About Social Media Today
We all know that social media is a two-way street. It gives you the ability to communicate with the outside world and engage with people beyond your normal social circle. Imagine what social media could do for you in a business environment – breaking down departmental silos, reducing emails and meetings, connecting you with internal experts, all in real-time.
You might think that bringing social technologies into your business is about communicating better with customers, but it’s more than just that. Incorporating social technologies into your business is about connecting with customers as well as employees and building a solid foundation of collaboration within your own enterprise. Most organizations adopted social from the outside-in, but it’s most effective when it happens from within.
Incorporating social collaboration into your business helps to establish culture and leadership within the office “walls”. The pace of technology adoption enables businesses to become social, but it’s the mindshare of your employees that makes it tangible.
As companies consider a variety of enterprise collaboration tools, they often fail to realize that the use cases extend beyond cutting down email. Here are 10 ways employees will benefit from social tools in their enterprise:
- Connect with your internal experts: Do you have a question for someone in products, marketing, sales or finance but don’t know who to go to for the right answers? Instead of worrying about spamming distrubituion lists, post your request using a private social network and get answers pushed to you directly from the experts within your company.
- Collaborate with remote employees and mobile colleagues: Remote employees often feel disconnected. While they may communicate with a few select team members at the home office on a regular basis, their connection with the rest of the staff is scarce. Bring everyone together with a tool that helps them stay connected and also allows your workforce to tap into regional expertise.
- Easily share large files: Sending large documents and presentations through email clogs inboxes or can trigger error messages. Plus, you never know if you have the latest version. Upload and collaborate on a file using a collaboration tool, like Salesforce Chatter, without hitting mailbox limits or signing up for additional file-sharing services.
- Prepare for presentations: Instead of spending time in endless meetings going back-and-forth on customer presentations, post your slides to your team and get questions and feedback in half the time.
- Manage team projects: Complex projects involve a lot of different people and moving parts. Bring the project and its related tasks together so everyone is on the same page with the latest information, without filling up inboxes with endless email threads.
- Discuss confidential topics: Departments like HR, finance, and legal need to discuss sensitive information in a secure private setting. Using a private group within a collaboration tool ensures that these conversations will remain confidential.
- Get answers: Next time you have a question for the product development team, marketing, or any other department, don’t send an email blast – post your questions and get answers from the people you wouldn’t even know to include.
- Share important information with coworkers: When you find interesting articles, videos, or websites that are relevant to your business, post them instead of sending an email to the whole office.
- Solve customer issues: When a customer has a problem, you often need to work with people across your company to solve the issue quickly. To give the best possible service, post your problem to get quick responses from those who are knowledgeable and available.
- Brainstorm marketing ideas: Skip the meeting and have a virtual brainstorm. Post your topic using a collaboration tool and get ideas from your team when it’s convenient for them or get feedback from a focus group to test advertising or marketing ideas.
With the integration of new communication channels and mobility, more companies are discussing how to take their business to the next level with social technologies. As this shift towards social occurs and becomes more widespread, companies must think about how they can infuse internal social platforms to communicate across their business, to create a real-time thread of ideas, opinions, and feedback. Start with a social business tool that works for your company; some options are even free. You will find that it drives greater results, by allowing employees to unite and become part of the company brand.
