Image by George Dearing via Flickr
It's tough to have a business conversation these days without someone mentioning social media and its impact on business.
Many of us that work within the confines of social computing are too often distracted by all the technology around us. We tend to assume that everyone knows why they should have an internal social network or how an external community can drive sales reach. Here's a big news flash folks - it's still very early and most of us, like it or not, are figuring out all this stuff together.
If you're still allowed to travel and have attended any recent social media or interactive marketing conferences, you've probably heard the cries and seen the blank stares.
"We think our marketing group needs a Wiki but we're not sure"
"Our VP said we need a community platform and he thinks we should start an initiative ASAP"
"The CEO says he's tired of hearing about Facebook and says we should do social networking internally."
The problem with quotes above is there's no specific objective tied to any of them. While more sophisticated users can quickly spell out how to apply a wiki to the way they work, others are continually pulled into the tech quicksand, unable to discern between a wiki or a beefed-up HTML page.
So let's try those quotes again.
"Our marketing group needs a better way to communicate its strategy internally and wants other ways to share information other than email"
"Our VP wants our company to have a handle on what our customers are doing with our products. He's confident we'll see a sales and marketing lift if we get our customer talking about us.
"We want to make sure we're capturing the knowledge within our organization. It's imperative that we move our communication into a more real-time mode.
Now that you've honed in on what challenges lie ahead, shouldn't you be able to quickly find a vendor to help? Clients I've spoken to say the process still requires way too much work aligning with someone that clearly demonstrates an understanding of their business. Something that makes them say, "Yeah, that's us, that maps to our business."
That last part is something we (Telligent) work very hard at. Give us a shot, we'll show you.
Related articles
- Thoughts From Telligent's 2-Day Social Computing Strategy Session (wowfeed.com)
- An Online Community Packing An ROI Punch (socialmediatoday.com)
- Report: Community Platforms Market Led by Jive Software and Telligent (readwriteweb.com)
- Intel, Telligent, Jive, and the Social Software Marketplace (cmswatch.com)
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