Social networks may be the best tools for business collaboration, according to BT’s Customer Service Futurologist Dr. Nicola Millard. In a recent video interview, Millard said businesses should be embracing social media instead of shunning it.
Millard believes that the word “social” in social media has many businesspeople eschewing social networking in favor of e-mail and other traditional marketing strategies. “A lot of people interpret [social media] as fun play and not work,” she said. Those people are missing the point that social media is actually one of the most effective business collaboration tools.
It may be hard for some to understand why a business would attempt to recruit on Facebook, or make social networking any kind of priority. Millard said smart businesses engage in social media, “Because you’ve just recruited someone who can get a job, who can socialize, who can collaborate.”
Millard explained that social networking is a powerful collaboration tool compared to email, for instance, which she said some are calling a black hole of collaboration. She pointed out that cluttered email in-boxes are ubiquitous on the web today, and that businesses sending emailed messages are more likely to get lost in the fray.
According to Millard, the problem with email activities is that they depend on a willing and receptive target market of recipients. “You need to know who you want to collaborate with,” she said. Social media, on the other hand, is all about building a network of like-minded people.
Combining unified communication methods with social networking platforms
Millard said businesses need to understand the “hive mind” of social networking. “We call it network expertise,” she said. According to Millard, a business can start the social conversation simply by broadcasting a message asking “Who knows about this?”
Millard predicts the future of collaboration may be trending away from email. She said businesses may begin combining unified communication methods with social networking platforms to form a new business tool for collaboration.
Consumers have become quite adept at using social media to its greatest advantage, said Millard. Her professional opinion is that businesses need start to harnessing that power to enhance the way people collaborate. Social media should not be considered off limits for business. In fact, social networking may just be the most powerful collaboration tool available today.
And who are we to disagree? Read more about the new ways of collaboration – without email? – in our white paper, ‘The Zero Email Company’, below.
Tags: collaboration, Nicola Millard, social media, social network
I can only support Nicola’s point.
Manjority of ICT deciders does not grasp the meaning of “social”.
In a recent article of datanews (the Belgian ICT magazine 20111125), a survey was made about zero email.
To the question : “What are the alternatives in case email would not exist anymore”, the answers were :
Mobile device: 61% (I guess it means Mobile phone)
Instant Messaging : 60%
Fixed Line : 53%
Teleconference : 32%
Videoconference : 28%
SMS : 24%
Several remarks from this pool :
1/ It seems to be a confusion between tools and applications (can’t you make instant messaging on a mobile?)
2/ from the answers, there is a feeling that the new paradigm of new way of working and collaboration has not yet been understood! No mention is made from “enterprise social platform”, that encompasses much more than just instant messaging! Where are the “workspaces”, the wikis, and so on that should be part of an integrated suite of entreprise social platform?
3/ all-almost- answers only considers “synchronious” means! while email should be essentially asynchronious! Can we conclude that people are using email for what it is not meant to be! hence missuing it? asking the question is responding to it!
Only few people have taken the time and made the exercice (not only mental) to imagine what should change in their companies if “Outlook” (not to name it) was unavailble or simpy would not exist. Number of procedures – repeatable – could be simply digitalized and freeing up the mailboxes and making life easy as they would be documented. More over one would discover that collaboration could be brought to another level if documents and knowledge were not trapped in the inboxes of the colleagues.
As rightly mentioned by Henk Vandendooren in that same article, the step to zero email, hence the broad usage of enterprise social platforms is a change in culture! What is often the most difficult and time consuming changes to implement!