Many corporate leaders throughout the world have lacked the know-how to adopt social business technologies and apply the true value of such platforms throughout their organization. Why have so few companies truly tapped the value of social business technologies?
There are a variety of challenges that stand in the way of properly implementing social technologies such as cultural or organizational problems and the expectation that such technologies may bring immediate results and cost savings. Without large returns, many company leaders tend to decline the concept of company-wide programs.
However, by following a number of different and relatively simple methods, managers and executives can untap the wide variety of benefits from social business technologies. In fact, such technology will help engage employees across all departments and transform your company.
Take a look on what you’ll find on this article:
- 1. How to Add Value from Social Business Tools and Reduce Complexity
- 2. Ensure Essential Organizational Support is in Place
- 3. Testing, Experimenting, and Learning are Vital Aspects of Social Business Innovations
- 4. Track the Impact of the Technology and Learn from Metrics
- 5. How Runrun.it Software Aligns with Innovative Social Technologies
1. How to Add Value from Social Business Tools and Reduce Complexity
You will find that social technology can bring the most value and benefits to your organization by having these tools become central to running your organization. For instance, project management software that provides a straightforward way for you to communicate with your employees and send and receive key documents or revised spreadsheets. Most importantly, it is vital for social tools implemented in your organization to complement already existing processes.
Social networks and forms of communication such as blogs have been recognized as vital for strengthening company collaboration and improving the sharing of knowledge and ideas, according to an article from McKinsey & Company. These types of social tools have been known to improve organization and strategic planning. However, companies have also had to grapple with resistance among employees and the need to learn from potential failures during the implementation process.
Nonetheless, social business tools add significant value to a company by developing a collaborative mindset among employees and an emphasis on creating new strategies. Some of the key social networking tools that have helped corporations expand their customer base and improve relations with employees include LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Yammer.
Stakeholders and employees have become part of the process, but companies initially begin with marketing strategies through social networking sites to attract more loyal customers. Some of the ways that managers and company leaders can reduce complexity while gaining the value of social business tools include:
- Gaining an understanding of complications associated with the tools and analyzing trade-offs of different systems
- Find areas where business processes, products, or information systems can be simplified
- Continually re-examine any obstacles during an expansion
- Clarify processes and roles among employees to simplify the adoption of social tools
With complexity alleviated, it becomes vital to ensure that organization support is provided across your department or company with the use of social business tools. Below, we outline how to ensure this objective is achieved.
2. Ensure Essential Organizational Support is in Place
It is vital for you as the manager and leader within your company to provide essential organizational support. Essentially, the first step you take should be to define your goals and objectives for a particular strategy or project management processes. Then you’ll need to select the right social business technology to support these goals and objectives. Lastly, you’ll want to consider all of the additional parts of organizational change that you need to support in order to successfully implement the new technology.
Organizational support tools and social technology can come in many forms. What goals and objectives do you want to meet? Do you want to do more research on your customer base? If so, then your marketing team will need to coordinate with sales teams to determine the concerns and questions of clients. However, you can also use the tool Typeform to conduct simple surveys on multiple customers at the same time, according to an Inc article.
Are your goals to improve your content strategy and set up specific steps to grow your content? Then you’ll benefit from the Content Strategy Checklist, which will help you customize a specific plan with objectives and metrics to measure your content’s performance.
Are you looking to brand your company and become a more well-known organization? Then you’ll need to work with the press and ensure publications are talking about your business. One way to get more press opportunities is by using the HARO (Help a Reporter Out) tool, which connects journalists and experts. By employing this platform, you’ll get emails with requests for expert opinions within specific industries. This will allow you to work with journalists and reputable publications to get your company’s name out there.
Whatever goals and objectives your company is seeking, choosing the right technology to meet your business needs should be relatively straightforward. You’ll need to employ all the elements of organizational change in order to aid implementing essential organizational support tools. You will also need to experiment and learn on-the-go when implementing new social technologies.
3. Testing, Experimenting, and Learning are Vital Aspects of Social Business Innovations
It is vital for your company to take on a culture of testing and experimenting when implementing new systems and social business tools. Be sure that your teams take on approaches that emphasize testing and learning from any and all mistakes. Any missteps should not be seen as a failure, but as another chance to learn and succeed.
If a particular tool or platform has lacked a real impact on productivity or has not met your goal, it must not be viewed as a failure, but an opportunity to learn something new and develop a new strategy to meet your goals.
For example, if you have a new idea or a new platform that you want to adopt, you can turn your idea into action by creating a basic version of a product or an outline of your plan, according to Gallup. Often, entrepreneurs and company leaders find that their outline or basic product version needs refinement before either the employees or customers will embrace it.
As such, it is key to gather feedback and incorporate it into improving their business model. Essentially, the first step is to hypothesize by making informed guesses on customers and their needs, which is meant to minimize risk. The more detail a hypothesis includes, the easier it is to spot issues early in the process.
It is important to remember that customers and stakeholders also desire to work with a company with a specific business purpose, so be sure that your client base has a true understanding of your business purpose when creating your early projections. Next, it is time to experiment.
These hypotheses are tested by creating an experiment where customers can show the strengths and weaknesses of the model. The way to do this is to start selling the product or to start utilizing a new system in the workplace. Customer feedback can be very relevant during this step. This can help designers and company leaders build a better product or improve a system.
Next, the outcomes of a new platform or product need to be measured. The success of the experiment needs to be assessed. This step can help you determine how much a product should cost, how many customers you will attract with the product, and how well you are able to meet your clients’ needs.
The last part is to learn from the cycle of a hypothesis, experiments, and measured outcomes. This new knowledge that a developer or designer has learned can be used to create a better product. Then a new hypothesis for an improved product or platform can be developed.
As previously mentioned, tracking the success of newly implemented technology and paying attention to metrics is imperative.
4. Track the Impact of the Technology and Learn from Metrics
It may be important to be open-minded about new social business technologies and innovative initiatives, but you’ll need to keep track of metrics as well. At the beginning of a project initiation, it may not be possible to have strong metrics available. However, once a new tool is in place and clearly adds value, it is imperative to incorporate rigorous metrics to ensure true value is achieved from the social technology.
Every recent experiment or tested product needs to have its success or failures assessed. There are various things that this can help teach the developers or team such as how much money should be invested or what a product should cost as well as the needs that their audience has.
There are specific values and benefits you should seek from your new social technology systems, which your metrics should show. These include greater speed to access knowledge, lower travel costs, decreased communication expenses, and greater satisfaction from partners and suppliers.
Additionally, utilizing social strategies such as incorporating customer reviews and social media in your strategies as well as offering more online information can help to build greater transparency at your company. More transparency can be a significant benefit for any organization.
When working across teams, it is useful to incorporate social tools such as project management software. The Runrun.it platform can be a great fit for those looking to implement a new social business tool.
5. How Runrun.it Software Aligns with Innovative Social Technologies
If you are looking for a collaborative tool that stands out among many innovative social business technologies, then Runrun.it project management software is right for you. This collaboration tool will help keep your team motivated and communicating across the platform, which will increase productivity.
Additionally, your communication will become more transparent and general business transparency will increase. Your workflow will move smoothly without any issues standing in the way. The digital dashboard will also provide you with all the metrics you need.
If you’re interested in learning whether Runrun.it software is right for you, click here for a free trial.
