Beyond Blogs, Social Media will Change your Business

An excellent [revised] article in Business Week last week, with some great insight on the new roles youth and technology are playing in businesses. Here are some of what I think are the most exciting points:

• Rangaswami describes the changes since the 2005 article. Then, he says, there were either traditional communications or weird stuff with funny names, like blogs and wikis. People at BT now embrace a full range of online tools, and they use them more and more, especially as young workers join the company.

• “The new people come infected with the new world,” he says.

• A Dell (DELL) employee who goes by the Twitter name of Ggroovin tells us that Dell’s service on Twitter has brought in half a million dollars of new orders in the past year. Some on Twitter sniff around for the next job. “The new résumé is 140 characters,” tweets 23-year-old Amanda Mooney, who just landed a job in PR.

• More than 16,000 BT employees work together on wikis, using the same technology as Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that lets anyone post or edit entries. But instead of teaming up to edit an online encyclopedia, employees gather on them to write software, map cell-phone base stations, launch branding campaigns. Nearly every new project hatches a wiki. This is especially valuable in a global economy, where engineers in Asia can pick up a project as Europeans go to bed.

• “We’ve spent years talking about the value of the water-cooler conversations,” he says. “Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision-making migrate. We see how people really work.” Why does this matter? The company can spot teams that form organically, and then can place them on targeted projects. It can pinpoint the people who transmit ideas. These folks are golden. “A new class of supercommunicators has emerged,” he says.

• They created an in-house social network, Blue Shirt Nation. Now it has grown to more than 20,000 participants, 85% of them sales associates. In a company with a 60% annual turnover rate, this group churns at only 8.5%, blogs Gary Koelling, one of the founders.

• While we’re talking money, let’s revisit one of the boldest assertions in the old article. Could a blogging bubble burst? “That’s easy,” we wrote, answering our own question. “No.” The logic was that blogging, a free form of publishing, was anything but a highly capitalized industry…How could an industry built largely on free labor and free software develop a bubble, much less burst? It can’t.

Image Credit: BusinessWeek