It’s been longer that I expected since my last post. Sorry, life got busy. One of the things I’m busy with is LaidOffCampNY, a free two day conference happening this Friday and Saturday (May 1 & 2). Come see me and network with the New York metro area’s best un-, under-, and non-traditionally employed. Pre-registration is suggested.

To recap what I last posted: What are the areas where social networking methods can beneficially impact enterprise voice and video communications? At a high level, they’re the common motherhood and apple pie issues familiar to most organizations.

* Improved customer experience
* Increase employee productivity
* Improve the product
* Grow organizational heath

I provided examples for the first two points in the last post, now I’ll do the last two.

3.  Improve the product

The obvious example here is the monitoring of Twitter as an early detection mechanism for product or services breakdown.

Another example:  Hold a YouTube contest to identify innovative uses for your products.

Another example, one that is more speculative as to its reliability, is to use social network analysis to identify the hidden and public thought leaders in your product consumer networks and directly engage them to assist in product design.

Yeah, many folks already know of these examples.  Please, let me compensate for the lack of more innovative examples with a link to a lolmonkey picture.

4.  Grow organizational health

Heard about eTelemetry’s MetronEBA yet?  This product monitors an organization’s voice calls to map out your organization’s social graph.  For extra punch, couple it with one of the many email and messaging analysis tools.  Sure, it feels a little big-brotherish, but it will definitely provide new insight into your organization and allow monitoring of efforts to improve organization communications and break down intra-organizational barriers.

Today’s bonus link:  Intro to Dunbar’s Rule (a best-of restrospective from my corporate past) Read it to understand why we need contact lists, and why all such lists should have rating fields.