I've tried several times to build a model that I can use in presentations to help describe a social business. The graphic above is my latest attempt and I think I may have something to work with this time. A social business can apply the tools and processes to both internal and external activities with significant benefit from both. The tools themselves are not particularly different, at least not at present. I do believe though that this is at best the first generation of the tools and that we will see a significant evolution over the next few years. I think that over time we will see this list of social tools merge into what we currently call enterprise applications, maybe in fact they become socially enabled enterprise applications. We're already seeing this for customer facing tools that are merging into current CRM apps. To get to the scale we will need for enterprise class tools there really isn't an alternative to this progression. Some of the platform offerings already encompass several types of tools in a flexible package, combining blog's, wiki's, community management and microblogs and other collaboration tools. They're basically standalone though and that inhibits realizing all the value out of their use IMHO.
What would embedded social apps (or maybe the term is socially enabled apps) look like? Building from the current apps foundation I think the following is a credible start:
