An avid reader, writer and user of all things Web 2.0, Richard is particularly interested in the social aspect of CRM and e-commerce. Here you’ll find his thoughts on how social tools and applications are reshaping this space.
Hello, and welcome to Socializing Beyond The Enterprise.
First of all, let me introduce myself. I am Richard Hughes, Technical Director at BroadVision. While much of the focus on Enterprise Social Networks recently has been how they help companies energize their workforce, my particular interest is in applications of ESN outside the enterprise. Hence the name of this blog.
When talking about employees of a company, it is something of a cliche to say "we're a team", "we're a big family", "we want to work together better". Of course we do. But it always surprising to me how few companies have the same attitude towards their customers. Many companies and their customers coexist in a kind of mutual tolerance. My interest is how social networks can improve this relationship.
There are two main topics that this covers:
Social CRM: using social technology to form mutually beneficial relationships between companies and their customers
Social Commerce: using social technology both to increase companies' sales and to increase a customers' confidence of their purchases.
Of course, there is some overlap between the two, most notably in using Social CRM to drive repeat business, so at times the dividing line will become a little blurred. But let's not worry too much about that.
I wrote a white paper about this in January 2010, also entitled Socializing Beyond The Enterprise, although focusing primarily on Social CRM. In such a fast-moving area, it would probably benefit from an update soon, but I feel it still does a reasonable job of articulating the case for building more social relationships with customers. There is also a webcast (part 1, part 2) for those of you who prefer to have the white paper read to you.
All of this is not to say that I am uninterested in social technology within the enterprise. I'm particularly interested in how social intranets change the way employees communicate with senior management of a company, and where this moves the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. So I'll also be writing about this.
Finally, if you think I just spelled "behaviour" wrongly, that's because I live in Oxford (Oxford, England, that is. I hear there are others...). And that's how we spell it here.
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