Undiscovered Opportunities of the C-Suite

Sometimes you don’t know what you have in front of you. The opportunity to change.

That’s what lies before today’s C-Suite executives if they choose to explore it. What I’m talking about here, of course, is really about relationships. With the advent of social computing in the second half of this decade, the power has shifted from producers and marketers to people.

The challenge, of course, is for today’s executives to leap into the deep end of the pool and embrace these new relationships. To build new loyalty into their customer base, by demonstrating the ability to listen, learn, share and improve.

This is a great opportunity that current executives and VPs have that their predecessors didn’t have.  The ability to change the relationship and make it one built on the trust and respect of quality products and honest interactivity.  This goes equally for internal communications.  The opportunity to use these same open and trust building methods within an organization is huge.  Especially with organizations that are struggling with employee engagement and moral in these trouble economic times.

It goes beyond displaying good will, however.  Any effort in using social computing for building new relationships requires a commitment to open dialog, acceptance of public feedback (both good and bad), and the willingness to discuss this in a public venue.

The point here, is that our current executives have this powerful new option that their ancestors did not.  The question is, how many are of strong enough to take that bold step?

Image credit: Envios

Facebook Relationships

I’m frustrated with how Facebook handles relationships.  Set aside for a moment that I think it’s inferior to a blog for social networking.  If I was to entrust my social network to Facebook, I’d have a hard time to keep track of all the different types of interrelationships.

We all have family, friends, associates, co-workers, employers, vendors, suppliers, and so on that we deal with on a daily or weekly basis.  Why can’t we classify our "friends" according to type of relationship?  There should be more choices, like following relationship types: family, friends, followers, & associates.

Doing this would allow us to organize contacts to be more aligned with groups, apps, and sort out what each type of "friend" could access.  I’m one of those people who want’s all contacts to "see" everything I do on Facebook – but I would still like to be able to sort my contacts by type.

This is one area that Facebook and the rest of social network services will have a hard time to provide PIM functionality that many people still use.  That’s my $.02 – what do you think?  What other types of relationships could be included?

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