By M. Isi Eromosele

Social business, which is the application of social technologies as a formal component of business processes, revolves around understanding how your customers or stakeholders connect to your business and how you reshape your business to understand, accept and innovate, based on their involvement.

Social business is about integrating all of your business functions: customer support, marketing, the executive team and more. It means doing this for the purpose of creating collaborative innovation and engagement at meaningful, measurable levels tied clearly and directly to your company’s business objectives.

Participative Social Business

Ultimately, social business is about participation with and by your customers and stakeholders in pursuit of an organization that is strongly connected to them through participative and collaborative processes.

As a result, a social business is often better able to respond to marketplace dynamics and competitive opportunities than a traditionally organized and managed firm. This may occur through participation in a social community, a support or discussion forum or any of a variety of other social applications and contexts.

The efforts leading to the creation of a social business often begin with identifying or creating an opportunity for participation with (or between) customers, employees or stakeholders within communities or similar social applications.

Building a social business starts with establishing a community or other social presence around or in which your brand fits naturally, whether through a casual presence on Twitter, a more involved Facebook business presence or your own community built for customers, suppliers or partners.

Encourage Customer Participation

Regardless of who the community is intended to serve, strong communities are best built around the things that matter deeply to the members of the community: passions, lifestyles, causes and similar fundamentally aligned needs.

The core elements powering a social business in any case need to be something to which the community members (customers or potential customers, for example) will spontaneously bond with and that as a result will encourage them to invite others to join.

If you’ve ever met a small business owner, you know how passionate they are about what they do. A very effective way through the practices of social business is to tap this by identifying and serving the needs of that small business owner by encouraging discussion about issues related to his/her business that your company can help them with.

Similarly, smaller communities, where personal interests drive strong relationships are prime opportunities for social business initiatives.

Getting the activity focused on something larger than your brand, product or service is critical to the successful development of social behavior within the customer or stakeholder base and as well within the firm or organization itself.

By understanding the passions, lifestyles and causes that are relevant to your customers, you can identify the best social pathways through which to build connections to your product, brand or service.

This is where a number of otherwise well-intentioned efforts go wrong: Attempting to build a community around a brand or product will often fail if participation is driven primarily by advertising expenditure and costly promotions rather than by organic interest generated by and between the participants themselves.

Use A Strong Anchor Message

The surest way to avoid this trap is to appeal to passion, lifestyle or cause; in other words, to anchor your initiatives in something larger than your brand, product or

service.

Appeal to your target audience with a strong message, one that is carefully selected to both attract the people you want to associate with and to provide a natural home or connection to your brand, product or service.

To increase your market share with today’s customers, you need to obtain a better transactional view of the customer.

The customer receives your marketing messages, for example, buys the product or service and then also goes on to provide feedback, whether directly via CRM or similar or through a listening program that collects and analyzes conversations.

The difference here is that there is a feedback mechanism. As such, compliments and concerns can flow your way. This opportunity to listen and understand and thereby craft a response is a direct benefit of participation with customers through the Social Web.

The strong anchor message forms a common bonding point for both the business or organization and customers and stakeholders and in particular in the context of social participation with a business.

This connects the brand with the customer through a shared value and purpose, something larger than the brand itself and to which both the brand and customer simultaneously aspire to. This creates a very powerful linkage that transcends the basic brand-consumer relationship.

Social media takes this practice to the next level. Social media inherently revolves around passions, lifestyles and causes, issues that define larger social objects to which participants relate.

The social media programs that are intended to link customers to communities and shared social activities around the business, and thereby around the brand, product or service must themselves be anchored in this same larger ideal.

Creating A Strong Social Business Presence

The appeal with a strong anchor message to a lifestyle, passion, or cause is what drives organic participation and growth in online social communities. The payoffs are lower ongoing expenses and a higher degree of stickiness and participation as well as advocacy for the community.

Great social sites grow organically based on an individual’s realization of a reason to be there: Facebook and Orkut both deliver on the basic desires of people to meet other people and socialize. Members see the value in more members so they actively encourage their friends to join. The obvious purpose and basic appeal of these sites combine to drive organic growth.

As a result, participation and organic growth occur naturally, without the need for costly promotions: People will join social networks like Facebook and Orkut and use these services on their own, for hours at a time without paid incentives.

In social business, collaboration occurs in two venues: customers to customers and between customers and employees. In the latter, collaboration generally occurs only when your customers develop sufficient trust and your employees develop sufficient visibility, such that the two groups begin conversations about how the business may be changed for the better.

When charting your course in social business, be sure that you distinguish between social media marketing efforts and social business programs that more tightly link the personal lifestyles, passions and causes of customers with the business and its products and services.

Social-media-based marketing efforts can drive awareness and there is value in that. That said, there is a need for organic growth and participation in the underlying communities by naturally placing your product into this context. There is a compelling and measurable value to the brand in that, too.

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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