using online social networking to grow your business nettc symposium & techstar awards oct. 2009...

Using Online Social Networking to Grow Your Business

NETTC Symposium &TechStar AwardsOct. 2009

Austin Gillis - Executive AdvisorGartner Executive Programs

Brandon Talbert- Manager, Marketing and Client Services - Regional Alliance for Economic Development

© 2009 Gartner, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Discussion Points

What is “Social Networking” and it’s perception within your enterprise?

What are the business and/or cultural benefits or risks of Social Networking technologies?

What are the opportunities for CIOs in leveraging today’s Social Networking technologies?

What does the future “supply and demand” for social networking technologies look like?


What is “Social Networking” and its perception within your enterprise?

Collaboration and social communities are concepts as old as society itself — so why should we be talking about them now?

The answer lays in the fact your employees and customers have embraced virtual communities and collaboration; they are now a key part of their lives, and enterprises cannot avoid doing the same.

Decade of the "Digital Native“

Intuitively knows how to use technology and uses it automatically• Complex non-geographic social network• Collaboration across time and space• Comfortable in a virtual society• Different work/life balance and value set• Individuals that have discovered the power of collaboration and communities, will never go back.• Organizations must now do the same. Organizations will start to lose total control of their business

models as communities redefine them — think of what happened to the music business.

Community: Humans need to belong to a community, of whatever type Technology enables richer, faster, denser social networks "Who you know" is more important than "What you know"


What is “Social Networking” and its perception within your enterprise?

Collaboration:

The age of Participation – Web 2.0

New trust and value networks – Open Source

Comfortable living within virtual societies – MMORPGs

A Gartner Definition for Enterprise Social Networking:

We define enterprise social software as software that facilitates, supports and promotes non-routine

interactions between people within an organization. This broad definition encompasses conventional

communication and collaboration tools such as e-mail and shared workspaces, technologies for social

network analysis and dynamic profile management, and forms of group interaction such as social

bookmarks, social tagging, content ratings, and blogs and wikis.


Social Software: A Factor Inside and Outside the Enterprise

Social networking- Social profiles

- Social network analysisSocial collaboration

- Wikis- Blogs (borderline social

publishing)- Collaborative office

Social media- Content sharing (tags)- Content aggregation

- Social publishingSocial validation

- Social rating, ranking, commentary

- Social content structure

The Distributed Social Web

How does it affect you?

It's affecting you now, and increasing rapidly.

Next Monday morning..

Establish rules of engagement.

Begin monitoring.

Begin participating.

Bring a social dimension to your internal and external Web sites.

Critical time frame: 2010


Social Networking Trends

2007 Gartner ITxpo: 3% of IT professionals indicated their organizations encourage social-networking sites

USA Today, 4/19/08… Javier Olivan, International Manager at Facebook, based in Palo Alto, CA. "Our goal would be to hopefully have one day everybody on the planet on Facebook."

Twitter

Pownce

IMVU

Jaiku

Wikis

Blogs

Second Life

Plaxo

LinkedIn

Facebook

MySpace

Friend Feed

Beebo

Club Penguin

Xanga

Live Journal

1000s others

Sun - IBM - Google

Microsoft – Yahoo -eBay

Oracle - BEA Systems

Leverage - Amazon

Spoke - Userplane

Socialtext - Corespeed

Etc..

?2013??2013?

CIOs – Enterprise

Employees

Customers

Suppliers

Competitors

Family – Friends

Future relationships


What are the business and\or cultural benefits or risks of Social Networking technologies?

Advantages1. Attracting and Retaining Employees

2. Providing Better Work/Life Balance

3. Fostering Innovation of Business Practices

4. Marketing, Product Development, Advertising

5. Communities created by anyone

Risks1. Productivity

2. Security

3. Acceptable Usage

4. Corporate Liability

5. Data Loss

6. Privacy

• "What are the business benefits of allowing employees access to social networking sites?"

• “What is the missed business opportunity of blocking access?”

• “CIOs should have access to and experience 2-3 social networking sites including one virtual reality site each month.” Agree or Disagree… Why?


What is the measurable business impact I should expect and commit to with regard to collaboration? Suggestions…

• Use a "sandwich" approach comprising several layers of top-down, quantifiable benefits (productivity benefits) / and bottom-up (quality improvement benefits (for example, innovation, idea generation and creating)

• Employ anecdotal arguments• Be conservative• Monitor post implementation

Examples of quantifiable benefits: Lower travel costs; printing costs Increase productivity of call center agents; production coordination Improved closure time Shorter production time for collaborative documents Self service intranet

Examples of anecdotal benefits for executives Involving more people in decisions with shared team spaces Tighter teamwork by connecting geographically distributed employees Emergency communications One-off savings and process improvements Wider use of existing corporate resources due to intellectual asset inventory programs Deals won or sales made due to improved collaboration among employees or with the customers directly Greater content reuse and leverage; successful career development resulting from wider access to e-learning Risk if we do nothing, etc..

It is important for organizations to recognize the role that collaboration plays in achieving the organization's goals and avoid measuring the productivity of the tool instead of the associated business impact. The benefits of improved collaboration effectiveness may be a little "soft" to support a conventional business proposal, so low-cost pilot schemes that can be easily demonstrated to win support should be the favored approach. Actual experience can then guide further incremental investment.


What are the opportunities for CIOs in leveraging today’s Social Networking technologies?

Customers- Existing- New

Suppliers

External to the Enterprise (services, communities, etc…)

Internal to the Enterprise- Sales, Customer Service, HR, Finance, Distribution,

Marketing, “Manufacturing”, Board of Directors, etc…


What are the opportunities for collaboration? Suggestions…

What processes and business activities require associates to collaborate as a way of providing value? Clarify business purpose?

Where are “formal and informal” communities built today in your business? Why?

Where do you see “work” characterized by user-controlled, conversational-style interactions, often centered around exchanges of opinion, comments, preferences, bookmarks, descriptions, and so on?

Where can technologies create denser, richer, and faster collaborative networks?

Benefits to think about: Associate, customer and/or supplier collaboration and communities are tools of innovation

Collaboration is an important vehicle for learning, building productive communities and sharing information, inside and outside the organization

Collaboration provides new opportunities for generating revenue from observation and data mining

Collaboration can provide new ways to solve problems through sources of trusted knowledge and offer new ways to create products


Mobile Social Network Taxonomy



•Integrated Communications

•Real Time communications (audio, data, voice, etc..)

•Shared Workspaces

•Collaborative writing/wikis, blogs, file sharing, membership management, etc.

•Team decision support (voting, sorting, ranking, scenario planning, categorizing)

•Community and content services (social networking analysis and mapping, content rating, reputation management, surveys, events)

•Move seamlessly in different interaction modes

Planning Assumption: By 2010, more than 60% of Fortune 1000 companies with a Web site will have some form of online community that can be used for relationship marketing purposes (0.8probability).

Massive penetration: With voice and messaging capabilities, mobile phones enable people tocommunicate anywhere, anytime. They represent the preferred personal communication tool 3.3B!


How do I deploy the technologies, processes and behaviors to help drive collaboration? Suggestions…

Perform a corporate self assessment. Collaboration isn't a technology category; it simply means people working together. Therefore, companies should assess the collaborative behaviors they wish to support, not their need for tools with certain "functions."

Determine your company's style of collaboration. Enhance collaboration efforts by understanding whether your organization uses a tactical or a strategic approach to collaboration — or whether people primarily coordinate and communicate or engage in richer collaborative interactions, such as dynamic shared work spaces, social networks or ad hoc communities of practice.

Utilize "use cases" before choosing tools. Reduce uncertainty and failures in deploying team collaboration tools by first matching the technology to processes and business scenarios. Understand the impact of bringing tools to bear in the business.

Measure the benefits. When companies have implemented collaboration technologies, one of the biggest challenges they face is how to measure the benefits. To measure the benefits, they will need to follow the actual results, such as efficiency increases and quality improvements, which come from supporting team collaboration.

Behaviors can change. Behavior follows value weather that means “personal” productivity or “corporate” productivity so foster this through metrics that allow associates to identify, innovate and reward collaboration.

Educate executives and users. The tools and technologies can be deployed easily by the IT once the support for the specific business process is identified. Open-source products for wikis (personal- or group-information repositories), blogs (personal perspective publishing) and discussion (pure conversational tools) forums can now support general business collaboration.


Conclusions

Get out of denial. Recognize the reality of the impact of social networking and relationship to collaboration “needs and wants” in all aspects of enterprise IT and infrastructure.

Don't try to stop collaboration in social networking communities. You will fail. But, you can manage it with education and a realistic and pragmatic approach.

Keep an open mind and watch employee and consumer activities around technologies carefully.

You will get cost savings, but you will get far greater benefits in more-unexpected areas such as employee productivity, creativity and satisfaction.

You ain't seen nothing yet. This trend is still in its infancy; prepare for the ride of your life.


Gartner’s Collaborative Strategy Framework


Thank Youand Congratulations

Thank Youand Congratulations

QUESTIONS???????????????????????

using online social networking to grow your business nettc symposium & techstar awards oct. 2009...

Documents

social communities

enterprise social networking

social tagging

social webhow

social dimension

online social networking

enterprise social software

denser social networks