A few weeks ago wiredFINANCE looked at the ROI from social networking . It showed Lowe’s , the home improvement retailer, as a leader in the use of social business. But more companies already are doing it.

Meanwhile, Tom Austin, VP and Gartner Fellow, offered this advice back in June: If you’re trying to build positive emotional momentum for whatever you’re trying to accomplish with the business, look seriously at social tools as a potentially powerful element in a broader overall strategy.

For IBM and Forrester Research, the business value [of social networking] lies in the ways it enables collaboration to succeed within a business environment. Here’s what some business are doing with social business clouds now.

EMC, Oracle, HP, Dell, NetApp and other big vendors can be expected to come up with social business cloud offerings. IBM, however, with its LotusLive Social Business Cloud has emerged as the leader with real businesses actually profiting through social cloud collaboration:

Newly Weds Foods, here, needed a way to connect geographically dispersed teams without the capital expense and staff required to run an in-house collaboration system. They also needed security to protect their proprietary information and safeguard client recipes. They turned to the LotusLive Social Business cloud. The benefits: cut response from days to hours, saves 4-5 days per month in travel time, and cut travel costs by 10%. And a no-cost guest account lets them invite clients to collaborate on recipes.

Panasonic turned to LotusLive cloud collaboration in its drive to become the electronics industry’s leading green innovation company. It also expects to improve its competitive advantage and boost business results by enabling multiple business units to work together more efficiently. The benefits: reduced cost and immediate accessibility to advanced collaboration tools across all regions of the global company, but especially for product research, development, and sales.

Russell’s Convenience, here, has emerged as IBM’s poster child for social business collaboration. The company, which operates stores in numerous western states and Hawaii, looked to social media to connect its far-flung franchises and people using the cloud. It turned to the LotusLive Social Business cloud for seamless communication between corporate management, franchisees, and project teams and to provide a central location for definitive information and project plans. The results: travel costs reduced by 33% and postage costs by 50% for $30,000 in annual savings. It also increased revenue as a result of more timely communication around inventory and purchase trends.

Look at your business processes—maybe starting with budgeting, procurement, or AR—and see where you might capitalize on social business collaboration in the cloud.