Thanks for Erin Moloney for pointing this out to me. Tara Clark at Business2Community.com has a quick post on the 5 ways you can harness the power of social tools. I won’t steal her thunder by reposing everything but I will provide a quick list and then commentary on one item that stuck out at me.
- Allow it to shape and manage your company culture
- Allow it to help you strengthen change management initiatives
- Allow it to help you improve execution of corporate strategy
- Allow it to let you better facilitate corporate communication
- Allow it to let you better manage and increase employee engagement
I wanted to focus on the execution of corporate strategy. I spend a fair amount of time talking to people about their general web, portal, and social strategy. In doing so, I see a lot of people who are involved in the trenches of business. So many of these people are so focused on the day to day activities that they rarely focus on what strategy the company has. So many rarely hear about the overall company strategy and how their company is reacting to market changes. Personally, I’m a big fan of having corporate leadership using a variety of tools to communicate that strategy. They should do it more often and they should take the time to help employee understand why they have chosen a specific strategy.
Now to add one more topic that isn’t on the list above but should be addressed some way. In those same workshops with my clients, I constantly see them asking for a capability that IT already provides. I always ask IT to make sure someone from their team attends these sessions for just that occurrence. I think IT should use social tools more just to help business understand the tools at their disposal. Everyone would be happier with a deeper understanding of the tools in the bag.
