Though I am still in Chapter three of the new book "Groundswell, winning  in aworld transformed by social technologies" published by Harvard Business Press and Authored by Chharlene Li and Josh Bernoff with Forester research, I had to say a few words about this great manuscript of insightful information. 

Since I took the helm of CNP Integrations as CEO and we decided to go down the path of supporting all of the technologies discussed in this book and after reading Paul Greenberg's CRM at the speed of light I have been attracted to books filled with statistics. Mostly because I have to justify what we are doing and investing to my board. Well... Groundswell maps out the Social Technology spectrum better than any other book I have found since it has not only the statistical foundations to quantify this magnificent transformation in our culture and how we communicate but it identifies how anyone with a business can use these tools to create a direct and honest communication link with their customers. I emphasize honest because while this creates significant cost savings for connecting with your customers they can be brutally honest in return. So "that which does not kill us makes us stronger" can often be a common mantra when embarking on social networking as part of your communication strategy. However the feedback you receive could save you a ton of money by providing valuable insight into how you can improve your products and services with the least amount of investment.  

 There are some great simple graphs that illustrate the global use and impact of social networking. It explains how business owners should approach social networking, how it changes relationships and a good overview of how these technologies work. 

Though it covers stuff we have been entrenched in for years, I hope that all of our customer read this since it will make my job a lot easier. Much of the discoveries phase in each of our new customer relationships involve making sure that we are all understanding the technologies we are implementing or integrations. I think Groundswell will be my first recommendation to customers that want to create vibrant social networks.

One of our best customers Fred Friendly Seminars (www.fredfriendly.org) I met at a workshop with Paul Greenberg in NY city about CRM and Social Networking Web 2.0. What helped us really move forward quickly with this project was that we did not have to get them up to speed on the technologies only how to redefine their model on to the web and train them on how to use some of the tools.

An old friend use to tell me to "Train your customers well" and while this may seem to be a bit of arrogant, it is really true. The better your customers understand what you do and how you do it the more you can offer them and the greater value they can get from your services. Do not get me wrong since this works both ways in that you really have to understand your customers if you are going to give then what they need and build trust and loyalty in return.

With that said if you are planning to embark on a social networking community web site or start using some of the social technologies as part of your communication strategy you should get "Groundswell".

It is a must have for your knowledgebase!

CN

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I often kid with my wife, friends and family about our/my business being like a second wife that is much needier than my “;first” wife. Not that my wife is needy, she is actually very independent. However, the point I make is that owning and managing a small business can be very demanding on your time and mental bandwidth. One of the other challenging things with many small businesses is the required office space and software and hardware resources required typically to get everyone working to serve your customers in a common direction. So this is where the idea of a Virtual Office became so appealing to me. We started our business we spent a lot on building out office space and investing in assets that today actually collect dust since we have shifted everything to a virtual space. I once thought I would have a team of busy beavers working on our little office space and we would have long winded conversations around the water cooler as in most traditional offices. I was wrong though, since meetings on site became much less frequent and as our workforce grew with independent consultants located across the United States and abroad. So this has actually saved us a lot of money since we have lower facility maintenance costs and overhead. It also provided our workforce to have more freedom and independence, thus improving their productivity and increasing loyalty.

The other key component of a Virtual Office is that the tools typically have a variety of business automations that can, if you configure them correctly, actually let your business talk to you, your workforce and your customer in real-time. With event triggered workflows and collaboration tools you can interact and respond faster and much more efficient than ever before. I am a bit of a geek so I like web based tools and have spent the better part of the last 10 years researching and experimenting and even building from the ground up tools to fulfill this dream of a Virtual Office that could connect a geographically dispersed workforce and offer the real time collaboration that made doing business fun.

Allas… all the pieces have come together. A few years back I set out to start a new business model to support small businesses with the web based tools that can hopefully make their lives easier, reduce costs and give them more freedom and independence and control from their businesses. I wanted to learn from many mistakes either I had made in the past 20 years of being an entrepreneur or that I had seen others make. So… on this road I found some great technology tools, some smart people to help us integrate them and build a platform for delivering such a powerful capability.

We use the info@hand Customer Relationship Business Management system with a Joomla Customer portal and sync it with Quick Books. This not only gives us complete ecommerce transaction management but an effective marketing and communication interface with our customers, stakeholders and workforce. We have leveraged several workflows to communicate and respond quickly to the needs of our customers and stay informed as project life cycles progress. It is a well proven fact that this kind of customer relationship management significantly reduces costs and builds customer loyalty when applied correctly.

The closer for me was the new Glueble Suite . This is like merging Skype, Yahoo, linked in, facebook, myspace, youtube and Go-to-meeting all in one. In addition to the great desktop collaboration client there is a robust social community for interacting with real live people. This offers us and our customers private collaboration workspaces for communicating in real-time with video, audio, chat while sharing desktops, documents or delivering presentations. It also allows us to build personal relationships and keep the process of doing business interactive and enjoyable.

Oh yea and by the way this "Virtual Office" concept is all very "Green" friendly so you can feel good about the investment required to get set-up. In the end it will save you a ton of cash if you are smart about how you do it.

All-n-all it has been a lot of work to get this all implemented in a way that impacts our bottom line as intended but now that we are over the hump I have more quality time with my “first” wife, friends and family, our workforce is much less stressed since our business communicates with them, our customers are much happier since they get faster and more responsive attention and we are all having a lot more fun doing business together from all corners of the world.

Now with that said, I am off to Brazil for a month… but you will hardly notice.

  CN

For more information about how you can get your business integrated with a Virtual Office Suite visit the following web sites: www.cnpintegrations.com (home), www.infoathand.us and www.glueble.com

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