Does Your Company Get Social Business?

Over on CMSWire, Oscar Berg (@oscarberg) posted an article describing 5 signs that your company doesn’t ‘get’ Social Business.  Social Business was the theme of Lotusphere 2012 and it seemed like everyone ‘got’ it there, but I’m sure there are a lot of companies still struggling with what it means to be a Social Business.

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Here are Oscar’s 5 signs that you may not be a social business:

1. Social Media is used as a broadcast channel.  So all those companies that think their website should be just be brochureware will probably follow the same path in the social realm.  Being social means having conversations, engaging customers, etc. Brochureware is a one-way conversation.
2. Organizational change is used to boost worker productivity.  Here the focus is on shaping the organization through management structure and ignoring the informal networks that build within a company.  If your organization uses org chart shifting as a way to deal with being competitive, then maybe they don’t understand what a social business is.
3. Teamwork is streamlined at the expense of networking.  So your company has put in the lastest and greatest team oriented software, which allows members of the team to share content, tasks, etc.  While this is good, is it coming at the expense of interdependence of other teams or individuals who contribute outside the team structure?  Looking at just teamwork misses the boat on these extra-team relationships.
4. Knowledge workers are kept on a tight leash.  How many times have I seen this?  Lots.  At a company I was working with recently, they implemented a new social system to get the conversation started.  But then they crippled it by putting so many restrictions on who could use it, what you could say, etc.  Usefulness of the site is almost nil now.
5. Customer services is not treated as core business.  To me, this one came out of left field.  But I guess, if you are outsourcing customer service, you really don’t understand how to engage customers to get quality feedback. Oscar suggests that instead of outsourcing customer service, you should “put all your people in customer service. Stop seeing customer service as an organizational unit and see it for what it really is: the services that you provide to the customer to ensure the best possible customer experience.”  I like that suggestion.

Do you see these signs at your company?