Reading an article recently I was surprised to learn that social is now the #1 use of the internet, with 94% using it to learn, 78% to share knowledge and 49% to engage experts.
Of course that is across all users, but even businesses are increasingly gaining greater visibility into the sentiments, activities and behaviours of large numbers of people. Encouragingly, the use of social has evolved to encompass a broad range of collaborative practices that facilitate business and commercial engagement. With 66% participating in professional communities, 81% engaging in brand conversations and 61% evaluating what others think and do, people are sharing knowledge, insights and even how they make decisions.
So organisations adopting this new way of working are becoming more commonplace. Business is now much more of a two-way street, empowering both customers and employees.
Companies that are in a position to utilise this approach are able to take shared insights and turn them into collective knowledge built on experiences, collaboration and customer engagement.
Lets have a look at this in more detail;
Using analytics to gaining actionable insight from their social data:
They build a stronger workforce: By applying behavioural sciences across the talent lifecycle. They use evidence-based insights to attract, motivate and retain talent, instilling a culture of self-awareness, self-improvement and stronger leadership.
They unlock actionable insights: By creating new strategies to cultivate data-supported decision-making, transform cultures and improve the effectiveness of how their workforce and marketplaces interact.
They use data to engage with people as individuals: By personalising value at every point. They deploy new processes that help them better understand the unique characteristics, capabilities and preferences of their customers and employees, optimising actions and loyalty.
“The solution is to change the fundamental way your organisation is designed and managed so that people can exercise the natural power that comes from being a human.”
(Harvard Business Review – https://hbr.org/2015/05/6-myths-about-empowering-employees)
Implementing a digital social solution for customers and employees:
Starting with their workforce: By deploying a social platform across their workforce, which integrates collaborative networking, knowledge management, social learning tools, expertise locators and workforce optimisation applications.
Extending into the marketplace: By delivering personally relevant and rewarding experiences in context. They use an integrated toolset that improves self-discovery, marketing effectiveness, online sales, service and loyalty programs.
Adopting new crowdsourcing models: By deploying collaborative portals that support co-creation with customers, employees and partners. They integrate these practices into their strategic planning processes, from product development to marketing to services and sales.
Harnessing a transparent and authentic way of working
Re-imagining their business: By evaluating how their organisation works today and then create a comprehensive yet evolutionary approach to implementing change. They design new leadership and operational policies with an eye on eased governance. They crowd source employee input to best reflect their unique culture and to proactively educate and train their employees.
Enabling their processes to be inherently social: By empowering their people to easily evolve to a new way of working, they automate the adoption of social capabilities in the context of the business processes they already rely on to get work done. They deploy upon the flexibility of an open standards based cloud and mobile infrastructure.
Protecting the enterprise: By applying new security, privacy and compliance controls, enabling them to easily monitor, identify and pre-emptively address any regulatory issues, threats and/or inappropriate behaviour that may occur.
The prize is there for any and all organisations brave enough to take the leap – by embracing new technologies and processes to benefit from the collective insight of employees and customers.
If you would like to know more about how Intec can help deliver the prize, please get in touch today.
