Social Media – Product Development and Internal Communications
Much attention is paid to Facebook and Twitter as a communications method with external customers. Rightly so, since between them they have quite a few subscribers. Often missing from the conversation is how social media tools can help companies develop better prodcuts and improve internal communications.
Product Development and Social Media
Corporations have spent a great deal of the past century creating products that meet a criteria that fits the companies business model. Beyond that companies spend millions of dollars in customer research and feedback. What’s still mostly missing is the use of crowdsourcing for product development. Bringing customers in to be part of the product development cycle by capturing, conversing and sharing their ideas to help build better products and services. Sure, many companies have customer advisery panels, but social media gives you the opportunity to create a larger and more diverse set of resources to the mix.
Although this scares the daylights out of most companies for a number of reasons, those who miss out on this may miss out on game changing advances.
Social Media and Internal Communications
In a large enterprise many organizations exist in a vacuum, duplicating efforts and going outside the enterprise for services that are available in-house. Using an internal social platform to share ideas, information on projects and day to day activities and discovery can save you millions of dollars in prodcutivity.
A new book on these subjects, The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees, is due out in October. Check it out here.
Also see
What’s Your Social Strategy in HBR
Related articles
- How Companies Can Use Social Media to Improve Internal Communication, Collaboration and Compensation (1ntheknow.wordpress.com)
