This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Scott Klososky, author of Enterprise Social Technology, says MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social technology are dramatically altering the way the business world operates.
Explain the concept of crowdsourcing.
It's the practice of harnessing the Internet "herd" to do work on your behalf. And it's the next step past outsourcing in that instead of having to negotiate with a specific group to do contract work, you post projects on the Web and let people you do not know, or who might even be anonymous, compete to do the work. Instead of assigning a project to a specific person or group, you post the job on a crowdsourcing site, and workers from around the world will compete to do the work — in many cases in advance and presenting it for input. It will one day soon be larger by volume than outsourcing.
Describe how social technology is changing how companies do business.
Companies have the capability to build distinctive one-to-one relationships with constituents in a financially feasible way at any volume level, and virtually for free. It changes advertising, marketing and customer service radically. Companies' reputations are built by what people say about them on the social Web. They can no longer hide from poor service or bad products. They also are able to use social technologies to further the concept of virtual teams and remote workers so internal operations will continue to change.
How will crowdsourcing and remote workers change companies' international operations?
They will allow them to hire fewer full-time people, and use the concept of assembling and disassembling virtual teams quickly to a deeper extent. They can rent capabilities from around the world. For example, we need a product packaging person to be on a development team, we just put out the request, choose from lots of "applicants," give them the task, pay them and move on.
How can businesses integrate the full range of social technology tools?
First, they need to document and lock in their internal policies and guidelines. They also need to form a team that will take responsibility for implementing social tech within 18 months. They must define three to five pilot projects to test various forms of social tech and use these pilots to be scientific about learning to use the tools. Once a pilot is complete, they should replace it with another until they have experimented with a variety of methods. And they must be committed to using these tools.
How can social technologies become part of an organization's strategic direction?
Social technologies are just tools. They are not magic. They make doing certain tasks cheaper, faster, scalable and more elegant. Once companies have their overall strategy set, they simply need to ask themselves which social tool concepts can be applied to help reach overall goals. For example, there are social tools that can help improve top-line revenue and others that will help lower back-office expenses.
Dawn House Scott Klososky, author