Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Despite what the title appears to say, I am not going to embark a communist revolution. Though perhaps, the revolution that we are about to live will have many adept players.
The revolution that is just around the corner in the business world is social. And when I say “social”, I am talking about social networks. In less than 5 years, all companies will have some kind of social network.
Various confluent factors support this:
- More than 500 thousand people worldwide make use of these networks outside the workplace.
- The new Generation Y that is occupying employment positions do not use e-mail as their main form of digital communication like the previous Generation X. The new generation bases their digital communication on Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging.
- The “degendering” of technology. The successful products are those that are easy to use and that most resemble the way we behave as human beings. Corporate social networks are the equivalent of the touch screen of a smartphone. Similar to the way we like to change the background image of our mobile, or the way we turn the pages of a book, as human beings we like to talk, share and explain what we are doing to others. This is our natural way of collaborating. It is not simply copying a file into a directory. Behind that file, you will see there is always a story to tell.
- Finally, the term adopted a few years ago by Alfons Cornella, now also used in car advertisements, we suffer from infoxication particularly via e-mail. Thanks to corporate social networks we can send messages more productively, avoiding the interruptions generator that is our e-mail. And of course, without using any blind copy.
Socialisation is going to be everywhere. Just a few examples to follow:
- Social Business Intelligence (idea conceived by Jaume Joan of APESOFT): Management reports are always reviewed with commentary which generates an extremely long string of e-mails. Contrary to this, I can share easily with whomever I choose in my social network and make comments via microblogging.
- Social CRM: the creation of a collaboration proposal in a collaborative manner with a client raises the probability that we will win the account by 40 points. Imagine the possibility of being able to upload the first draft of an offer on a social network (private of course) and that the different client contacts start making their comments on it, to be able to produce a second version, much more in line with the client requirements and continuing in this way until achieving an offer so good that the client can only say “YES”.
- Social ERP: it would be good if the sales team knew when clients have paid their invoices or when the marketing team will launch a fantastic TV advert, or that the purchasing department receive an automatic notification when a department has run out of stock… and a lot more information that these days stays within the department walls of a company.
And of course the Social intranet: current intranets generally only go in one direction, someone posts something and the rest if at all, read it. OK then, imagine that you could share files, work, offers, ideas and be able to comment upon them like on Facebook and in addition, you could have access to all of the things that gradually get stored on your intranet: holiday request, meeting room reservations, attendance register.
In a nutshell, since ZyncroApps arrived, all of this has become possible with Zyncro.