Oftentimes when we refer to social media we refer to how a brand can engage with customers or prospects to build relationships. These relationships are external facing; meaning brand to consumer, and are used for functions such as product development, customer service, increasing sales, and marketing. Through social media companies seek to understand and do things such as: empower their customers, collaborate with their customers and prospects, and gain actionable insight from their customers.A very similar type or relationship with collaboration, actionable insight, and empowerment also needs to happen internally WITHIN the enterprise; oftentimes called Enterprise 2.0, a termed coined by Andrew McAfee a few years back.
When you look at a company such as Dell, Boeing, or EMC that has over tens of thousands of employees the potential to collaborate, share information, and build relationships internally is enormous (as it is for smaller size companies as well). When social media really started to gain momentum most people immediately turned to its external uses. Many of those involved with Enterprise 2.0 (myself included) believe that most companies should begin their social business transformation internally before branching out externally. There are several benefits to doing this such as building a social corporate culture, familiarizing the company with new tools, and understanding how to gain actionable insight and drive business results from collaboration. Once the company as whole understand this then it becomes much easier to build relationships and collaborate externally with prospects and existing customers.
I briefly explored a few ways in which social media can be used externally, but what are some of the benefits that enterprises can see from collaboration and social business within the enterprise? Here are a few:
- Improving productivity by making information and people easier to find and connect with. This also means reducing the amount of time that people spend on email, browsing through an outdated intranet platform, or perhaps finding the right person within the company to ask a question to.
- Knowledge sharing across the enterprise. There are numerous Enterprise 2.0 examples and case studies of how companies have been able to either make money or reduce costs by sharing information from one individual, department, or location to another. If one division of a company (such as a franchise) finds a way to save hundreds or even tens of thousands of dollars annually, imagine how much the company as a whole could save if they were privy to the same information.
There is a lot more to be said on Enterprise 2.0 as many of the same issues arise (as in externally facing initiatives) such as ROI, increasing adoption, getting buy in, organizational structure, and resource allocation. I’m hoping to explore these topics in more detail here (as I do on my blog) but first wanted to get you thinking about social business can be used to benefit the company internally.
What are your thoughts and ideas on this? Do you have any questions? Let’s discuss.
Related posts:
- Microsoft Execs: Enterprise Search Is Our Turf, not Google’s
- Google Upgrades Enterprise Search, Adds Security Measures
- Forget Audience Segmentation …. Segment by Conversation!
- Forget Audience Segmentation – Segment by Conversation!
- Social Media Success 201: Forget About Your Brand, Get a Personality
Tags: collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, social business, Social Media
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Hi Jacob,
I especially like how you highlight the way social media can foster collaboration, actionable insight, and empowerment internally, as part of your definition of Enterprise 2.0.
Having worked in various large enterprises, I do think that social media evangelists and other enthusiasts sometimes put the cart before the horse, focusing social media initiatives on customer-facing relationships, before first practicing what we preach, internally.
I recently attended an O’Reilley webcast on social business, with Stowe Boyd, Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang, and Joshua-Michele Ross, which strongly complements this post. It presented social business as encompassing marketing, but ultimately so much more, including leadership, culture, and organizational design.
Using social media tools internally, across disciplines, can promote that social media mindset that is a pre-requisite for successful, external relationship-building, in this new world of work. It can help shift the business culture for successful external engagement, long-term, by helping us hone the new ways we think and work together, based on these new technologies.
I’ll follow this series of posts, with great interest.
from my perspective, a sales manager with a marketing approach, the most important suage of social media within the enterprise is
1. making the company human – by letting the employees – any employee, represent the company and become its ambassador on the web
2. using employee power to identify prospects, unhappy customers, etc, and use the unstructured social media tools to funnel them into the more structured processes and take care of the issue (close the sale, or engage with the customer and make them happy again).
I know this is not exactly “within” usage, but its the usage that both employees & customers would find most interesting in context of the company.
Benny
SaaS Sales & marketing blog – bennyshaviv.com
[...] a comment » In a recent post at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix, Don’t Forget About The Enterprise: A Glimpse Of Enterprise 2.0, Jacob Morgan explains that oftentimes when we refer to social media, we mean “how a brand can [...]