Yesterday, I watched a video interview of David Armano talking about what's on the horizon for Social Business.

It reminded me of the time when I was invited to conduct a series of 1:1 video taped interviews with Australia's leading eBusiness thinkers and vendors (e.g. The CEO of IBM Australia). It was back in the time when eBusiness was being promoted by IBM and a number of others in the management consulting industry as a whole new way of doing business.

Those interviews were published as a collection of interactive CD ROM's. Today they would be made available on a web site or through YouTube... which only goes to prove the Internet is more about a revolution in distribution and delivery than content and UX.

By the end of those interviews, after listening patiently to the endless possibilities of how this technology was going to change the world of business, and then estimating the probabilities for market adoption (once cultural factors and countless other barriers to entry had been factored into the equation) my personal position on the value of the eBusiness revolution to businesses large and small was simply this:

The only e in Business is expenditure.

So if you are not using this eBusiness technology to deliver more with less then you were missing the point.

After all, why set up a new on-line store when you haven't explored every opportunity to use this technology to optimise your own internal processes and systems?

Why waste money on exposing your organisational inefficiencies to the rest of the world when you can achieve lots of quick wins internally while minimising the risk and significantly reducing your costs of doing business?

Listen to some authorities on the subject and you soon discover that, much like eBusiness was just over a decade ago, Social is the future of everything in business.

This of course should come as no surprise. Fashions come and go but the underlying technologies (and the ideas that drive them) tend to just receive face lifts and repositioning statements "to keep them in the moment".

So just as the latest family sedan or pick up truck sits bold and beautiful on a 30-40 year old chassis and drive train design, and the tired old, creaking technology stack that is Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence is being dusted off and rebranded as Big Data and Social Analytics, so too has the 3-Tiered architecture of the CRM and the eBusiness platform received a face lift that repositions them as the new platform for doing Social Business.

The problem of course is the underlying premise of this new Social Business revolution is probably even less convincing than that of the original eBusiness package.

After all, what is the activity of doing business, of exchanging goods and services, even in an age of Rainbow Brands, Big Box Retailers and eCommerce, if not social?

How does one redefine the future of business as doing business "the old fashioned way"? but with technology, and not people, providing the competitive edge?

You rebrand the retail experience... today everybody is in So.Biz!

Yesterday was about counting the pennies... today it's all about being the next Hollywood

So what does the rebirthing of eBusiness and CRM as the new So.Biz tell us about the strategic opportunity at hand today?

Let's begin with the underlying So.Biz mantra. The world of business is about conversations.

A cursory hour spent on Twitter of Facebook will reveal there are only 4 types of conversations doing the rounds in the world of Social Media.

They can be neatly summarised as...

I'm...! You?
You're...!? Me!
They're...!? We!
We're...! Them?

So, for example, the I'm...! You? would translate into I'm watch my favourite show on TV! How about You? or I'm reading about Big Data! How about You?

(By the way if you can point me to anything more deep and meaningful than this type of dialogue then please do.)

Now we can map how these conversations play out between prospects (i.e. Customers) and business (Large or small) diagrammatically.

As you can see most of the time is spent listening rather than conversing.

We also see that despite the urgent calls for Chief Conversation Officers, Chief Social Officers and the like the reality organisations have actually being doing business this way for a long, long time. With Sales, Support, Service, Advertising and Marketing doing most of the listening and the talking.

Which probably suggests that, just as the eBusiness revolution was more about doing more with less rather than a new way of doing business, so too will So.Biz be about improving internal efficiencies (i.e. doing more with less) than a introducing a radical, new way of doing business across these pre-existing business silos.

The winners will use this technology to significantly improve their internal communication flows across silo's (e..g Sales and Support, Sales and Service, Service and Support, Sales and Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Service and Marketing) and then with their suppliers and distribution/sales partners rather than exposing their dysfunctional internal dialogue to the rest of the world via Twitter or Facebook.

I say that simply because in the end business may be conducted tactically in a frenzy of conversations but at the strategic level it is all about relationships.

Put simply, the winners won't be using this technology to migrate low value and low need relationships into high value, high need strategic partnerships, they'll be using it to significantly reduce their costs of doing business with these low value customers and to keep their Strategic Partners close.

Copyright 2012 Digital Partners Pty Limited. All Rights Reserved.