The way in which we communicate with each other has changed almost beyond recognition – and now business must catch up. Stan Lepeak gives some advice on how business can use social media and how to deal with it within the business.

Collaboration is a core skill in any successful business. The means, however, through which businesses collaborate internally as well as externally with customers and partners have changed dramatically over the past 20 years and  will continue do so at a torrid pace. 

Historically businesses were relatively insular. Interactions were conducted face-to-face, through mountains of paper based mail, and via the telephone, but only when in a landed setting. This began to change in the 1970s and 80s with the steady advancement of computing capabilities and the beginning of the break-up to telco monopolies and the subsequent decline in communication costs. Business computing systems began to communicate directly via protocols like EDI (electronic data interchange) but only in very structured ways to support transactional activities.

Things changed dramatically in the 1990s with the emergence and growth of email, the internet and accessible and affordable mobile telephone services. Employees became connected real-time to coworkers as well as customers and others outside the walls of the organisation. These advances were paralleled in efforts to create software tools to enable collaboration like Lotus Notes, then Groove and then much more interactive internet and web-based services and tools. Today the collaboration envelope is being pushed by peer to peer social media applications and offerings exemplified by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, wikis  and a myriad of other related services and tools.  

Most corporations have been relatively slow to adopt the usage of social media, particularly for internal collaboration efforts. Corporate Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are becoming more common but most businesses are still learning the uses for and impact of social media. This can pose a problem because social media is already being used and impacting most businesses internally and externally. Corporations must accelerate and prioritise efforts to understand and exploit social media as a set of serious business tools. In doing do they must clearly understand and account for social media’s key tenets and characteristics (e.g., accessibility, reach, immediacy, spontaneity, uncontrollability). 

Corporations embracing social media must figure out the best ways to exploit the medium (e.g., accelerated viral marketing, peer-to-peer customer support, 'crowdsourcing'). They must also update legacy corporate policies and procedures to reflect the reality of the market (i.e., social media’s mainstream and you cannot stop or avoid it).  Most importantly, corporations must constructively encourage and channel social media’s usage rather than (vainly) trying to unduly control or stop it. Key points to address include the following:

• Make social media usage a corporate agenda item
• Provide constructive guidance and training to employees on how to use social media as part of their job duties
• Identify social media experts and bring them into the discussion. Encourage mentoring between the experts and key staff in areas like sales, marketing, and customer care
• Update and create realistic policies on employee use of services like Twitter and Facebook and tools like wikis and blogs relative to their work duties.  Pay close attention to topics like data privacy and intellectual property protection
• Create contingency plans and response teams for the inevitable breach or problem
• Involve all key corporate roles, including executive management, legal, risk and compliance representatives in social media planning and discussions; it’s too critical to delegate

In the global sourcing industry where EquaTerra plays an advisory role there are many opportunity areas where social media can bring value. It can help distributed, often global teams, to collaborate better on a sourcing opportunity. It can help with service provider vetting and assessment (most major service providers have Twitter accounts and Facebook pages) by providing a less structured and formal window into the provider thinking.

Social media can help update relevant parties on the status of an ongoing sourcing effort and alert them to problems in real time. Ultimately, if social media can help to foster better collaborative relationship between a buyer and their service provider it will prove its value as one of the core tools to enable sourcing success. 

Stan Lepeak, Managing Director, Global Research, EquaTerra