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.

For those that haven’t heard of Dopplr it’s a travel tool that allows you to share plans with your network of friends and colleagues. Rather like in work when you let people know where you’re going to be, Dopplr lets you share this information with the people you choose, not just as a way of keeping people informed but also as a means to organise your time better. If you happen to be in New York on business when your friend or business associate is too than why not meet up for dinner or arrange a quick meeting rather than kill down time on your own for example.

Askpeopleyouknow (AKYP) is a social search tool that lets you share searches with your chosen network. It’s a social network in that you need to create a profile and then invite or find friends. Once you’ve done this the idea is that can not only search the web as you would normally but also ask your network of friends if they have any ideas as well. It’s been funded by Peter Bazalgette, ex Creative Director of Endemol, amongst others so it will be interesting to see how quickly it can gain traction in an already extremely competitive search market. Getting people to give up the Google search habit is no easy task as Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask have all found out.

With regards to us, it’s great news to see value being put on both these products as they offer features and benefits that we’ve built into Cofacio.

The first is the ability to share information with other people which benefits us by allowing us to find others in similar situations so we can jointly make the most of our time and be better organised. Finding others looking for the same can open up numerous opportunities for cooperation between those two or more people as they share a common objective.

The second is the ability to ask a number of people easily and simply, without having to do so individually by phone, mail or in person. In the case of Cofacio you can ask other Cofacio users or post your query to your contacts on Facebook or Twitter. So while search engines undoubtedly provide us fantastic access to the information documented on the web, it’s worth remembering that;

1. People are great sources of tacit knowledge, i.e. information that can’t easily be transferred in writing and is better explained via conversation
2. A lot of information simply isn’t on the web and resides in people. I’m still looking for a statistic but my guess is that a minuscule percentage of the worlds information is documented, let alone made public online. Just consider the number of closed company and organisational intranets.
3. It is often other people’s opinions that help us make decisions. People we know or those we consider experts allow us to qualify information that we find and benefit from their experience and knowledge.

To end then, congratulations to Dopplr and good luck to Askpeopleyouknow. It’s always good to hear positive news about other web companies in the cooperation space and great to see such an ambitious start up as AKYP being run out of the UK.