Your business may be “social,” but is it a social business?

Social business is all about moving beyond just using social media (listening, posting, chatting, and so forth). It’s about more effectively leveraging the social conversations to help employees bottom-up, top-down, and across your organization to better share information and make more-informed decisions.

It’s about business intelligence — recognizing it and getting it to the people who need to know so they can use it (hopefully wisely).

It’s not about scaling social.

Social business isn’t about size.

Scaling social is about moving from 1:1 to 1:many while keeping intact the connection that comes with conversation.

Social business is about how you position your organization to take advantage of the social conversations going on all around you.

It’s about integration.

The Altimeter Group has a new report that explores the shift from scaling social to becoming a more social business. The authors write:

Having mastered the nuts and bolts of social media, today’s social strategist is focused less on scaling social engagement and instead looking inward, partnering with leaders to help social business cross silos, support a broader digital vision, and achieve new levels of employee engagement and advocacy.

This is good news.

Integration — the people and process stuff — isn’t sexy. It’s the nuts and bolts, including governance, analytics, and a focus on employee engagement.

You won’t get anywhere if you ignore your foundation.

There’s work to do. 

The State of Social Business 2015 highlights four key areas:

• The need for a cohesive social business strategy.
• The significance of organizational leadership.
• The critical role of HR in driving organizational change.
• The importance of integrated marketing communications.

There’s work to do. Are you ready to dive in?

Photo by puroticorico (Flickr).