Many people see technology as the problem behind the so-called digital divide. Others see it as the solution. Technology is neither. It must operate in conjunction with business economic political and social system.
Interest in business ethics courses has surged and student activities at leading business schools are more focused than ever before on making business serve long-term social values.
In the social business marketplace brands that hope to build loyal and growing communities do so most effectively when they demonstrate their core values and allow a community to build and engage around it.
In today's social business marketplace Facebook is one of the best places for nonprofits to be discovered and connect with a larger audience on the basis of shared values. So to get started a non-profit should launch a Facebook page and invite your existing real world community to connect your cause and their networks.
The social business marketplace is effectively forcing brands to engage with consumers on the basis of something that is meaningful to them. More often than not this takes the form of some core value that finds expression in a non-profit cause.
Perhaps the most effective way to describe the approach a brand must take is to think of themselves as social cartographers. By that I mean that brands must simultaneously inspire engage and maintain a series of conversations taking place within certain cultural landscape specific to their business goal.
In the coming years if not sooner social media will become a powerful tool that consumers will aggressively use to influence business attitudes and force companies into greater social responsibility - and I suggest move us towards a more sustainable practice of capitalism.
As a speaker business leader or marketer of any type the onus is now on each of us to become equally capable of communicating very personally with a seemingly endless number of people connected by social technologies.
What today's business reality makes clear is that brands cannot survive in a society that is failing economically socially ethically and morally.
The leverage and influence social media gives citizens are rapidly spreading into the business world.