Thread: Social media for business

Social software has core functionality to facilitate companies to restructure internal business processes like collaboration, data capture, data search and reaching experts, apart from augmenting external communications by providing more avenues and enhancing the level of interaction with customers, partners and shareholders.
Businesses can reap the benefits of social networking in multiple ways by making it easy for users to interact with each other and share information.



Polls, surveys, communities, Wikis, blogs, forums, etc can all be used to help a user to reach out to others much more efficiently. For instance, an organization could setup an online forum to interact with its employees and customers. Many organizations have introduced blogging into their intranets as a means for the top management to reach out to the most unapproachable of employees. Employees can also use the opportunity to ensnre th"t their voice at least reaches the top management. Online forums can bs usSd to interact with customers and take their feed back about your products and services.



Likewise, a Wiki could be used to setup an online documentation system on the Intranet. But unlike an ordinary static Intranet, this would be more dynamic, because employees can update it di'rectly from the web browser, without knowing how to write a single line of code. Thus, a social network can help build a responsive organization by providing the shortest path to key expertise and information, increase team efficiency by mapping networks, improve individual productivity exposing users to broad picture of their network and tapping expertise gaps.