Your customers are social, why isn’t your enterprise? - July 5, 2011 at 4:23 pm

 

According to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com there are 3 steps to becoming a social enterprise:
 
#1 Connect to public social networks
#2 Create a private social network
#3 Make your enterprise applications social
 
The social enterprise only works if you adopt all 3 steps, without that you will continue to have communication gaps.
 
Let’s break down how each step can be adopted…
 
Connect to public social networks
There are many social monitoring services available in the market, but only one links to your enterprise software. Radian6, recently acquired by salesforce.com, allows companies to monitor themselves on multiple social networks. Marketing departments can now see how their company is trending in order to make quick decisions based on customer interactions. 
 

The service is just as important for service and support teams. It can highlight trends of the most influential people (tweeters) so agents can react to the individuals with the most clout in the social web. Quickly resolving issues for these individuals can make a positive influencer out of a naysayer.


Create a private social network
Again, there are many private social network solutions on the market, most notably Yammer.  However only Salesforce.com’s Chatter is native within your enterprise software solution. Prior to using Chatter, I was an early adopter of several private social network solutions and the same issue always caused them to fail – they were disconnected. The toggling between email, CRM and social network tools became too much to keep up with.  With Chatter, your company’s private social network sits within an application your employees are already using.  

No longer is that remote worker in Boston limited to their own product knowledge or team’s support, now they can harness the minds of all their peers effortlessly across the organization.  In the past, this may have been accomplished through clogging up email inboxes – now it can be done in short direct messages.  If you ask most teenagers they don’t use email, why…because messaging is more social.


Make your enterprise applications social
Not only should your private network connect your employees’ voices quickly, they should be tied to a certain application. Salesforce.com’s Chatter is fully integrated to all aspects of their platform.  Whether it’s a sales team communicating on account strategy or if it’s a support agent needing addition resources to solve a customer issue, linking a message to a particular situation gets everyone within the organization on the same page.  The communication doesn’t stop there; it’s searchable and available to others when needed.   


The social enterprise allows companies to play on the same field as their customers.  The ability to communicate as fast as they can is no longer just important, it’s essential.  The social enterprise is a shift and Model Metrics is supporting companies to deploy this vision to the enterprise.  It’s no longer cool just to be in the cloud, you need to make it social.

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