The Social Enterprise: Grabbing the Bull by the Horns
The Social Enterprise is a big theme for Salesforce users. Chances are, it's only going to get bigger as it continues to play a key role in platform development.
Salesforce.com's seasonal releases bring in new updates that are making the CRM platform more capable of supporting social application integration and analytics - meaning Salesforce is now able to handle more social tasks and meshes well with advanced plug-ins.
In this month's issue of CRM magazine, Ed Thompson, a VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said, "In 2012, CRM executives are faced with the challenge of taking 'social' more seriously - not as 'just another channel,' but as a whole new way of doing business."
CRM magazine also reported that the social factor was part of a $12 billion global sales figure for the CRM industry in 2011. The Social Enterprise is going to look very different for a small business compared to a large corporation. The principles for engagement will vary, but there is still a way to make being "social" a natural part of your company's customer service without sacrificing productivity or cohesiveness. If anything, the Social Enterprise, should be embraced as a way to truly understand customers' personalities and preferences. Please don't use new social tools to be a bullhorn for self-serving marketing messages because then the whole online community, including your prospects and customers, will think you are the annoying guy at happy hour who came to collect business cards and hog the guacamole. Focus instead on using the Social Enterprise to learn and become better at meeting the needs of your clients.
Doextra wants to help you figure out this new Social Enterprise. And once you figure out the Social Enterprise basic concepts, there will be new social tools to learn, embrace and deploy. But that's technology and we're all in this together, and the Social Enterprise is not going away. So let's discuss how to master it.
Homework Assignment: Read "Thinking about the Big Shift and the Social Enterprise," an introduction to the Social Enterprise written by JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at salesforce.com.