The Social Media Hangup

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Talent Management  

There is a common challenge that many people involved in some form of technology products face: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. We’ve seen people pull the bells and whistles out of the bag and use them as a way to try and impress others, but that often creates the opposite effect. Extraordinary product features that developers feel a need to showcase, presentations that sales personnel have overdone with multimedia components, Web designers that put together special effects on the screen that distract more than support a business--the list goes on.

With the increased public and professional attention on social media, its tools and techniques, there can be concern that the desire for an organization to jump on this bandwagon is more an exercise of working on something “trendy” than it is a well thought-out enhancement. While there are companies trying to take advantage of this movement for the short term, others have concluded that as new as some of the concepts appear to be, the core of the effort is really based in relationships--and those may be worth consideration.

By having the ability to easily share knowledge and information, various aspects of social media can contribute to the framework of business interactions and create a foundation that can forge a competitive benefit. At the center of this “new idea…

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