The Stakes

The new forms of global interaction fostered by ‘social’ technologies raise numerous important stakes, for organizations as well as for the brands they support.

- For organizations:

Unless providing coworkers with an ad-hoc work environment, knowledge sharing will happen on the Web, away from any kind of control and capitalization.

• Internal social networks allow improving communication and collaboration, while strengthening the sense of identity and belonging.

Formal training and most present work environments are unable to capture informal knowledge.

• Networks and communities are the new organizational ‘water cooler’. Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) allow anyone to enrich collective knowledge and to gain new competencies.

Senior workers’ retirement deprive companies of irreplaceable knowledge and expertise.

• Communities, external as well as internal, mentoring and coaching programs, allow experts to share their knowledge and allow newcomers to fit faster into a company.

- For brands:

Opportunities brought to individuals by social media put a real power into their hands.

• Individuals can influence each other (positively or negatively) either informally or inside communities focused on their respective interests.
• Negatively, they potentially can heavily damage a brand, a product or a service.
• Positively, they may become active ambassadors of the same products and services.

People share about their life, their concerns, about what directly impact them. Those conversations allow to better understanding how to help them ‘get their job done’.

• Listening to them allow offering them better products and services.
• Not listening is similar to empowering competition, to turning one’s back to innovation insights.