I generally don’t go in for the hand waving around social for business. While I’m a proponent of social, I like to see proof before I announce the revolution. There’s nothing I hate more than the social media gurus who seem to want to pigeon-hole organizations into standards tools and processes without really understanding who they are, and who their customers are.
Which is why when I first saw the video below, I was excited. It’s an example in which KLM Airlines dabbled in using social media to surprise and delight some travellers with random acts of kindness.
Of course today it looks a little hokey, a little contrived. But imagine this as the norm, imagine it without video cameras recording it for posterity and imagine when a consumer really knows that they can connect with an organization if they need to – that’s the social revolution.
While Marc Benioff has been criticized for being little too evangelical about the social enterprise, and while some may be offended at his conflating both the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement as indicators that a similar revolution is coming for the enterprise, watching video like this it’s easy o see that Benioff, while obviously putting a salesforce slant on it, isn’t far from the truth.
(Cross-posted @ The Diversity Blog – SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy)
