Years in the realizing…Social Contextual Collaboration will deliver major productivity gains.
The culmination of cloud, social and contextual collaboration is creating a perfect storm.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so email has been used for decades as the de facto collaboration tool. Since IBM Profs in ’80’s and Lotus Notes in ’90’s, companies have tried to offer better alternatives. However, these alternatives fell short due to complexity, inflexibility and cost. Web solutions cropped up, but they just duplicated an antiquated paradigm.
For the first time, the decreasing costs and increasing capabilities and acceptance of the cloud, coupled with the familiarity of social technology and ubiquity […]
Contextual Social CRM, an example of Social Contextual Collaboration
For decades, CRM (primarily used for SFA) has been “that critical application that really is not used.” This is because CRM is typically top-down driven, but bottom-up resisted. Executives want a better understanding of how sales is doing, but sales people do not want additional tasks that only take time away from earning their commissions.
After decades of technology product and customer application implementation experience, I have learned some immutable lessons, one of which is – top-down driven initiatives that are perceived as detrimental to the users (e.g., more work) fail to meet their objectives.
First, benefits at the bottom
Social-enabled (see “‘[…]
“Social” in Business: Disambiguation
The English language can be pretty ambiguous at times. For example, “Services” can refer to web services, software as services, or professional services. Likewise, “Social” has different connotations. Business leaders may have a negative perception of “social” applications because they think of lost worker productivity on personal social networking sites like Facebook. But “social applications” can also refer to social-enabled applications. These are applications that have incorporate successful “social functionality” (features) from social media applications like Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
This “social functionality” has empowered customers to the point where companies run scared of Social Media. The only way […]
What is “Social”?
With all of the attention on “Social”, there seems to be confusion and a need for a comprehensive map for navigating all of the terms and players. “Social Network”, “Social Media”, “Social Collaboration”, “Social Software”, … What does these mean? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Yammer, Chatter, Jive, Qontext, … What’s the difference?
Who & Why: First consider who controls the community. Individuals select whether to join “Social Networking” sites like Facebook or Linkedin. Organizations or workgroups within organizations determine whether to use social tools for implementing external customer communities or […]
Welcome!
This blog focuses on leveraging technology to improve working together, encompassing issues around collaboration, communities, and social networking.