Bill Bittner

BrainTrust Query: Is 'Social Media for Business' an Oxymoron?

February 4, 2010

FROM RETAILWIRE:
As new marketing verbs like tweet, blog, and social networking permeate our thinking, we need to acquire a clarifying thought vocabulary that will allow us to grapple with emerging concepts and put the tools to appropriate and beneficial use. Is "Social Media for Business" an oxymoron?      [more...]

The Internet offers businesses a huge opportunity to cut their overhead by cooperating with one another. Take the maintenance of a product master for point of sale. If a group of businesses collaborated to share item descriptions, sales tax and deposit codes, product dimensions and weights, etc, it would save each of them time and effort. If retailers offered DSD vendors access to real time inventories online, it would cut store visit times (and loading dock tie-ups) in half because the vendor would carry into the store only what was needed. Retailers who don't compete may be willing to share promotion ideas or information on the latest vendor offers.

All these opportunities depend on a high degree of trust in the quality of work provided by the various participants. Members will want to have a monitoring mechanism in place and the ability to eject participants who are not contributing. Is this "business networking"? I don't know but it seems the efforts of many should reduce the effort for each individual.

I don't think the mechanisms have been introduced to encourage business cooperation. In some sense, this could be the role of various business groups. In addition to political representation and business meetings, the business group could also provide the Internet services that encourage cooperation.