As business trends shift, more consumers are doing their research before they are purchasing products and services. It's no surprise that they are turning to Google/Internet to educate themselves.
One of the most effective ways to educate and meet consumers where they are in the buying process is to build "social business platforms." This means building a web based education tool to answer consumers questions in one central website.
How They Work
The basic concepts behind most social business platforms are to provide your consumers with an easy to navigate user experience to find answers to their questions. These types of systems can vary depending on the use-case, but it normally looks something like this:
Consumer does a quick search query in Google and clicks on the topic they think will answer their question. Then it's your job to educate them with the answers to their question. This can mean allowing them to ask questions in a topic driven "forum" or search to an index of questions already answered by your expert staff.
In turn, this allows your potential consumers to educate themselves in one central place. This has a high probability to lead to a conversion/sale.
The Benefits to Social Business Platforms
In the battle for 1st place rankings on Google, social business platforms provide an avenue for Google to consistently index fresh, and relevant content on a daily basis. This inherently provides you with more probability to become a top search result on Google or any other search engine for that matter.
Allowing your consumers to see how you interact with the rest of your consumer base will build a sense of trust and transparency which is huge in today's marketplace. Here is a Ted talk by Mark Sheridan on how business is shifting to a more transparent economy.
Lastly, social business platforms have been known to increase employee productivity and other ROI benefits. Both Jive software and Socialcast have good resources for those areas.