Embracing Social Media
No longer is the web a one-way publishing mechanism: it's now a two-way method of communication.
Last year we were heartened – and somewhat pleasantly surprised – to host more than 80 people at an event talking about online communities. Many people are familiar with the personal benefi ts that can be gained from using online services such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and what many people are realising is that many of the same tools used by these services can be utilised by organisations – to develop and grow communities and spheres of infl uence inside and outside organisations.
No longer is the web a one-way publishing mechanism: it’s now a two-way method of communication.
While most organisations have a web presence, there is signifi cant opportunity to evolve this presence to engage with your audience. Within the organisation, the intranet can be extended to better understand staff issues and needs; externally, there are opportunities to put an interactive presence out to the market, using the web to engage with visitors to understand what they are looking for. From these understandings you may develop new ways of researching needs and wants, or differentiate yourself from other organisations. At the very least, you create a reason for people to return.
This isn’t all about marketing either. By becoming more engaged with your visitors you have a better chance to understand their needs more fully, which can provide useful input into new products or services. You can listen to customers to fi nd out what they like or dislike about your offerings. You can encourage and reward people for helping each other, creating a sense of belonging and, ultimately, a self-managing community. And these people can contribute their opinions, ideas and content to make the experience better for others – without the sanitisation that can sometimes come from a marketing or communications team.
So how can your organisation implement one of these solutions? Intergen has a range of offerings for organisations looking to embrace social media. As always, which offering you select depends on what you want to do. EPiServer’s Community and Relate+ offerings enable organisations to create web and intranet communities – either on their own or by supplementing an existing site. Similarly, Microsoft SharePoint is also broadly deployed, and we can customise this, utilise the EPiServer offerings, or take advantage of NewsGator Social Sites which tightly integrates with SharePoint.
Intergen has recently partnered with US-based NewsGator, which has a long history in RSS aggregation and online community development. Ultimately, whichever solution you choose depends on what you want to achieve – talk to us to discuss your options. Email: marketing@intergen.co.nz Intergen’s walking the talk and is on Twitter – get real-time updates by following www.twitter.com/teamintergen.