PEST test your business for social?: Wiki litigation and the social web’s wider effects

* * Updated / corrected with thank to @johnniemoore * *

One of the recurring themes for us at iCrossing and our clients over the past year or so has been the way that the social web is should be thought of as a business issue first and marketing issue second.

An article about libel on The Lawyer website called “Virtual veractity” reinforces the importance of thinking outside of the marketing box when it comes to social media. It outlines the libel case against Simon Singh by the British Chiropractic Association and how in a number of important ways social media influenced the trial, from scrutiny and public discussion of the details by a significant online community of interest to the fact that “those following the case on the internet were able to demolish the central element of the British Chiropractic Association’s (BCA’s) case long before it was able to reach the courtroom.”

Image: If social media is re-writing the law, what does it mean for business? ((cc) Eflon)

We have seen the social web begin to change the way that politicians campaign and make laws, how the fourth estate, the media operates, and recently, with this case and in the de facto destruction of super-injunctions we are seeing the influence of a connected citizenry having a direct influence on how our legal system works.

The Lawyer article calls this “wiki litigation”.

When a business engages in planning its strategy, it often uses a variation of the PEST model: looking at how Political, Economic, Social and Technological environment is likely to change in the next five to ten years. The “S” in this analysis represents how demographic and cultural shifts (for instance an aging population or attitudes to corporations), but the social web should be considered in each of these areas.

Obviously, the considerations would be specific to a particular business, but here are some off-the-cuff generalisms by way of an example.

• Political: Will a connected electorate mean a change in the voting system, more direct democracy? Will that mean more or less regulation? Will this make politicians less prone to fad campaigns from Fleet Street, or more susceptible to single-issue campaigns from a web-mobilised electorate?
• Economic: Will social finance models like Zopa begin to change how the way you sell your product works? Does the acceleration of business models as edge ideas become mainstream (John Hagel and John Seely Brown’s Push The Power of Pull is the definitive work on this effect) mean your market will be more volatile, fragmented?
• Social: How will attitudes to the data you hold about customers change? How will the spread of digital literacy change the relationship between employees and their employers? How will people think of transparency? What will the tolerance of response time to customer service via web services be? Will your customers think less of you if they cannot access your services or information in the social networks they use?
• Technology: Before we even get to mobile web access and geo-location as strong emerging technologies, existing social computing tools like wikis, Twitter (and its ilk) and other ways of sharing and collaborating are establishing themselves as alternative ways to get things done in organisations.

For a long time the question that was most frequently asked about the web was “what is the ROI?” It is becoming very clear, as the social web disrupts so many aspects of our society that the question should be “what is the business case for social media?” Even more, “what could the business implications be of ignoring social media?”