Social business strategy insights

Your social business strategy: A staple of product development

“Social business is no longer a nice to have, but is now a business imperative to improve customer communication and engagement, build loyal partner networks and improve internal collaboration.” – Jim Shaw

Developing and marketing products was, in the past, a more simple and straightforward process. Someone would come up with a product idea that promised to dramatically transform our life, or solve a problem, and the idea would spread like wildfire. Innovation was easy and word-of-mouth was your most powerful weapon against competition. If your product did not delight one segment of the population you could just move to another target without suffering too much backlash from customers or the marketplace.

Fast forward to 2011—technology has revolutionized the way we design and develop products! The process is now more complicated and requires a sophisticated social business strategy that is responsive to customer needs and improves collaboration.

Adopting a social business, strategy: A win-win situation

The social web has become a powerful vehicle for individuals to communicate and share ideas, suggestions and issues related to products or brands, with other community members and organizations. It may be difficult to accept, but organizations no longer own the conversations about their products and brands. As Jim Shaw so eloquently states in his article, Companies that don’t adopt a social business strategy will be left behind, customers have “unprecedented power over your brand” and demand to be included as key players, in the decision making process, at every stage of the product development process. This is not a trend that is going to die out anytime soon. It is a fundamental change to the way products are developed. Instead of ignoring it or seeing it as a threat, organizations should welcome the opportunity to co-create with customers and develop products that align with changing marketplace expectations.

OneDesk: A key component of your social business strategy

To effectively manage all insights coming from different stakeholders across various channels, organizations are actively exploring new social technologies. OneDesk is a unique solution for managing this new customer-organization dynamic, and improving collaboration in the workplace. Our customers religiously use this powerful software to manage the product development process from the early stages of idea generation and management through to the more complex and demanding stages of production and implementation.

Click here to see OneDesk in action and try it for free.