With Cofacio now launched and over £1,500 raised for charity we’ve began working on help engine solutions for businesses so they can help their customers more effectively online.

It was great timing then that last week we were invited to attend the Dell B2B Social Media Huddle, hosted at the Microsoft London offices in Victoria, a big thanks to the organisers, Neville Hobson, Kerry Bridge and our host Mel Carson for a very well put together and interesting day. It was a great opportunity for us to gain an insight into how leading companies such as Dell, Paypal and Microsoft are taking advantage of the many opportunities social media offers to engage with customers and empower staff. As a result they’re benefiting from lower customer service costs, increased sales and greater customer advocacy.

There were lots of takeaways from the day but one slide I particularly liked was by Benjamin Ellis which summarised the three ways in which businesses can start benefiting from social media now. It made me realise that while we as a business concentrate on making it easier to get and give help, the way in which we work with companies will be focused along three areas; build, buy or borrow.

With businesses and organisations struggling to understand social media, the opportunities and risks it conveys and the way in which they can start getting involved, I’m a great believer in keeping things simple and Benjamin’s three B’s do this perfectly. Faced with a client who wants to get started the way forward is simple, you can build, buy or borrow.

Build: This is a longer term option and involves creating community functionality on the client site so that the various stake holders can engage and interact, customers, staff and shareholders for example. At Cofacio we’re already in talks to deliver internal help engines for training purposes and external facing solutions for enhanced customer service.

Buy: This refers to supporting or even purchasing an existing community. We presently work with Legal & General and VeriQual on Cofacio.com in this way where they make it possible for our users to support charity projects.

Borrow: The quickest and cheapest route involves taking part in communities, so participation. We’ve just welcomed our first retailer to the site who is looking to help people out with advice on photography and cameras, they’re well aware that if they help people then they’ll be building up trust and goodwill and this will very quickly lead to new customers. We’ll be rolling out further developments soon for both businesses that want to help customers and organisations that would like people to help them on the site.

These then are our plans for how we can work with businesses to help make them more social but we’d love to hear what you think. Do you agree that businesses should be using social media to improve customer service for example or how do you think businesses can best empower their staff to enhance their brand and reputation?

Which reminds me, one of the most repeated phrases at the DellB2B Huddle was that it’s still early days for social media and that it’s just going to keep getting bigger. Now really is the time to get involved as it’s only going to get more difficult and expensive to join the party from here on in.