Enterprise Social Media: conform or die!
There’s growing momentum right now behind the seemingly snowballing desire for the masses to have what they want ‘right now’ to encourage business to completely renovate their business structure and processes so that they function in real ltime. This is certainly so from a customer services point of view already, with some examples cited (in Tim Leberecht’s article - Get Social Now! - over on Cnet) of the following brands:
Zara, the Spanish clothing chain, uses customer feedback to develop new clothes, in near real-time. TCHO, the San Francisco-based chocolatier, relies on continuous flavor development and customer feedback to drive constantly evolving versions of its dark chocolate, with variations emerging as often as every 36 hours. Status updates, embedded news feeds, and Twitter apps have injected some “real-time-ism” into professional online social networks such as LinkedIn andXING, converting them from address books to conversational circles, from networking forums to collaboration platforms. Zappos, the online retailer, successfully combines real-time customer service on Twitter with near-real-time delivery – having established a powerful, dynamic brand before letting its customers decide what business it was actually in. And Skittles, the candy brand, ingeniously replaced its corporate homepage with the ‘Interweb,’ a collage of real-time social web conversations not by but about Skittles – essentially recreating itself as the first ever real-time brand. All these models show that the news industry’s big conundrum applies to every other business, too: It used to be that there’s nothing more boring that yesterday’s newspaper. Now there’s nothing more boring than today’s. When you relaunch your business model, product, brand identity, web site – it’s already too late. Real-time beats planning to the punch.
I’m all in favour of social media behind the firewall - Enterprise Social Media. It’s something that as a former Knowledge Manager I appreciate how key sharing information as readily as possible can improve processes and gain you more market share than perhaps just SEO alone would. However where pioneers in digital marketing have always blazed a trail I think business in general (business 1.0 let’s say) have an enormous way to go to make this tranistion.
Indeed it is transition stratgey that is the next bold frontier as forced upon us by the revolution in of the network led society. Companies like Lee Bryant’s Headshift are the future in this regards.
The great thing about this challenge is that needn’t be the monumental task it seems. Once a framework is established based on an understanding of the social digital world we live in the steps neede for change need merely to be put in place. However it is the physical that stands to be the biggest challenge. Is our existing mangement infrastructure able to cope with the change. They may have to conform or die!
“The process is the product,” as Trendwatching writes in its latest report, in which it also claims that the real-time the web is breeding a new quest for longevity or “Foreverism”: “the new popularity of technology that allows consumers to find, follow, interact and collaborate forever with anyone & anything.” It’s not as paradoxical as it may sound. Living real-time means living in the ongoing – forever. If everything happens in real-time, nothing is ever final and always in permanent beta. Conversely, if everything lasts forever on the Google web (your emails, networks, conversations) and your digital presence is only as good as your latest search results and Twitter updates, you better utter some digital impressions NOW.
Other reading sources:
Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff: The future of computing looks like Twitter
Trendwatching’s amazing “Foreverism”
From David Armano’s Logic & Emotion blog - From Social Media To Social Business Design
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