Social Mediocre

While this Dilbert strip is supposed to be fiction, I suspect it’s more real for some folks than it should be.  Social isn’t something you can do half way, you need to empower/trust your team members to get out into the marketplace to actively participate and learn from the people in the market.  It’s not just a marketing exercise either, you need to ask yourself additional questions and help the rest of the organization to support your products in the marketplace to improve traction from a new sales perspective and to increase the quality of service you deliver.  The questions I start with are:

• How is sales using social media to better understand their prospects?
• How is support using social to improve service delivery, knowledge of our customers business and their own processes?
• How can other parts of the organization use social?
• What can Finance, Professional Services, Development and QA do  to improve how they perform their craft and improve the customer experience?

Social Media isn’t just something for marketing, it’s something the whole organization need to embrace to better serve the market.  The emergence of the social organization is not a trend, it’s a competitive requirement.