With more than 900 million actively engaged users, it’s the largest community the world has ever known. Google search is not quite dead yet, but Facebook is where we spend our internet time – we discover, share, and connect like never before. And we spend a lot of internet time..
Facebook has no plans of slowing down at 900 million. Zuckerberg is likely eyeing at the 7 Billion odd global population. The mobile phone is how it now plans to enter our lives. The endless resources the IPO gives Facebook access to are probably going towards this.
Any marketer worth his salt wants to be on Facebook. If you are not where your consumers are, you are gone, finished, rendered irrelevant, nada. Moreover, if Facebook is where your customers are, maybe that’s where you want to be to deliver them service? So undoubtedly, the social phenomena of Facebook means everything to businesses.
But that’s not what social business is. Sure, it is part of social business, but not all of it.
Social business is the broader philosophy of using the social design of social media technology to break down all artificial barriers – those which exists inside the organization, as well as those between the business and its environment – prospects, customers, partners, and the larger market. Social business is more than Facebook, or even Twitter, or even Pinterest. It is about using the learnings of social media to alter the very design of organizations.
Being engaged in popular social media services like Facebook and interacting with the market is part of it – best described as social media marketing. But an equally important part is adapting it and making it work with business applications so that employees can share and connect and tap hidden synergies – that is social collaboration (that is the part HyperOffice focuses on). Facebook is just not geared for social collaboration.
So the Facebook IPO mean for social business? A reminder - a reminder to pull up your socks and make Facebook an important part of your marketing strategy. But an equally important reminder to start using business focused social tools and get some of that free flowing sharing working for your businesses.