Submitted by terrigriffith on Sat, 06/16/2012 - 09:18

Last week I had the chance to check in with a team of consultants who are supporting supply chain clients with new ideas around social media. The conversation helped me crystallize my own thinking and gave me a reason to share connections with some experts.

My summary of recent conversations

Many supply chain organizations (and many organizations overall) get value from thinking about social media more broadly than tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yammer, Jive, or Salesforce Chatter. While this list includes many sophisticated capabilities around messaging, blogging, wikis, expertise identification, consumer versus enterprise focus etc., they are often thought of just as messaging, shoutouts, and customer interaction, regardless of the sophistication of available tools. In each of my supply chains talks, I've found people gaining value from thinking about internal as well as external interactions, and expanding the "social" question to include social work in all its forms: social media, social networks, and collaboration in the broadest terms.

(These comments also hold for non-supply chain organizations that are in early stages of using social tools for social work -- I've just had the opportunity to talk to supply chain audiences recently.)

That said, there are some interesting developments specifically focused on social and supply chain. For example, a few posts back, I described how Vollero is using extant social networks in unique support of vendor/supplier networks. What other verticals could gain similar value from such tools or approaches?

Social Work Supply Chain Experts

My conversations tend to drift, as appropriate to the topic of social networks, to who else people might benefit from talking to. While I think my generalist view of mixing human, technical and organizational issues provides value, there are other experts with much deeper expertise in supply chains. If you are looking for specific examples, please consider contacting:

Adrian and Jeff have provided me with great counsel and they will you as well.

Thank you to my consulting friends for this chance to summarize small parts of our conversation. I look forward to future discussions and any additional insights from others.