Social Media in the EnterpriseSocial Media in the Enterprise

Some think it started with YouTube and MySpace. Others point to mobile phones and text messaging. Still others say Google with its email, instant messaging and document sharing capabilities were behind it. Collectively, there is an attitude that social media and personal interactions started with the Millennials. These positions are wrong, wrong and wrong again.

Social media in the enterprise has its roots back to the days of forums and bulletin boards. It wasnt called social media back then, but the objectives were the same as they are today: Listening to customers, moderating the interactive communication, providing information and links to address concerns, and most importantly, letting enthusiastic customers be a voice for the firm and its products.

Social media in the enterprise has evolved. It has moved from being one of those fringe applications that only a few people were aware of, to grabbing mind share across companies of all sizes. The value of social media has bifurcated, providing value both inside the firewall as well as customer facing.

FORMS OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR THE ENTERPRISE

David Carter, co-founder of Awareness Networks , a social networking platform company, identified eight ways in which firms use social media for outward facing communications. Most firms use only two or three of these techniques today, leading us to believe there is substantial room for growth and business expansion opportunities with further, deeper implementation.

The eight uses of outward facing social media are:

The corporate voice. These are the firms internal experts who blog. These are blogs and wikis enabled for some bidirectional communication. The objective of the corporate voice is to talk about efforts going on inside the firm.

Campaigns. These are lifestyle communities of interest. CVS Pharmacy has established a social network to support families with members who have Alzheimers Disease. CVS moderates the discussions, but the point is to share the ups and downs of caring for a loved one with this debilitating illness.

Enthusiasts. This social network is topic specific: Apple iPhone users, Specialized Bike riders, Saab owners. These people are over-the-top delighted with their device and want to share cool capabilities they discovered or have learned about the product.

Association or Subscription. These are user groups, generally established by the company, to obtain feedback up and down the supply chain.

Loyalties. This social platform is established to reward exceptional customers. Similar to a frequent flier or guest services, these are the inside specials offered to the loyal customer.

Innovation Community. This social network is for idea generation. It includes people from inside and outside the company. We are seeing more and more of these social networks appearing as firms seek to obtain customer desires, rather than conducting R&D and crossing their fingers that the end product will be cool and widely adopted when released.

Peer Support. This type of social network is a form of CRM. It supports highly skilled users acting in a helpdesk manner even though they are not an employee of the company.

Event Specific. This type of social site is established to cross pollinate between its users and events such as trade shows and webinars. No Jitter also drives participation to and through VoiceCon, a specific event it hosts.

The eight types of social networks also identify a logical way in which firms can start down the social media path, executing in a measured, incremental manner to ensure optimal success.

What are the driving factors behind this relatively recent shift in the adoption of social media in business? What are some of the best practices firms should consider when implementing social media platforms? And what are some of the issues firms should consider before executing a social media project?

Driving Factors for Social Media Adoption in Business

1. Technology Availability
There are dozens of social media platforms and vendors available today. Many are free or have extremely low price points for entr�e into the medium. In addition, the physical infrastructure is widely available, including near-ubiquitous broadband Internet access, smart phones and laptops. Finally, management tools are readily available that support identity and user access, providing control for the site moderator.

2. Customer Service
The drumbeat for the need to improve customer service, the customer experience and customer satisfaction has been steadily growing. It costs less to keep an existing customer than to obtain a new one. This is a fact no matter what the state of the global economy is at any point in time.

Social media enables a richer customer experience by offering a choice in communication options from basic telephone to chat and instant messaging. Forget IVRs and pressing 0 to reach an operator. Todays customers want support and service at a time convenient for them in a communication mode that best meets their situation in the moment. Social media provides the communication flexibility, from self-service knowledge base searchability to real time interactions with topical experts who may or may not be an employee of the firm.

3. Cost Containment
One of the goals typically called out with business process improvement undertakings is to reduce operational expenses. Social media supports these efforts on two fronts.

First, self service knowledge base searches reduce the number of calls to the help desk. Fewer calls allows for fewer help desk personnel. This is not a zero sum game, though. There will be an increase in IT spending associated with content management and searchability functionality.

Second, the product or service experts participating in the social network may or may not be employees of the company. These are enthusiastic, fanatical users. They push the envelope using technology in ways that may not have been anticipated by the vendors. These folks love to demonstrate their prowess. They want to help others also become fanatical users. Apples iPhone users are a good example. All those cool applets were not developed by Apple. They were built by the user community and are given away at no cost. These fanatical users also offload the firms helpdesk. It is users helping users in a highly interactive manner.

BEST PRACTICES

In conversations with social media vendors Rusty Williams, senior VP, channels and business development at Mzinga ; and Ross Mayfield, chairman, president and co-founder of Socialtext , we explored what best practices firms should implement when rolling out social media initiatives. Some key points:

Tight integration. As firms select a social media platform, they need to look beyond their initial requirements at the big-picture objectives. A company may start with wikis or blogs, but the ability to integrate with other applications into a single platform must be considered. It is not out of the question to need to integrate with photo and video applications. Also consider the need to integrate with mobile devices, not just for data but also audio streams. The platform needs to be able to support a wide variety of information exchange streams.

Staff the initiative appropriately from its inception. Sure it is great to get users talking, but the social network must be monitored and staffed to levels appropriate to meeting the initiatives objectives. Staffing, which includes training, ensures the experience will drive ongoing participation. The goal is not to shut down negative feedback. The goal is to foster constructive debate, filtering out profanity and abusive users.

Clearly define analytic metrics. Social media platforms offer enterprise businesses the opportunity to continually monitor and measure what is going on in the marketplace. It is important to know who the thought leaders are, who the top talkers are and what they are saying, who is providing coaching, training and support. Clearly defined metrics also enable a firm to see what links are being utilized most frequently, including documents and other assets. This assists in determining where a firm should be applying more resources for content development. If white papers are hot and data sheets arent, redeploy the writers to meet the information demands.

Aggregate information. As the user community accesses the social network, ensure all the information they need or could possibly need is readily available. The workspace should support rich text, embedded images, video, links, and attachments. Conversations are multimedia; the social network should be also. Support tagging. The tag cloud should show tags across the entire platform. Recognize that users seek independent, third party sources to corroborate vendor claims. Support RSS feeds and other news aggregation capabilities.

Security. Single sign on and identity management are the foundations of security in a social networking environment. The security needs to be robust enough to discourage the site from being hijacked, but easy enough that users will continue to return. Consider using a software-as-a-service model to reduce the costs associated with security expertise and support.

Define the ROI of Implementation. Use the same hard metrics for measuring ROI as you would use to define the business objectives. If the firm is implementing a Peer Support social network, then the metrics would be the same as those used to measure success of the helpdesk. Avoid soft metrics that are difficult to measure, such as improved productivity.

Define the TCO of Implementation. Similar to defining the ROI, use the same hard metrics to measure the TCO as would be used for any IT initiative. This includes the cost of the platform, software licenses, ongoing maintenance and support. Be sure to include the training required for the people staffing the social network. Look at alternative methods of implementations such as hosted or outsourced to assist in mitigating expenses.

Times are changing. As we experience the Industrial Era business models collapsing around our ears, impacting the financial markets on a global basis and rippling throughout businesses of all sizes with massive numbers of layoffs, cutbacks and downsizing, the benefits of social media are beginning to percolate up to the executive suite.

Before heading off to execute on a social media strategy, be sure the strategy is clearly defined, including the roadmap for expansion and what the business objectives are for considering the implementation. Social networks allow companies to listen and respond to their customers at levels previously unknown. Firms can quickly obtain information and feedback through queries and surveys in a matter of days.

In the words of Chris Brogan, community and social media thought leader: "The social phone is ringing. Are you there to answer it?"

Martha Young is founder and principal of Nova Amber, LLC. She has been writing on the topic of virtual business processes since 2002. She can be reached at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marthalyoung or http://twitter.com/myoung_vbiz