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

What Then Is Social?

Everything these days receives the label of “social” as long as sharing or communication is enabled in some way. There is some connection: e-mail is certainly social, as are mobile phones, and in fact most legacy communication technologies are social in some way. So what's the difference?

First, let's look at what exactly makes social media social, and then we'll look at social business to see if it's different. Structurally two fundamental aspects must be present for something to be considered social media:

• The social graph. This consists of a user profile that identifies a person and, optionally (but typically), a list of everyone that person is connected with. In other words, it's who a person is and those others he or ...