Get real. Get Social.

One of the tenets I follow in Building a Social Business is the importance of focusing on real business value. Personally, I’m quite comfortable in acknowledging the incredible contribution social is having to the way we work – I see it every day. But there is no better way to convince a sceptical CEO to invest time and money in the adoption of social technology and processes than talking about numbers in a P&L! Making the benefits of social ‘real’ is often the key to securing that precious commodity: CEO-level support for social business-building.

Fortunately there are some great stories out there to assist us in making social real. I find myself frequently citing giffgaff, a UK mobile service provider, who have used social technology to take out the cost of providing a service support function. Instead they have built a ‘gamified’ forum, relying on the crowd – their customers – to provide rapid and extensive assistance to each other. This is something that has broad relevance to all large corporates. If giffgaff can do this, at what point do you start challenging the need for your IT help-desk?

And if you needed more in your pursuit of making social real, why, McKinsey’s, that bastion of the corporate establishment, have produced a cracker of a report laying it all out for you.

All this helps you (and hopefully your CEO) realise that, in essence, social is a way of extracting latent value that has been built into the Internet. It’s an enabling technology, an enabling philosophy, that overlays valuable networks of knowledge and relationships on top of the connections that exist in the Web. Clever organisations like giffgaff are exploiting this to gain competitive advantage. Why wouldn’t you?

So, you’ve no excuse, now. Go upstairs and make it real for your CEO. You’ll be a huge step closer to building that social business.

photo:  reynermedia