Someone wrote recently—I didn’t make a note of who it was—that social media is an inappropriate venue for business because contracts are the language of business and therefore businesses cannot speak with an informal, authentic, human voice. What reactionary bunk. Corporations may be legal entities but they won’t exist without people. But the business world is populated by a lot of like-minded people who don’t like change and won’t acknowledge it even as it happens all around them.

Every now and then, I see something that spotlights the kind of change rocking the world of business. Taken individually, these changes may not seem monumental, but when tracked along a continuum, they are symbolic of the new business ecosystem.

I found one of these examples the other day when Lee LeFever blogged about a new PaperWorks video his company, CommonCraft, had produced. This video (included at the end of this post) explains in plain English how California’s public education system is funded. Lee points out that the video was produced for a client, YouthNoise, a nonprofit dedicated to instilling activism among young people.

I took a look at YouthNoise, which approaches its mission through a social networking interface. Curious, I searched for more information and found an article that explained that the company eschewed the traditional fundraising approach traditionally taken by nonprofits and obtained $1.5 million in venture capital from Omidyar, which raised the funds after presenting YouthNoise’s model to a group of corporations and foundations that were looking to make social investments.

With the funding in hand, YouthNoise scrapped its old informational website and launched the social network. Then, rather than turning to traditional media companies, digital marketing agencies, or advertising firms, YouthNoise contracted with CommonCraft to produce a video that presumably resides on the YouthNoise social network but is also available at YouTube, where others can post it their own blogs, comment on it, and rank it.

CommonCraft, of course, began its “Plain English” series as an altruistic endeavor, using the PaperWorks approach to simplify confusing topics like RSS and wikis. The approach was so successful it attracted clients like PRWeb and, now, YouthVoice.

To summarize, a nonprofit…

• Wanted to convert its online presence to a social network
• Obtained venture capital so it could move quickly
• Sought out a small social media consultancy to produce content
• Allows the video to appear anywhere people want to put it
• Encourages interaction and conversation through the social network along with the commenting and ranking features inherent on YouTube

Compare that to how a nonprofit would have approached similar challenges a mere five years ago. Taken by itself, this may seem like an anomaly. Taken in context of other similar stories, the changing environment in which business takes place should be evident to everyone except those who prefer to wear blinders.

The video is pretty damn good, too. It doesn’t have the edge of some of the other Plain English videos (probably a client requirement), but it makes a complex topic pretty simple to understand: