Social software for your business eric imbs. Your employees & customers are exposed to valuable insights every minute of the day. Insights that matter.

social software for your business

eric imbs

Your employees & customers are exposed to valuable insights every minute of the day.

Insights that matter to your business.

Business Social Software is about harvesting & harnessing the collective intelligence of those insights to deliver:

• a better understanding of the market, • reduced resolution times for issues, • accelerated product to market and feedback times making those insights instantly available to all who need it (rather than waiting for marketing dept to gather, package and deliver it to the business).

Until now, the mechanisms for acquiring and sharing those insights have been limited, but through Effective application of Web2.0 technologies Business Social Software creates new and exciting possibilities.


executive summary

Collaboration is quickly becoming a strategic imperative for all businesses.

By deploying social tools within and externally, you create this new ‘layer’ of capability to more effectively and efficiently handle exceptions to business processes, which is where people spend the most time.

Additionally, these are the types of tools more and more people are demanding as the net generation moves into its second sweep of our workforce and customer space.

Social software offers a simple path with lightweight tools that allow:• valuable formal and Informal conversations, • views, • sentiments and • expertise …to be captured, channelled and immediately put to use in the business.

Business Social Software is THE key to delivering the collaboration imperative .

what are the current social software trends?


why?

The most current trends in Business Social Software are the use of blogs, wikis, tags and Conversational tools.

Most businesses have heard of or are beginning to use these tools in varying capacities, but their use is somewhat disjointed with respect to building and binding useful communities & leverage collective intelligence internally, and particularly in the public domain.

This often has businesses asking themselves, ‘if these tools are so valuable, why isn’t our business tapping into it & how do we get started?’

Change within large organisations can be like steering a big ship, especially when that change will move from formal, restricted networks and constructs, into informal networks and unlimited, open collaborative environments, which is the new social software trend.

There is some hesitation by business to move into the Business Social Web space.


it’s no passing fad...

For decision makers and influencers who have limited exposure to social software in the public space, the shift appears to be fraught with danger: employees loitering in blogs and wikis, compliance issues, customers influencing other customers, new support costs, intangible value propositions etc.

These issues are forming the basis of many business conversations around the value of social software, which is the perfect segue into our next topic:

Identifying the value of Business Social Software.

This is where it starts to get interesting.


value part 2...

There is a lot of activity in an organisation that happens informally; an event in the marketplace, competitor changes pricing and you need to respond or there’s a new project to deliver.

There is no rule book on how to manage these non-routine, non-transactional activities, but you still need to bring a lot of people together to work on them, resolve them, respond, adjust and move the situation to the next level.

At the moment, businesses deal with informal activities using current informal technologies like email and the phone. These are not adequate support tools to deal with these informal activities.

The degree of informal activity in an organisation, especially in relation to non-routine tasks is much larger than the kind of activities that are workflow, formal, and that are supported by a more strict and inflexible environment.

Now we begin to reveal a key value of Business Social Software.


value part 3...

The role of Business Social Software is to fill the gap between the inflexible tools we use to deal with more formal tasks and defend ad-hoc, chaotic situations, where in many cases it is incumbent on a vital few to deal with the activity; so the resources they bring to bear remain hidden from everyone else.

Business Social Software helps identify and bring together numerous participants to review and deal with the situation and create a more effective response, which by its transparency becomes repeatable and can be improved at a much faster rate.

The bottom line here is that social tools empower the user to reach well beyond the vital few when a situation arises, building on the collaborative environments they need, as a situation arises.

How does Business Social Software enable this?


value part 4...

Collaboration is about finding the right people to participate in the situation. Business Social Software is about making this process faster, more transparent, involving more participants while enabling the business to further nurture those groups thereby continually increasing engagement and effectiveness of these groups of interest or expertise.

This is because social software allows us to build and leverage rich, dynamic data about each individual that becomes more detailed and relevant with each informal interaction they have with us; through the comments they leave, the bookmarks they make, the tags they use, the ideas or solutions they provide on their blogs, tags or wikis.

So, because we have all these types of information associated with each individual, we capture and build repositories of valuable information from all of these informal activities which in turn can be used by others in need of information or expertise.


value part 5...

Extending social tools into the customer space is a simple amplification of the internal application of those tools, and moves you squarely into true community collaboration.

With the right communication pieces supporting the social tools, ad-hoc &informal yet critical Situations like competitor pricing, transactional issues, marketing insights and opportunities, positive and negative feedback will reach you faster so you can respond quickly to capture the opportunity (or limit any damage).

Some of those issues will be addressed and resolved within the communities you host, others will be quickly picked up by others in the business where the internal benefits of social software will enable speedier response and resolutions times.


justifying your investment...

As your online community grows, customers will become less reliant on the resources you have to manage the informal, ad-hoc situations, and seek guidance from other community members.

This is not only a key customer benefit; it brings significant cost saving benefits to the business, where more time can be dedicated to improved customer service and dealing with formal, more complex situations.

The way customers interact with your themes, other people, documents etc through tagging, blogs, comments and bookmarking provides immediate and rich data that enables quick and highly targeted responses and action.

Another less tangible, but extremely desirable benefit to customers is the value of being able to have one’s voice heard and sentiment & insights shared and promoted with the community and with the business influencers and decision makers.


justifying your investment...

Investments in social software are increasing as does the need to justify those investments with sound business cases. While it is important to understand the general benefits of more effective collaboration, the business case needs to be grounded with something more specific to ensure buy-in from those signing the cheques.

We have to identify business processes that are broken or that can be improved or enhanced through more effective collaboration, and then tie the business case to each specific business process metric.

What’s a good example?


pace...

In the example of collaboration and issue resolution in the customer space, how long does it take today for specific issues to be captured, reviewed and processed by your people and what types of issues could be managed within the community site without the need for direct involvement by your people?

These are the metrics you need to understand and then tie back to the benefits of a shared environment in which best practices are captured and shared and there is self-help peer support in the groups your community platform has brought together.

What’s the best approach for business social software novices?


making the move part 2...

We know that while Business Social Software as described is relatively new in the Australian Corporate landscape, we also know that it has become a business imperative that will only grow in importance.

There are many tools out there to ignite the power of social software, but where does one start, particularly if it represents a new direction for the business?

Well the great thing about social software is that it allows you to toe-dip firstly in those areas that you instinctively know will deliver benefits.

We, of course need to consult with each client to understand specific areas of focus or need at any point in time, but there are some general guidelines to follow to enable a rapid rate of business and customer uptake and to increase the business appetite for social tools as opportunities and benefits begin to reveal themselves.

Basic requirements to get you started?


making the move part 3...

1. An internal set of tools to capture Voice Of the Business (VOB)1. innovation platform using tags, blogs and conversational software2. workflow tool to manage the output and provide reporting3. admin tools to allow the business to add/customise themes as required to provide focus and drive

interest4. rating tools to allow employees to give feedback about specific matters

2. An external set of more basic tools to capture Voice Of the Customer(VOC)1. ability to rate aspects of the business or themed promotions2. ability to complain, compliment or provide general feedback3. workflow tools to manage the output and provide reporting on community activities


ready to talk?

This early, phased deployment will provide you very realistic insights as to the business benefits. You can then use these numbers about the impact on the business metrics that got you here, to justify the next round of investment for a broader and more sophisticated deployment.

This approach requires minimal resourcing and moderation. The customer approach is somewhat scaled back initially, so that:

• customers can begin to embrace the new channel at a gentle pace (through simple rating and feedback tools)

• no comments are published publicly until the business understands how best to manage the community and response mechanisms when it is ready to capture the richer data that comes from the tools that will enable the community to talk to each other and the business

• the business can determine customer appetite to justify how and when the next steps are taken


Social software for your business eric imbs. Your employees & customers are exposed to valuable insights every minute of the day. Insights that matter.

Documents

value of social software

business slide

social tools

business conversations

business social web

business processes

new social software

current social software