Social Networks That Boost Your Business

Most people are familiar with the term “Web 2.0,” which refers to a second generation of Web development and design that focuses on fostering social networking via the Web. Innovative companies are beginning to embrace Web 2.0 technology as a way to enhance communication, information sharing, and collaboration, thereby allowing them to work smarter rather than harder.

The use of Web 2.0 in business represents a new trend called “Business 2.0.” Aside from being the name of a defunct magazine, Business 2.0 is about using new Web-based social networking applications (many of which were originally created for personal use) in a way that fosters teamwork, customer touches, and internal and external collaboration in a low-cost seamless way.

Unfortunately, many businesses feel that Web 2.0 and social networking are for the younger generation and a waste of time when used by employees. However, once you understand the power of these applications and how to use them in your company, you’ll quickly find that they can be invaluable tools to boost your bottom line.

Following is an overview of the best Business 2.0 tools.

Personal Tools with Business Applicability

Facebook
Personal Use: Facebook enables you to connect and share with the people in your life. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with others. People can add friends, send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

Business 2.0 Use: Large organizations can connect all of their employees, or members, with Facebook. Some are finding an added advantage of using an internal, secure version of Facebook. This has helped organizations to dramatically increase their internal networking and collaboration.

Ask Yourself: Could we use Facebook, or our own internal version to get people to collaborate at a higher level?

Twitter
Personal Use: Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of short, quick answers using no more than 140 characters per message. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or co-workers. Users can receive updates via the Twitter Web site or other social networking sights such as Facebook. Young people use Twitter for answering the question: What are you doing?

Business 2.0 Use: Business users could change this question to: What problem are you trying to solve? Several companies have used this as a fast way to solve problems. Hotels, airlines, and airports are using Twitter to pitch services, travel updates, and respond to travelers needs.

Ask Yourself: Could we use Twitter to solve problems faster with our organization or our customers?

Wikipedia
Personal Use: Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can use to find information on virtually any topic. Anyone can edit the content as well.

Business 2.0 Use: A large manufacturing company with engineers in locations around the world increased problem solving and collaboration by creating an internal, secure version of Wikipedia for sharing information on parts and service offerings as well as repair and maintenance instructions. Retailers and suppliers could create a version of Wikipedia to foster education and training as well as enhanced information sharing.

Ask Yourself: Could we create an internal version of Wikipedia to foster better information and knowledge sharing?

YouTube
Personal Use: YouTube is a video sharing Web site where users can upload, view, and share video clips. YouTube displays a wide variety of user-generated video content as well as movie clips, product demonstrations, and commercials. Unregistered users can watch the videos, while registered users can upload an unlimited number of videos.

Business 2.0 Use: Businesses are posting humorous commercial videos to generate interest in their products with great success. The more entertaining it is, the more people watch it. Business partners could create a YouTube like channel for the purpose of educating and training.

Ask Yourself: Could we enhance our marketing efforts as well as general communication by using YouTube?

Digg
Personal Use: Digg is a social news Web site made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting and accessing links and stories. Voting stories thumbs up or thumbs down is the site's cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying.

Business 2.0 Use: Many organizations have found this to be a good way to track the most interesting advances in technology or the most useful business news. Large organizations can create their own internal version for sharing what employees consider to be the most useful information.

Ask Yourself: Could we use Digg, or our own internal version, to get people to share their most interesting and valuable Web-based information with each other?

Delicious
Personal Use: Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. It uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms.

Business 2.0 Use: Business users can share their most useful Web sites with co-workers or business partners. If a customer purchases a product, sellers could share relevant bookmarks that keep the customer coming back for more information and hopefully more products.

Ask Yourself: Could we use Delicious to share important new Web sites faster within our organization or with our customers?

Visual Communications
Personal Use: Visual Communications, unlike traditional video conferencing, uses your desktop, laptop, and soon your smart phone to hold a quick, anytime, anywhere videoconference with one or more other people. Travelers who must be away from home are using their laptops in hotel rooms with broadband access and free software such as Skype and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to communicate with family and friends to enhance their personal connection.

Business 2.0 Use: Businesses are discovering the power of Visual Communications to enhance the connection with their sales force, business partners, and customers.

Ask Yourself: Could we use Visual Communications to enhance communications internally and externally?

Purely Business 2.0 Tools
Wiki
A Wiki is a collaborative Web page or collection of web pages designed to enable anyone to create a quick web page that allows visitors to search the Wiki’s content and edit the content in real time, as well as view updates since their last visit. Wikis are often used to create collaborative Web sites and to power community Web sites. On a moderated Wiki, Wiki owners review comments before additions to the main body of the topic. Additional features include calendar sharing, live AV conferencing, RSS feeds, and more.

Ask Yourself: Could we use Wikis to enhance internal and external collaboration?

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-oriented professional networking website for exchanging information, ideas, and opportunities. There are over 35 million registered users spanning 170 industries actively networking with each other. For example, large insurance companies use LinkedIn to foster networking with their independent sales representatives. Human resources (HR) professionals from all over the world could use LinkedIn to share best practices.

Ask Yourself: Could we use LinkedIn to expand our organizational network for enhanced knowledge sharing?

Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (Saas)
In cloud computing, some or all of the storage, software, IT processes, and data center facilities you use can exist on your provider’s server, which is maintained and cared for by your provider, giving you 24/7 access from any device anywhere. The cost of upgrading hardware and software, maintenance, and associated IT labor costs can be dramatically reduced or eliminated. Currently, the ideal organization would be any size company that’s facing big investments in computing and communications infrastructure. For example, Amazon.com can give you an entire e-commerce back end. SaaS such as SalesForce.com has a customer relationship management (CRM) package, SciQuest has a spend management package, and Google, Microsoft and others have a suite of offerings.

Ask Yourself: Could we use cloud computing and SaaS to streamline our IT needs?

Gain a New Competitive Advantage
By reframing the use of social networking technology, companies can increase communication, collaboration, problem solving, and competitive advantage with little cost. Remember, many of these tools are free or nearly free, making them accessible to even the smallest of businesses. Therefore, the sooner you embrace Business 2.0 and put it to work for you, the faster you can penetrate new markets and win the lion’s share of business.

These Are the Times of CRM Vindication and Validation – Part 1

Some previous TEC blog posts have discussed the benefits (but also the inevitable caveats) of white papers, including the all-too-common vendors’ self-serving marketing fluff and buzzword verbiage, and about their (un)intended audiences. As part of my daily routine of doing research on vendors and their strategies and offerings, I’ve read a ton of white papers in the last decade or so.

And yes, these have ranged from blatant and flamboyant bragging about a vendor’s capabilities (a la the “Every man thinks his own geese are swans” proverb) to some exceptional ones that were quite educational and established someone’s expertise in something. Other latter examples (in addition to my previous post on Arena Solutions’ white paper on the pitfalls of manufacturing outsourcing) would be the following two white papers:

1. “Customer Relationship Management: The Winning Strategy in a Challenging Economy,” authored by Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and
2. “Maximizing CRM Effectiveness During Lean Times,” authored by Oracle CRM

Why? Well, when I read them, many things therein rang true to me from my own research and findings (e.g., the ongoing success of Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, RightNow, Sage CRM, SugarCRM, and SAP CRM as well as ongoing TEC’s end-users’ inquiries), even though I was cognizant of Microsoft and Oracle intentionally touting their “astute CRM features” in respective documents. The fact remains that in 2009 customer relationship management (CRM) became a recession-proof enterprise application category as organizations scrambled to retain and mine existing clients for new opportunities, while superior customer service remains a differentiator in these times when lower prices and higher quality are a given.

In an ever-increasing competitive environment, the window between product conception and innovation on one hand, and commoditization on the other hand, is getting ever smaller. This phenomenon increases the need to differentiate around customer service to distinguish any organization from its competition. And, as a matter of course, customer experience can transcend every touch-point on the company’s front line including its sales, marketing, and service teams. The customer-facing front line also includes the company’s programs, campaigns, and promotions in all these areas, as well as its Web-based service channels and storefronts.

Not the Time to Be a Shrinking Violet

In a growth economy, everything seems straightforward: businesses typically work hard to expand their customer base and spend aggressively to fire up the growth engine. But as soon as revenues begin to dwindle during challenging times, many companies respond by aggressively cutting staff and budgets, particularly those in the IT department.

The conventional wisdom is that in the face of an economic downturn, rationalization, consolidation, cost-cutting, hiring freezes, etc. become the name of the game. Everyone tends to spend less on IT and only invest in those technologies that enable the organization to meet its most basic operational requirements.

In other words, companies tend to cut the IT budget to the bare bones needed to support building and delivering their products and/or services. But while this knee-jerk response is understandable, is it necessarily the wisest one?

Unfortunately, when it comes to managing customer relationships, this behavior could be both a short- and long-term detriment to business success. In fact, an article in The McKinsey Quarterly from September 2008 entitled “Managing IT in a downturn: Beyond cost cutting” cites the risk of making wholesale reductions in IT spending:

“Simplistic cuts, applied across the board, may endanger critical business priorities from sales support to customer service.”

McKinsey has also found that investments in “technology-enabled business processes” deliver far more impact than reducing costs. While the natural reaction for many companies in challenging times is to become inwardly focused and concentrate on conserving working capital, history has shown that it is in these critical times that savvy organizations have a significant opportunity to outflank their competition.

“A downturn is a terrible thing to waste.” This quote in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article from mid-2008 came from one Home Depot supplier, and it reinforces the bold premise of investing for growth when times turn tough. In fact, a March 2008 study conducted by Bain & Company found that during the last recession more than a fifth of the companies in the bottom quartile jumped to the top quartile in their industry and more than a fifth of “leadership companies” fell to the bottom quartile.