An old colleague of mine recently asked “What are the key 3 capabilities that Social Media provides, that you believe will significantly impact the business processes of the enterprise?” She mentioned:
1. Automatic profiling – networking beyond your known network
2. Tagging – manually and automatically, people, processes and documents
3. Instant collaboration – (status updates (people and processes), tweets, instant messaging)
I agree with tagging and social classification. This is incredibly powerful and definitely a key SM capability. I talk at length about it in my book, “Reshaping Your Business With Web 2.0″ (amazon link) so I decided to chat with my team and come up with 3 OTHER areas.
Interestingly enough, some of them attended THIS event just yesterday with Chris Brogan and so they were ready with some great insights.
These are less about specific technologies and more about what SM tech achieves and yields:
1) Voice of the Customer/User/Interested = richer product development, “free” focus groups, better inbound information streams from a statistically more diverse group of constituents. This leads to more pro-active pattern recognition, trend spotting and the ability to head off problems before they explode or even materialize. What if Toyota had been proactive about the whole accelerator pedal issue based on rumblings from the social media sphere?
2)Reputation cultivation and better customer service = It can be a direct conversation with that customer in real time and best of all; you can reach the customers/prospects/interested that wouldn’t call in but would tell all of their friends. By doing so you gain and cultivate a reputation for integrity and sincerity as well as street credibility around your topic(s) of interest.
3) Public, one to one conversations: customer feels special and unique, even though you are reaching “many” at one time (e.g via Twitter) because the conversation (which must be open and honest to garner respect)
What do you think?
Tags: brogan, social media
