It's A Social World: And We All Live In It

Joshua Paul of the company Socious calls it, quite simply and elegantly: Being helpful. "In a business environment where customers are connected and Google never forgets a bad review or scathing article, being helpful is the new marketing. Your number-one social business objective should be to find ways to make your customers more successful with your products and services.

"Your company wants to reduce costs, increase productivity and improve customer retention. Your customers don't care. You want to launch an online community to promote social connections, discussion and collaboration. Your customers don't care about that either. What do customers care about? Getting help."

Joshua adds, (and I embellish in parentheses)—

"Customers care about:

• Validating ideas before presenting them to their management (a perfect use of social as a backboard);
• Getting home to see their kid's soccer game (improving their lives);
• Finding solutions when they are stuck (it takes a village);
• Making your product more useful in their businesses and lives (business performance improvement); and
• Job security (‘nuff said)."

In her great article in this White Paper, Heather Gossard of NewsGator Technologies talks about how the president of her company often comments on her and others' activity streams, because there's a transparency in her company that allows that to happen. But just as equally, the person at the front desk has the same access and transparency, and the same right to comment and add to the conversation. "I know I'm smarter because my colleagues educate me every day with new and relevant information," she writes with apparent pride. That sort of cooperation would have been—uh—unlikely in the dog-eat-dog corporate world of 10 years ago.

I like how Mike Vertal of Rivet Logic puts it in his article: "Within the enterprise, productivity can be enhanced when employee-to-employee relationships can be fostered and workgroups can be hatched from the ground up—seamlessly—as part of everyday business."

Aaron Stewart of KANA in his article talks about creating a way to listen to "the voice of the customer." But when you drill-down into his message, what you come to understand is that-regardless of the technique one uses, or the technology one applies-the real goal is to understand the sentiment of the person you're communicating with. Aaron talks mainly about the business-to-customer relationship, but we're beginning to understand that it's just as important to understand the sentiment, the message, that our co-workers are sending. That's the beating heart of a social business.

My friend John Mancini puts it well in his always entertaining blog, The Digital Landfill: "Organizations are now beginning to understand that true systems of engagement mean more than just this public veneer; true systems of engagement mean embedding social technologies in the very nature of how an organization operates. In just a few years we will cease to view ‘social' as a separate layer from process and the objective will be how to make the business itself social," John writes.

"It is clear that the young professionals in our organizations—those of the mobile and social generation—view work much differently than we in the email generation do.  And if we are going to race with the machine rather than against it, if we are going to position our organizations for the future rather than the past, we best start paying attention to what they are saying."

Hear, hear.