How Businesses Can Get More from Social Networking

AMR Research analyst Jonathan Yarmis says that social media falls short of providing business value for many companies. In order to combat this problem, companies must start small and focus on what conversations they want to have in social media forums.

Comments

How would you describe the method for implementing social software to start? How is it different than traditional software?

In some ways it's optimized by Google: throw something up there and see what sticks. The days of these multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts and software deployments - I won't say they'll be gone completely, but they basically just don't make sense anymore. If you start with some lofty business objective like "we want to improve customer satisfaction," you still need to just take a first step [with social media] and see what happens.

I see so many companies come up with 137 ideas about that they want to do with social media, but they should just start with one. Get comfortable taking that first step and see what works along the way. That is way different than the software model we're used to.