Is Your Company Ready For Collaboration?

Although I write a lot of posts about being customer-centric, it’s important to remember that customers form only part of the corporate relationships agenda. Another category of important relationships are partners.

And partners will only become more important in the Digital Society.

A recent article by John Hagel III and Marc Singer entitled Unbundling the Corporation hit home just how the importance of partners will grow within the Digital Society. The article appeared in the McKinsey Quarterly.

Hagel and Singer wrote,

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Collaborate or Risk Social Media Failure

There’s substantial ROI of social media, whether it for PR, Marketing, Customer Service. But if leaders don't understand the business relevance of social media, they may be doing their organization harm.

If you missed out on yesterday’s Focus roundtable, then you missed out hearing Dr. Natalie and I talk on the importance of collaborating across functional departments and what happens to brands that don't.

Among our topics, we covered:

  1. Mixed messages that have a longer life due to social. – iRobot case study
  2. Not getting the full benefit of ROI. – Dell case study
  3. Dangers of poor leadership that can cause internal weakening due to political infighting. – Aliased case study (name hidden to protect the fightees).

Catch up, though, via the replay.

 

Talking around the town – Friday, 10/16/09

I entered into a great discussion this week on John Moore’s blog regarding Important Social Media Stats From IDC For You To Consider.

The article highlights adoption of social media by workers and the technology implications.  I commented on my techno-thoughts, in the good company of others.

 

I agree with a lot of what John writes, however, in his article Social Media May Never Scale Beyond Support For Most Businesses, John and I face off on opposing sides.  There's great potential for business uses of social media -- but it will fall into collaborative realms.

Business strategy should always lead technology

There are ongoing discussions ablaze concerning how to label social media technology solutions.  Should they be called Social CRM or Social Business solutions or what have you.

It’s beneficial to decide on labels so we can all speak a common language so the discussion is important.

However, the focus on the technology is also a cart before the horse phenomena.

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Collaboration equals harnessing diversity

Sometimes I wonder why collaboration is so interesting to me and today I solved on the why.  It’s because collaboration equals harnessing diversity.

Being an information explorationist, despite whatever job title I may hold at any given time, diversity means exposure to truckloads of information I might not find on my own. And that's cool!

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How to calculate the ROI on collaboration software – Building the business case

One of the big questions on social media software solutions is ROI.  The general thought is it’s hard to determine.  I disagree.

Just so we’re on the same page, by collaborative software I’m thinking of feature functionality like wikis, file sharing, and discussions.

What you want for a return on any business investment is either revenue generation or cost savings. 

 

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Community-enhanced versus traditional websites – what’s the what

One of our Intellicore Design Consulting clients needed help in understanding the value of a community-enhanced website versus their traditional website.  You know, “community” as in social media outreach.

I put together a short PowerPoint presentation to explain what’s the what and thought others might also want in on the whata.

Check it out.

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GroupSwim released version 6.1 - Cool beans!

GroupSwim, developer of social software for business, released a version 6.1 of their nifty collaboration and community software suite last week.  The platform just keeps getting better and better.

Intellicore Design Consulting is also a GroupSwim partner.  For those of you who are new to GroupSwim, Gartner selected the developer as one of its Cool Vendors in Social Software for 2009. 

We likey GroupSwim for a lot of collaborative communication reasons and you can read more here.  Add to that list, the following new functionality is:

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