Professional Documents
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Social
Business
Imperative
This manifesto is about the power of a new approach to getting work done. It’s about responding to
a bad economy in a proactive way. It is about harnessing a different way to produce positive business
outcomes in an age of unprecedented uncertainty. It’s about giving your people, customers and
business partners new ways to succeed.
Web 2.0 technologies shaped by consumer sensibilities and applications have revolutionized the way
tens of millions of individuals communicate, relate and socialize. Now, that same Web 2.0 momentum
is coming to the enterprise, driving the biggest change in the way businesses work in more than a
decade.
59%
Customer Relationship Management software, which
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pulled enterprises far closer to their customers and ensured that customer knowledge didn’t walk out
the door with a departing salesperson.
But as more companies have adopted these tools en masse, the performance differentiation they once
heralded among early adopters has leveled off. Enterprise applications focused on instrumentation
and automation have become table-stakes for the successful organization. Now, forward-leaning
businesses are embracing a new way to distinguish themselves, an approach that amplifies and leverages
the value of their best people, relationships and intellectual capital. The answer lies in Social Business
Software, a class of enterprise technology that supports natural, human, peer-to-peer connections and
the group contributions and conversations that are required to drive success in the future.
Social Business Software builds on the best principles and applications of Web 2.0. It combines the
power of social networks, where individuals share ideas, criticisms and information that benefit the
collective, and makes the most of emerging forms of communication, including wikis, video dispatches
and blogs. Social Business Software is simple, no user manuals required. It also is inherently social,
creating an environment where listening is a virtue and cooperation is understood. It can be applied
externally, for purposes of customer outreach and branding, and internally, to support teamwork that
reaches across org charts and time zones to produce truly transformative results. For an even more
profound impact, Social Business Software can be applied both inside and outside an enterprise,
bridging contributions and insights from the entire circle of employees, partners and customers who
contribute to the success of a business.
Among organizations that have already embraced Social Business Software are Avon Products,
Best Buy, CNN, Chordiant Software, ConAgra Products, Dell, Dow Chemical, EMC, Nike and
Starbucks. Why? Nike reports that fully 40 percent of the runners that register and participate in
its Nike+ social community convert to its products. Dell, meanwhile, has fundamentally changed
the way it treats innovation through a customer community called IdeaStorm that it launched in
February 2007. In its blog, Dell reports that
Projected Enterprise Web 2.0 Software Spending, 2009 – 2013
IdeaStorm has generated close to 10,000
Year Internal/Enterprise 2.0 External/Social Computing ideas and more than 80,000 comments.
2009 $621,000,000 $625,000,000 Visitors can promote and demote ideas,
2010 $912,000,000 $993,000,000 and the company reveals that it has used
2011 $1,222,000,000 $1,499,000.000 hundreds of them to change the way it
Adoption of similar initiatives is building, faster than many enterprises had expected: This is one
of the few categories of business technology spending expected to explode over the next four years:
Forrester Research, for one, predicts, “Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly
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over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013. While the spending by enterprise-class
companies — firms with 1,000 or more employees — will touch $764 million in 2008, the collected
expenditure on social networking, RSS, wikis, blogs, mashups, podcasting, and widgets will grow at a
compound annual rate of 43% over the next five years.”i Gartner, meanwhile, forecasts, “By 2012, more
than 30% of large organizations will have deployments of social software suites available to all their
employees.”ii
That’s where Social Business Software steps in, layering fresh perspective and ideas on top of legacy
enterprise software applications.
In a video interview published in October 2008 by the Harvard Business Review, Cisco Chairman and
CEO John Chambers predicts that the next wave of corporate innovation and productivity growth
will be about amplifying the power of people. “It will be built around something that actually our
children, and young people invented in social networking,” he says. “Except we will bring it to business
with process, with discipline, common vocabulary, common review cycles, resource allocation, top
management focus on it, etc.”
Anticipating the change this new technology would bring, Chambers created what he calls working
groups that transcend Cisco’s formal organizational chart to encourage social business connections.
These teams bridge cross-functional concerns. Rather than being concerned about the day-to-day
worries of an individual operating unit (although those concerns are represented), they have as their
focus larger strategic agendas.
Chambers tells Harvard Business that this transformation took plenty of patience, time and trust,
especially from senior executives, most of all him. It took a lot of discipline, he relates, to let teams
come to their own conclusions without top-down interference. Yet, the decisions these teams make
are often better than those dictated by a single individual. “I think the stumbling block that we all trip
on is we’ve been successful in command and control, and therefore we know how to do it very well,”
Chambers tells Harvard Business.
But Chambers remains firmly committed to the philosophy that new collaborative work styles and
applications enabled by Web 2.0 will be powerful tools for the successful enterprise of the future.
If anything, the movement is happening more quickly than he expected, Chambers said during an
interview published to accompany the company’s earnings report released in February 2009.
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1. The U.S. recession will be one of the deepest, if not the deepest, in six decades.
2. The downturn will be the worst in Europe over a couple of decades and the worst in Japan since
1998.
4. The Federal Reserve and other central banks will keep cutting rates.
9. The dollar will remain strong as long as the financial crisis continues.
10. The single-biggest risk facing the U.S. and world economies is a timid response to the crisis.
Now, more than ever before, success depends on your ability to realize the transformative value of
your people, ideas and relationships. When your best people work on your best ideas in an open,
transparent, collaborative way, they create a completely new kind of asset called Social Capital. This
manifesto is about how to unleash the power of that asset, one that is directly within your sphere of
influence.
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Social Business Software supports the development of your Social Capital by creating the environment
for people to work in a marketplace of ideas, where the best ideas for solving problems or seizing
opportunities rise to the top and become the basis for decision-making and action taking. The faster
the best ideas are translated into decisions and actions, the more Social Capital you have. This creates
the platform for out-executing your competition. The company that executes on the best ideas the
fastest wins.
Your company’s ability to grow its Social Capital faster than the competition will be key to unlocking
what business strategist Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, calls “smart growth”
through the recession and beyond. The ability of business leaders to adjust their success metrics and
management techniques quickly to support this transformation will be critical for survival, he argues.
Here are Haque’s four hallmarks of smart growth, as outlined in a Jan. 30, 2009 post to his “Edge
Economy” blog for Harvard Business : iv
Haque believes that these principles require business leaders to recalibrate their expectations of
corporate performance and focus not just on driving more transactions, but on producing strategic
business outcomes made possible only through entirely new approaches to teamwork and innovation.
Social Business Software will accelerate a business leader’s ability to propagate these new approaches
throughout their organization.
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It provides a platform for capturing and sharing conversations and insights around a variety of
subjects, and it can become a foundation for creating communities of interest that link companies
with their customers and business partners. Yes, Social Business Software facilitates collaboration and
teamwork. But it doesn’t get hung up on formalities, such as the functional roles of participants or
complex workflow processes that could get in the way of sharing ideas and information quickly.
“The biggest untapped source of value in the enterprise now is people,” says Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive,
a company that develops Social Business Software being used by more than 2,500 companies. “If
you want to dramatically transform efficiency, you must start there. Today, employees are forced to
collaborate in e-mail silos where nothing is reusable, and file systems where documents are never seen
again. They rarely look outside their own departments to other teams, and very rarely look outside
the company. There has never been a system to manage this ‘big
conversation’ among customers, partners and employees – learning
how to do this will drive massive value back to the transactions and Relative amounts of different types of ties for
a prototypical knowledge worker
processes.”
Perhaps the best way to visualize the value of Social Business None
Software is by picturing all the different connections that it can help Potential
the typical knowledge worker make, especially those that would not
Weak
otherwise be possible.
Here are McAfee’s requirements for software applications and platforms aspiring to fit the Social
Business Software category:
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Frictionless, meaning it takes very little time to turn a random thought, idea or comment into a
contribution within the environment.
Emergent, suggesting that the value of contributions will increase over time as more
contributors share ideas and patterns become evident.
“Too many corporate collaboration environments that I’ve observed … come up short on the frictionless
and freeform criteria,” McAfee writes in his Jan. 27, 2009 blog entry, entitled “I Know It When I See
It.” “They make it far too difficult for prospective users to contribute, and they persist in slotting
people into pre-assigned roles based largely on the formal org chart. In many cases they also impede
emergence by having many small and mutually inaccessible environments, instead of one big one.”
Social Business Software is distinguished by its ability to capture that bigger conversation by letting
people have more of the smaller ones, whenever, wherever and however they want.
“This is a marketplace of ideas. The best ideas should win out, and this new approach makes it easier for
that to happen,” says Jive’s Hersh. “When you have the right conversations and the right interactions,
those will drive value to the right transactions. You can make smarter decisions.”
One of EMC’s most controversial decisions was whether or not to let employees chat about topics
that are less business-specific, such as the best restaurants near each local EMC office or local
community activities. Although there is ongoing internal debate about whether these conversations
are appropriate, they have been allowed to happen. “I am a firm believer that the social interaction
aids the business interaction,” Pappas observes. The result has been personal, social connections that
engender trust and make for healthier working relationships.
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2. Drive sales growth. With lengthening sales cycles and intense economic pressure, marketers
need more advanced strategies to enable success. Social Business Software creates public communities
in which prospects get connected to trusted peers—enabling marketers to create a powerful new
sphere of influence. Social Business Software can also support social networks where salespeople can
pose questions that are answered quickly by experts, where they can share best practices with each
other about how to approach certain accounts, and where they can find other people who might know
how to approach a particular customers or prospect.
3. Increase loyalty. Customer retention is more critical than ever but tighter travel budgets
will undercut efforts to directly engage clients at proprietary conferences. By using Social Business
Software to run an ongoing series of virtual events that accompany or build on face-to-face gatherings,
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your business can solicit client feedback and make it immediately actionable by channeling it directly
to your employee community.
4. Identify market trends. With the rapid adoption of social media, standard web analytics no
longer provide sufficient customer insight. The value of Social Business Software is also directly tied
to increases in users, participation and content generation. Social Business Software enables you
to perform robust social analyses that arm marketers with clear, real-time visibility of community
adoption, engagement and overall community sentiment.
3. Empower Individual Productivity. Too often, employees can’t access key resources when
they need them, be they people or documents. Social Business Software provides employees with a
360-degree view of conversations and activities across previously isolated information silos. As a
result, they can easily access the right people and information to generate better results in less time.
2. Reuse knowledge. Over 40 percent of organizations fail to provide support agents with effective
knowledge management tools. As a result, support agents repeatedly tackle the same issue before the
solution is communicated through traditional channels such as email. With Social Business Software,
solutions are automatically recorded and indexed, making them highly visible and enabling agents to
reduce call times and increase first-call resolutions.
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3. Build customer trust. Self-service support tools do not build trust between a company and its
customers, resulting in poor customer satisfaction and decreased retention. Social Business Software
helps build that trust, providing transparency into support activities and allowing customers to see
whom they’ve engaged with, actions taken and a history of all previous conversations.
2. Build an innovation culture. Innovation is the lifeblood of the enterprise. Creating a culture
of participation and engagement in driving innovation within your employee base is an enormous
competitive advantage. Social Business Software creates a central enterprise innovation marketplace
that gathers together ideas from across your organization and engages your entire workforce in the
ideation process.
3. Align innovation with the market demands. Informing your ideation activities with
customer feedback is the surest way to consistently create great products that establish a strong
foothold in the marketplace. Social Business Software helps companies engage both their entire
enterprise and surrounding ecosystem of customers, developers and partners in the ideation and
product development process. In essence, you can capture on-demand market research in a fraction of
the time it took in the past.
4. Drive better results from your R&D investments: Successfully navigating from ideation
to commercialization has become an increasingly complex process. Across globally dispersed
workforces, siloed functions, and the entire product development lifecycle Social Business Software
connects people and their expertise to transform innovative ideas into winning products.
Where does Social Business Software count the most? Actually, the better question is where doesn’t it
count? These scenarios suggest entry points within your organization; ones that will help you quickly
realize a return on your investment. But the value of Social Business Software increases substantially
as it spreads to connect all of your Social Capital, inside and outside your formal organization.
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Protecting your Social Capital is more important than ever. In January 2009 alone, U.S. companies
eliminated almost 600,000 jobs. What’s more, an anticipated 40 percent of the U.S. workforce is set to
retire by 2010.
Every time any employee walks out the door, years of Social Capital walk “If HP knew
out of the door with him or her. And yet, very few companies do anything
what HP knows,
about it. A recent study by the Institute for Corporate Productivity found 30
percent of responding companies retain knowledge poorly or not at all when we would be
workers leave, while another half think they have an “okay” plan in place three times as
to preserve institutional know-how. Only 20 percent feel they do well with
profitable.”
knowledge retention. The late Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard,
once famously said: “If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times
as profitable.”
As more companies move to outsource business processes or functions, the knowledge they seek to
protect will increasingly come from business partners and project contributors who live outside the
formal organization chart. That knowledge is just as valuable, and you should embrace contributors
inside and outside your corporate firewall as part of your Social Capital.
How does this work? Dow Chemical Co. has turned to Social Business Software to connect retirees,
employees on leave, and current employees through an online mentoring and referral network
called Dow Connect. The original motivation: Over the next five years, the company figures about 40
percent of its 46,000 employees will retire, which will require a massive, costly recruitment effort.
Dow Connect is short-circuiting the cost of finding replacements for departing workers—and it also is
keeping retiring workers engaged with the company’s activities, which means Dow still has access to
their valuable knowledge.
How does this work? According to a case study Gartner published about Dow Chemical Co., social
software proved to be one of the best ways to address these workforce challenges:
Forty percent of Dow’s global workforce will be eligible for retirement through 2013. Dow has
approximately 40,000 retirees in the U.S. alone, many of whom still live near Dow’s largest sites.
Many employees who are temporarily not working, because of maternity leave or for other
reasons, needed a way to stay connected with the office while they were out.
Based on external benchmarks, Dow expected a 10% active participation rate within a year of the
launch. This target was exceeded within two months of the launch.
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In the three months since the launch, the site has more than 4,500 network members.
Ninety-five percent of the users are returning.
25,000 referrals have been posted.
130,000 first- and second-degree connections have been made on the network.
Through the site, users have applied to 24 Dow jobs and 40 Dow contracted jobs.
The job center portion of the network receives the most visits from retirees.v
The results are clear: Social Business Software can enable companies to short-circuit the cost of finding
replacements for departing workers—and also keep retiring workers engaged with the company’s
activities, enabling the enterprise continued access to their valuable knowledge.
David Scarborough, Associate Professor of Management at Black Hills University in the College of
Business and Technology, and Chief Scientist at Large for Kronos, a leader in workforce management
software, said all generations will benefit from Social Business Software that redefines the concept of
employee engagement. “We are going to be seeing a significant brain
drain over the next 10 years. As the Baby Boomers leave the workforce,
Boomers Consume a lot of expertise is going to be walking out the door. Both generations,
By the end of 2008, close to two- old and new, could benefit from social networking sites within their
thirds of all Boomers consume company,” Scarborough says.
social media including blogs,
podcasts, user-generated video,
Social Business Software Attracts The Best
forum commentary or customer
ratings. This is up from less than
People
Forrester Research released a report in late 2008 tracking usage of what
50 percent in 2007.
Source: Forrester Research
it calls social technology, defined to include social networks and blogs
and related content.vi Demographically speaking, it won’t shock you to
Not Just Spectators hear that adults from the age of 18 to 24 lead the way. In fact, only 10
The percentage of Boomers percent of those Forrester interviewed DO NOT use social networks
likely to react to content in social and other Web 2.0 applications. More than one-third of people this age
networks or other social media create content and take part in Web communities, while approximately
doubled to one-third by the end one-half are active critics who comment and engage in online dialogue.
of 2008.
As harsh as it sounds, your company’s strategy and value to this new
Source: Forrester Research
workforce will be judged by its ability to apply this technology on their
behalf—and on the company’s behalf. Younger workers will evaluate
Join the Crowd what measures are in place to allow for their way of working and they
By the end of 2009, more than 85
will gravitate to organizations that support these methods.
percent of U.S. online participants
will read or view social content. “The younger workers are demanding it, and they are going to find a way
Source: Forrester Research to use it regardless,” says Jive’s Hersh. “It’s going to be close to impossible
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for companies to recruit younger people if they don’t support the use of Social Business Software tools.
This generation barely uses e-mail anymore.”
By the way, it isn’t just 20-somethings who are embracing social technology.
In the same report, Forrester also found that, “Middle-aged adults have begun to actively adopt social
media. In fact, only 28% of US online adults ages 45 to 54 and 38% of those ages 55 and older say they
don’t use social technologies.” That means the majority do.
It also means your company’s ability to attract and keep the best people will be directly proportionate
to your ability to apply the innovation happening in Web 2.0 consumer applications to tools that will
make it easier to do their job. Your employees will have little patience for software applications that
are any less easy-to-use or intuitive than Web 2.0 applications.
Social Business Software supports both of these agendas. What’s more, it appeals to your customers’
radically altered expectations of marketing allowing your business to appeal to existing customers and
prospects in ways not previously possible.
More than three-quarters of enterprise marketers “agree” or “strongly agree” that Web 2.0 is rewriting
the rules for how their company communicates its messages, according to MarketingSherpa, an
organization that researches what marketing tactics work in the real world. viii
Close to half of all
enterprises plan to increase their 2009 marketing spend in places such as social networks and blogs.
The intuitive challenge for marketers is that it’s difficult to measure the return on investment.
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“These days all of your customers are online,” notes Dion Hinchcliffe, a consultant in Alexandria, Va.,
who advises executives on how to harness Web 2.0 technology for real-world business applications.
“Are you truly engaging them, supporting them, and creating a rich community of shared interest
around what you’re doing? Chances are you’re not. Few large companies have created successful online
communities around their products, and customers have largely had to create them on their own until
very recently.” ix
Athletic products company Nike is one company bucking conventional wisdom, by investing in Social
Business Software to create an online community for runners. You don’t have to be a Nike customer to
use the Nike+ community site, which lets athletes upload and analyze information about their training
runs. But the content available becomes more valuable if you are one. This simple, subtle fact has
helped turn more than 40 percent of Nike+ community into converts, according to Trevor Edwards,
Vice President of Global Brand Management for the giant athletic products company.
IHG’s social marketing team expects to quickly offset the costs of the community through its exclusive
online only offers to Priority Club Members. In addition IHG will continue to optimize user generated
content in its marketing and communications collateral – something it’s being doing for more than
year with content from its private online communities. Further, IHG is exploring partnerships with
other travel sites and bloggers to syndicate the community’s content.
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Social Business Software can also serve as the foundation for customer support activities and events,
helping keep a lid on costs.
According to the Association of Support Professionals, the average company spends an average of 7
percent of its revenue on technical support. Each average customer support interaction costs $36.14.
Separate data from Forrester Research underscores the reality that most support methods currently
at the disposal of enterprise businesses are woefully ineffective. ”Despite the potential benefits to
both the company and the customer, 40% of the companies we surveyed evaluated their ability to pass
relevant information to an agent when the customer transitions from self-service to live service as
poor/below average.”x
VMware’s experience in this area offers an example of the relief possible through Social Business
Software. The virtualization software company created the VMworld.com community with an eye to
cutting the cost of its in-person user conference and to generating more revenue from the information
shared during sessions. Simply put, VMworld.com turns VMware annual conference into a year-
round event. In little more than a year, the community has attracted more than 50,000 virtualization
professionals, and built out a conference library including more than 1,000 streaming video sessions,
10 partner sections and 100s of valuable support and technical documents. Anyone can purchase
access to the event content, even if they weren’t able to attend in person, creating a new source of
revenue for the company that also happens to help its customers. In addition, by handling all the
registrations related to the live event with VMworld.com, VMware saves at least $250,000 annually in
event management fees.
A separate survey conducted last year, however, finds that a majority of executives feel their innovation
efforts fall short. The Boston Consulting Group reports that 67 percent of executives feel they should
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get more out of their innovation efforts. They identified four macro concerns that sapped their return
on investment for innovation: Lengthy product development times, risk-averse corporate culture,
difficulty choosing the right ideas, and lack of coordination within the company. Interestingly, each of
these factors was weighted about the same, according to the survey results.xii
Here’s some additional perspective on the innovation process from Judy Estrin, a Silicon Valley
entrepreneur who cofounded seven companies and authored the 2008 business title, “Closing the
Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy.” Estrin described the process
of innovation during an interview with McKinsey: “It’s all about nurturing, it’s all about surprises. It’s
all about having no goals. It’s all about gaining information and being prepared for the future… Having
a vision, having a shared purpose. Those people can’t get isolated from what the corporate mission is
because then they’re off in left field. But ... you don’t want to manage them the way you manage your
day-to-day business.”xiii
Social Business Software accelerates and nurtures the fragile innovation dynamic described by Estrin.
It supports interactions that reach across functional silos within companies, it exposes valuable input
from customers and business partners, and it encourages contributions that have less to do with role
and more to do with social perspective. It leaves room for surprises.
In the 24 months prior to creating the Chordiant Mesh Community to support its research and
development process, Chordiant introduced just three new products. In the 24 months after the
launch, the customer experience management software developer completed 18 releases.
The Chordiant Mesh Community, which replaced an existing wiki platform supporting 53 fragmented
projects, brings together more than 1,000 Chordiant employees, developers, customers and partners.
In all, there are 30 participating companies from 20 different countries. Creating the community
required a dramatic rethinking of the product development process. Chordiant has rebelled against
the traditional process of gathering feedback and then disappearing for months to create feature-
bloated software that lags true customer needs. Through the Chordiant Mesh Community, its entire
roadmap for each release is available, along with information about content and status, open issues,
as well as all code, test results and documentation. The process is transparent: available not just to
developers but also to customers and key partners.
“When working with geographically dispersed teams, it’s imperative that critical up-to-the-minute
project details and deliverables are easily available to team members, stakeholders, and community
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members alike. … Relying on e-mail or other legacy tools leaves far too much room for misinterpretation
and mistakes,” says David Sallett, Manager of Solutions Design, Chordiant.
According to a case study published about the deployment, there were several factors that influenced
Chordiant’s decision to dump its wiki in favor of a Social Business Software platform: The company
sought a unified, simple-to-use platform for member profiles, discussion profiles, questions, blogs and
other content; and it also sought flexibility to evolve as projects evolved. Its previous software was too
rigid, fragmented and roles-based, everything that Social Business Software stands against.
The EMC|ONE community offers additional guideposts for how Social Business Software can help
facilitate innovation. As one example, a posting about green technology from an employee in the Asia
Pacific region attracted attention from community members from around the globe and resulted in
a new product idea. The company reports that Social Business Software has cut the amount of time
it takes to gather information and feedback on new ideas down to mere days from a matter of weeks
before the community was introduced.
“Some business leaders will be looking at paring things back to the basics while a different sort will
be looking at entirely new avenues to survive and thrive,” Hinchcliffe writes in his “Enterprise Web
2.0” blog for ZDNet. “While some might look at the social aspects of things like Web 2.0 as marginal
subjects when things get tough, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to the deeper
implications of Web 2.0 in the enterprise.”xiv
There are five compelling reasons to invest in Social Business Software immediately:
1. It will unlock the power of formal and informal teams by letting them step over time zones and
org charts.
2. It will help you increase the value of your company’s Social Capital, protecting the valuable
knowledge of existing employees and attracting the best and brightest contributors from a new
generation of workers.
3. It will enable your organization to sidestep corporate inefficiencies by reducing irrelevant travel,
sales, marketing and development costs.
4. It will help you identify customer pain points and build loyalty in an increasingly fickle
marketplace.
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5. It will rev up innovation and your ability to release new products and services to market more
quickly.
McKinsey reports that 38 percent of enterprises believe their use of Web 2.0 tools that fall into the
Social Business Software category already has transformed the way they communicate with customers
and suppliers. Another 16 percent say it has created major new roles and functions within their
organization, and 14 percent report that it has created a flatter hierarchy. Among the companies that
were most satisfied with their Social Business Software investments, only 8 percent said the technology
had not inspired a change in the way their company was managed or organized.xv
In its February 2009 article, “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0,” The McKinsey Quarterly reports that
enterprise Web 2.0 projects are too often left to emerge on their own, without the guidance of senior
management. This, they write, is a mistake. “These business leaders are correct in thinking that
participatory technologies are founded upon bottom-up involvement from frontline staffers and that
this pattern is fundamentally different from the rollout of ERP systems, for example, where compliance
with rules is mandatory,” the authors write. “Successful participation [in Web 2.0], however, requires
not only grassroots activity but also a different leadership approach: senior executives often become
role models and lead through informal channels.”xvi
Consider this insight from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke to McKinsey researchers about the
executive’s role in innovation and about the need for business leaders to know when to get out the
way.
“I understand why people want to build business units, and have their presidents. But by doing that
you cut down the informal ties that, in an open culture, drive so much collaboration,” Schmidt told
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the McKinsey interviewers. “If people in the organization understand the values of the company, they
should be able to self-organize to work on the most interesting problems. And if they haven’t, or are
not able to do that, you haven’t talked to them about what’s important. You haven’t built a shared value
culture.”xvii
To Win, Be Social
A belief in the power of shared values is the very thing motivating the 175 million people using Facebook
to invite family, friends, professional contacts, long-lost friends and brand-new acquaintances
into their Web 2.0 social circles. This same belief will prompt enterprises to spend more than $1.24
billion on global enterprise Web 2.0 technologies in 2009 and close to $2 billion in 2010, according
to projections from Forrester. xviii Whether or not your organization is prepared, the Social Business
Software wave is about to break.
Why resist the cue being given by your employees and customers? Now is exactly the right time for
you to leverage the power of Web 2.0 technology that builds on the new social connections that are
surrounding and shaping your company. It’s time to invest in Social Business Software that turns your
Social Capital into an asset, unleashing new styles of enterprise collaboration, innovation and customer
interaction. It’s time to lead your organization proactively into the age of the Social Business.
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i
“Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 to 2013,” Forrester Research (April 21, 2008)
ii
“The Gartner Collaboration and Social Software Vendor Guide, 2009,” Gartner (Feb. 19, 2009)
iii
“Top 10 Economic Predictions for 2009,” IHS Global Insight, January 2009
iv
“The Smart Growth Manifesto,” Umair Haque, http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque (Jan. 30, 2009)
v
“Case Study: Dow’s Formula for Social Software,” Gartner (March 27, 2008)
vi
“The Growth of Social Technology Adoption,” Forrester Research (Oct. 20, 2008)
vii
“Coordinating Marketing and Sales Across the Entire Revenue Cycle,” IDC (August 2008)
vii
“2009 Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Guide,” MarketingSherpa (February 2009)
viii
“Using Web 2.0 to Reinvent Your Business for the Economic Downturn,” Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog, ZDNet
(Jan. 29, 2009)
ix
“Why Talking to Customers is Ruining Your Business,” Forrester Research (August 29, 2008)
x
McKinsey Global Survey (October 2008)
xi
“Innovation 2007,” Boston Consulting Group
xii
“How to Fix the Innovation Gap: A Conversation With Judy Estrin,” The McKinsey Quarterly, (January
2009)
xiii
“Using Web 2.0 to Reinvent Your Business for the Economic Downturn,” Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog, ZDNet
(Jan. 29, 2009)
xiii
“Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise,” The McKinsey Quarterly (July 2008)
xiv
“Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work,” The McKinsey Quarterly (February 2009)
xv
“Google’s View on the Future of Business: An Interview with CEO Eric Schmidt,” The McKinsey Quarterly
(September 2008)
xvi
“Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 to 2013,” Forrester Research (April 21, 2008)
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