Social Business | The Infographic

The good guys over at GetSatisfaction have produced another interesting social commerce infographic – this time on the broader trend of “social business”, an umbrella- if nebulous – term that they use to bundle social commerce with social enterprise tools for collaboration, community and publishing.

Their headlines stat is that the market for social business services, software and enterprise tools with be worth $4.6bn by 2014.

Other key stats:

• According to the Jive social business index of 900+ US execs, 53% believe they have to adopt social business in order to not fall behind, and 57% expect social business to boost sales
• The tech industry is the leader in social business adoption (16% respondents), with healthcare and financial services in second position (11%)
• Current top priorities for social strategies are creating ROI measurement, and integrating social business tools and software into websites

If these stats are indicative of a general trend, it would seem that the business community currently sees – or wishes to see – social technology primarily as a sales and marketing tool, as opposed to an enterprise productivity tool.

Whilst this makes sense in the context of social commerce, we’d have thought collaboration and community tools were more adapted to streamlining and enhancing internal processes than selling and self-promotion.  It also strikes us that unless businesses are proficient with social technology used internally as an enterprise resource, they are unlikely to profit from it as a commercial resource.  Social is a mindset thing, unless you believe and walk the ‘we are smarter than me’ talk, then social makes no sense whatsoever.

Let’s Get Down to Social Business (click image for high resolution version)