USA Today wrote a great article Social media is reinventing how business is done, the article states:

“Companies are using social networks to build teams that solve problems faster, share information better among their employees and partners, bring customer ideas for new product designs to market earlier, and redesign all kinds of corporate software in Facebook’s easy-to-learn style.”

In today’s world many people are working remotely, and the new challenge for an organization is competing with different time zones, conference calls and hundreds of emails to get their attention. What if you want to have your executive leaders brainstorm with the customer service reps, who work on the floor, to think of new ways to serve your customers? Some of the reps may feel intimidated talking to a 30 year veteran leading the company, either in person or on the phone. How can you overcome this and get them to talk one on one? Knock down the barriers, Twitter’s claimed success. Create an internal social network for co-workers to share ideas, collaborate, and even conduct training webinars.

The benefits of an internal Social Network:

1. Having to read less email
2. Seeing the avatar of your co-worker for instant identification
3. Feeling open to express your ideas in a Forum or to the CEO and not needing to wait for your idea to work its way up the ladder. Also not having to risk your idea being taken by someone else on its way to the top.
4. SMS alerts to let you know that someone has sent you a message, which makes participation more easily adopted
5. Being able to voice your opinion, communicate or learn 24/7

The disadvantages of an internal Social Network:

1. The cost of implementation
2. Getting your employees and executives on board to use the application, and to see the benefits of doing so on a regular basis
3. Training your network on how to use the application

At Engage121 we have created an internal social network inside our social media management software. Our tool mirrors Twitter’s functionality and allows you to post status updates to your organization, send direct messages to co-workers or publicly reply to updates. Enterprise accounts can allow franchisees to send messages to the franchisor, or an agency can message their clients internally as well.

Here at Engage121 our internal social network, Connect121, is a huge benefit to connecting with my co-workers and updating them on marketing promotions that are beginning today by posting a public update. They can reply publicly or privately to ask me questions on how this will affect our clients. Emails are becoming a less successful way for me to communicate and Connect121 enables me to get in front of everyone in my organization immediately, due to SMS alerts that can be set up to let someone know that there is an update.

Do you have an internal social network in place at your organization?

Engage121’s Customer Care helps clients achieve a higher level of client service satisfaction, more efficiently, with game-changing features like:

The Broadest Range of Content
Benefit: Building a great Customer Care capability begins with capturing the broadest range of customer conversations in social media. Engage121 aggregates content from all channels where your customers are speaking, including social platforms, blogs, RSS feeds, over forty rating and review sites and more, delivering one of the most comprehensive socially powered Customer Care capabilities available today.

Case Creation
Benefit: The Engage121 case creation feature gives you the ability to capture customer concerns in real-time, allowing you to provide immediately responsive service to your customers. Once a customer care issue has been identified, one click develops a case name, subject and customer identity.

Case Management
Benefit: Engage121 provides a dedicated Customer Care dashboard that enables comprehensive case management across time zones, product teams and user permissions.

Permissions Management
Benefit: Engage121 furthers your ability to manage social Customer Care by assigning specific permissions to your users. This provides better management controls over compliance guidelines for staff, when engaging with customers.

Case Reporting
Benefit: No Customer Care application would be complete without the ability to report and measure the key metrics of your efforts. Engage121 makes it possible to review and assess your social customer service efforts, both on a user basis and in the aggregate.

Franchise companies use Engage121 to increase local store traffic, find and reward loyal customers, increase repeat visits, recruit franchisees, and keep the brand message consistent across the social media landscape.

In fact 29 restaurant brands sign up with us in 29 days. Click here to read some of our franchise client’s success stories. Our food service clients range from TGI Friday’s, Golden Corral and Twin Peaks to dessert-treat specialists like Dairy Queen and Rita’s Italian Ice.  We’ve just added more restaurant review sites to our application, such as Urban Spoon and Open Table.

If you liked to see how to increase your franchise business with social media, you should see a demo of Engage121. Click here for a free demo.

- Who’s Gartner?

- What does this mean?

- You’re really not that cool!

I’d like to clear this up for everyone, once and for all.

Who’s Gartner – they are the clear leader among IT Analyst Firms. To put it into perspective, they are a $1B+ organization whose ticker symbol is IT. Enough said. Specifically to us, they have been preaching for years to CIOs (Chief Information Officers) that IT needs to function as a strategic business unit, not as a group of tech people.

What does this mean? – It validates everything we’ve been doing. When I demo Engage121 I always hear prospective clients say “cool,” to which my response is always “Why?” Because nothing we do is actually cool for the sake of being cool. There is always a method to the madness; or as we call them at Engage121, Business Solutions…a.k.a.…the same thing that Gartner is challenging CIOs to deliver on a daily basis.

What are business solutions? It depends on your line of business. For Restaurants, you want more butts in seats. For Real Estate Organizations, you want more listings and more sold houses. For Financial Institutions, you want to retain and grow your client base. We help our clients achieve their specific objectives through social media every day. Heck, I challenge you to find a corporate objective that social can’t influence.

And to my friends who say I am really not that cool, you know who you are. You are just busting our chops, because you are right there with us. Together, we are in the midst of working on some stuff that is straight up revolutionary. We are changing the ways business is done on a day-to-day basis.

Things couldn’t be any more exciting at Engage121 than they are right now. I am thrilled that I get to enjoy the ride. For the rest of you, buckle up because big things are coming. How do I know? Because I’m cool.

In this webinar Michael Chin, VP of Marketing at SocialFlow, teaches you how SocialFlow works and shows you how it can effectively increase your engagement on Twitter.

SocialFlow publishes your content (tweets) at the optimal moment; maximizing clicks, retweets, mentions and follower growth. There are many simultaneous conversations occurring on Twitter, making it difficult, if not impossible to break through the white noise and deliver your content.

We believe SocialFlow, through Engage121, can help you accomplish that task. We are now offering SocialFlow for free to all Engage121 clients for a 3 month period starting May 1st, 2012 until July 31st, 2012. Clients please refer here to learn how you can activate SocialFlow or call your customer experience rep.

How do you determine the best time to tweet?

As an Admin of the account, go to Account>Library>Account Apps and click on the SocialFlow icon.

This will prompt you to accept the terms and conditions.

Shouts out to Tumblr making it’s application accessible for Brands to monitor, unlock prizes when you tweet about the Olympics & Gartner Inc. names their cool vendors for CRM Customer Service & Social.

What did you discover?

Tumblr and Gnip partner to provide businesses access to public posts
Getting Ready for the Social Media Olympics
Engage121 Earns a spot on Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in CRM Customer Service and Social 2012″ List

Lots of news this week in the world of Social Media. Facebook buys Instagram for $1 BILLION, LinkedIn is making their platform better for marketers, and Google+ copies its competition! Did I miss anything?

Also in honor of the Instagram news I’ve applied a visual effect to my YouTube video. What do you think?