Ross Mayfield is the Chairman, President and Co-Founder of Socialtext.
Introduction:
Today, marketing organizations and marketing professionals are seeing record revenues based on collaborative intelligence solutions. Securely communicating and sharing dynamic information across marketing and the sales field has never been as efficient and effective. In order to maintain success, marketing professionals need the most current and accurate collateral to provide to their sales force.
Today, the average sales person spends 30-50 hours per month searching for content or re-creating customer-facing content that already exists. However, with a collaboration platform, sales and marketing can operate as a unified and streamlined team - working together closely, fluidly and transparently. Now, team members discover and leverage the expertise of others, re-purpose the work of colleagues and collectively build a shared portfolio of best practices. In today’s market, the more active marketing is in internal communities, the more successful external communities become.
When your marketing team is distributed across borders it’s difficult for team members to learn from each other’s findings and feedback. How can a marketing team use Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 tools, such as wikis and blogs, to boost productivity, increase efficiency and better capture knowledge for greater innovation, faster project cycle times and better overall communication? With business social software, marketing can ensure messaging and sales tools are provided in a timely manner to the sales team to empower them with the most effective sales information. Due to the current economic status, distributed marketing teams now have higher coordination costs. Social media tools enable marketers and the like to get better at sharing social context, as these collaboration tools can be used by marketers to improve competitive intelligence, teamwork and win new business deals.
When social networking is integrated into the collaboration platform, knowledge sharing becomes a byproduct of getting work done. The result is the Power of the People – people leverage each other’s ideas, knowledge and expertise. The most challenging aspect of adopting collaborating thinking in marketing is that the predominant pattern in Web 2.0 is sharing control to create added value. A good example of collaborative thinking is seen in communities like Wikipedia or YouTube. And in the business world, models like Open Source are significantly transforming business productivity thanks to a variety of business social software tools.
Marketing spends a lot of time generating sales tools – what is effective, what works and how professionals can receive the most targeted feedback. Engaging the right feedback loops allows individuals to become more efficient. With social media tools such as a wiki, individuals can make feedback completely transparent thus proving a faster and more efficient response mechanism. Feedback is immediate, everything is searchable, findable, with faster iterations; one team and everyone is on the same page. It is an opportunity for a marketing team to involve their downstream customers to set priorities and thus yield better results and satisfaction both internally and externally. In the past, the marketing teams work involved a small group of experts who would perform and use competitive intelligence in a stealthy management. Reports that existed were sent over the wall, with analysis done in isolation and individual updates by email.
Summary with Case Study:
Today, businesses are moving from a “need to know” to a “need to share” culture. If individuals rethink competitive intelligence, they can take the approach to deploy social software as a solution for collaborating within the team and that group will quickly develop a group memory. Secondly, marketers are redesigning to make reports more transparent and shift the way you are communicating to streams, feeds, blog posts and insights that can go into RSS feeds. This all enables a wider scope of vision throughout the team.
MKTG is a marketing services firm that delivers programs for their clients. MKTG is using Web 2.0 tools to improve the process used for winning new business. “For each potential customer, the account team needs to create a tailored bid presentation and each Account Manager had various versions of their own presentation stored locally on their computer,” said Neil Callahan, President of Digital Division, MKTG. “This made it difficult for them to collaborate on content creation, and next to impossible to guarantee consistency of our message,” added Callahan. At MKTG, with Web 2.0 tools, all the information for each proposal presentation is stored centrally in a shared workspace and the team does their work on wiki pages. They collaborate easily, re-use good work, and build on each other’s best practices.
Before the use of social media tools such as the wiki, MKTG never knew whether someone on the staff had special experience relevant to a new client situation that could make the bid proposal better. “Now we're operating faster, making better decisions, and leveraging the collective knowledge of everyone,” noted Callahan. “This is knowledge management done right, meaning without the policing or red tape. We can now get people to share knowledge and build off of each other. This greater level of awareness has enabled us to respond to proposal requests faster and with greater quality. We’re winning more business and creating more happy, loyal customers.”
Next Steps:
As a result, information that is not shared ultimately does not exist. People become exposed to the activities that they need to be paying attention to. The important updates from colleagues that deserve notice. Collaborative intelligence allows marketing professionals to look at a different way to utilize business social software tools to further realize the power of the various contributing teams.
How can marketers us Web 2.0 tools in their organization? Internally, a program that involves Web 2.0 tools can be used to collaborative budgets, events and campaigns. Instead of the marketing team going back and forth via email, working via a wiki page allows them to edit the information in a single place. Also, a marketing team can create, review and share content with Sales and develop competitive intelligence information. The use of Web 2.0 tools externally can build brand awareness. These tools offer the ability to reach huge audiences that you otherwise would have difficulty and high costs to touch. Also, by sharing information, as well as listening to the response, complaints, and suggestions, marketing and sales are able to strengthen the relationships with customers.
What ends up happening is that the information does not exist because it is not shared. Increasing the scale of participation and letting anyone contribute intelligence, enables all employees to understand the value in their context. As marketers end up increasing transparency and participation, they end up being able to see different patterns. When people talk about intelligence, it yields a different form of intelligence. The result is that, marketers understand what people should pay attention to and this shifts their activity back to what is most valuable. In today’s economy where competition is more important and markets are more turbulent, the value of competitive intelligence is growing and is more cost effective because what you are doing is leveraging the interest, expertise that all of your employees have – to share and comment about the issues that really matter.