Social Media is changing the very fabric of organizations, their communications and the way their consumers interact with them. Enterprise sociability is today an important criteria for job satisfaction amongst the current generation of job seekers. To add to this customers and consumers are seeking and making decisions through communities.

For an enterprise to be social they need to take a 360 degree view to being social. This means one can create social objectives to reach out to 3 categories that constitute their universe.

Employee Community – enterprises need to encourage employee communities to meet social objectives that relate to collaboration, innovation, training and knowledge management.

Customer Community – where enterprises can listen to conversations and get ideas for improvement along with the ability to increase sales, improve service and cross sell / up sell to their customer base.

Consumers and External Communities – These are prospects and users who have needs for products or services that are being produced, but are not being serviced by competitive brands. Similarly external communities exist where conversations are taking place on their competitors products alongside theirs.

So, the first step is for organizations to decide on the Social Intent. This should be followed with a plan and  roadmap for being social across all these three categories of communities.