Early Adopters And Pioneers Have Benefited From Social
Across executive board rooms and even in living rooms, social business is all the rage. In 2010, social crm (SCRM) and Enterprise 2.0 (E20) rose into mainstream conversation. Despite the mindshare and awareness, a majority of business leaders have yet to begin these initiatives. The good news – those organizational leaders who have adopted disruptive technologies in social, have already realized the benefits. Those benefits include:
- Faster product time to market and customer adoption
- Reduced marketing spend and increased marketing engagement
- Reduced incident to resolution times that lead to greater customer retention
- Greater market influence and brand awareness
- Improved collaboration across departments and improved knowledge bases
SCRM and E2.0 Evolve Into An Uber Category Of Social Business In 2011
Fast followers have noticed the business benefits and have begun planning for social business initiatives in 2011. Innovative management teams can expect social businesses to bring together the many concepts of social media, social analytics, social media monitoring, social marketing, SCRM, E20, community platforms, and Vendor Relationship Management (VRM). Leaders seeking to understand social business can succeed by following these five simple rules for social business (see Figure 1.):
Figure 1. Five Simple Rules For Social Business
- Trust is the new social currency. Trust drives influence, engagement, and relationships. People and organizations must earn trust through their actions across their relationships. Trust can be expended to gain influence, create engagement, and foster relationships. Trust can be taken away through lack of credibility, bad behaviour, and dishonesty.
- Social is a cultural shift. Social is not a fad. The growing preference for engagement through social channels drives new relationship models. Social has moved beyond the tipping point. How social evolves and permeates our lives is the question. Expect a smaller but strident anti-social movement to counter this current trend. Social is here to stay and is one of the five forces of consumer tech entering the enterprise.
- Building community is the goal. People and organizations seek a sense of belonging. Communities form around personal ecosystems that transcend geographies, time, and individual status. Communities provide the force multipliers to amplify messages through advocates and detractors. Communities require curation and nurturing for success. Once you have a community, organizations and individual must earn trust to create social currency.
- P2P is today’s reality. B2B and B2C are dead. Social business is conducted through Peer-to-peer (P2P) relationships. Attempts to stove pipe individuals into forced-fit, artificial categories, fail because each individual brings multiple roles to the community.
- Social business is just good business. While the moniker social will eventually go away, business has always been social. Breakthroughs in technology and cultural adoption drive the social business phenomenon. However, business can not be conducted without relationships. Social business will be omniscient.
The Bottom Line -Embrace Social In 2011 Or Be Left Behind…
(Cross-posted @ A Software Insider's Point of View)
Great post, Ray! You nailed it. It’s all about the relationships – it always has been. It alway will be.
Social Media is just another “delivery system” for engaging with others. When you really think about it, the Fax Machine was once a new way of communicating with others, too. Sure it was…we sent communications to others over the fax; just like we did over the telephone before it. And, the letter before that. These communication delivery systems are all variations on a theme, so to speak.
I bet with each innovation there were those who once struggled to create new rules and ettiquette for each communication tool/device. No question about it; there have always been things you would not want to discuss over the telephone electing to wait and discuss the topic face-to-face. There are also many things we may wish to discuss that we would prefer not to send in E-mails or in letters, because these ways are much more impersonal. Every situation is different and there is an appropriate communication method just right for it.
So, Social Media is just another way of engaging people. It requires good judgment and common sense, just like its predecessors and its existing communication alternates do.
Marc LeVine
Director of Social Media
RiaEnjolie, Inc.
http://www.riaenjolie.com
Follow us on Twitter @RiaEnjolie
“Social Media is just another “delivery system” for engaging with others.”
True that. I couldn’t agree with you more.
The real impact of all this is on the world of traditional IT is yet to be determined. Certainly I would say that the impact of the various technological innovations described in Ray’s earlier article (“Research Report: How The Five Pillars Of Consumer Tech Influence Enterprise Innovation”) are giving CIOs more sleepless nights than whether or not new applications are sufficiently “social”. IT departments in many organizations are very much cultures unto themselves and additionally under greater pressure to reduce costs which always serves as a convenient excuse for maintenance of the status quo. I think that the real unknown factor at this point is how much or how little corporate IT will be influenced, both by internal staff and external stakeholders, to adapt to the standards set by more consumer-friendly technologies.
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Good rules, Ray, right on.
To put it in more practical terms, we also need rule number 6: You must have proper tools in place to implement the first 5.