Carfi describes the enterprise journey to being social as a five-stage process-traditional, experimental, operational, seeing real results and finally, being a fully-social, fully-engaged organization. The path to being social can be defined by organizational steps, but it's a process that takes years.

"Organizations may aggregate to the fifth step of being fully engaged," he says, "but different parts of the organization, like marketing, support or HR, will be at different stages at different times during the journey."

In social, Carfi sees a lot of places where the customer support side of a business has done well. The social applications that predated Facebook, after all, were tied to forums and online communities. Examples of "outstanding organizations" that have connected with customers as social businesses go back to 2005, if not earlier, Carfi says. "Some businesses, like , have community forums that go back more than 15 years [and] have grown and evolved."

Dell is another company that started on its path to being a social business more than six years ago. Back then, Dell typically tracked around 4,000 comments a day about the company on the social Web, mainly in forums and discussion boards.

Fast-forward to today-there are more than 25,000 comments a day about Dell in the social Web, and the company is answering customers and providing tech support on a number of different social platforms.