ENTERPRISE 2.0 | STRATEGY
through Web conferencing, calendar,
instant messaging, and e-mail tools.
Oracle Beehive embeds collaborative
tools such as Web conferencing directly
into existing business applications and
processes. With these applications,
employees can share information within
and across teams and develop new ideas
and products. Communications that
would otherwise be lost, such as briefings or brainstorming sessions, can be
stored for future reference. “With tools
such as Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g and
Oracle Beehive, we’ve orchestrated Web
2.0 services into a prebuilt, ready-to-use
application for sharing, collaborating,
and working together, embedded directly
inside any application,” says Casarez.
EMPOWER YOUR SALES TEAM
The sales organization often presents
the biggest cultural challenge for a
new IT system, and understandably
so. Representatives on the front lines
want to spend as much time as possible
selling products and making money for
the company (and themselves). Any
technology not aligned with that goal
can be perceived as an administrative
chore. Although some critical sales data
must occasionally be collected from the
sales team via strict policy enforcement,
effective IT change management is best
achieved when the new system helps
reps sell more products. Fortunately, new
Enterprise 2.0 tools do just that.
A large part of what sales reps do is
unstructured. They network with potential clients and peers, conduct research
to identify new leads, and brainstorm
about content that helps sell to clients.
This is where Enterprise 2.0’s social cus-
According to Web 2.0 experts Chris
Brogan and Julien Smith, trust agents
are people who are able to “use
today’s Web tools to spread their
influence faster, wider, and deeper
than a typical company’s public relations or marketing department might
be capable of achieving, and with
more genuine interest in people, too.”
How do they do this? Here, Brogan
and Smith, authors of Trust Agents:
Using the Web to Build Influence,
Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust
(Wiley, 2009), explain how agents
operate—and why every company
should have one of its own.
PROFIT: You say being a trust agent
is about bringing the human side to
business, and stress the importance
of listening and doing favors. Why are
those skills critical right now?
SMITH: Consumers are so good at
detecting when people are lying to
us; we know very easily when people
are telling the truth and when they’re
not. For some reason, companies feel
that they can speak to us in a different way than they speak to their own
colleagues around the watercooler.
And they shouldn’t. Chris and I talk
like human beings when we meet with
clients. We’re trying to be honest, and
we’re trying to be real with people.
BROGAN: Using the Web immediately
removes a whole bunch of visual cues.
We can’t judge body language; we
can’t see your folded arms; we can’t
see your eyes darting around, as if to
say that you’re a little uncomfortable.
But we can glean a lot of elements
of trust from how you talk, from how
you conduct yourself, from how you
handle answering bad questions.
We find that there are a lot of big
businesses taking opportunities to
have conversations when it suits
them, but not when it doesn’t. This
is not a call for the world to open up
their business doors, and it’s not a
call to tap every phone line to every
executive: there are lots of times
when private business is private business. Instead, we’re saying, “Just be
human and open with us as you’re
doing business.”
PROFIT: Should businesses appoint
someone to be their Web 2.0 presence?
SMITH: So few people develop themselves as trust agents that if one person in a company does, that person
becomes a representative for everyone
who works there. All of a sudden that
person is extremely responsible for the
company’s image in certain circles. So
you might as well choose somebody
on purpose who can do the job right,
instead of some guy who randomly
decides he’s going to start blogging.
Choose somebody who can do it well,
or groom someone for the job.
PROFIT: We interviewed Tim Ferriss
when his book The 4-Hour Workweek
(Crown Publishers, 2007) came out.
He argues that you shouldn’t check
e-mail more than twice a day because
then you’re just wasting time. How
much time should you be spending
with Web 2.0 tools?
BROGAN: The answer is as much as
you see value, as much as you see
returns. If your tribe is there, if the
people who are complaining about
you are there, then that’s where you
go. If people are talking about you on
blogs, then you spend time on blogs.
If they’re on arcane forums, then be
involved in the forum or the message
group. Furthermore, remember that
you’re really trying to use the engagement as more than just, “Howdy do,”
but less than a structured campaign.
If you have enough trust agents talking specifically to people about what
they’re specifically interested in, then
that’s where the magic happens.
SMITH: If you’re going out there and
you don’t know who you’re speaking
to, that’s probably one of the biggest
mistakes. You can’t say, “OK, what
am I getting as a return on this?”
because you don’t even know who
you’re talking to; you don’t know
where they are in the sales funnel;
you don’t know whether you’re going
to be able to convert them easily,
because you don’t even know who
they are.
Human 2.0
HOW CAN TECHNOLOGY HELP US ACT MORE LIKE REAL PEOPLE?
