Social Collaboration For Dummies

Chapter 14

Engaging External Collaborators

In This Chapter

Recognizing how external collaboration is different

Setting ground rules for external sharing

Providing for proper security

Engaging partners and customers

Start to demonstrate success with internal social collaboration, and very soon there will come a day when some piece of collaborative work needs to extend outside the organization. Maybe your employees need to collaborate with their counterparts at a distribution partner, manufacturing partner, or ad agency on the launch of a new product. Maybe you want to run an online focus group discussion with a dozen of your most loyal customers, connecting them with your engineering and product development groups to brainstorm about new products within a secure workspace.

This is different from operating a public social community, which is more the territory covered in Community Management For Dummies and Social CRM For Dummies. To create a public community, you may take essentially the same platform Jive provides for internal use and set it up on a public website and allow anyone ...