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Getting here to this point, to this piece of content you’re reading has been a long trip.
[flexy_breadcrumb]These thoughts have been in my head for some time now, constantly evolving and changing shape, just like water does when placed in different bottiglias.
This Eureka moment has been bubbling up inside my brain since 2010.
Business 3.0 Definition by Florin Muresan
Business 3.0 is when all business assets of a company start communicating with the business operator, telling them what things need their immediate attention and offering a plan of action.
What does this mean?
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Imagine if you could have the digital assets of your business talk to you about the problems they see. They’d turn from mere assets which simply exist, to “living things” which tell you what ails them.
If it can be dreamt, if it can be imagined, I think it can be done.
Reading this for the first time might sound like Science Fiction.
It is not. Many components (more on this available in this article) of what could one day become Business 3.0 as a whole, are already being developed and most of them have already made their way to the market.
Different tools from Squirrly, Shopify and Google Analytics already offer a glimpse into Business 3.0.
So what would Business 3.0 Look Like for Your Business?
Imagine you could keep a clear mind, thinking about the great challenges you’re facing within your business or your industry.
Well… heh heh… now imagine doing all that while NOT being forced to constantly check everything in the business yourself. If you’re playing on a higher level: imagine if you didn’t even have to regularly do manual progress checks for your sub-managers.
Your mind, your attention could be focused only on the tasks that matter to you then.
If there’s an employee who drives your organization forward, yet the person feels under-appreciated, your HR system would instantly tell you about this.
What if your system could properly identify when it’s the right time to praise someone for their efforts and give them bonuses? You’d have all the data at your finger tips and then you could make a decision, without having to track and react on the initial info yourself. You’d just make the decision and the action that matters.
If there’s a problem with your Facebook Pages, there would be a system that would simply tell you of all the problems and suggest next actions for people in your organization.
If there’s a problem with the Sales Pages (vital pages for sales in your website).. something like: customers get stuck, they leave the page in high spikes all of a sudden, buttons don’t work (action isn’t triggered) then you’d instantly know of this because those pages would “tell you” they’ve detected anomalies.
If the newly released pages don’t work well on one type of screen, it could also tell you that.
If you’re being link-spammed by SEO spammers, you’d know before Google takes you out of their index and you lose valuable traffic.
Your Logo could tell you that it thinks the current design is not appealing enough compared to its shape, size and colors from over a year ago.
(there are so many ways you could expand this)
Now what if your Business was smart enough that it knew how to prioritize all messages according to importance, departments, domains (in case of a Holacracy)?
It could even build dashboards for your teams, so everyone would know the challenges their roles should be concerned with… maybe even easily distributing work to everyone for everything related to the proper maintenance of all your business operations.
You’d easily minimize risks this way.
Why this Business 3.0 Definition and not any other?
I knew I wanted to write about this. I think that tech enables us to transform the businesses that we create and the businesses we manage.
Business 1.0 – basic commerce. As old as time itself. The very static, old school business. I have something to sell. You’d better buy it.
Business 2.0 – the Social Business and also the Social Technology for Business. It happened due to Web 2.0, where customers became empowered and could easily influence brands and decisions through forums, blogs, and social media. As for the social tech, the APIs and open platforms have enabled businesses to grow further by collaborating with other businesses and transferring data, thus providing better services for end customers.
Basically, Business 2.0 started being a bit more open and it became collaborative. Lean Business, Agile Development, 2.0 Brand Management have all included the opinions of all the Humans that the organizations were doing business with.
How can we find out more about what people need and deliver better stuff for them? How can we involve them in the conversation?
Many leaders in Business 2.0 have started thinking along the lines of: “Marketing must become a conversation between the buyer and your company about the story you can help them win.”
Everything became collaborative. It was necessary, because organizations began struggling to adapt and survive in the long run.
However, with all the many things impacting a business these days, business owners are becoming more and more tired. Also: more and more out of focus. There’s just too many things that need their attention.
Business 3.0 – Businesses with a Soul. That’s how I like to put this, but it’s most likely Businesses with a Brain. The amount of data that each business collects (or can collect) is just HUGE. It borders on the un-believable.
Businesses were static. Then they became open and social. Now they’ll add a layer of intelligence atop all that.
Imagine if a business system could sip through all those massive amounts of data, read it, “think about it” and then come up with:
- ideas
- projects. proposed next actions, with a real plan.
- implementations. (meaning that it could start implementing changes right away, without need of human operators)
If all the components of the business could start “waking up”, checking their vitals, and coming up with action plans and implementations, you’d have a lot LESS stress on your mind and you could keep a clear mind. A clear mind for things that really matter. Not for every single detail.
Of course, for some of these things, you could come up with better fixes, better solutions than the business system itself, but… generally speaking: you wouldn’t be innovating every single aspect of your work, anyway. You’d come to the conclusion that it doesn’t make sense.
Your innovation, your brain power should be for those things that only you can do. All the rest could be handled by the respective business components themselves.
It’s a natural evolution, and it makes 100% sense with the Web 3.0 definition I have provided many years ago. You can see the Web 3.0 ideas here if you wish to study them.
Link here for the Web 3.0 Paper published by Florin Muresan (opens in a new tab)
So what is Florin Muresan doing about this other than giving a Business 3.0 Definition?
Hmm.. let’s see:
At the moment I am tackling the Marketing side of Business 3.0
Most companies I’m seeing, mentoring, advising, etc. have Marketing problems. Most of them are struggling with marketing.
Also, given my expertise in Digital Marketing it makes a lot of sense that I would start here.
I’m creating Business 3.0 Marketing Tools. All of these tools that I’m building over at Squirrly have embedded assistants in them. They are systems which assist the human operators in coming up with better action plans for solving marketing problems that these tools help bring to light.
So yes… these Assistant Software are already managing to go through a lot of data (each for their particular field and purpose) and tell the human operator where there are current challenges and how to overcome them.
Then the human operator decides what they want to do, based on all those trains of thought built up by the software.
The system has the data. It then takes the data, reads it and suggests next actions and new plans for furthering the goals of the Business.
Business 3.0 in a minimal state. It’s just for marketing at the moment. But it’s getting more and more developed with every passing quarter.
What next?
- try some of the tools developed by the Squirrly Company to experience the early days of Business 3.0 yourself.
- come up with your own list of awesome Business 3.0 implementations. Now that you know the definition and the concept, you can dream your own Business 3.0 systems and how they could benefit you.
- spread the idea. Hopefully other creators will join and we could all make Business 3.0 become a reality sooner, rather than later.
