We build social sites as a focal point for user-generated content. These sites require an ongoing user base, technical functionality and dedication from the site owners. Without any one of these, the site likely fails.
Users… these are the key contributors to your site. Users bring with them experience, curiosity, interests and friends. They ask questions, answer questions and post about their experiences. They have a desire for the latest news, events and offerings. Users share the information on the site.
Functionality… to engage your users. Users read, share and comment on content. They often post news, events and photos. Most are open to creating a social profile. The site functionality needs those features and a solid user experience to encourage them to participate. Other features help the site owners learn from the community including challenges, polls and surveys.
Dedication… to adapt to your users and keep your site fresh. Community managers keep a pulse on the community. Community managers help write content and disseminate information, often gleamed from external sites like Twitter. Community managers respond to content issues, sometimes of which is spam, user content that is deemed inappropriate, or disorganized information. Community managers share in the experience.
Through dedication and functionality, users often give the site a life of their own. Trust between users and site owners is important.
Workers can find the information and people they need faster with social tools. Social tools also make internal information and business processes more visible, findable, and shareable, and makes it possible to see who knows what.
Find ways to compare your productivity levels to see if there is an increase.
Employee Engagement
Social Business Software helps your users collaborate and discuss online. Your workers will spend less time in e-mail and more time in collaborative interaction.
This goal can be measured by reviewing email volume and by periodically conducting employee satisfaction surveys and gaining feedback from the users of the system.
Innovation
Innovation can come from anyone and everyone.
Idea Management includes an idea submission area which can be used to discuss and track successful ideas. Use innovation wikis to collaborate further.
Improve Customer Experience
Productivity gains can also lead to an improved customer experience. Employees have greater access to answers and tools to track issues across departments. Compare your customer retention and satisfaction levels.
Social Engagement
Employees can build connections in an organization, busting through silos. Find out who the experts are in your organization.
Sales & Turnover
There are now consistently reported benefits of social for most organizations.
Use Social Business Software as a competitive advantage. After using Social Business Software, compare sales figures and sales generated per employee.
After attending a moving presentation from Don Tapscott (of Wikinomics fame) at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, almost two years ago, I felt encouraged about the work Concursive was doing with centralized tools for businesses. The CRM had the right features for sales force automation and document management, and managers were happy seeing daily roll-ups of opportunities and action planning. Don had convinced me that there needed to be more collaborative elements in the business process, "a paradigm shift."
Posted by Michael Harvey on
December 21, 2007, 7:15 PM
EST
The end of 2007 is close, an ideal chance to reflect back on the year. It’s been a great year for us, from gaining investment from Intel, launching our new Concourse Suite 5.0, and of course our name change which reflects the growing presence of the company. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our employees, customers, partners and investors, which have supported us throughout 2007.
I noticed that Mashable, the largest social networking news blog, ran a piece on “Best of 2007: Trends That Shaped the Web”. Three of the trends that Mashable selected: ecommerce, social networking and open source, are all areas that Concursive is directly involved in. In our drive to enable organizations to connect through the simplicity of a single platform solution, we provide the tools that better enable ecommerce, embrace all social networking standards – and all through open source standards.
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