How's Your Social Life? Notes Following Lotusphere 2012

Companies and organizations will be increasingly forced to embrace social business and import the 'wisdom of the crowd' into their internal operations after IBM's landmark Lotusphere 2012 conference, held last month, radically lowered the barriers to adopting collaborative technologies.

With "social media" the buzz term of the year, it makes sense that no enterprise can succeed socially unless it becomes a social business internally. A survey conducted by IBM last year found that, indeed, most companies were failing in their social media strategies. But as Gartner analysts have pointed out: "By 2014, refusing to communicate with customers via social channels will be as harmful as ignoring emails or phone calls is today." Failure is not an option for an enterprise that wants to survive, let alone to thrive. And despite the hype, media should be just one facet of an enterprise's social life; social business comprises the totality of its digital experiences, encompassing all the interactions between customers and staff. Social media is just the tip of the social business iceberg... (To read my complete report on how the social revolution can help your business, click here.)