Can social channels revolutionise business?
In this video Sharif Sakr investigates how social media usage is impacting the way businesses think of their bottom line. Billionaire IT entrepreneur Marc Benioff believes he has discovered an unforseen function in his latest product. Salesforce Chatter is a software package that helps staff in a company to collaborate. Benioff believes social networking can revolutionise business but says he uses Chatter for something else: to keep an eye on his many employees at Salesforce.com and judge which of them are pulling their weight: “The benefit to me as an executive is a lot of transparency. You know, email tends to be a very private medium. It’s not a great vehicle for sharing information, but social networks are.” Then there are software giants Google and Microsoft, who have their own online collaborative tools. Google has its Apps, and Microsoft has its Business Productivity Online Suite (aka BPOS). These tools make it easier for a small, trusted group of colleagues to collaborate on a document, or share a calendar, or access a spreadsheet from their smartphones. With many business processes heading towards more collaborative methods, perhaps it’s only right that managers should be monitoring the resulting activity. Such an arrangement could make it more apparent exactly who should be credited successes in the workplace.