MIT Sloan Management Review

A study by FedEx and Ketchum found that 52% of respondents said social business was strengthening relationships with the general public; 51% said it was strengthening relationships with clients; and 40% said it was strengthening relationships with partners and suppliers.

Given that technology-based social networking has been transforming social norms for the past decade, will social networking and social software have a similarly transformative effect on business? Are they already doing so? How are enterprises benefiting?

MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte asked thousands of managers about how their companies are using social media tools — and how important those tools are becoming to their organizations. Here’s what they said.

Featured this month in the Social Business Innovation Hub:

New Q&A: Social Business at Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente uses Twitter to gauge customer reaction to specific initiatives, such as valet parking.

Featured this month in the Social Business Innovation Hub:

McAfee Q&A: What Sells CEOs on Social Networking
In 2006, MIT Sloan's Andrew McAfee coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" as a shorthand for what collaboration and sharing tools such as blogging and wikis (and, today, Twitter) would mean for enterprises.

A recent survey on social business that MIT Sloan Management Review conducted in collaboration with Deloitte asked how important social software is to an organization’s activities in a number of internally oriented areas, including employee development.Â

Image courtesy of Flickr user Carson Ting.

It’s a dynamic you’ve probably witnessed and one that is substantiated in recent studies: when conversations in online product forums start to skew negative, they tend to stay that way.

One potential solution: provide incentives for more casual customers to post reviews.

New research sheds light on several important dynamics that affect the opinions that customers post about products.

Social web platforms don’t thrive by magic. They can succeed only if they attract the right individuals, motivate them to act in the right ways and empower them to know and trust others in the network. That’s where online reputation systems come in.

Trying to create sales projections in an uncertain economic environment? New research suggests that the sentiments consumers express online may be a leading indicator of future sales.

New research reveals the surprising power of ancient — and largely unconscious — forms of human communication.

Using net promoter score, a metric that, in most industries, correlates well with a company’s growth rate, managers can evaluate how investments aimed at improving the customer experience actually affect the bottom line.