What Managers Really Think About Social Business

1. For more information about SAP mentors, see M. Finnern, “SAP Mentor Program,” SAP Community Network (blog), November 15, 2007, http://scn.sap.com; and “SAP Mentor Initiative FAQs,” accessed May 25, 2012, https://wiki.sdn.sap.com

2. As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte Consulting LLP and Deloitte Services LP, which are separate subsidiaries of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.

3. D.M. Smith et al., “Predicts 2010: Social Software Is an Enterprise Reality,” Gartner Research, December 3, 2009.

4. D. Kiron, interview with Andrew McAfee, “What Sells CEOs on Social Networking,” February 7, 2012, http://tablet.mitsmr.com.

5. G. Tay, “Ask Five Questions to Determine Whether to Deploy Social Software Bottom-Up or Top-Down,” Gartner Research, January 20, 2011.

6. Of course, social business activities can be valuable in many ways. It is our belief that social business activities in these four areas have the potential to generate substantial value.

7. E. von Hippel, S. Ogawa and J.P.J. de Jong, “The Age of the Consumer-Innovator,” MIT Sloan Management Review 53, no. 1 (fall 2011): 27-35.

8. S. Nambisan and P. Nambisan, “How to Profit From a Better ‘Virtual Customer Environment,’” MIT Sloan Management Review 49, no. 3 (spring 2008): 53-61. For an analysis of Threadless and social media, see D. Hinchcliffe and P. Kim, “Social Business by Design: Transformative Social Media Strategies for the Connected Company” (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012). For more details about Lego’s experience, see Y.M. Antorini, A.M. Muñiz, Jr. and T. Askildsen, “Collaborating With Customer Communities: Lessons From the Lego Group,” MIT Sloan Management Review 53, no. 3 (spring 2012): 73-79.

9. J. Hagel, “Pull Platforms for Performance,” February 20, 2012, http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com.

10. Providing clear guidance about communications external to a business can be tricky, especially in regulated industries like health care and financial services. Too much guidance can put a damper on social business activities. “If I ask an organization for their social media policy, and I get back a 50-page document,” says Andrew McAfee, “that might as well just say, we’d prefer it if you don’t use social media.” Even in unregulated industries, too much oversight can cast a shadow on innocent interactions. Keri Pearlson described a recent meeting with a colleague and two representatives from a large technology company. Her colleague tweeted that she and Pearlson were at a lunch meeting, naming the company but not the individuals. When the representatives returned to work, the office was buzzing about who was speaking without authorization about the company. Staff had been monitoring information flows from Twitter about the company and had seen the tweet from Pearlson’s colleague.

11. M. White and B. Briggs, “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for Digital Business,” Deloitte, 2012.

i. Social media is how people get together virtually to accomplish outcomes. Social networks are formal descriptions of groups of people who congregate in a social medium. Social software is the set of tools that gives people in a social network the means for automation, virtualization, scale and abstraction.

ii. Not all social business activities will produce mutually useful connections between individuals. In some cases, it may be beneficial to diminish certain connections between staff or with some customers.

iii. Other uses of “social business” might refer to organizations or to economic systems that promote some notion of social welfare. For an example of the latter, see M. Yunus, “Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs” (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010).

iv. See F. Gossieaux and E. Moran, “The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media” (New York: McGraw Hill, 2010); and A.J. Bradley and M.P. McDonald, “The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees” (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).