Email is *not* an outmoded form of communication. There have been some articles written on this topic several times over the past few years, but, right now, it's just not feasible to think that email will be replaced anytime soon.
Social networking is fine, but should be used as more of a marketing tool for the company rather than a mainstay for customer communication. Social Networking leaves the company open to lawsuits because there is currently no way to monitor and manage communications if you open it up to everyone. There are companies utilizing Social networking, but it's managed by a single person, or group of persons, not the entire company, to make sure there are no legal liabilities. Most of the communications are being fed through an authorization process which includes top-level approval prior to company information being posted. Also, realize that not everyone is a *social* being and not everyone is suited to communicating company information in real-world social setting, let alone an online one. So.yes, please elaborate what you're thinking. From: James Rankin [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, November 13, 2009 4:40 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Trying to harness social networking I'm finding myself pushed towards a more strategic role in our business and as such I'm trying to make a bit of an impact...one of the ideas I've come up with is that for our customers, email is becoming an outmoded form of communication - people are more likely to communicate via social networking, Facebook and the like. The technical problem I'm hitting is how can we encourage the business to communicate with our customers via social networking without opening it up to abuse? I can't see any way to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate uses of social networking sites. Does anyone else have the same problem they've had to overcome? I'd like to move forward and embrace the power that social networking sites offer us for communication and engaging with our customers...but at the same time I don't want to take a step back and allow our employees the chance to while away the day chatting with their friends and reduce our overall productivity. Please feel free to encourage me to elaborate because this idea is pretty much in the developmental stage....thanks for any input anyone can give.... TIA, JRR -- "On two occasions...I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." http://raythestray.blogspot.com ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
