Interesting how "Social First" is being discussed in mainstream magazines like this one.

"Social First" is where the whole of your business moves to using social media both internally and externally.  Why would you do that?  Because it enables far greater efficiency and effectiveness than current non social and non digital processes.

It would be "usual" to start in the Sales department where you can get a 30% increase in incremental, so new, revenue, which then enables the project to self finance.  Sales should be self-sufficient in their own leads (in addition to whatever the rest of the business wants to create) as well as having the additional 30% revenue.

Once you have transformed your sales team to social, you can move the rest of the business; Human Resources, Marketing, Customer Service, Finance, Procurement etc etc to social.  Stripping out cost and increasing efficiency and effectiveness as you go.

It's Digital Transformation and Business Process Re-engineering all rolled into one.  The difference between this and say a program from a "Management Consultant" is that they just strip out cost and talk about efficiency.   This is different as it's about increasing sales at the same time.  If you see a Management Consultancy talk about actually increases sales then let me know.

Another business case of "social first" is the enablement of the employees to social.

For example, we were recently in Singapore and looking out the window we spotted the Singtel building.  So with regard to Singtel, let's look at the Business Case for "social first" all employees.

Singtel has 35,000 followers on Twitter, which isn't bad, but when you think they have 28,000 employees and 4 million subscribers, they should have over 4 million followers.  It just proves that the current policy they have of using corporate marketing just isn't working.  Nobody is interested.  Well 35,000 people are interested but 4 million subscribers are not.

If we empowered 10% of the employees and they all only had 100 followers, Singtel would have 280,000 followers.  It should be possible to empower 50% of the employees, would give is 1.4 Million followers and that assumes the employees only have 100 followers.  Assuming each employee had 500 followers, this would give Singtel 7 million followers.

7 Million people who know and love the employees and so are highly likely to share the insightful and authentic content.  Note, this is not a channel to push corporate content, we have already proved this does not work.

With 30% incremental revenue increase and a massive presence on social media, you can see there is a clear monetary reason why companies are doing this.

Plus there are other reasons that while cannot be measured can have a massive impact.  

Maybe time to investigate "social first"?