By M. Isi Eromosele

In a socially connected marketplace, shared knowledge is now emerging as the ultimate resource. Information wants to be free and in today’s new market paradigm it is: free of constraints on place, free of control on content and free of restrictive access or consumption.

Social media and its underpinning technologies connect people in ways that facilitate sharing information, thereby reducing the opportunities for marketplace exploitation. The Social Web dramatically levels the playing field by making information plentiful, even as it compels businesses and organizations to operate more transparently.

The Social Web highlights excellence just as it exposes mediocrity in products and services in the global marketplace, without regard for the interests of any particular party.

Social media technologies, as expressed through social CRM, vendor relationship management applications, customer-driven support forums and consumer communities where participants engage in all forms of social discourse now act in unison to equalize the market positions of manufacturers, business and organizational leaders, customers and stakeholders.

As a direct result of the above, businesses and organizations embracing social technologies are delivering better solutions that have been developed through direct collaboration with customers and stakeholders.

Contemporary businesses, organizations and governing entities are increasingly meeting the challenge of transparency and operating with their customers and stakeholders, often through an empowered and connected workforce, to deliver self-evident value that gets talked about.

For the marketers, their customers, suppliers and stakeholders are the new source of future innovations and marketing and therefore also the drivers of long-term growth and success. This is what social business is all about.

Social business in action is running your organization in a way that generates the conversations you want. Social media is now considered a given in business.

The advent of Web 2.0 and the Social Web has clearly revolutionized the science of marketing and the art of engaging with customers. The collaborative social technologies that now define contemporary marketplaces offer a viable approach to driving changes in deeper business processes across a wide range of applications. There is something here for most organizations, something that extends very much beyond marketing and communications.

There is a veritable link between the basics of social media marketing and the larger idea of social technologies applied at a whole-business level. Even within organizations, you can think of this deeper, customer-driven connection between operations and marketing as social business.

With the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, the set of tools that facilitate the process for people to create and publish content, to share ideas, to vote on them and to recommend things to others have upended the well-established norms of business marketing, resulting in a much needed change.

No longer satisfied with marketers’ advertising and promotional information as a sole source for learning about new products and services, consumers have taken to the Social Web in an effort to share among themselves their own direct experiences with brands, products and services to provide a more real view of their research experience. At the same time, consumers are leveraging the experiences of others before they actually make purchases themselves. The impact on marketing has been profound.

The classic purchase funnel is connected to the Social Web through digital word-of-mouth (a.k.a. social media). This loop, from expectation to trial to rating to sharing the actual experience is now a part of almost every purchase or conversion process.

Whether consumer-facing, B2B, for-profit or nonprofit, people are turning to people like themselves for the information they need to make smart choices. Consumers look to these new sources of information for guidance, alongside traditional media communications; which are still very much a part of the overall marketing mix. The result is a new vetting process that is impacting the efforts of businesses and organizations to grow their markets.

Social Feedback Cycle

What the social feedback loop really represents is the way in which Internet-based publishing and social technology now connects people around business or business-like activities.

This new social connectivity applies between a business and its customers (B2C), between other businesses (B2B), between customers themselves, as is the case in support communities and similar social applications and just as well between employees.

As a result of the above, there is much more widespread dissemination of information on a broader basis. Information that previously was available to only a selected or privileged class of individuals is now open to all.

Social Business

Social business takes social concepts - sharing, rating, reviewing, connecting, and collaborating to all parts of a business. From product design to the promotions team and customer service, social behaviors and the development of internal knowledge communities that connect people and their ideas have given rise to smoother and more efficient business processes. Social business, viewed in this way becomes more about change management than marketing.

Social media marketing seeks to engage customers in the online social locations where they naturally spend time. By comparison, social business picks up on what they are talking about and what they are interested in and connects this information back into the business where it can be processed and used to create the next round of customer experiences and hence the next round of conversations.

Your Customers

It is important to understand the role of the customer, which includes anyone on the other side of a business transaction: It might be a retail consumer, a business customer or a donor to a nonprofit organization.

What’s common across all of these archetypes and what especially matters in the context of social business is that each of them has access to information, in addition to whatever information you put into the marketplace that can support or refute the messages you've spent time and money creating.

Beyond the marketing messages, be willing to consider suggestions for improvements or innovation that may originate with your customers: As a result of an actual experience or interaction with your brand, product or service, your customers have specific information about your business processes and probably an idea or two on how your business might serve them better in the future.

Consider the following, all of which are typical of the kinds of information your customers may have to give you after a transaction with your company:

The above list is typical of the kinds of information that customers have and often share amongst themselves and would readily share with you if asked. Collecting this information and systematically applying it is in your best interest.

This information and the ensuing pleas for help expressed in online forums is something you can collect through social analytics tools and processes. It can then be combined with the experiences of other customers, as well as your own process and domain knowledge to improve a particular customer experience and then offered generally as a new solution.

This new solution could then be shared through the same communities and collaborative technologies with your wider customer base, raising your firm’s relative value to your customers in the process and strengthening your relationship with the customers who initially experienced the problem.

The resultant sharing of information and its use inside an organization forms the stepping-off point from social media marketing and social analytics into social business. From a purely marketing perspective, this shared consumer information can be very helpful in encouraging others to make a similar purchase.

It can enlighten a marketer as to which advertising claims are accepted and which are rejected, helping that marketer to fine tune their message. It can also create a bridge to dialog with the customer; think about onsite product reviews or support forums so that marketers can understand in greater detail what is helping and what is not.

Access to customer-provided information means your product or service adapts faster. By sharing the resulting improvement and innovations while giving your customers credit, your business gains positive recognition.

The participation and hence marketplace information is coming from the customers and is heading toward the business. Traditionally, over mass media, it’s been the other way around.

Now, it is the business that is listening to the customer. What is being learned as a result of this listening and participation is then tapped internally to change, sustain or improve specific customer experiences. When subsequently tied to business objectives, the practice of social business becomes holistic indeed.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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