Is Your Organization Tapping Social Media for Collaboration?
One of the great side benefits of social networks for companies is how they can be used to collaborate with customers and business partners on new product ideas, suggestions for product design improvements or enhancements to customer service or support.
And while a growing number of companies are taking advantage of these opportunities, there are countless others that have done little to exploit social media for these capabilities. And that may be putting them at a competitive disadvantage, according to Dan Neely, CEO of Networked Insights.
Customer and partner collaboration "should be done, and if companies are not doing it they're at least two years behind their competition," says Neely. "Because their competitors are learning in real time and your company is learning from focus groups that take a year or more to analyze."
I had a chance to catch up with Neely and other industry executives regarding their respective outlooks on the use of social media for customer and partner collaboration. Here's what they each had to say:
"(Social is) not just a widget or channel, it's a 24/7 focus group." -- Geene Rees, Director of Social Media Consulting, Lyris
"Think about the stakeholders in your organization. Each of those stakeholders are going to become more social and exposing their actions. With location-based services, you can figure out where your friends are and that helps facilitate conversations." - R Ray Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO, Constellation Research Inc.
"This is ultimately the value of social media - the information you collect from customers. For the most part, businesses have taken on traditional feedback vehicles to gather information from customers: surveys, focus groups, etc. The problem is that we gather a certain no of people and we hope that they'll tell us exactly what they think. But more often than not, their answers are biased. If you feed them and provide them a comfortable setting, say, in a focus group, they'll provide you with positive feedback. It's not intended, it just happens. With social media, people state what's truer to what they believe. They're not responding to a question, they're stating their true feelings about a situation ingrained in their experiences. That's the value that you get out of this." - Esteban Kolsky, Principal, Founder, ThinkJar, LLC
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