Social Media—It’s Not Just Another Channel by Rob Tarkoff   Social media collects and distributes knowledge faster and more widely than anything we’ve seen.  It’s a testament to our deeply collaborative nature and shows us the enormous value that collaboration brings. Social media works the way it does because people are quick to contribute; we jump at opportunities to cultivate our talent and love sharing our knowledge and experiences.  The internet makes it easy to publish.  Social technologies make it easy to share.  The resulting explosion of user-generated-content (UGC)—real, authentic voices of shared experience—has indelibly changed our economy.   Yet most companies today struggle with social media. Sixty-seven percent say they don’t have the time or resources to invest, 50% say they can’t measure success and 42% say they simply don’t have the competency.  Many companies that have jumped in so far mostly just fold social in to existing business processes as a new channel—an important and influential new channel perhaps, but a channel nonetheless.  They get a Twitter account and a Facebook page and start tracking channel successes like fans and followers. They cheer as the channel successes pile up, but eventually someone starts looking for the business success. Sadly, because they’ve adopted a channel-centric view of social media, very often no one can point to a single dollar saved or earned.   Smart brands today realize social media isn’t just another channel.  It’s a new and hugely efficient collaboration machine—a mechanism for matching talent and knowledge with those who need it.  They create online customer communities that give people with problems instant access to those with solutions. They create engaging social customer experiences that motivate and reward contribution. They develop knowledge bases where service questions and product solutions are owned, codified and easily accessed by anyone in need.  And they save multi-millions per year in the process. When it comes to creating and distributing information customers need, smart brands prove every day that social technologies offer a novel opportunity to realize off-the-chart scale.   Using the power of the crowd, top social brands today grow their service and support teams exponentially, deepen their knowledge bases many-fold and speed up innovation by looking at thousands of ideas instead of several.  They don’t just push impressions through existing social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They build their own customer networks, turning the power of social into a perennial business asset that delivers returns year after year.   And those returns are staggering.    Since launching its customer community, Australian-based voice and broadband company, Telstra, has seen nearly half of customer queries resolved in the first instance. UK-based mobile service operator giffgaff has no call center at all. Their customer community answers 100% of inquiries in an average of 90 seconds. What’s more, giffgaff enjoys one of the highest Net Promoter Scores on record, right up there with the likes of Google and Apple.   With all the efficiencies and advantages it offers, driving meaningful results through social media is fast becoming the new normal.  We’re not fully there quite yet, but there is an enormous opportunity for differentiation in a crowded landscape.  While the channel-centric competition is still counting fans and followers, smart brands like Telstra, HP and giffgaff are using social to change the way they organize work, apply talent, conduct research and make and market their products. These trailblazers show us every day that when we stop approaching social as just another channel and start seeing its potential to transform our operations, our customer relationships — our entire business — we unlock its full potential.     This post is part of a series co-produced by The Huffington Post and Blogworld, in conjunction with the latter's NMX BusinessNext Social 2013. That event will feature some of the world’s leading social-business luminaries and influencers, each of whom will be speaking at the event to provide an up-close look at how the world’s most successful businesses harness the power of social.     -- More great reads:   The Problem With Measuring Digital Influence by  Lithium Chief Scientist Michael Wu While influencer marketing provides brands with the leverage to reach many by engaging only a few illusive influencers, TechCrunch interviewed Lithium Chief Scientist, Dr. Michael Wu, to explore the many problems brands face around influence measurement. More Here from TechCrunch   Build Brand Advocacy through Online Communities with Lithium with Lithium Chief Strategist Lyle Fong Business Software sat down with Lyle Fong, Lithium Co-Founder and Chief Strategist, to talk about Lithium’s vision for social and how enterprises can harness their communities for better brand engagement. More Here from Business Software   BBC: Viewpoint - Using keen customers to gain competitive advantage by Lithium CEO Rob Tarkoff Happy customers are vital to a successful business, and great experiences are vital to happy customers. That's why, as the most promising route to competitive advantage, customer experience has long been top of mind for many top brands. Now that nearly one and a half billion of us use social media, according to eMarketer, the most innovative companies are looking to use the social customer experience to gain a competitive advantage. More Here from BBC   The Big Data Fallacy And Why We Need To Collect Even Bigger Data by  Lithium Chief Scientist Michael Wu The value of any data is only as valuable as the information and insights we can extract from it. Lithium's Chief Scientist, Dr. Michael Wu, discusses why we need even bigger data in TechCrunch. More Here from TechCrunch   Why Don't Companies Understand Digital Influence by Lithium CEO Rob Tarkoff Lithium Chief Scientist, Dr. Michael Wu, contributed a piece to WIRED in the UK on the widespread misunderstanding of how digital influence works despite it being such a hot topic across the industry. More Here from Wired   Hoffman's Hot Seat: Understanding the Social Customer Experience by Lithium CMO Katy Keim 1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman speaks with Katy Keim, CMO at Lithium, about what companies often miss when it comes to understanding and contributing to the social customer experience and ways in which effective social engagement can help strengthen business results. More Here from Hoffman's Hot Seat   Why Facebook Can't Be The Center Of Your Social Strategy by Lithium CEO Rob Tarkoff In a guest post for Forbes, Lithium CEO Rob Tarkoff discusses just how important it is for brands to own the social customer experience on their own domain. "Brands who are winning in social have one very important thing in common—they know that the full benefit of social media comes from engaging experiences that enlist social customers to act favorably. And they know that the best place for those experiences is on-domain," says Tarkoff. More Here from Forbes             ... View more