The BrainYard's 7 Social Business Leaders Of 2012

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Gloria Burke, director of knowledge and collaboration strategy and governance at Unisys, said social collaboration has been successful for the technology services firm partly because of role-specific education that showed employees how the system would help them in their jobs.

Unisys has adopted NewsGator Social Sites, layering the social network atop an existing SharePoint-based knowledge management initiative. Sales teams use Salesforce.com's Chatter, which makes sense because it dovetails so well with the CRM system, but they also have access to NewsGator when they need to reach out to the broader organization.

One of the things that really matters to the sales team is "market agility," Burke said, and the kind of ready access to experts provided by the social communities is paying off now that they can use a mobile device such as a tablet to get answers to customer questions. In the old days, they'd have to go back to the office, figure out who to ask, and then wait for an answer, she said. "Now they can often find out who the subject matter expert is, pose the question, and get the answer before they even leave the office. That's impressive to the client."

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