
Trust came up in quite a few of our features this week. Always a necessity, it is becoming more of a challenge as the number of people working remotely increases.
What can companies do to foster trust? Are there any tools that help? Read on to find the answers.
The People and Tools to See it Through
Developing Trust in the Digital Workplace
Sharon O'Dea (@sharonodea): In offices the world over, a quiet revolution is underway. The costs of technology have fallen, the quality of social platforms vastly improved, and senior management attitudes have changed; after many years when it was simply an aspiration, or a buzzword, the digital workplace is fast becoming a reality.
To Socialize Organizations, Socialize Executives
Rachel Happe (@rhappe): 2012 has been a year of uncertainty. The economy is slowly improving, but with fits and starts and the recent IMF report confirms that the global economy is not beyond a dramatic meltdown. Close elections in the U.S. have everyone holding their breath until we know what direction the political winds are blowing. And technology continues its rapid pace of change, disrupting how we work, connect and collaborate.
Enterprise Collaboration in 2012: The Good, The Bad, The ...
Kevin Conroy (@seattlerooster): When I got word that CMSWire’s editorial focus for the month of October would be “enterprise collaboration and communication,” I immediately smiled, as this in itself showed some real progress for our industry. There’s no doubt journalists covering our space will continue to talk about “social business” and the “social enterprise” for some time to come (I’ve used this phrasing myself more than once), but “enterprise collaboration and communication” really cuts more to the chase of what I think we’re all trying to do here, which is to improve communication and productivity within the enterprise.
Rethinking the Intranets: Teaching an Old Tool New Tricks
Maria Ogneva (@themaria): The world is changing fast; even the nature of change itself has changed, says futurist Thornton May. Many corporate systems are holdovers from a time when things changed less frequently, everything was more predictable, and content was created by a few and consumed by many. Corporate intranet gets a bad rap; but it’s just a perfectly good tool designed yesterday and being used by today’s jobs. You wouldn’t check out a book at a library to respond to a tweet from a customer, would you?
Social Reconnects Enterprise Search
Julie Hunt (@juliebhunt): Enterprise Search continues to go through transformations to improve its usefulness for all employees, since information is common currency for practically everyone in every organization.
Beware the Information Architecture Trap
Toby Ward (@tobyward): IBM’s intranet information architecture is not good enough for you; nor is Microsoft’s.
9 Ways to Stay Productive on SharePoint
Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet): When I paired up with fellow SharePoint expert Geoff Varosky (@gvaro) last year for a presentation at SPTechCon Boston, we decided to create a fake company as part of our effort to create use cases and working examples without having to rely on the Microsoft-provided generic company Contoso. During our working sessions, somehow the conversation degraded (if you know Geoff and I, this is not surprising) into a wild and silly fake company, where our characters (yes, we created characters) were also in a band together. So we found ourselves in Boston, presenting several beginner scenarios on how someone new to SharePoint could quickly become a "rock star," with all of our examples based around the activities two fake employees in a fake rock band called Horse's End.
Struggling with Content
He Said, She Said: Content's Role in the Sales and Marketing Marriage
Carla Johnson (@carlajohnson): If content marketing is supposed to support the sales cycle, why are so many companies so bad at it?
So many companies think the answer comes from the right marketing automation system or any other bit of technology that gets content in front of a customer or prospect. It’s not.
Struggling with B2B Social Marketing? Here's What to Do Now
Carter Hostelley (@leadtail): Come on B2B marketers, just face it: you don’t know what you’re doing with social media.
Sure your company has a Facebook and LinkedIn page, and someone on your team tweets every day (maybe you). But, to quote Dr. Phil, “How’s that working out for you?” Or to quote every Sales VP I’ve ever met, “Where are the leads?”
Learning Opportunities
Content Strategy: Distracted Behavior is Good for Content Producers
Ahava Leibtag (@ahaval): If you’re involved in the business of digital content, then you know you contend with distracted consumers, multi-screened attention and multi-threaded conversations. You probably have thousands of post-its on your desk reminding you to use odd numbers in your headlines, refer to pop culture, tell stories, use video, don’t use video, etc. to make your content stand out.
Don't Let Sales Push Customer Relationships into the Background
Chris Bucholtz (@bucholtz): Customer relationship management (CRM) is, in theory, a broad topic: it’s about building relationships and that encompasses a lot of different activities.
Unfortunately, the activities that are seized upon by most companies are all sales-related.
Customer Experience: We Have Customers, Not Users
Gerry McGovern (@gerrymcgovern): User is a word that lacks empathy, and empathy is the most important attribute a web professional can have.
Digital Lies and Lawyers
Big Data, Smart Data and the Fallacy that Lies Between
Michael Wu (@mich8elwu): The promise of big data is that it contains big information, big insights. But data and information are not the same. Data is only as valuable as the information and insight we can extract from it, because it’s the information and insight that help us make better decisions.
Mobile Business Intelligence: Putting Information in the Palm of Your Hand
Norman Marks (@normanmarks): Businesses are making it increasingly easy for their workers to accessbusiness intelligence on the go. While the benefits of this trend can be felt enterprise-wide, how will it help those working in risk management?
Wildervoices: Robert Brownstone on Digital Law, Challenges of the Digital Workplace
Scott K. Wilder (@skwilder): Digital Risk, Crisis Management, Cyber Security: three fields that would have meant little to nothing for most businesses as recently as 10 years ago. But in today's digital workplace, they are all but unavoidable.
Our evolution of enterprise collaboration will soon come to a close, but never fear, we have a few more great features to close out the month.
Image courtesy of Germanskydiver (Shutterstock)