Friday, May 2, 2008

Web 2.0 helps firms innovate, allows closer monitoring of marketing spend

To fulfil the aspirations of a young workforce, continuously asking for seamless, real-time interaction, companies are allowing the use of Web 2.0 applications such as Skype, LinkedIn, Facebook, Joomla!, Second Life and S for business purposes to generate sales leads, recruit talent and test and improve products.

Subash A K Rao, director, human resources, Cisco India — a leader in networking for the internet — says the company uses a broad suite of social networking tools like blogs and wikis. It also uses richer applications like TelePresence to connect and collaborate.

Infogain, a technology solutions company, uses its internal as well as external blog sites to connect communities of dispersed knowledge workers for collaborative benefit. Eddie Chandhok, president, global delivery organisation, Infogain, says: "We expect to leverage the power of collaboration by getting innovative ideas from individuals, who are free to send theirtechnology/business ideas to the our CTO office directly."

Soon, the company is planning to use these communities (through Infogain Blog, Infogain Wiki) to get feedback on new services feedback. This will help in raising the efficacy of its marketing.

APC-MGE, a leading global provider of critical power and cooling solutions, (a part of Schnieder Electric) uses mashups besides wikis, instant messaging services and others.

Subodh Tagare, marketing director, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh region, APC-MGE, says: "Our employees use mashup to manage leads emanating from diverse sources. It helps in consolidation and tracking of leads and to ensure closures."

Salesforce.com is another hit among sales and marketing employees across the world for automation of sales and marketing tasks. Anand Dhand, director, Salesforce.com, India, says: "Though Salesforce applications are used across all the verticals, Business-2-Business, Business-2-Customer, Salesforce Automation (SFA), partner — and customer- relationship management are the most widely-used services."

Vineet Tyagi, associate director, engineering, Impetus Technologies, says his company's sales team in the US extensively uses Salesforce.com for research, lead generation and prospect management. "Our recruitment team uses a variety of social networking websites to narrow down on talent and communicate about the work options the company offers.

Not only this, Impetus marketing and communication team makes wonderful use of social content sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia for branding," he says.

Sunil Mangalore, CEO, Datacraft India Ltd, a leading IT services and solutions provider and a strategic partner of Microsoft, concurs: "We use blogs, wikis, discussion forums, shared calendars, shared project-tracking tools to collaborate on leads, projects, problem resolution."

Sundararaj S, Partner, Anantara Solutions, a provider of business and IT consulting services, says: "We use sugarCRM for customer relationship management, basecamphq for managing and tracking projects, LinkedIn for business connections and as a recruitment aid and Skype for messaging and for tele-conversations." Anantara has an office in Second Life and uses this extensively to socialise and connect.

here are inherent risks like data privacy, application security, information integrity and information silos in using Web 2.0 applications, note experts. There is a chance that inaccurate, or occasionally even offensive, information may get out. But social networks can help monitor and control this situation. "Over time, we think the social norms around these collaboration tools will develop and become second nature.

For example, there was a lot of concern around abuse and misuse when email was first deployed in enterprises. Now, people know what is acceptable to email and what is not," Rao from Cisco says.


Source: business-standard.com/common

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