PlanetNTF

Another great visualization (and posting) from Dion Hinchcliffe. The era of Social Business requires change in the interaction with customers. It requires for sure organizational change in the enterprise, but it requires your corporate website to change to. To effecively communicate, host customer communities and have a social supply chain your web site needs to transform from the fancy shop window of your company to a social enabled web site, a Social Portal linking the outside world directly into your enterprise.

Where are your Customer Communities hosted? Sometime they are (already) external Social Media like Facebook or Twitter. But there are often good reasons to host them on your own web site. You are owning the community (and its data). You can add some level of security if needed. You are making your own web site more attractive. People stay on your site instead of easily get disctracted and leave surfing somewhere else. Obviously it needs to be easy for your customers to join. Don't ask them for long registration processes. Offer login through OpenID.

Make the communities on your web site live and attractive through providing premier services and access to your experts. Leverage your community to get your customers input for the next product releases. We are just doing that for the next-next realease of IBM Connection. Unveal the power of Customer Self Service Communities. In the era of Social Business people are more than ever willing to help each other. I am always using the example of our Mac-community within IBM. IBMers are helping each other to run their Mac as Business workstation within IBM. We don't have an official help desk, but are supporting each other very successful. There are hundreds of examples on the Web, where people are actively helping each other with advice. Leverage this new willingness and behaviour of the Social Age for your customers and your enterprise.

Put the Customer in the centre and provide and Exceptional Customer Experience. For sure it is primarily not a technical but a cultural challenge. It needs change. But it is worth it.