From the Living Room to the World: Social Business Unpacked (Part 4 of 8)

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Hi, this is Tony McWilliams, and I’m here with my daughter.

Hi, and I’m Lindey Duckworth, and I’m with my dad.

Well, back to Social Business 2.0. Some people would say that Tom’s Shoes, which started online out of an apartment, would be Social Business 1.0, but that when they moved into the anchor stores of the mall, that that’s when they become more of a Social Business 2.0 because then they got into the retail market, you know, the full-blown retail concept. Hashtag market. And as a matter of fact, their growth was significant when they went into the stores, into the anchor stores and retail stores. It not only had significant business growth, but also significant social outreach growth.

2.0 also moves the social mission measurably forward, but once again, the earnings, even though there’s shoes that are actually sent to people and children in need, the earnings are reserved for employees and profits that are generated for retailers and that sort of thing. So that’s where the earnings are.

What we have to get into next is Social Business 3.0, and that’s really where we’re heading. I call it the genius and the goodness of Social Business 3.0. These other social businesses have their place. They do great work. They reach out. They’ve tapped the market. They’re getting the job done. They’re funding what they need to fund. More power to them.

Yeah, doing good in the world. Exactly. But the Social Business 3.0 is what we want to cover next.

Before I go into the Social Business 3.0, I really need to revisit the Sam Castro story and the Manna Relief story. Sam not only had started the nonprofit organization that we talked about recently, and that organization has sent various nutrition to 90 countries of the world, and with the help of other distribution companies and nonprofits like Convoy of Hope, which we’ve mentioned before, they get the job done. They were also at that time focused only on the funding that could be generated via a charity donor model, and that proved to be disappointing and really short on sustainability.

And when you’re feeding kids sustainability, if you do not have sustainability, their lives remain at a level of danger. And so Sam knew that that had to change. Now, they still take donations. They still have that model in place, but they do not put all their eggs in that basket. They don’t dare, not if they’re really going to make an impact on the 7 million children who die every year from malnutrition.

That’s when Sam not only was doing the research to know about Social Business 1.0, which I covered, and Social Business 2.0, which I also covered, but he started to realize that they needed to do something called Social Business 3.0 because it has a dynamic connected to it that is not the same as 1.0 and 2.0, and that’s what we need to talk about next.

Okay, what is Social Business 3.0?