Every business should be social. Everyone should be forming into empowered communities and revolutionising the way the business operates. Innovation should come from everywhere. Being social is JUST good business. Businesses are boundary-less and customers and employees should be talking openly.
Anyone else heard stuff like this? Those are just the statements I’ve seen in the last 4 days. Unfortunately when I saw them I didn’t realise I was going to write this so I can’t tell you who they came from but they are all from Twitter.
I know lots of people who are very passionate about social media and the impact it can have on organisations and they range in their fervour from the table thumping ‘if they don’t get it they should just join the Amish and move out of the way’ to ‘if they don’t get it then that’s cool and I can take advantage of it’. Whilst these people are often impassioned the conversation doesn’t always get to the ‘why’ and how one could build a compelling argument for undertaking fairly significant organisational change towards the mythical ‘Social Enterprise’ at the end of the rainbow.
Then I had an “Italian Job” moment and this post is the result of that idea….
My idea is to ask anyone and everyone to share either research or case studies on the success of social within organisations. The definitions of success can be varied across commercial, engagement, innovation, collaboration or anything that would make a compelling argument to someone with positive intent towards social but needs evidence to get them over the line. I will happily follow-up on any links, journal articles or similar. I have full academic library access at present so happy for them to be in expensive journals. Points will be deducted for case studies based on organisations that have started as social but there could be some interesting outcomes so deductions will be minimal 
I will share any content I manage to pull together with anyone who comments on this post (as long as you put your e-mail address in the e-mail field) but thought this would be a good opportunity to use the wisdom of crowds to try to gather something empiric to help the impassioned folks (and me) make a compelling argument. What I have in mind is information that you could present to someone who has the ‘in God we trust, everyone else bring data to the table’ mindset and convince them. No big ask then!
It will also be an interesting crowd sourcing experiment and my sense is it will either fly or be the least commented post ever….up to you really!
