Published on the IBM Social Business Insights Blog on March 10, 2015.

There is no doubt that the future is upon us and the rate of change we experience in technology and its impact on our daily lives are advancing rapidly. Technology has made it possible for us to connect, and now social media has made it possible to do it in a more organic, human way. Facebook and LinkedIn have been around for over a decade and Twitter almost seven years. Together, they’ve fundamentally changed how we engage with each other online – and opaque social technology like Snapchat and Secret are the next evolution in this area.

Millennials who grew up in a social world are entering the workforce and becoming active citizens. What happens next? Social business.

Social business is the next step in the evolutionary process in the day-to-day functions of digitally enabled organizations. Much in the same way that the Internet revolutionized how we all work in the era of e-business; social processes, technology, and mindsets will revolutionize how people in organizations connect, collaborate, and share knowledge.

With and despite social and other technological megatrends changing how we live our lives, how can we stay focused on being more people-centric—more human?

I share my perspectives in this TEDxUniversityofNevada talk.

The answer is as simple as it is complex. Because of advances in social, mobile and digital communication channels, society has the ability to share ideas quickly and the opportunity to build and iterate off the ideas of others. The more data we create—and we are creating exponentially more data each year—the more human the message must be in order to garner our precious attention.

In order for messages to resonate, they need to be relevant to the individual, which is forcing us to embrace the ancient art of storytelling and bringing the importance of relationship and empathy to the foreground. Information has been democratized.

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Michelle Killebrew