The Humanization of Business: Currency of Caring

The concept of humanizing business is something I’m a big believer in. It might be better thought of as re-humanizing business though. Social media is taking us back to the Mom & Pop era, where you had to care about your community if you wanted to have a healthy business.

The shift now is away from mass media, mass marketing and mass production, towards something, as Maddie Grant who just finished writing Humanize with Jamie Notter describe as more human:

Social media succeeded by abandoning the traditional mindset and assumptions of our machine-based organizations, and instead embracing ideas that are much more consistent with what it means to be human. In social media, relationships matter. So does trust. So do things like meaning, humor, transparency, authenticity, and creativity. Social media is built on the principle that control is a thing of the past, and that the results you get are not always the ones that you were seeking when you started. Those principles are much more aligned with what it means to be human, than with what makes machines work well. That is fundamentally why social media has been so explosive. We like being human. We can’t help it. When we get access to something that lets more of our humanity come out, we are drawn to it. That is why we are flocking to social media.

There is more social than media in social media. Humanization is a term to get used to hearing.