Jeff Bennett's Blog

Most of the news about Web 2.0 has been in the consumer realm of the Internet, from MySpace to Facebook, Digg to Twitter, Blogger to WordPress. For all of these social networking applications, most of the news has centered around consumers adoption and use. There is enormous potential for businesses to deploy and reap incredible benefits from Social Networking as well.

Businesses need to foster enhanced methods for employees to communicate. Lotus Notes was the standard for early collaboration, but there is opportunity to enhance the ways for employees to connect and collaborate with more transparency. At our company, NameMedia, we have enhanced communication and collaboration with with our Twiki, which is a wiki application allowing for employee databases, personal pages, schedules, work flow and more. There are so many additional ways this can be deployed and other tools to be added for sharing information, enhancing collaboration and improving productivity.

Businesses can also leverage social networking tools to enhance how they interact with customers as well. The article that I “Digged” below gives a great example of how Comcast has deployed Twitter to enhance communication with customers. At NameMedia we have also deployed Chat as another method for our sales team to communicate with buyers.

In this networked world unresolved problems can create lost sales but even more importantly hurt a companies reputation. RatePoint is offering companies a platform that integrates with it’s web site to solicit feedback, track problems and facilitate resolutions. Closing the loop quickly on problems in a direct manner will aid customer service and enhance reputation. Reputation management must be an important facet for companies when they deploy social networking tools and capabilities.

These are just a few expamples of how businesses can benefit from Social Networking today.

For all the talk of businesses embracing Web 2.0 and social software tools, most companies are still at the very early stages of adoption, says Jonathan Yarmis, an analyst at AMR Research who focuses on emerging technologies. In his latest research note on companies taking their first step into social media, he says that companies must avoid

read more | digg story

Related Links:

Groundswell – Book by two Forrester analysts, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, based on consumer data for how dozens of companies are utilizing communities, blogs, wikis, Facebook, YouTube and more.

Mark Cahill on the Use of Social Networking in the Office