On social business, social media and social systems

On the topic of social media and social business (which is covered in subjects such as ecommerce and strategic management), I want to express my views as follows:

a. Social business is fundamenally different from a profit-making organization; and organizations that claim to be a non-profit-making organization can actually be highly profit-maximization orientated. A social business is a social entity "which seek to manage relationships" (Checkland and Holwell, 1998). A social business practises marketing 3.0 to its stakeholders (and not just its customers); it manages their stakeholders' experience in their dealing with the business. In the process, it appeals to the social, emotional and spiritual needs of its stakeholders. A social business needs to make profit to survive though profit-maximization is not the main objective of its business.
b. The social media ecosystem that we now has raised our interest to adopt social business as our guiding business metaphor. But, how many of us are still convinced by M. Friedman's view of business as a profit-making machine, with senior management of business being shareholders' agent? I would say that most of us still are.
c. Just because companies participate in the social media ecosystem to run their business, including to conduct their marketing activities, do not transform them from profit-making organizations to become social businesses. For example, it is totally feasible to conduct shareholder value-driven marketing activities in the social media ecosystem; such marketing activities are still very much guided by traditional marketing thinking (ie, with features such as company controlled messages, company initiated marketing communication and ROI-driven marketing efforts). Traditional marketing is not social marketing (e.g. marketing 3.0), but is still social marketing (re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_marketing).
d. A social business can operate without the social media ecosystem; however, social media ecosystem is a very suitable habitat for social businesses to live in, because their highly emotional and spiritual approach of management is compatible with the climate  in the social media ecosystem. The social media ecosystem is democratic, engaging, personalized, and community-based. These attributes are the characteristics of its climate. I would also say that social media technologies and platforms are highly relevant IT enablers to strengthen the business model of social business. [This is not to deny that there are also lots of traditional marketing as well as contextual marketing activities in the social media ecosystem.]

The concept of social business, as formulated by Yunus, could be further developed by incorporating the notion of social system from Ackoff (see Ackoff and Garajedaghi (1996).). This is considered useful to enhance our skills to manage a social business. In Ackoff's view, a social system should embrace the goal of development, not growth; a social system has 3 organizing problems: how to (a) serve their own purposes [the self-control issue], (b) the purposes of their parts [the humanization issue], and (c) the purposes of the larger systems of which they are part [the environmentalization issue]. Addressing these 3 problems in Ackoff's soft systems thinking are vital in a social system.  We have already got quite a lot of ideas of how to run profit-making enterprises and create sustainable competitive advantage in different competitive landscapes. We now need to study more what the implications are to run a social business as a social system in a globalized social media ecosystem, because running a business as a profit-making machine is more problematic in this social media ecosystem. For instance, we need to study what exactly are the advantages of social businesses to conduct social marketing, such as marketing 3.0. In studying the topic, we need to examine the following pairs of concepts in this specific research setting:

a. social business vs profit-making enterprise
b. organizations as social systems vs organizations as profit-machine machines
c. social marketing vs shareholder-value driven marketing (ie traditional marketing)
d. social media marketing vs marketing via traditional media
e. social good vs consumer goods

References

1. Ackoff, R.L. (1981) Creating the corporate future, Wiley.
2. Ackoff, R.L and Garajedaghi, J. (1996) "Reflections on Systems and their Models: Research Paper", Systems Research, vol. 13(1), pp. 13-23.
3. Checkland, P. and Holwell, S. (1998) Information, Systems and Information Systems, Wiley.
4. Kotler, P., Kartajaya, H., and Setiawan, I. (2010) Marketing 3.0, John Wiley and Sons.
5. Morgan, G. (1986) Images of Organization, Sage.
6. On social business: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_business
7. On social good: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social_good.asp
8. On social media marketing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_marketing
9. On social media 2011 (video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxzQPmrkCyM&feature=related