About the Book
This book is meant to equip business leaders with the tools and knowledge necessary to humanize their business operations …Stay Connected
About the Author
Michael Brito considers himself a student of the social business, community building and customer advocacy.
More About Michael >>
How to Create a Customer Advocacy Program
Advocates congregate all over the social web. They spend time on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, blogs, forums and other, smaller community sites. Before an organization creates a formal customer advocate program for their brand, they must first be ready to scale their programs internally and understand the budget, management/ownership; and then formalize and document specifically how the program is going to function. Additionally, companies must ensure that the entire organization is fully bought into the program and ready to support it at all levels. And once the program is in place, companies need to be prepared to take action. Merely listening to advocates and saying “thank you” every now and then just isn’t enough.
Putting an end to modern-day slavery one book at a time, or better yet …
I just finished reading “A Stolen Life: A Memoir” which chronicles 18 years of Jaycee Dugard’s life living as a slave less than 50 miles from my house (touching interview here). I finished the book in two days and couldn’t stop thinking of the two most important people in my life, my daughters. It broke me and I almost wept on the plane coming back from LAX surrounded by strangers. Reading this book completely validated my decision to donate 100% of all the book royalties to Not For Sale which is a non profit organization that is trying to abolish human and sex trafficking and ending this madness.
If you can’t afford to buy the book, please just donate $5 or $10 to Not For Sale by clicking on “Chip In” on the below widget which will take you to Paypal (note: the July 13th date displayed is 2012)
Choosing the Right Social Business Technology
Technology will not change a company but it’s still important. Having the right technology solution will help facilitate change initiatives across job functions, business units and geographies. However, finding the right social business technology is not easy. The good news is that there are dozens of software vendors offering social business solutions. The bad news is that it makes the process for choosing the right platform that much more difficult. Additionally, many technology companies today are making acquisitions (i.e. recently Salesforce/Radian6, Meltwater/Jitterjam and over the last couple of years – Lithium/Scoutlabs, Attensity/Biz36) so in the future, the number of social business vendors will decrease. That being said, there are several considerations that technology decision makers and social business change makers must think about before deploying a social application. The most important is to first understand the company culture and leadership.
Clearvale: The Social Business Cloud – VIDEO
I had an in-person demo of Clearvale yesterday and I was really impressed with its features that it provides to the enterprise, specifically the intranet/extranet integration. Clearvale is an enterprise social business platform that enables organizations to create a network of mini networks; a social enterprise ecosystem not just behind the firewall but externally as well. The platform itself is excellent for cross-functional teams to engage, connecting employees, customers, and partners in a collaborative and virtual environment. Here is a video that explains the platform, definitely worth watching.
Here is a link to a few white papers and other documents that might be helpful.
Social Business Q&A with Maria Ogneva, Head of Community at Yammer
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Maria Ogneva, Head of Community for Yammer. We talked about the social customer, various social organizational models, governance and social media policies and the evolution of social business. Here are the slides that guided our conversation and many of the questions we covered are here. A recording of the webinar will be available soon and I will post it here.
SocialBase: From Chaos to Collaboration
For those who work in the enterprise, managing a suite of community management tools and applications can be difficult. It can get even more chaotic when there are multiple stakeholders who are responsible for engaging with the social customer. One tool that is streamlining this chaos is SocialBase; it’s a collaborative social media project management system that eliminates the chaos of social media management by consolidating the tasks, tools and platforms. The following video explains a few of the features:
Jive Social Business Study: Will conversations ever become action?
Jive released a study today – Jive Social Business Index 2011, (infographic below) which surveyed 902 US based executives at large and mid-sized companies on their views of the social organization.
The study revealed that Social Business is increasingly perceived as a strategic executive imperative in the enterprise, with 78 percent of the executives surveyed admitting that having a social strategy is critical to the future success for their respective organizations.
Key insights include:
- 66 percent of executives believe that social applications for business represent a fundamental shift in how work will get done.
- 53 percent of executives believe they must adopt Social Business or risk falling behind.
- 57 percent anticipate “increased revenue or sales” as a result of implementing a Social Business strategy.
- 62 percent of executives cite the potential to achieve “better customer loyalty and service levels” and 57 percent anticipate “increased revenue or sales” as a result of implementing a Social Business strategy.
- 62 percent of all respondents think that businesses need to leverage social software inside and outside their organizations in order to remain competitive.
- Online communities are an important source of information for making purchase decisions, especially for millennials. Fifty-four percent of millennials said that they are more likely to rely on and make purchase decisions from information shared via personal contacts in online communities versus 33 percent more likely to use information from “official” company sources.
- 83 percent of executives leverage at least one social network for work use.
The…
Budgets on the Rise for Social Business
Many times, social media teams are forced to roam the halls of corporate America with a tin cup asking for budget to support social media programs. This happens for a variety of reasons. Either the money has dried up to fund existing programs, there is a need internally to invest in social technologies, or a company is looking to build an external presence in social media and needs to hire an agency or community manager for support.
The Difference between a Social Brand and a Social Business
The difference between a social brand and a social business is fairly straightforward. A social brand is about external communications. A social business deals with operations and culture change. The end result is the same — to better engage with the social customer. Check out the social business book on Amazon if you are interested in learning more.