Social Media or Social Business?

(image from Shutterstock)

I’ve been going over the differences between the terms “social media,” and “social business” as I’m working on developing a new company site for Chess Media Group (which will launch soon).  My business partner Connie and I kept going back and forth debating on if we should call ourselves a “social media consultancy,” or a “social business consultancy.”  Connie actually brought this up and after thinking about it we decided that we are going to call ourselves a “social business consultancy.”  I’m not one for picking apart things based on semantics but in this case I really think it makes sense.  See, the whole goal of Chess Media Group is to focus on the business side of social media; we really want companies to see the business value of their social media efforts.  So why go with social business as opposed to social media?  Well there are a few reasons for this.

First of all, something to consider is that I rank pretty high on search engines for the terms such as “social media consultant,” “social media consulting,” and “social media consultancy” (on page 1).  As a result when people find me in search engines I can then refer them to the company site.  It’s a strategic decision to not target and brand the company for something that I am trying to own personally.  More importantly however…

What we refer to as “social media” has become much more than any type of media; when you think about everything that social media can be used for it’s apparent that it’s actually a shift in business that affects a company on many different levels.  “Media” in and of itself is usually designated for things such as print, tv, radio, and outdoor ads; social media is much more.  Social media can be used for:

• internal collaboration
• product development
• sales
• marketing
• customer service
• PR

It’s not just another channel to get a point across, it’s a new way to build and grow a business.  As a result, instead of calling ourselves a “social media consultancy” which implies we use “social media” as a channel to reach out to people; we went for “social business consultancy” which implies that we not only spend time on understanding a clients business while trying to affect business objectives,  but that we also use social media as a way to change how a business operates and interacts with each other and with the outside world.  Chess Media Group is not a social media consultancy; it’s a business consultancy that understands social media.

What do you think?  Social media or social business?