Enterprise 2.0 is spurring the evolution of us business professionals. Its enabling employees, no matter their role in an organization to engage directly on behalf of their brand - to advocate for their brand, products and services. We all know the market talks about our brands - with or without us being present. By integrating conversations with business processes, brands can not only tell their story with convication and passion but they can act on those conversations.
Now, the ZDnet crowd as well as many of the Enterprise Irregulars and many others have weighed in on the SAP Business Suite launch and the Enterprise 2.0 functionality now found in the Suite. As I've been lucky enough to be included in some of the discussions around this type of integration, I thought it'd be helpful to share a bit more of our thinking and perspective as we approached this new wave of functionality.
Lets start with a couple of assumptions:
1. Social Media is a HOUSE OF CARDS
Easy to Build and Easy to fall apart unless you tie it directly to your business objectives and hence the processes of your organization and use it to enrich the experience ca customer has with your organization
2. Conversations Can Impact Top and Bottom line Revenue Growth
When a customer or prospect has an experience with your brand-- "marketing" in any form (product experience, service experience or Big M marketing, conversation begins. Those conversations may be with the brand or with other customers. If customers find value in those convesations, they begin to develop not only an affinity for those value driven exhanges but relationships develop. Out of those relationships and value exchanges eventually the customer not only comes to appreciate the intrinsic value of the conversation but affinity for the brand develops. At this point, a buying cycle is likely to proceed to everyone's satisfaction.
You can think about people engaged in conversations as a non-linear process. In any conversational dynamic, individuals take away nuggets of information and pass that information onto other groups and other individuals.
What we've done is integrate conversations into enterprise processes so that they are actionable on behalf of the enterprise. These take 2 forms. Conversation -> Process integration and Process -> Conversation.
A good example of Conversation -> Process integration was demonstrated yesterday briefly but to elaborate, by pulling Tweets into the SAP Business Suite and applying a sentiment engine to those tweets, a customer service rep can make those conversations actionable by identifying and emerging customer or brand issue. Someone may be complaining about your product or service. With Sentiment analysis not only can an organization proactively address a looming customer crisis but they can initate corporate processes such as raising a Customer Service Ticket to initiate a problem resolution process.
Once done, SAP can then issue the results of those trouble tickets on Twitter itself!
Going the other way, a super example of Process->conversation integration is the deployment of Marketing Campaigns using Social Channels. Using Business Suite functionality, users can now design and deploy marketing campaigns which can execute over a variety of social environments, including Twitter.
And there ya go...
Enterprise 2.0 is the latest evolutionary pressure on businesses. Those of us that adapt will survive this pressure and thrive as the new ecosystem comes to dominate our business dealings. Those that don't will find themselves facing extinction pressures that will be hard to avoid.
