Introduction

• How is social media changing my business and how can I take advantage of it?

• How can collaboration boost value creation, foster customer loyalty and enhance productivity?

• What is crowdsourcing, why is it important, how do I use it?

The program Revolutionize Your Business With Social Media and Collaboration will help executives and managers understand how different approaches to social technologies can strengthen business initiatives, boost productivity, increase customer loyalty and improve knowledge transfer.

There is a fundamental change taking place in business. Social media and collaboration technologies such as Facebook, iPads, Android, Yammer and other Web 2.0 tools are changing how work gets done at an accelerating pace. Although social media has been the exclusive domain of marketing, PR or sales departments, it now affects the entire value chain.

Business leaders must harness the power of this new way of engaging customers and employees to maintain and gain a competitive edge. It is essential to lead this change and not be left behind.

The new generation of employees (Millennials) is not the only change facing corporate leadership. New technologies are shifting traditional notions of "control," requiring managers to adapt their skills for leading. These new skills include creating, engaging and nurturing social networks that may result in unanticipated actions beyond the leader’s control.

Led by IESE faculty experts along with industry leaders, this program is for high potential executives in both internally- and externally-oriented management roles. The future of business requires today’s leaders to understand how to leverage social media and collaboration across the enterprise.

Top

Key Take-Aways

• Develop a roadmap for engaging your customers through social media

• Learn how to leverage online communities to create better products and services

• Explore how to streamline internal knowledge sharing and facilitate training and development with social technologies

• Understand how to tap into the global virtual talent pool and extract business value from crowdsourcing

• Identify the main steps involved in developing a social strategy and governance framework for your business

• Analyze up-to-date cases and gain insights from cutting-edge IESE research

Top

Program Structure

The program will focus on the three key areas where businesses can extract the most value from social media and collaboration today: connecting with customers, empowering employees and leveraging crowdsourcing. The curriculum will also include a more general discussion on how to develop a strategy and a governance framework to ensure success of social initiatives.

Connect with Your Customers
The rise of consumer social media has created an unprecedented opportunity for savvy companies to foster a direct real-time conversation with current and prospective customers. Examples abound and span the areas of marketing, customer service and social innovation. The program will explore cases of customer-facing initiatives in both the B2C and B2B domains to help participants distinguish the differences between successful initiatives from those that fell short of their objectives.

Empower Your Employees
Deploying social collaboration technologies within the organization can enhance the flow of information across organizational silos and capture relevant business knowledge. Internal professional communities, employee-driven knowledge wikis and corporate social learning platforms are gaining traction at many organizations. However, these initiatives can also pose significant challenges. Ensuring success of internal social collaboration goes well beyond installing the right tools and technologies: It requires building the right social framework and ensuring its fit with the organizational culture. The program will provide examples of how social collaboration can be leveraged to empower employees and identify key challenges and success factors in carrying out such initiatives.

Tap Into the Virtual Talent Pool
Social collaboration enables companies to tap into the vast talent pool offered by the global Internet audience. From hiring a virtual workforce assistant or gleaning ideas for creative design, to sourcing complex software from an online community of developers, crowdsourcing is changing the way organizations operate. The program will evaluate the main benefits and limitations of crowdsourcing, identify key crowdsourcing models, and help participants understand which models work best for different types of projects and tasks.

Make the Vision a Reality
To take full advantage of the diverse opportunities social media and collaboration offer your business, companies need to develop a comprehensive social strategy. The strategy must span all areas of the value chain and be oriented towards specific value drivers. In addition, companies should establish a robust governance framework aimed at minimizing risks and guiding decision-making around social initiatives. Participants will also explore common approaches and key trade-offs involved in making social initiatives a success at the enterprise level. 

Top

Approach

The program incorporates a number of highly dynamic and interactive teaching approaches, including group discussions, class lectures and the case study method.

Widely used in executive education, the case study method is an intense, challenging approach that demands participants to make business decisions and take action by analyzing, arguing and defending their recommendations against a multitude of equally plausible solutions.

Top

Who Should Attend

This intensive program is designed for all business leaders whether dealing externally with clients, or internally with team members.  Because it deals with issues of social media and collaboration, it is equally relevant for senior managers with or without IT backgrounds. Given how social media and collaboration skills have a growing impact on all business areas, managers from diverse functional backgrounds and from various levels of the organizational hierarchy are encouraged to attend.

Top

Faculty

Top