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Converting social to value

Cindy Cheng, ​Sr. Director of Marketing Communications, EMEA, Appian
October 16, 2013

Deriving business value from social media efforts may seem tricky, but there are strategies that many enterprises can embrace to simplify these efforts and focus on growth. From boosting customer service to enhancing competitive efforts, social media has many benefits to add to a company, if implemented correctly. Each of these factors doesn't rest apart from the others either - investing in a well-rounded social BPM solution can optimize social media across a broad spectrum of uses with a single focal point.

Taking the business process management approach to social media helps companies focus on what is actually important within these solutions. This means deriving real business value from social initiatives, not just minor improvements.

Collaborative intelligence

The advantage of enterprise social is that it brings employees together to tackle problems as a team, not individually. This crowdsourcing of ideas will lend itself to faster resolutions and quicker time to market when applicable. Many companies are embracing communications tools for collaboration improvements - integrating BPM software is the next logical step.

Invested workforce

People spend hours on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest, even during work hours. Investing in social media solutions like worksocial simply gives them a more productive outlet that gets professionals invested in their company - not silly cat videos. Focusing employees' efforts on actual business related social news will promote productivity, even in their downtime.

Building structure

Many businesses focus on social enterprise efforts as a way to build a stronger employee structure within their operations. Beyond driving productivity, this encourages workers to seek out new ideas and innovate on their own, seeking support from their coworkers and building stronger collaborative efforts overall. This allows employees to optimize their use of process management software before the tools even go into use, pushing the productivity and efficiency benefits even further.

Getting more done

Simply put, BPM solutions help companies do more, faster. The increased productivity resolves into increased profits and other value drivers, such as reduced operational costs or streamlined communication along the chain of command. Workers will spend less time waiting and more doing, either because they have more motivation or because the systems they use to get their jobs done more efficiently.

Rather than focusing on the processes themselves, businesses should work to improve process management and fix the problem at its source. This will have a broader range of benefits and help firms accomplish more, sooner, rather than trying to eliminate productivity issues one at a time. This provides the ultimate value from BPM.

Cindy Cheng

Director of Product Marketing