If you want to be a Social Business you need to think of Social as "Infrastructure"

This post is based on a great Article published by McKinsey titled "How 'social intelligence' can guide decisions"

Here for a great example on how for Businesses Social Media / Social Collaboration / Social CRM is "Infrastructure" and the key to obtain value from it comes from its application to specific use case scenarios:

What are the phases - steps involved in using Data to inform a Company's strategy? And how do they differ in a Traditional versus a Social Enabled Business?

Phase	Traditional Approach	Social Enabled Approach
Data Identification	Research sources for Public Data (i.e. Census, publicly traded companies) and Proprietary Data such as primary research, analyst studies, etc.	Identification of public, vocal and influential subject matter experts, Advocates or Fans and the locations where they like to exchange / have the opportunity to influence others.
Data Gathering	Acquisition, assembly and normalization of data	Engagement of the groups identified above and tracking of the actions and reactions
Insight, Information Extraction	Traditional Statistical Analysis, Benchmarking, etc.	Data mining, sentiment analysis
Insight Delivery	Generation of huge comprehensive reports leaving it to the recipient to find and act on the gold nuggets	Subscription based micro delivery of insights in friendly and easy to share formats that facilitate discussion and action.

For Data Identification the Social Enabled Business:

• Is always monitoring the public locations where their area of interest is being discussed. 
• Is always identifying key participants in those conversations; particularly those that display the Maven, Connector and Leader traits. 

For Data Gathering the Social Enabled Business: 

• Is always Engaging the individuals identified above and tracking / measuring the actions / reactions those individuals have to their engagements as well as the Engagements from the competition. 

For Insight, Information Extraction the Social Enabled Business: 

• Is always mining the data, identifying deviations / new trends.

For Insight Delivery the Social Enabled Business: 

• Is continuously evaluating the micro insights extracted from the data, identifying new trends and discussing potential implications and generating action out of this. 

Clearly the above is only possible with a Business wide infrastructure that facilitates data capture, tracking of key customer (and non customer) relationships, programmatic delivery of messages, automated measuring of actions/reactions, data capture and mining, subscription based delivery of insights and content centric collaboration. This is only feasible if "Social" is an infrastructure level capability across the business and not individual appendages for silo units. 

What do you think? 

Filiberto Selvas