It's (Already) Time to Rethink Social Media

Take The Stelter Company, a leader in planned giving marketing communications for nonprofit organizations, for example. The Stelter Company established Bestow, a community for gift planning professionals. Bestow offers community members a place to share and evaluate ideas, engage in peer-to-peer networking, start conversations with Stelter thought leaders and gain insights from others. Prior to Bestow, The Stelter Company was left to traditional marketing avenues, but with it, they have realized a significant uptick in "inbound" traffic. In sum, they have transformed the customer relationship from a one-way, push flavor, to a meaningful, conversational and mutually beneficial one.

Pillar 3: Respond—you hear your customers. Now what? So you have found your customers, know what they are saying, and maybe even established a community where you've begun getting some level of control over this thing called social media. Now what?

Not only is social media about establishing meaningful conversations (not just communications) with customers, it is about improving response levels and the quality of the overall customer experience. Achieving this takes more than just tools and techniques. It takes a real commitment from the organization and participation at all levels. The trouble is that many organizations have policies that preclude participation from staff that are actually best suited to respond to customers. Still, more than 45% of large organizations block staff use of public social media tools. In certain sectors, such as investment advisory firms in financial services, it is actually illegal for certain departments to communicate with other departments using messaging or any other social media tool.

Does this mean that these organizations are doing nothing with social media? Are their customers doomed to phone conversations and other one-to-one forms of communication? The good news is "no"; even organizations with strict bans on public social media can capitalize on the opportunities it represents. "Business-ready social media" solutions—those that ensure compliance with regulatory mandate and corporate policies while offering the rich, intuitive and immediate communication aspects of public tools—are being adopted as part of holistic content management and social media for business strategies.

The advantages of an enterprise social media platform are twofold:

1.  Organizations gain control over the social conversation between their business and customers, thereby strengthening brand consistency and customer service quality standards; and

2.  They empower the individuals inside the company who are best suited to react and respond to customers without the security and compliance issues associated with public networks.

A bonus of aligning a social media solution with broader content and knowledge management strategies for the enterprise is that organizations can address the growing demand among users to leverage social media as a way of working. Beyond requiring it to interact with customers and partners, employees are rapidly shifting to social media as a preferred method of communicating with colleagues, sharing ideas, collaborating around projects and carrying out processes and workflow steps.

By delivering enterprise-class social media applications that can extend to customer use cases for the Web, intranet and extranet scenarios, such as a social platform from OpenText, organizations can rapidly apply social media to existing team collaboration and content and knowledge management solutions to capitalize on the opportunities of social media while averting the risks it may pose.

Organizations that want to harness social media to improve customer experiences, build loyalty, increase "wallet share," establish new revenue channels and reduce costs—all value points generated by its use—must assess and rethink their current approach. Regardless of their findings, they will make a sound choice by deploying enterprise-class social media applications that provide an all-in-one answer for how to monitor, react and respond to their customers.