to be told that one essential element of its success lies in culture change. There is an allusion here to the larger problem of how we reset our societal value system. In future opportunity will require us to approach wealth with a changed value system. But most platform vendors do not believe this - they prefer to talk about the culture change needed to make their platforms function rather than the value shift needed for the next phase of capitalism.

You will grapple with that for a year or 18 months. You will offer badges to get your people on board. You will develop a gamification strategy and you will see improvements as you give away prizes because above all employees do not want their employer to come down on them. They will roll over here and there. But in reality the culture change, the value shift has to come first, and I will write about that hopefully tomorrow.

Now's a good moment to define social business . Here is my definition. It's simple and I think liberating. Social business is about what my colleague Nick Vitalari refers to as instantaneous connectivity. I prefer the term instantaneous, ubiquitous communications.

Social business is the discipline of working out all the societal and business impacts of instantaneous, ubiquitous communications.

Now that we can communicate with anyone at any time from anywhere, and we can communicate and create knowledge from communications between a growing array of devices we are liberated to do business much, much faster, to seek the most appropriate people to do business with, and to explore new limits in human potential.

All that starts with instantaneous, ubiquitous communications. If you want to develop a social business strategy you start there, not with a software platform and a vendor implementation plan.

Speed of communications has long been recognised for its economic potency. From canal to train, train to road, road to air, telegraph to telephone. Communications drives novelty and innovation. Now it is instant, so easy and it embraces a fast evolving global economy with a shared culture of entrepreneurism.

There are many many implications of this connectivity - and it might be your organization only needs the lightest possible touch of technology to reap the benefits. Essentially what you see before you in your workforce is a group of people who can communicate to anywhere in the world, develop relationships with people you had not imagined matter to your business, create new opportunities, accelerate new ideas to market, distill many global actions into succinct knowledge, spot new technologies and opportunities, partner, and generally act in a more entrepreneurial way either on your behalf or theirs.

If you want to give them badges, go ahead, watch them under-perform. If you want to impose one more software platform on them, that too is your right. But my advice is to spend some strategic time with what social business really is - instantaneous, ubiquitous communications, for everyone, all on the same terms.

What it is clearly also leading to is a change in societal values, a re-set of what we can expect of each other for our respective contributions at work and home. This is not an empowered workforce or a break for freedom but it is dramatic.  It requires a new social contract. More of that next time out.

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