The real value of social media

Jon Mell outlines how to properly engage with social networking platforms to derive true business benefit

A social business is an organisation with a culture and systems that encourage networks of people to create business value. Not likes, not followers: business value. Social media is of course valuable in your marketing strategy but organisations that embrace social media across all their business processes benefit beyond the hard-to-measure "likes" or "favourites".

Social media has transformed all aspects of business. Firstly, information is being created and shared at unprecedented rates.

We have democratised publishing, with 140 characters or 10 seconds of video becoming the norm. The ability to forward content to others at the click of a button or tap of a finger has massively expanded the volume of information available and its reach. With more than three billion entries on a social media platform made per day, this "knowledge economy" has grown beyond recognition.

Information pertaining to the views and activities of people online is far more accessible, whether this is from the guy in the basement of your company with an idea of how to cut 10 per cent from the bottom line or crucial product feedback from one of many customers. Businesses can get visibility of the sentiment, activities, performance and behaviour of large numbers of people.

Organisations are becoming more transparent. Probably most employees are engaged with social media, both internally and externally to the company, and they expect organisations to engage with them authentically, as people rather than a serial number.

The day of the bland corporate face is over, and command-and-control authority structures do not work for the new generation of workers.

Leaders have to rethink the importance of mutual trust, employee empowerment and engagement, responsiveness and authenticity. Companies are updating their designs, policies, operating principles and business processes to empower people while still protecting the enterprise.

Social media is the future of how modern enterprises work, and the time to act is now. Social media has become the new production line for the information age. Your competition is likely to be improving employee engagement, productivity and innovation by applying collective intelligence from the entire organisation to the biggest challenges, as well as getting into the minds of their customers through social media analytics.

Deploy an enterprise social platform across your workforce to allow you to access expertise more quickly, and embed social media into your day-to-day processes. Energise advocacy in your customer base by delivering an exceptional digital experience and integrating your web presence into social media communities.

Finally, take advantage of crowdsourcing, with both customers and employees, and integrate this into your key processes from product development to marketing to services and sales.

Get under the skin of what drives performance in your organisation and apply lessons from behavioural science to hiring decisions. You can start to predict who will be successful in your company and in which roles.

Using analytics, understand the next best action for both customers and your employees to take, analysing how they engage with you on a social platform. Aim for a market segment of one person.

Trust people. Evaluate how your organisation works and look at the operational and management policies. Ask employees for their input using a crowdsourcing model, and proactively educate and train your employees.

Embed social media in tools that people already use; this can help avoid "adoption" issues. And ensure that this is all underpinned by security, privacy and governance controls, pre-emptively addressing any regulatory issues.

Organisations that follow this pattern will be able to point to new processes and ways of working that deliver measurable value to both customer and employee – and are far more effective than a simple "like" or a retweet.

Jon Mell is UK social business leader at IBM