Open and Agile Social Business Solutions
Transitioning into an effective social business is a goal for many enterprises today, as it can provide a tremendous competitive advantage when done right. Studies show that more than 70% of businesses are already using social business software in some capacity today, especially to help with interactions with customers, employees and vendors/suppliers. To make this transition as smooth and effective as possible, it's important to understand what a social business encompasses, the drivers behind it, and the technologies available to make it happen.
The Social Business Is Here
Social represents a fundamental, tectonic shift in how business is conducted today, and is driven by three major trends-social, mobile and personal.
Social—The Web is becoming increasingly more social and much less anonymous. It's all about building relationships and sharing experiences. Facebook, Twitter and other social media facilitate communication and story-sharing among your customers, so this can dramatically affect how business gets done. Within the enterprise, productivity can be enhanced when employee-to-employee relationships can be fostered and workgroups can be hatched from the ground up-seamlessly-as part of everyday business.
Mobile—The growth of mobile access to the Web with smart phones and tablets is simply exploding. Tablets in particular are undergoing rapid adoption with no end in sight, affecting how organizations communicate with customers, employees, partners and other stakeholders.
Personal—While the Web is continuously expanding in terms of ubiquity, it's also becoming much more personal in terms of user experience. Localization and one-to-one communications are paramount in many industries.
When foundational change like this occurs, those who recognize the change early and quickly adapt will benefit the most.
What is a Social Business?
A social business is first and foremost open. An open business is one that breaks down all barriers between its employees and its customers, advocates, skeptics and all other stakeholders. It's a business that leverages all relevant information and knowledge both inside and outside its walls, and uses open architectures and software tools to ensure that its employees and partners can get the right information at the right time, and that its customers and sales prospects are actively engaged across multiple open channels including its website, self service portal, social media and mobile applications.
A social business is also engaged, meaning it listens as well as it talks. Traditional marketing and sales are good at talking a lot, but today's businesses need to listen to the market much more intensively than ever before. It's a business that uses open architectures and platforms to build communities around its products and services, to provide a forum for customers, prospects, and critics to express themselves. And it's a business that listens and responds authentically.
Finally, a social business is agile, which allows it to leverage all the content within its social software infrastructure to respond to the market rapidly. This means faster product development, response to customer demands, response to market opportunities and reuse of intellectual capital.
Value Creation From Social Business
A socially engaged business brings benefits to both the revenue and cost sides of the equation. Positive impact on revenue comes from an increase in customer loyalty, repeat business and customer growth. In today's socially connected world, brands can get enhanced or destroyed in minutes. Social businesses utilize tools to continually build their brand value, propel innovation and reach new customers across a wide variety of digital channels.
Cost savings comes from a networked and engaged workforce that can get to the right people, expertise and content quickly and efficiently. Social businesses utilize tools to speed products and services to market, enrich the skills of their employees quickly and allow them to develop the relationships—both inside and outside the organization.
While incorporating social software into an organization's IT strategy has its obvious benefits, there are also challenges. Social software creates masses of unmanaged content, and most enterprises find it a struggle to balance the need for social collaboration and employee productivity, on one hand, with content management and reuse and governance on the other hand. Leading enterprises recognize the need for social content management to be deployed alongside social business applications.
An Open Architecture for Social Business
At Rivet Logic, we believe open architectures and open source are the best candidates to consider for social software. Leading examples include Alfresco and Liferay. With its open architecture and comprehensive set of content services, the Alfresco platform provides the foundation for social content management and serves as a platform for managing all types of content for socially enabled enterprise applications. In addition, Alfresco offers an application—Alfresco Share—for enterprise social collaboration. The Liferay Portal also offers a robust set of capabilities for social collaboration, along with a complete set of portal application capabilities. Crafter Rivet, an open source application built on top of Alfresco for Web experience management, enables enterprises to manage Web content and site visitor experiences across multiple online channels, including the enterprise website, mobile applications, Facebook, Twitter and any other social media channel.
Transitioning into an effective social business is a goal for many enterprises today, as it can provide a tremendous competitive advantage when done right. An open and agile solution based on leading open source tools can help achieve that goal.
Rivet Logic is an award-winning consulting and systems integration firm that helps organizations better engage with customers, improve collaboration and streamline business operations. Through a full suite of solutions for content management, collaboration and community, Rivet Logic enables organizations to fully leverage the power of industry-leading open source software. With deep expertise in Alfresco, Liferay and Apache Solr, Rivet Logic crafts content-rich solutions that power next-generation Web properties, social business applications and collaborative communities. With offices throughout the USA, Rivet Logic serves clients across a wide range of industries. Rivet Logic—Artisans of Open Source. Visit rivetlogic.com