Business IT Buzz Blog

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Mark Sochan, CEO of Partnerpedia, an independent online community that enables partner-to-partner networking.

Sochan answered the following questions for me:

1. What might be a potential roadblock for enterprises utilizing social media for business benefit?
2. Is social media for business in the early adopter phase? When will it take it off as having more mass appeal?
3. Why have enterprises been slow to adopting social media when it comes to creating and maintaining business relationships?
4. What kind of cross-pollination do you see with social networking sites working together, leveraging each other?

Take a listen!

Listen to or download the 5:51 podcast below:

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Tell me a brief background of Partnerpedia.

Partnerpedia is an online channel enablement solution. People can go to Partnerpedia.com and that's a great way for companies to be able to better enable their channel sales so the functionality that people will find on Partnerpedia is the ability to create a partner finder where you can search for partners. You can also post your company's profile and better market what your company has to offer and what kind of partnership you're looking for. And once you've established your partner ecosystem, Partnerpedia offers capabilities to distribute leads with your partners as well us to collaborate with your partners more effectively for winning and closing deals.

What do you think could be a potential roadblock for enterprises utilizing social media for business benefit?

Well, many of the companies that we speak with Jessica are in the early stages of their social media strategy and the channel marketing experts that I speak with recognize and sense that social media is the very big trend that can impact their business. It's amazing how we've seen usage of social media on the consumer side now overtaking e-mail as a form of communication. But on the business side, companies are often looking to have a clear return on of their investment and with new technologies; it's often hard to make that hard business case for ROI.

Do you feel social media for business is in the early adopter phase and what do you see taking off as having more mass appeal?

Well, I think that social media for consumers has already hit mainstream and the fact that social media has already surpassed e-mail usage is just a stunning statistic that demonstrates how comfortable people of all ages have become in using social media. But in business, the adoption has been slower and more cautious. Many of the marketing and channels execs that I speak with tell me that they often aren't sure exactly where to start or they may not have complete management team buy-in. So for most companies, the adoption of social media has been in early experiments mostly on the customer service areas where companies have been using it as a tool to gain greater customer intimacy and feedbacks on their products and services. I think the big opportunity for social media in business is when social media gets integrated into the normal flow of business process of finding and transacting business.

Why you think enterprises have been slow to adopt social media when it comes to creating and maintaining business relationships?

Well, I think that businesses are generally cautious and they are conservative for when it comes to new technology because they're concerned about the potential damage to their brand. Enterprises also want to see a clear business case for any investment that they make of what kind of return on investment it's going to make. And so I think it's -- that's part of the challenge. I think the other challenge is the fact that social media has pretty clear benefits for people in their personal lives; they're trying to reach out to former friends, and classmates, and rekindle relationships. But sometimes defining that difference between personal and business interests has been something that people have been learning about.

And for example, your family photos are there for all to see in Facebook, and your corporate history, and basically your resume are there for all to see on LinkedIn. And so I think that as people have a better understanding of what parts of their life and information that are appropriate to share for friends and family and what information that they want to share with their colleagues and with the professional contacts is going to be different.

For people who are on these different social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, perhaps Partnerpedia, what kind of cross pollination do you see with these sites working together and leveraging each other?

Well, I think people are getting more savvy about defining the difference between personal information that they wish to share with their friends and family, and the more professional information they want to share with business colleagues, and their business network and so I think is evolving. And already we're seeing companies leveraging Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Twitter for that crossover in trying to communicate and get more information and intimacy between other customers. And we also see social media sites like Partnerpedia that are very much channel and business focused for a specific purpose of helping companies grow their channel sales.

But at the same time, we're also leveraging in popular social media like Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Twitter so there can be the right cross pollination there for very large communities of social media users. But using that within the context of very specific business process of how do you grow your channels sales, and how do you find partners that can help you grow and open up new geographic markets, how do you find the right people within those organizations that can start on those partnering activities. And then once those partnerships are established, how can you start passing leads back and forth, and how can you actually start collaborating on deals so that you can work much faster and much more effectively than you could before just using e-mail.