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In this blog we are going to talk about how you as an organisation can use social to run your business as well as give you 10 tips on how to make using social in your organisation a success.
Using social to run your business has become more and more the norm, especially in the world of start-ups, but corporates have caught on as well. Companies such as Oracle, Accenture etc use social to collaborate. Products such as Slack (which we use internally) Microsoft’s Yammer, Salesforce’s Chatter, Oracle’s Oracle Social Network and Jive, to name a few. With the advent of Cloud, SaaS and mobile. It’s so easy to load an app on your mobile and get collaborating. Many families have WhatsApp groups and projects are run on Slack. That said, Social is maturing from departmental nice to have, to enterprise mission critical application. Some are even saying…… *Dramatic pause*…. It will replace email.
What do I mean?
Social is about working together (collaboration), sharing ideas, content, reporting, everything that we do on email. But without the down sides.
In the last 20 years Intellectual property and collaboration has taken place on a personal computer (PC). All this data is held in Outlook on .pst files on that PC. If you lose your PC or somebody gets that laptop stolen, you lose that IP. There are also additional data privacy issues with laptops and .pst files as people take it with them when they leave the company.
GDPR also throws up a number of issues, where upon people are hold people data on their laptops and of course under GDPR companies are now accountable and responsible for all person data through this legislation. For example, if somebody evokes their right to remain forgotten under GDPR legislation the data has to be removed from all systems, every application such as CRM, as well as any data on PC, such as emails, email attachments and spreadsheets. Let’s not forget all the back ups too!
What Benefits That Companies Seeing For Using Social Internally?
We run our business on social and I think if you go to the “Old Street” and Shoreditch areas of London or drop into Campus London where Google is situated, most companies use social too. We are, after all the “text message” and “whatsapp” generation where we want to communicate using a quick, short and snappy language. Long gone are the days of the “two page” email, that nobody ever read anyway.
Gone are the days where the “copy all” mentality exists in major corporates, most people understand they become salves to email and I would question, you might be busy but are you productive?
How About Some Real Examples of Using Social Internally?
Human Resources (HR) – New Starters can use it to collaborate with hints and tips so that new recruits can also share their experience. HR portals are great but too static, not flexible and generally stuffed with too much data. Also Millennials don’t like websites they are after all the facebook generation.
Sales Collaboration – By embedding social with a Sales force Automation Tool / CRM, people can share updates and collaborate across sales teams. Sales can also collaborate across companies or continents.
Saves time on meetings: The heavy lifting of meetings and discussions sharing of data can take place before the meeting. In my experience this has cut meeting times by half.
Forecast – A Sales forecast is accurate plus/minus 100%. How can a Sales Leader gain the inspection to get a feel that it will sign this month?
Sales Leaders by interacting on social can judge from the updates and velocity (or lack of it) a pace and energy in deals. That gives people a better judgement on the “art” of selling.
Related: The Business Case for Social Selling and Social Transformation
So what 10 Things Can You Do to Make Sure Social Is a Success In your Organisation?
Senior buy it is a must and there must be active participation leading from the front. Senior leads must be active and visible using social. Here at DLA I won’t answer emails if I think that the communication could or should have taken place on social.