Becoming A Fully Integrated Social Business
This is another guest post that I wrote for Social MediaNZ…enjoy.
Now that every man and his dog are well and truly in the socialspace how much further does it have to go? Can companies become fully integrated social enterprises?
The first hurdle has already been passed
So far the biggest challenge in social media consultancy is reassuring potential clients that they can gain more than they stand to loose by ‘opening up their brand’.
But, this is less of a challenge than it was even six months ago now that so many more businesses are experimenting with the socialweb. So many of us have become a fan of something on facebook or followed a company or two on twitter and the real freaks amongst us will even be the occasional reader of a corporate blog.
So even if your business isn’t in engaging in the social revolution it’s likely that you’ve had some exposure to the successes and failures that other companies are having in their social exploration. So now that we’ve all got some sort of understanding of what social success and failure is & most have gotten over their fear just how far can we take it?
The Next Step In Social Evolution (is also here…)
One of the things that is emerging from my research into corporate blogs is that people like transparency. Peeps didn’t seem to enjoy corporate blogs had unnecessarily invisible control. For example many of my participants prefered comment systems where they were able to have some control moderation, e.g. using digs/votes. Most people also seemed to enjoy being able to give feedback to companies as long as those companies were open and responsive.
Combining open and responsive listening with feedback seems to be a winning combo, but surprise surprise it already exists. UserVoice (which is now 100% free) and Get Satisfaction are two of the most well known consumer feedback forums, all sorts of techy and web based companies are using them to help make ’wiser’ decisions…(as shown).
Now we’re just waiting for the masses who saw the potential for growth and embraced Facebook and Twitter to realise that it’s just as important to make informed, open and transparent decisions.
What Does The ‘Marketing Renaissance’ Really Look Like 
Once again…it might just be here already. I’ve already written one post on how amazing threadless.com is and for the life of me I can’t understand why more business peeps haven’t made moves towards the Threadless.com model…it just seems so perfect.
Business by the community for the community. Tiz a beautiful thang…what do you think?