Ok, it flipped in my head and I can’t go back. Somewhere in the course of the last several weeks the conversation changed for us. We no longer provide social strategy. We stopped having the “social” conversation and began having the core business conversation. I don’t mean figuratively, like “hey, we are now business consultants,” but rather the real value proposition on how to move the dial for organizations from a core perspective. Social business is really becoming business value for us. Points in case:

• “We have X number of Facebook fans, what do we do with them? How do we create value?” It flipped when the conversation turned to “If your facebook fans are less than 1% of your customers, it isn’t very important” to “we need to start with the customer’s motivations for buying, engagement, and the catalysts for purchase. Social is one way to engage with them, but it has to be thought of in terms of how do we deliver a better value proposition. This wasn’t a theoretical, feel good strategy conversation as it went into some hard core discussion about commerce, measurement, customer insight, etc around monetizing these relationships and demonstrating value to the business. Social is a means to an end.

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