Social business vs. social media

Last week I was fortunate to join Social Media Club San Francisco for an discussion regarding “Social Media vs. Social Business, What’s the Difference?”

A meaningful difference between the terms exist – parsing the terms gives us a good place to start. Separate the adjective in common from the nouns and we’re left with “media vs. business”. Few would argue that those two terms are synonymous. Media are communication channels and content. Business consists of commercial operations.

Add “social” back in – or a different modifier like “digital” or “global” – then you have terms describing more specifically focused concepts.

Social media channels and concepts have been around for a handful of years, while the uptake of social business is just starting and will continue to rise.

You can read summaries of our discussion in San Francisco here and here. I think most of the discussion was captured in tweets. We’ll also be continuing the discussion to some extent on Thursday May 26, during a session at BlogWorld Expo NY called “Making Sense of Social Business” with Virginia Miracle, Ben Edwards, Chris Heuer, and me.

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