The Path to Social Business..Share, Engage and Measure

I spent the last week fully immersed at our user conference (OpenText Content World 2011) and in my opinion; I think it may have been our best conference to date. Each year I like to create a post after the conference that speaks to my experiences at the event and this year I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at a previous post I wrote in 2009 on social media and it's use and acceptance at the conference, just to see how far we have come in the last 2 years. As with the past years, I went to the conference to present on the topic of social business and the value of applying social media across the organization to help improve the customer experience. In 2009 I wrote in my post;

There was a general consensus with the attendees in my sessions that it was not a question of whether or not they saw the need to introduce more “social” tools to their users to allow them to contribute and build out conversations around content and business processes - the struggle existed in the ability to shift the mindset of users. Many people in the room were more concerned about how they were going to be able to adapt to the use of social media. They understood that this was more than just introducing new tool sets; it represented a culture shift - a shift that needs to happen to make the use of these social tools take on meaning and relevancy in their organizations.

I would have to say that this year I heard less about adoption issues, (though this is still a concern for many) as our customers seem to be on the path of understanding how they can apply social media to their current business processes to help knowledge share and better engage with each other and their customers. Many of the conversations that I had with our customers revolved around the ability to ensure that they can measure the effectiveness of their use of social media in the Enterprise. Customers were very interested in seeing where we are heading with our web and social analytics offerings as well as compliance; many of our customers are asking about how they can best balance the risks vs. the rewards when it comes to using social media in the Enterprise in an effective and safe manner. There were many discussions around the governance of social content and how customers can evolve their current knowledge management strategies to also now include social content.

It was nice to see this progression in the conversation around social media. The conversation is no longer just about the "why social media", we have progressed to the "how social media" and now we are starting to hear "how can we do better social media".

Where are you in your path to social business? Let's keep the conversations moving....

Social Buiness: It's Time to Put Social Media to Work!

Over the last 4 years in my role of product marketing for our social media and collaboration offerings we have used several terms to talk about social media such as; Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0 and the Social Enterprise. The most recent term that has evolved is Social Business and, in my mind, this term resonates very well with the enterprise audience. Social business is about the shift in the way we do business and the changes in the business model itself. It's about tearing down the walls and the operational silos, it’s about connecting users, partners and customers through purposeful conversation and collaboration and most importantly, it’s about integrating or weaving social media into our existing business functions to help build a more collaborative infrastructure.

We seem to slowly be moving past the roadblocks and the misconceptions that have existed previously with the term, Social Media - many believed (and many still do) that social media in the enterprise resulted in time wasting and increased risk. Social Media made sense when we talked about it in the context of marketing, but when it came to applying social media within our day to day work stream it seemed harder to grasp where the value add would come from.

Over time, we are seeing many great use cases of value add when we apply the use of social features in the context of a existing business process; such as the on-boarding of new employees by offering them more transparency to the companies goals; empowering sales teams with collaborative team spaces to better learn from each other; fueling conversations with customers for improved marketing effectiveness, and many others.

My advice is start small, think about an area of your business that could benefit from increased levels of engagement. "Situating social media in high intensity areas of worker engagement and putting it in the flow of work is much more likely to result in substantial return on investment than large, horizontal deployments." wrote ZDNet's Dion Hinchcliffe.

Are you ready to put Social Media to work?

Social Media and Rock and Roll...Building a Better Experience

Summer time means for me a slew of outdoor concerts. So far I have been to at least 7 live shows over the course of July. Something that I have noticed at these live shows is the growing use of social media on mobile devices. A number of the shows have had large flat screens along each sides of the stage running live Twitter stream feeds and Facebook updates with their event hash tags. These streams were representing fans trying to engage with both the performers and the audience. I saw several shout-outs for birthday wishes, requests for reactions such as “let’s all scream when this hits the screen”, (no one ever screamed though) and even a marriage proposal (did not see an acceptance tweet). Apart from what I would call “spam like” tweets and status updates, I also saw a lot of interesting conversations happening between the fans and the bands themselves performing on stage. This to me is where we can truly see a shift in the music culture happening, much like what we are seeing in the shift to social business in the Enterprise world. The wall between rock star and fan is slowly coming down with the use of social media. This was duly noted in a blog post I read this weekend here.

"As music blogger Bob Lefsetz pointed out that historically in music there has been a buffer between star and audience, but thanks to social networking sites the barriers were coming down. "It was like everybody with a media profile had a coach. And if you disobeyed him, you were booted from the team," he wrote. "But now, through the magic of the web, through the magic of Twitter, a celebrity can speak directly to his audience; can tell his side of the story, sans the reinterpretation and the agenda of the media."

More and more, artists are starting to see the power of building stronger connections with their fan base and the power behind giving the fans what they want. They are going beyond just the top down fan club approach and creating that VIP customer experience by building conversations with their fans through tools like Twitter and Facebook. They are harnessing that power to turn that experience into a more engaged fan base; which can turn into a larger fan base and at the end of the day, can also become a vehicle for selling more media(songs, CD’s, t-shirts). The beauty of this is that this is all happening organically and without the help of the big record labels themselves.

What I find of interest here is that social media is leading the music industry into a new business model, one that is driven by being more social and more open. We are already seeing this happen in the business world as we drive more social collaboration into our business process, but it is nice to also see this happening across a broader perspective and driving change in other areas as well.

Where else are you seeing this happening? Let’s socialize our thoughts….

Is What I had for Lunch on Thursday a Corporate Record?

Today more and more companies are asking their employees to get out there and start swimming in the streams of social media. Companies are asking their employers to take part in social media forums such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn to help build better connections with both their peers and customers. Here are just a few of the questions that typically follow after hearing this request:

What am I suppose to talk about?
Do I only talk about the company?
Do I need to create a new account that is separate from my existing personal account?
Can I still Tweet about what I am having for lunch? (OK, maybe not..but had to throw it in there)

These are all great questions and the answers should be captured by your corporate social media policies.

Social Media creates new and exciting opportunities for an organization such as increased engagement with employees and new channels of conversation with customers; but it can also create equivalent risks and obligations. The key is to capture this balance between risk and reward.

Before a company embarks on having their employees dive into these social media streams it is crucial that your employees clearly understand the risks and how they can help mitigate them. Employee education and awareness on social media policies are a must.

I wanted to share with you an excerpt from an article I read recently titled; From 'friend request' to discovery request: Issues raised by business use of social media. This was written by Matthew A. Cordell and Barry P. Harris, IV, Ward and Smith, P.A. The full article can be found here.

“In creating social media policies, businesses must understand what can be implemented and enforced; the policies will form a baseline in an opponent's or court's analysis of what can or should be produced in discovery.”

“Social media can open new doors, but it also presents new challenges. All businesses participating in social media should adopt and implement policies governing its use by employees, and must be prepared to preserve relevant social media data as soon as it becomes reasonably apparent that litigation or an investigation is on the horizon.”

So my advice is to dive in, for the rewards will quickly outweigh the risks!

It's (Already) Time to Rethink Social Media

Last week was exciting as I had my first article published in KM World. The premise of the article was to talk about how Social Media should not be the strategy—it supports a strategy as a driver of business value. It's how and where your customers talk about your brand. And it's changing the way we work.

Here are a few excerpts from the article and I hope you will go and have a read of the article in its entirety on their website. (http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/White-Paper/Article/Its-(Already)-Time-to-Rethink-Social-Media-75435.aspx)

Or if you are not a KM World member you can obtain a copy from the OpenText website here.
“Even though most organizations have been using social media tools for some aspect of their business for two to three years, most say that a steep learning curve has yet to be overcome where understanding and effectively using it is concerned. Worse, a woefully low segment indicates that they are doing it well in terms of leveraging multiple social media channels to achieve specific business objectives.”

“Not only is social media about establishing meaningful conversations (not just communications) with customers, it is about improving response levels and the quality of the overall customer experience. Achieving this takes more than just tools and techniques. It takes a real commitment from the organization and participation at all levels. The trouble is that many organizations have policies that preclude participation from staff that are actually best suited to respond to customers. Still, more than 45% of large organizations block staff use of public social media tools. In certain sectors, such as investment advisory firms in financial services, it is actually illegal for certain departments to communicate with other departments using messaging or any other social media tool.”

“By delivering enterprise-class social media applications that can extend to customer use cases for the Web, intranet and extranet scenarios, such as a social platform from OpenText, organizations can rapidly apply social media to existing team collaboration and content and knowledge management solutions to capitalize on the opportunities of social media while averting the risks it may pose.”

Thanks for reading and I look forward to the conversations!

Join me at the Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Let's get Back to Business! Social Media Applied to Core Business Objectives...

I am excited to be presenting at this week's Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Cconference. My talk entitled -Getting Back to Business: Social media applied to core business objectives: marketing and organizational effectiveness - will talk about how social media should support your key business objectives and goals, as opposed to being the strategy or goal. I will spend some time discussing how applying social media can better equip you to hear and react to what your market, customers and users are saying. I will be talking about how social media can help expose those nuggets of tacit knowledge. Our social activities such as comments, tags and activity streams can make valuable content surface. Open conversations across the enterprise whether its conversations between users, between customers and partners or a combination of these can help add additional value to content that already exists by adding additional context - creating what is often referred to as social capital.

The event is on Wednesday the 16th of Feb from 12 to 5pm est. and it’s free to attend. I will be joined by a number of other great speakers so I hope you register and join the conversation!

You can take a look at the agenda and register here: http://www.e2conf.com/virtual/agenda/

Monitor, React and Respond: Are you listening?

As things start to slow down I thought I would try to get one last post in before the new year to talk about what I have been up to the last few months since my last blog. Content World 2010 consumed much of my November and what a great event it was. I had the pleasure of speaking about getting back to business and applying social media to core business objectives. Before my talk I polled the audience to see how companies were applying social media to their business and I was not surprised to hear that much of the audience was still struggling with trying to better understand the why and the how. The common theme was that many understood the need to make us of these technologies to help build more engagement with their users and customers, but they still weren’t sure how the best way to do this was. My advice to help address these questions was; equip your business with the tools needed to be able to support three key initiatives; monitor, react and respond.

To monitor means to understand where the conversations are taking place, be it Facebook or Twitter; develop a presence there. To react means to be able to engage in conversations that are happening and create a two way channel of communication with your customers. Lastly to respond means to equip the business with the tools it requires to respond to customer’s complaints, concerns and even their praise. The key is to show you are listening!

I also spoke about how the web was quickly becoming the virtual complaint department. In fact, according to the Tealeaf Annual Survey of Online Customer Behavior, (conducted by Harris Interactive) when customers experience problems attempting to conduct an online transaction, 78% share their experience with others and another 74% said when they read a negative comment online, it influences their likelihood to do business with the company. This enforces the fact that businesses need to have the ability to monitor, react and respond when a customer or user speaks poorly about your brand online. Introducing online communities; enabling customers the ability to engage with your brand directly through forums and comments; contributing to conversations where they are happening in Facebook and Twitter and building stronger social networks with your customers can all help contribute to your ability to monitor, react and respond.

Don’t forget, the perception of your brand is in the hands of a crowd of strangers and you can use social media to get to know them. What are you waiting for?