Solving Business Challenges With The Right Social Software
We’ve discussed in previous posts how social software for business and enterprise can be customized to fulfill a very specific requirement or solve a business challenge. By leveraging the strengths and right features a good social software solution can be adapted to various business processes from marketing, training and development, collaboration, project management, HR Intranets, customer service, support and even product development. Selecting the core features and building a solution for a specific process is important and with all the various options out there, it can be confusing.
Bernd Appelhans recently designed and published a social software classification chart in a blog post which really helps puts these different software into perspective alongside their category and the kind of activity/interaction they invoke from users.
When it comes to a more comprehensive enterprise social software platform that encompass all these as features, the problem is not really selecting one or more features but deciding how to customize the platform to bring the right features to the forefront. While all the features may be activated, it’s good to be able to highlight some of the core features needed on the main community to move towards the objective whether its social marketing, customer support or any other function. Businesses across the board have been able to take the same base platform and transform them to make it their own and solve their own challenges and a chart like this can really help identify those challenges and requirements.
For example if you’re looking towards social software to build a better customer support solution, discussing, talking and communicating will be important activities. Information and to an extent files will be key categories for providing support and also creating a self service resource for customers to find solutions to their issues. So, to develop a good solution for customer support, forums, groups, articles, documents and file sharing will be central. If the objective is to build a collaboration platform or project management solution, features like Wiki s, messaging, document sharing and groups become central to it.
Identify the objectives, the core requirements and then the social software features that could help enable them. If these features are at the core of your solution and the platform is built around it, it will invoke the right activity / interaction and create a more efficient process around your organizational objective. What are the activities that you need to invoke from your users?
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