Posts Tagged ‘Social Business’

Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media: Improving Your Processes vs. Changing Them

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February 11th, 2010

If I told you I could change and revolutionize the way your company collaborates internally and builds relationships with its customers via new tools and technologies, would you be interested?

What if I told you that I could improve the way your company collaborates internally and builds relationships with its customers through new technologies and tools?

If you were an executive at a large or mid-sized company, which would you prefer (or would want to hear)?

The first option means that you are going to have make drastic changes to your organization while abandoning methodologies and processes in exchange for new ones.  The second option means that your company does not need to make drastic changes while abandoning the way it operates.  Instead, the company is going to use new tools, technologies, and strategies to fit in with its current processes and methodologies.  Do you see what I’m getting at here?

The goal of enterprise 2.0 or social media isn’t to change and revamp the way companies operate.  The goal should be to improve how companies operate.  Here’s a basic example.  If you take a look at your company sales process, for example it might look something like this:

Are Twitter or Jive going to revamp this process?  There might be some changes along the way but for the most part, the process will remain the same.  What changes are some of the tactics.  For example, you might use Twitter or LinkedIn to establish a relationship and identify a need, but that process is still in place.  Part of a successful strategy is really understanding how the company processes and operations work and then plugging in new tools and strategies to help improve those processes and operations.

I’m in the process of reviewing how a client trains and works with its account executives through a selling framework to drive business.  The processes that the client has in place are solid, however there is no integration with new social technologies that can help drastically improve the way the client operates and trains its new account executives.

You won’t find a single executive whose pain point is “I need a whole new way to do X.”  Pain points revolve around improving and making things better.  It’s a lot easier to improve than it is to revolutionize.

Now imagine you’re that executive again.  Do you want something revolutionary or something that can improve and make your company more efficient?

TAGS: changing processes, company change, Enterprise 2.0, improving operations, improving processes, improving vs changing, revolutionizing operations, Social Business, social media

Is Collaborating, Listening, or Engaging Always a Good Thing?

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January 29th, 2010

Before reading on ask yourself this questions, is collaborating, engaging, or listening always a good thing?

Collaboration can take many forms either within a company or between a company and it’s customers and prospects.  However, as Morten Hansen says in his book Collaboration, there is no point in collaborating just for collaboration’s sake.  The whole point of any type of collaboration is always to meet a business need or objective.  This means that if you have departments or individuals collaborating but you aren’t seeing your business objectives met that there is potentially a problem.  The key to collaboration is action and this applies as much to Enterprise 2.0 as it does to external facing social media efforts.

When thinking about “listening” or engaging, again the important thing is not to listen or engage, it’s to gain ACTIONABLE insight (and to empower your customers and your team).  It’s important to make this distinction both when making the case for collaboration (or listening/engaging) and when measuring the results of these efforts.  There is no point in trying to sell a listening tool, engagement strategy, or collaboration initiative unless you can also sell the business objectives that you are going to meet.  Instead of saying “we are going to build a community around brand XYZ,” finish the sentence and say something like, “we are going to build a community around XYZ that is going to help us decrease market research costs which are currently rising,” or, “we are going to implement an internal collaboration platform to help unify our brand, improve productivity, and increase our rate of innovation; all problems that we are currently struggling with.”

There are a few key things to point out here:

  • Don’t sell collaboration (or anything else for that matter), sell the ability to meet a business objective (s)
  • When selling or looking to show results, make sure you have a solid understanding of the problem that you are looking to solve

Without action, collaboration, engaging, listening, and everything your company is looking to do is fruitless.

TAGS: Collaboration, engagement, Enterprise 2.0, is collaborating a good thing, listening, Social Business, social media

Lessons Learned from Cubetree; an Enterprise Social Software Company

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January 22nd, 2010

I had the opportunity to speak with the CEO of Cubetree last night and one of the things we talked about were some of the lessons Cubetree has learned over the past 2 years of being in business.  I first became acquainted with Cubetree at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco where they won [...]

TAGS: cube tree, enterprise 2.0 strategy, enterprise social software, lessons learned, Social Business

Social Business Means Collaborating Internally and Externally

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December 22nd, 2009

I had the opportunity to write an article for Jennifer Leggio over at Zdnet on the importance of internal and external collaboration.  It actually really got me thinking about how both types of collaboration can really benefit from one another.  Here’s a snippet from the article:
“When we talk about collaboration or knowledge sharing, we often [...]

TAGS: Enterprise 2.0, external collaboration, importance of collaboration, internal collaboration, Social Business

Why do Enterprise 2.0 Market Predictions Vary so Greatly?

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December 16th, 2009

This is the first post of a multi-post series covering the discussion between SOCIALtality founder and 20-year Fidelity-enterprise veteran, Wendy Troupe and myself.  The topics of our discussions were around Social Media, the emerging Enterprise 2.0 movement and the issues facing companies contemplating adoption.
In our discussions we addressed five questions.  Today we are going to [...]

TAGS: Enterprise 2.0, enterprise 2.0 analysis, enterprise 2.0 analysts, enterprise 2.0 economy, enterprise 2.0 market, enterprise 2.0 predictions, enterprise marketing, marketing predictions, Social Business, socialtality

Collaboration in the 2.0 Enterprise

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December 11th, 2009

Collaboration is a pretty broad term; according to Wikipedia:
“Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership [...]

TAGS: collaborating, Collaboration, company collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Social Business


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