The Inovis Blog

Being a software developer who tries to stay ahead of the bleeding edge (presumably caused by paper cuts), I’m always keeping my eyes peeled and an ear to the ground to keep up with the latest of the latest trends. Admittedly, it leads to bad posture (common to many a software developer), but it has served me well over my something-mumble-something years in the industry. A lot of what I hear, of course, is rumor and a large percentage of that is quite spurious and not worth repeating. However, I’ve recently heard not one, not two, but three different rumors all of which seemed very exciting to me (and at my age, that’s saying something—I’m not sure what, but something).

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Inovis continues to expand our efforts on delivering strategic partnerships to help transform your business communities.   A recent announcement of our partnership with Small World Labs is one such partnership which will help drive global collaboration, knowledge sharing and improved business community management for our customers and their business partners.  Michael Wilson, CEO and Co-Founder of Small World Labs has contributed a guest post to help better understand the value of social networks below. 

There continues to be a great deal of excitement around social networks.  MySpace currently has 275 million members and Facebook claims more than 70 million.  Those are big number numbers that no one can deny.  Is this just hype?  How does this affect your business?   Can your business leverage a social network?

 

The interesting thing about social networking is that the value is in the network, not the technology.  The knowledge, expertise and personal interactions drive the benefit – one user at a time. 

 

Businesses and organizations have started using existing social networks for a myrid of purposes – knowledge sharing, marketing and providing access inside and outside of the business for key constituents.    Marketing was perhaps the first key area seen using social networking.   In 2006, Burger King ran a successful, well known advertising campaign featuring a MySpace profile for “The King.” Over 140,000 people added The King as a friend  and represented a great use case on how public social network participation can drive revenue, loyalty and awareness.  The downside is public networks have limited to no restrictions how the network is managed and focused.

 

As time goes on, you’ll see more and more organizations incorporate “community” into their overall strategy.  Those that do will begin to actively reap the benefits that their community members provide through collaboration.  Those that don’t move first will likely see a competitive necessity to react as their competitors start to take advantage of this arena.

In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about this topic you can check out a specific blog post on social networking for businesses or the general Small World Labs blog

Thanks for the post MW!