Using social technologies to derive business value

Social technology allows for increasing internal social collaborations (Li, 2010; Vellmure, n.d.). The use of social technology has a different focus, purpose, and social business strategy when used internally or externally of the corporation. Corporations can use social technology for internal conversations focusing on particular topics and projects or develop potential talent, compared to where social technology is used externally for updates, attracting talent, engaging talent (Li, 2010; Wollan, Smith, & Zhou, 2010). Focusing on the fact that social technology tools are being used internally to increase collaboration on particular topics and projects, then one possible key performance indicator to measure the decrease in cost, time, and quality in projects of similar scope and size. Li (2010), stated that the focus on a project could also increase problem-solving between employees when issues arise.  This can also help reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues and thus decrease cost and improve first-time quality. Li (2010), mentioned that another key performance indicator is a drop in travel costs because there is a decrease in the need to travel, like what happened to Cisco, when they saved millions.

Blogs, Internal Wikipedia’s, SharePoint, and other platforms allow for employees to internally capture as much knowledge in explicit formats, such that it is easily searchable and discoverable.  An example of social technology providing value comes from Yum! Brands, which wanted to build a knowledge sharing platform to help connect 336K employees across 110 countries (Li, 2010).  In the end, the company started to work differently, by sharing their best practices across the globe. This can allow a corporation to build data lakes that contain functional subject matter expertise that is key to the corporation (Wollan et al., 2010).

According to Li (2010), allowing for internal knowledge capturing social technology tools would enable a new employee to quickly get spun up on a project and become a contributing member.  Thus, a key performance indicator to measure the effectiveness of these tools for knowledge capturing is the reduction of spin up time as employees are hired and as employees rotate to new groups.  Wollan et al. (2010) state that building a knowledge capturing system allows for the company to measure the business and employees capabilities, competencies, skills, etc. to identify any gaps that are needed to be filled.

However, other benefits of leveraging internal social technology tools are much more difficult to measure, like improving employee/customer relationships, and employee/customer commitment (Li, 2010). Finally, other ways that this increase of social technologies can help drive tangible value for product development, operations and distribution, marketing and sales, customer service, business support, and enterprise-wide levers (Vellmure, n.d.).

References

• Li, C. (2010). Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, (1^st). Vitalbook file.
• Vellmure, B. (n.d.). Creating measurable business value through social collaboration. Retrieved from http://www.brianvellmure.com/2012/07/30/creating-measurable-business-value-through-social-collaboration/#.Uhf0qNKsiSo
• Wollan, R., Smith, N., & Zhou, C. (2010). The Social Media Management Handbook: Everything You Need To Know To Get Social Media Working In Your Business. John Wiley & Sons P&T. VitalBook file.