“If you get hung up on the ‘media’ part of social media, you will miss the megachange of social business.” – Gartner

Social Business

6kites has a deep understanding of the dynamics that drive social engagement. We’ve been, and continue to be, on the front lines. Our team has rolled out big, small, tactical, strategic, top-down, and bottom-up initiatives for companies of all sizes.

We are here to help you, identify value in this over-hyped industry, and get your company measurable results.

At 6kites we organize Social Business into three areas: Social Media, Social Enterprise, and Social Support Communities. In any one of these areas, your company may be trying to figure out what to do, or how to take things to the next level. Regardless of where you are in the process, 6kites has significant experience with all things Social and we’ll get your business where it needs to be without wasting time and money.

Social Media

Here’s the straight talk—social media is in fact transforming how companies communicate and engage with their various audiences. Equally true, social media is often WAY overblown and not yet a game changer for all businesses.

When you work with 6kites you will find we take a different approach with social media. We are not a marketing agency; we work from an understanding of what drives online behaviors and lead you down a path of realistic expectations.

We connect everything we do back to your ROI metrics so there’s no doubt whether social media matters for your business. Maybe it does, maybe not (much). Specifically, here’s what we do:

• Help your team strategize, plan, and tie everything back to your ROI metrics
• Bring in our tools that reduce the risks associated with social media
• Connect your social media strategy to your web and mobile strategies
• Manage your communities for you, or we can train your team
• Gather statistics to assess how your company is doing and show you what to do to improve your results

Facebook Ads and Facebook Offers

6kites Will Help You Maximize ROI
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Social Enterprise

A social enterprise is one that applies social technologies to drive collaboration, engagement, and knowledge sharing in ways that weren’t possible in the past. Like other transformative technologies, when applied correctly, social enterprise initiatives can impact every element of your business.

6kites has unparalleled experience (yes, really) creating social enterprise strategies and deploying social software across very large operations. More important than our experience are the results realized through our efforts – millions of dollars in MEASUREABLE ROI. Here’s how we do it:

• Link the social enterprise strategy to the financial metrics that the business already measures. Categories of ROI tend to include cost reduction, revenue growth, increased innovation, and employee retention.
• Assist with deployment including planning, platform configuration, setting up pilot groups, community management training, and creating new business processes to support social collaboration
• Apply our extensive understanding of community dynamics to increase activity directly corresponding to the ROI metrics
• Work with people throughout your organization to drive adoption, engagement, sustainable activity, and increased information sharing
• Gather statistics to find gaps of adoption and engagement

We are particularly experienced with Jive Software and Salesforce, but much of what we do can apply to any platform. In the end, it’s about building and sustaining a community, regardless of the technology.

Social Support Communities

Social support communities are a place for your customers to interact and share information with each other. The basic principle is that there’s “wisdom in the crowd.” However, for some companies the reality is that social support can become just another place for customers to post questions, and for your overtaxed support organization to monitor.

6kites has worked with several companies to analyze their social support systems, and made recommendations that led to increased self-service, better product feedback, and more company-approved solutions.

An example of the depth of our skills with Social Support Communities… Recently 6kites was asked to evaluate and recommend ways to improve a social support community for one of the largest game companies in the world, with 1000+ new posts/comments submitted each week. Frankly, the community was a mess. Here what we did (and it’s a good blueprint for how we can work with your company):

• Experience the product: We played the game for hours so we understood their customers’ issues first-hand.
• Find patterns: We evaluated the content associated with the more active topics and the most active community members.
• Audit the community: We assessed the company’s community management practices against industry standards.
• Measure community health: We evaluated the community against the 6kites Community Health Index.
• Made Concrete Recommendations: In this case many of the recommendations involved turnaround time and addressing rampant profanity in the community.

If your social support community is central to your success, we can help because we take a practical approach. Really, it’s that simple.

Social Application Development

Social applications are tools to help you drive engagement, improve community management, measure ROI, and generally provide more value to your community.

From Facebook apps, HootSuite integrations, and social enterprise plug-ins to social analytics tools, 6kites is qualified to develop applications because of both our domain expertise and our application development skills spanning social and mobile web.