Suddenly, every legal department around the country has become the de facto Web 2.0 governance committee. What doesn’t get killed, modified, or mangled is left to the CFO to cut. Senior executives, who for the most part lack an understanding of the tools, are growing tired of all the noise around Digital, Web 2.0, Social Media, etc.
They are now directing their organizations back to what they believe to be proven strategies (as they say in the FS industry "past performance is not indicatve of future results) and tactics (core products, best customers and traditional sales & marketing tactics, like DM). It’s back to the future.
You’re mission, if you choose to accept it, is to find proven “sweetspots” for Web 2.0 in your organization now…and put it in your 2010 plan. Here are a few “no brainers” and/or proven areas that have shown to be impactful and/or demonstrate measurable value:
- Twitter - customer services applications, awareness building for events, new content, etc….no brainers
- Blogs – thought leadership, using them to help explain applications of products, credibility and audience builders…all winners and measurable.
- VODcast – similar to blogs, keep them short and on point, and work on getting the cost down.
- Wiki’s – defining internal nomenclature, taxonomy, and knowledge management all winners and well worth the effort.
Recently I met with David Godes, a professor at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. David and I got together to discuss our shared interest in sales processes, sales & marketing integration and social networks (we first meet when he was an associate professor at Harvard Business School, after he wrote a case study on the work we did with Avaya on managing integrated sales and marketing pipelines).
David and a colleague wrote an article published in the Harvard Business Review in 2006 on Sales Networks. After reading the article several times, I think it’s a useful guide for leveraging Social Networking tools to enable the sales forces. Although the study of social networks has been around for years, and it served for the development of social networking tools, the application for sales hasn’t really been developed. I believe this holds tremendous opportunity to discover “killer applications” for social media tools.
For now, think about this, the first wave of Web innovation (Web 1.0) was followed by a recession (Dot.com bust) that separated the “winners” from the “losers”. Successful technology innovations need a “killer app” to take hold. Often times it is very different from what the technology was originally designed to do (Myspace, as an example). We are now making our way (hopefully…and slowly) out of a recession that was preceded by the second wave of web innovation…what “killer applications” have you discovered - are they sustainable, and can you defend your investment in them going forward?
Do it quickly…time is running out. As Tim Washer said at the B2B Social Communication when asked about IBM's very funny video series "The Art of the Sale"; “things have changed in our social media governance and policies. I don’t think I could do this again given the current environment.”
