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CloudForce London: CEOs getting the idea of social enterprises

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CloudForce London: CEOs getting the idea of social enterprises
Posted by Stuart Lauchlan on Wed, 14/09/2011 - 10:56

With the Social Enterprise at the heart of CloudForce in London, Salesforce.com kicked off the sold-out conference with the release of new study that finds that UK CEOs are switching on to the concept. The study of 150 CEOs – conducted by Coleman-Parkes Research – reported a recognition of the importance of social media. Specifically the survey found: 73% said social networks were important for building brand awareness 68% say it’s important to use social networks as platforms to launch new products 74% say social networks attract new customers 61% use social networks to engage with customers and grow their businesses But despite this recognition, there is a lack of cross-departmental social strategic thinking. Some 68% of organizations have a social media strategy, but only 11% of businesses say that they run that social strategy as a collaborative cross-departmental team. Instead most companies have a fragmented approach with marketing most likely to dominate ownership (40% of respondents), followed by IT (28%) and HR (20%). Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff asked Cloudforce delegates: “Are our companies really social? In our marketing? In our sales. In our leadership? For those of us in enterprises and automating all aspects of our companies, how does our enterprise bridge the social divide brought about by the social revolution.” Benioff went on to outline Salesforce.com’s three-stage approach to developing a social enterprise.

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Stage One: develop social customer profiles to capture publicly available information about customers in order to deliver a higher, more personalised level of service Stage Two: develop private employee social networks to help staff to collaborate across functional siloes within the company. Stage Three: build social networks and product social networks to enable customers to engage with their customers in new ways.

One firm that’s being pitched as a flagship example of the social enterprise in practice is fashion retailer Burberry whose CEO Angela Ahrendts popped up on stage with Benioff to talk through the firm’s social strategy – which comes it seems from ‘the kids’: "Seventy per cent of our employees are under 30. They are digital natives. They live in social media. They don’t want to come into the office and go into a different community and learn a different language. Companies have to keep up with them and their culture. You have to evolve your company. We are a big old company but we had a burning platform. We had to go through this transformation. ”

This isn’t easy for the older generation of senior management to deal with, she admitted: “At my age, this stuff isn’t my mother tongue. It’s about listening. We created a Strategic Innovation Council with all the kids on it and the remit was ‘to dream’. We then told the Executive Council that its remit was to execute on the dreams. It was the Strategic Council who said that we had to engage more with anyone who touches the Burberry brand. They wanted to create the Burberry community. ”

Throughout all this, the Burberry brand remained at the forefront of thinking, added Ahrendts: “The young team told us that as we looked for solutions they had to ‘feel the brand’. The Salesforce.com solution is putting a halo over our brand. We use Salesforce.com to connect every constituency into the brand. We had to brand the platform. Even when our customers are on Chatter, it has to be branded as Burberry. Luxury is what we sell, that’s our brand and that’s important. This isn’t just a seamless customer journey now, it’s a seamless brand journey. ”

Summary
With the Social Enterprise at the heart of CloudForce in London, Salesforce.com kicked off the sold-out conference with the release of new study that finds that UK CEOs are switching on to the concept.

Description
The study of 150 CEOs – conducted by Coleman-Parkes Research – reported a recognition of the importance of social media. Specifically the survey found:

73% said social networks were important for building brand awareness
68% say it’s important to use social networks as platforms to launch new products
74% say social networks attract new customers
61% use social networks to engage with customers and grow their businesses

Tags: Chatter, CloudForce, Crowdsourcing, Salesforce.com, social enterprise, Social Media

Posted by Marco Torquati

Nov 20, 2011 10:25 am GMT Viewed 1636 times

Author: Stuart Lauchlan Source

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