Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 20

Energizing Your Employees for Social Media Marketing

In This Chapter

Connecting employees with social tools

Using prediction markets to pick winners

Making decisions collaboratively

Until the beginning part of this decade, enterprise software looked and felt very different from the software that was designed for consumers. Enterprise software helped businesses manage customer relationships, handle knowledge management, communicate internally, and handle company operations. It focused on addressing the needs of IT managers more than the employees who were the users of the software. Emphasis was put more on security, compliance, system control, interoperability, and maintenance — and strangely, less on what employees wanted or needed. The fact that the software buyers (the IT managers) weren’t the users (the employees) was largely to blame for this state of affairs. And then something changed.

When employees went home in the evenings, the software that they were using for their personal lives (web-based or otherwise) was progressively a lot better designed and easier to use. And more than that, the software allowed them to contribute content, share, comment, and connect ...