Social business is one of the big business buzzwords of 2012 but how many people actually know what it means?
This explanatory infographic shows all the routes business has travelled in order to become more social. Yes, it’s about social media but it’s also about values, customers, collaboration, involvement and engagement.
We define social business as the creation of shared value for everybody in a business value chain, including the customer and the communities they live in, online or offline. Social business has evolved from multiple sources and is taking business in a new direction. From the development of micro-finance to today’s customer ecosystems, shared value and social business is all about empowering people and creating a more collaborative human-centred business environment.
The technology stream
A strong tradition running through social business and dating back to the free software movement and then open source is the idea of contribution. Making a contribution to the ecosystem you work within. That tradition has also helped build the web into a giant, free collaborative resource.
The marketing stream
Another strong tradition begins with multi-level marketing and loyalty programs. The web has enhanced the capacity of smart firms to build loyalty by engaging more deeply with customers and by interacting in more equal terms.
The social stream
Finally there is the tradition of social itself beginning with the micro-finance initiatives that were designed to replace development aid in what used to be called the third world. That tradition has informed open innovation, the large mobile ecosystems that flourished first in Kenya, and then crowdsourcing.
The Global Dawn social business infographic shows social business is a complex movement with deep roots and is anything but a fad:
Andy Hewitt, director of propositons, Global Dawn