Getting Social with Your Colleagues

April 6, 2010

Recently, my colleagues and I have written a number of posts about businesses (and OpenView for that matter) using social media (Facebook, twitter, Linkedin, etc) as a vehicle for engaging with prospects and expanding brand awareness. Diana Winings, an analyst, provides Recruitment Support for our expansion stage portfolio companies, and Amanda Maksymiw, a marketing analyst for the VC, have written some outstanding posts about how to best utilize social networking sites for each of their particular expertise. Personally, focusing much of my energy on Lead Generation Services for the companies that we provide growth capital for, I have found social media to be one of the most effective ways to connect with prospects and generate opportunities for sales teams.

What do Diana’s, Amanda’s and my posts have in common? We all have focused on writing about social networking for external or public purposes.

It is important to remember that social media and social networking tools should also be used as a means for you and your colleagues to connect and share information internally.

Tony Byrne of Inc.com offers some great goals for companies to consider when exploring internal social networking:

  • Building a knowledge-base for everyone in your company to have access to all marketing documents/business information…from a sales perspective, this is very important!
  • Sharing ideas and enabling people to share their two cents on how to improve processes etc.
  • Managing projects more effectively
  • Allowing employees to better connect on a personal level

So what tools are best? Forums, Blogs, wikis, a sole instant messaging tool and, perhaps most importantly…internal collaboration software. 

OpenView made a venture capital investment in Central Desktop, an online collaboration platform, in 2008. Not only do we work with Central Desktop as investors that also provide operational support, but it is worth noting that we religiously use Central Desktop’s SaaS internally to interact, share and manage our daily work activities/documents from anywhere, at anytime. If you are considering utilizing this sort of technology for your business, I strongly recommend taking a look their website! Please reach out to me directly if you would like an introduction [email protected].