GageIn Blog

With IBM, Oracle, and other large technology behemoths announcing new social initiatives and Jive Software launching a successful IPO, 2011 marked a genuine “First Year” for social business. However, many executives still have doubts about riding the social wave into the enterprise, while others need to learn more about its supposed benefits to their businesses.

2012 will bring wider adoption of social business, as well as a search for tools to supercharge existing social applications.

An overview

Business social networks are both internal facing and external facing. At the moment, sales, marketing and customer support are the mainstream users for external facing, while knowledge workers are mostly using internal-facing social networking, hoping it to improve knowledge-sharing, internal communications, and teamwork productivity.

There are also two major genres of social applications in social networking: social CRM and social collaboration. Although there are plenty of successful stories in the early adoption of social business, vendors need to discover new ideas and use cases to excite customers and help them achieve better ROI.

How can social business be supercharged?

Unlike consumer social networks where user-generated content abounds, business social networking needs a mix of user and system generated content. It needs content that is relevant to business objectives and social engagement.

So far, efforts from social business vendors consist of helping employees centralize and share files with one another. However, perspectives from the external world around your company are more critical to business success as you sell to customers and compete with others. Bringing information from your business ecosystem and sharing it with your team and across departments, and reacting properly is increasingly critical and valuable to both businesses deploying social applications and social business vendors.

Social CRM and collaboration vendors are starting to realize the benefits of working with business content providers; some are taking steps and integrating content databases with their products and services.

Where does GageIn fit into all this?

We, at GageIn, have been working behind the scenes on some special partnerships with various social CRM and collaboration vendors and are looking forward to being able to officially announce our jointly integrated services in the coming months! We’re hopeful that this effort will create new momentum for social business.

Stay tuned!