Confused about Corporate Social Networking?

Igloo Software

Over the last 10 years the Internet has changed our lives forever – both from a social and business perspective. With over 1 billion people accessing the Internet on a daily basis, it truly has become the platform for social change. Currently we are in a phase that the industry experts are calling Web 2.0 – one that involves a set of new and innovative tools that take us beyond the simple browsing, searching and publishing of static web sites. Web 2.0 tools enable us to actively participate, publish and interact with others on the web quickly, easily and at little or no cost. This market has absolutely exploded, with over 250 Web 2.0 applications available to us today. Out of all of this noise and chaos, a new killer application has emerged – online social networking.

First Generation of Social Networking — Consumer Social Networking

Online social networking went mainstream in 2007, lead by the popularity of two consumer social networking applications; myspace and Facebook. These sites tapped into one simple basic human need — our need to connect and socialize with others. You can't argue with their successful statistics: over 250 million people belong to one or more consumer social networking sites.

Second Generation of Social Networking — Corporate Social Networking

Out of this first social networking wave came the next wave, as the technology has evolved and migrated from the consumer space into a new business category called corporate social networking. Corporations are just now starting to realize the potential business benefits of online social networking.

Many companies today, both large and small, struggle with:

• vital corporate knowledge being trapped in information silos like email inboxes (knowledge)
• a limited understanding of organizational expertise (talent)
• a dispersed and global workforce (relationships)

These barriers hamper productivity, decrease employee awareness and cripple the pace of innovation.

Corporate social networking is the natural evolution of current collaboration and knowledge management tools used in organizations today. Why? Because doing business is both a personal and social activity. Businesses don’t strike deals or perform transactions; people do. 

Corporate social networking empowers organizations to capitalize, nurture and connect their most valuable asset: their people.

Corporate Social Networking for Business

Leading edge companies are already embracing corporate social networking tools to connect employees, share knowledge and bring distributed teams, groups and organizations closer together to collaborate and share knowledge to achieve real business results. Corporate Social Networking delivers an effective way for you to manage the knowledge, talent and relationships both within your organization by connecting your workforce, as well as externally by reaching out to customers, suppliers, and partners.

Corporate Social Networking delivers an effective way for you to manage the knowledge, talent and relationships both within your organization (Workforce CSN) and beyond (Marketplace CSN).

Achieving Real Business Value — Workforce CSN

Connecting the Workforce — Internal workforce corporate social networks deliver a cost effective way for you to acquire the best talent, improve corporate communications and drive employee engagement and well being. Within a corporate social network, you can securely coordinate, manage and monitor employee processes, interactions and activities, including:

• creating the connections employees require to find and utilize information to drive business results
• increase recruitment and onboarding programs by reaching into your workforce on prospective candidates
• deliver just-in-time learning based on readily available employee content, collaboration, and interactions
• more effectively manage the talent within your organization by creating a culture of collaboration and career development

Increasing Sales — create a corporate social network for your sales team is a cost effective and efficient way for your sales force to access and contribute to rapidly changing information, and connect with vital resources at any time, from any place. Mobile sales staff can quickly and easily build an online sales support network to help them close deals faster. It also prevents them from wasting time looking for the most current version of pricing, presentations, competitive information, and the ability to quickly find the people and information to close a deal.

Achieving Real Business Value — Marketplace CSN

Customer Retention — It’s an old adage that once a happy customer, always a customer. In today's competitive markets, customer retention and customer loyalty are more important than ever. Especially when you consider that the cost of acquiring new customers, according to many surveys, runs 8 to 10 times more than the cost of keeping existing ones.

To provide superior service, your support team needs to create deeper and more trusted relationships with your customers. This becomes a challenge when customer information is distributed over many systems throughout your organization. As a result, your support staff is unable to find the information needed to resolve customer issues in a timely manner. Valuable lessons learned from previous inquiries are not available to help solve current issues. Your customer service representatives are unprepared and the resolution of customer complaints is handled ineffectively.

A customer-focused corporate social network can result in faster client service by giving employees and customer’s real time access to technical information. Customers can access the network from any place, at any time. And accuracy of information is 100% guaranteed. You can set up forums to facilitate interaction with customers, such as new feature requests and bug reports. Use announcements to create a variety of news channels for broadcasting important product and service news to your customers. And the network makes blogs available; to regularly publish upcoming releases, bug fixes, new features, and more.

Partner Relationships — Market pressures are continually forcing organizations toward greater efficiency and productivity. Controlling costs is only one part of this equation. Increasing the quality of products and services is another and this requires a continued commitment to developing innovative ways of doing business with partners and customers.

A corporate social network delivers all of the tools you need to create, sustain and manage a global partner trading community where the borders and barriers between partners and suppliers are replaced by virtual teams, improved operational efficiency and increased profits.

Delivered on a SaaS (software as a service) model, IGLOO can inexpensively and seamlessly extend your organization’s reach directly into the business operations of customers, partners and suppliers. IGLOO makes it possible to quickly involve partners and suppliers in your development or value chain, without costly upgrades to existing systems.

CSN Implementation Best Practices

The introduction of any corporate social networking solutions requires the effective management of people, process, and technology during the implementation and deployment to ensure success.

It goes without saying these tools must adhere to corporate governance policies and practices set up by the organization and made available in a formalized, controlled and secure environment. Managers need to become enablers in this new world and not gatekeepers. It requires changes in existing business models and corporate culture.

The following best-practices can help your organization as you embark on corporate social networks for your business:

Technology

• Integrated Suite — identify and recognize the advantages a complete suite versus a single point solution such as a wiki or blog can deliver not only over the short but also the longer term as your business strategy matures.
• Securities — ensure that your corporate data is secure including storage, transmission, and accessibility and auditing.
• Extensibility — look for solutions that will integrate seamlessly with your desktop applications, enterprise solutions and mobile devices.
• Administration s — identify your business requirements around controls for configuration, measurement and monitoring of information and collaboration.

Deployment

• Pilot — identify a known business problem with a high probability for success to show quick time-to-value and learn for your experiences.
• Bottom Up — empower your employees and make them part of the decision making process – as your employees will ultimately be the key contributors to your social networks.
• Measurement s — identify key measures of success including risks right from the start.
• Outreach — create and implement outreach and awareness campaigns to stimulate usage and excitement.

Culture

• Generational Gap — identify, recognize and plan for the differences between how different generations utilize and consume information within your workforce.
• Change Management — changing behaviour is difficult; plan on finding champions to promote the network; implement incentive programs; code of conduct and best practices.
• Feedback Loops — create easy to use feedback tools in your network such as polls, blogs and rating that can provide critical insight into future investments and deployments.

Conclusion

In summary, corporate social networking is becoming increasingly recognized as a powerful business application that connects the knowledge, talent, and relationships within your workforce, as well as externally in reaching out to customers, suppliers, and partners to drive real and sustained business value. Corporate social networking is fundamentally changing the way organizations both today and tomorrow conduct business.
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