Announcement: Gautam Ghosh Has Joined 2020 Social to Build our Enterprise Practice

Comments 22 October 2009

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I have a big announcement to make: Gautam Ghosh has joined 2020 Social to build the enterprise side of our Social Business Strategy practice. Gautam will join Dave, Upasana and myself in the core 2020 Social consulting team.

2020 Social is presently working with clients to leverage social technologies to achieve five types of strategic business objectives — increase revenue, decrease cost, design better products and processes, enable stronger relationships and increase productivity.

Instead of focusing on specific tools and technologies, we use a structured methodology to tap into the power of the five underlying value systems embedded in social technologies — user generated content, conversations, collaboration, community and collective intelligence.

Finally, we architect effective solutions in the form of community platforms, social applications, social commerce marketplaces, social CRM programs and enterprise collaboration programs.

Gautam will use his organizational development experience to help our clients think about the organizational culture and governance aspects of using social technologies. Specifically, here are the three questions Gautam will be working on –

1. What are the new challenges face by the customer-facing functions in the organization (sales, marketing, product and customer support) when the boundaries between employees, partners and consumers blur? How do organizations respond to these challenges?

2. What are the new pressures that organizational structures are subjected to when employees freely communicate and collaborate with other employees, customers and partners across departmental, geographical and organizations boundaries? How should organizational structures evolve to handle these pressures?

3. How can organizations use social technologies within the enterprise to simplify communication flows, enable stronger relationships with employees, catalyze innovation and improve employee productivity?

Over the next four weeks, Gautam and I will be co-authoring a series of posts (using, what else, a wiki) to come up with clear and actionable answers to these questions.

Everyone at 2020 Social is delighted that Gautam has joined our team and excited at the possibilities that we will be exploring together. Welcome, Gautam!

Author

Gaurav Mishra

Gaurav Mishra - who has written 746 posts on Gauravonomics Blog on Social Media and Social Change.

As CEO of 2020 Social, I build and nurture online communities for Indian and international clients, connect their customers, partners and employees, and help them achieve their business objectives. Ask us how we can help you.

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Gautam Ghosh

hey thanks for the welcome Gaurav!

Am delighted to be part of the team - and best of all- am having fun!

Gaurav Mishra

Best of luck to Gautam and Gaurav, It's a great team developing out there. may it bring out the best from everyone.

mita patnaik

Interesting that you picked business objectives, that are primarily "company" centric and not necessarily focused on creating customer value (that drives shareholder value). Increasing productivity&revenues, better products are becoming table stakes for competing in a flat world, so how do you transform a business from being merely good to “great” with an inside-out view of the world?

Gaurav Mishra

@mitapatnaik: The business objectives remain the same -- increase revenue, decrease cost and time to market, build better products and processes -- the path to achieving these business objectives has changed with the adoption of social technologies.

For instance, one path to achieve the business objective of decreasing support cost is by enabling customers to solve each others' problems using a customer driven support forum built on Lithium or Jive.

One path to decrease the cost and time to market for product and process innovation is to ask customers what they want using an ideation platform built on Salesforce Ideas, Lithium Ideas or Accept Ideas.

One path to increase revenues is to increase conversion and cross-selling rates by using customer ratings, reviews, Q&A, wishlists and stories, using a social commerce solution like Bazaarvoice.

In all these cases, the business objective has remained the same, but the path to achieve that business objective is possible only because of the emergence of social technologies.