Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business | Fast Company

IBM is moving itself and its clients well beyond social media into a new era of collaboration, insight sharing, and lead generation it calls social business.

It takes extraordinary chutzpah to promote a vision before it can be fully realized by your audience let alone your company. IBM did just that in 1997 when it introduced the notion of e-business. Fourteen years later, it is doing it again with a concept they call socialbusiness. Given its prescience about e-business, a concept that radically transformed how companies buy and sell their products, it is hard to dismiss their latest idée fixe.

That said, getting your arms around this grandiose idea is not easy. Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM, spent the better part of an hour with me explaining the ins and outs while providing specific examples of how IBM is testing various social business approaches both internally and externally. In the end, I came away with these seven reasons why just about every company should be thinking about becoming a social business.