Social Business is a recent but popular trend revolutionizing the way companies function and generate value for all the constituents (stakeholders, employees, customers, partners, suppliers).

What is a Social Business?

Reconciling some of the most interesting business, organizational and technological phenomena of the last five years, a Social Business is

An organization that has put in place the strategies, technologies and processes to systematically engage all the individuals of its ecosystem (employees, customers, partners, suppliers) to maximize the co-created value

This definition tries to underline that:

• The historical Manichean separation between the inside and outside environments of a company is losing importance. Moreover, the privileged role for those ideas and decisions that the organization pushes to the market (inside-out) compared to the reversed flow of indications that from the market reach into the company (outside-in). The flow is now effectively two-way and becoming realtime The decision making and change management responsibilities are no longer restricted to managers (traditional organization) or to customers (as prescribed by Social CRM). Other than managers, organizational change can be driven equally by customers, employees, partners and suppliers. All these categories are moving from supporting actors to partners and protagonists
• It’s engagement not communication that makes the internal/external flow possibile. Getting individuals engaged means accepting a variety of needs and using those needs to inform the organizational growth and evolution
• The existence of a corporation is no longer to exclusively generate value for its traditional stakeholders, rather it must now maximize the exchanged value throughout its entire ecosystem. It’s a bit like the number of stakeholders has suddenly expanded and is now including external actors. Even with this new twist, it should be noted how this exchange is intended to amplify, within a network perspective and thanks to the ecosystem, also the value generated for the traditional group of stakeholders.The Social Business is thus an organizational construct aimed to make the company more efficient under mutated market dynamics and consumer behaviors.