Page 361 - Social Media Marketing

Why This Matters in Business 339

Participant-driven support forums provide the possibility of both improved service ■ ╇ S ocial A pplications D rive E ngagement
and the actual determination of ROI. Service may be improved, for example, because
the support forum is available 24x7, including all day on gift-giving holidays when the
need for support typically spikes, and because the larger body of participants will often
have more answers for more issues. Because customers themselves often possess a deep
body of collective knowledge about how to fix, extend—think LEGO Mindstorms
here, where enthusiasts hack the internal control programs and publish their findings
for use by the Mindstorm community—and in general get more out the products and
services they purchase, support forums become central to the redefined, collaborative
customer experience.

Finally, an answer too on the ROI question: Support calls have a known cost.
Support incidents that are fully resolved in a support forum represent a call-center cost
avoided, leading directly to formal ROI measures and standards to which even the
CFO will give two thumbs up.

Workplace Collaboration

What’s been discussed so far has been done so largely from the perspective of a cus-
tomer or external participant-facing social applications. In addition to externally-
facing social applications, every one of the previous points can be applied internally, to
encourage the same collaboration inside the workplace that customers exhibit outside
the workplace. In other words, businesses and organizations can adopt social technolo-
gies for use internally—citing the same expected benefits—as their customers, suppli-
ers, and business partners who operate on the outside of the business.

To this point, social media consultant and community manager Heidi Miller (see
sidebar) noted in a recent blogpost:

“Research from McKinsey & Company and the Association for
Information and Image Management (AIIM) shows that companies are
seeing measurable benefits from the use of Enterprise 2.0 applications
and technologies. Specific benefits include an increased ability to share
ideas, more rapid access to knowledge experts, and a reduction in travel,
operations, and communications costs.”

By “Enterprise 2.0” what is meant is the same types of collaboration inducing,
information-sharing tools that define the Social Web. In Chapter 2, “The New Role
of the Customer,” and Chapter 3 I referenced Socialtext and similar Enterprise 2.0
workplace solutions. Enterprise 2.0 puts on every employee’s desktop the basic social
tools and applications that are in use across the Social Web: a profile, the ability to
“friend” and “follow” colleagues and other employees, a set of wiki pages and similar
collaborative tools, communications streams similar to Twitter (but built for secure