Social Business By Design: Transformative Social Media Strategies for the Connected Company

Chapter 4

The Global Business Transition to Social Media

The widespread adoption of social media in most of the developed world is a familiar story to most of us and integral to widespread change in society and global culture. To fully understand why, it's necessary to examine the confluence of complex but deeply connected factors that are driving the move to social business:

1. The growth of the knowledge-based economy (Figure 4.1). The lion's share of the U.S. labor force has transitioned to service and knowledge work from industry and agriculture. And only knowledge has been growing strongly, with the service sector seeing much slower, although, steady, increases in share as well. As of 2011, over half of the work in developed countries is ...