On Wednesday morning a group of people interested enough in social media to brave the LA traffic gathered at the W in Westwood for the Visible Technologies Social Media Readiness breaskfast. The first speaker was Esteban Kolsky of ThinkJar. Kolsky was a Gartner analyst and now does work on social CRM and strategy.

He spoke about the depth of unfiltered intelligence available in social conversations and the value this data has for an organization. Monitoring and analyzing social converations is faster, more accurate and costs about one-tenth of traditional market research.

According to the Trust Barometer what people trust most is no longer ‘someone like me’  it’s now  ‘a company like me.’

People trust, form relationships with, and buy from companies that share their values.  They expect, and in fact demand, that these companies become social internally and externally. They want to be involved,  They want to have a voice in how the products are designed and how the company operates.

To be a social businessyou have to:

Listen – but listening alone is not enough. Most companies are not sure what to do with the data and are not organized to use the information

Learn – Analyze the content you monitor and learn from the information and start to do something about it. There is a wealth of information in these conversations.  Mine the data and find those gems of intellegence.

Participate – Don’t let this be a one-way flow.  It’s about the conversation.  That means you have to participate and engage with your customers, detractors and evangelists. Use tools.  Form social media teams. Set social media policies and guidelines.

Collaborate – Provide your employees with the tools to colloborate,  Be open.  Take down that firewall between the smart market and your smart employees, so eloquently described in the Cluetrain Manifesto.   Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in. 
Grow and improve  - use the information you learn from your interactions with people  inside and outside the company to change, adopt better practices and make better products.  Use social media like you use email – it should be that integrated into your organization, not a ‘campaign’ or ‘experiment’ in PR or marketing.

Become a client-driven, innovative organization.

What does it take to do this?

• Buy in from the top
• A commitment to changing the way you operate
• Social media training. 

The training needs to go across the entire organization, from C-suite to finance (they approve the budgets) legal and  compliance, sales and CRM.  It’s not just for the marketing and PR department.