Using social media to turn a company into a social business

In Asia, as in the West, social media's explosion in recent years has been due in large part to its ability to help consumers make better buying decisions faster.

Through social media, consumers can browse product reviews, consult blogs or even watch demonstrations on YouTube. And, if no information is available about a particular product, they can directly ask their network, or people at large, for advice and recommendation.

Over time, a consumer-induced body of collective knowledge and intelligence about products and services has organically grown that is easy to access and highly advantageous to consumers' decisions.

In the same way that collective intelligence helps people make better and faster decisions in choosing the right product for their needs, businesses are starting to realise they can create significant competitive advantage if they can access and leverage the right business know-how from their ecosystem at the right time.

Organisations and businesses have a lot in common with people. They live and thrive in their ecosystems comprising myriads of interconnected networks: clients, suppliers, employees, customers, partners, and so on.

Businesses, like people, also engage in their own daily interactions: buying, designing, manufacturing, marketing and selling the next product.

Yet, current social media channels offer limited capability for creating business knowledge, intelligence, and the know-how that could give businesses a better business decisions (BBD) advantage.