Despite common notions—and hype—to the contrary, social media is not purely about marketing and PR. And while some social media content can leave you scratching your head about its utility or interest to anyone, social media as a whole can provide many benefits to you and others throughout your organization.
But the starting point for thinking about social media shouldn’t be what you are trying to get out of it, but what your customers are trying to do. By beginning with your customers’ objectives (their customer scenarios), you can identify which tools from the “social media toolbox”—forums, blogs, microblogs, wikis, idea engines, reviews, ratings, rankings, tagging, leader boards, and more—can help them successfully reach their goals. Then, by mapping your business unit’s objectives into this picture, you can identify those social media tools that can make you successful.
Social media does bring a new set of challenges to businesses, from its impact on organizational culture to the difficulties in finding the useful information amongst all the clutter. This report discusses these and other challenges, and provides five key recommendations to help you leverage social media throughout your organization.
What Is Social Media?
We humans are social animals. Social interactions among people have existed since the dawn of mankind, long before (to bound ahead by several millennia) the dawn of business and commerce, which we’ll loosely define as the exchange of goods and services between individuals and groups of individuals. As we are social creatures, business has always had an intrinsic social component. In business, we communicate with others, we learn from and about others, we buy from and sell to others, we barter with others, and we help and are helped by others.
Supporting the flow of these interactions is information. Business has at its foundation the connection between
people and information; how we get it, when we get it, what we do with it.
