In a recent article Forbes talks with Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications, about the future of social networking technologies in the enterprise.
Besides being interested in his comment that "voice is now an application" the article didn't give too much insight into social media. "We still are at the tip of the iceberg, if you will, in terms of what the potential for social networking will be for businesses."
He stated what we often find when talking to large companies about social media especially if the technology people are involved - "When a business starts to think about social networking, they, first of all, are concerned about control and security types of issues".
As Poll says, it's when companies move on to ask "how do I use social networking with respect to my customer base that's out there?" that things become interesting and potentially valuable.
One thing we've done that's very interesting is we've started to interact with a lot of our end users, our ultimate customers, using technologies like Twitter to give our customers different ways of basically interacting with Qwest, said Poll.
That's kind of old news, and it's about there where the Forbes interview stops. That raises the question, how much progress has Qwest made, and how about the controversy around their "social media portal"?
TalkToQwest was launched with quite a bit of fanfare, the Qwest leaders behind it being Margaret Fogarty and Michael Crowley, of Qwest, supported by James Clark, of Boulder-based Room 214.
The accompanying site is certainly dull - "it sounds like a bunch of 'old guys in suits' trying to be cool" as one commentator said - or is it "simply support the authenticity of those [social media] efforts" as a Qwest spokesman said?
On face value it looks like the critique of Qwest's "social media site" made by WideFoc.us's Eric Elkins in April 2009 has largely turned out to be true although no doubt Qwest's Twitter experience and management is constantly improving.
See this report on 1 October:
The early success of this program is contributing to Qwest’s slow-but-sure rise in customer satisfaction surveys, where it has long hovered near the bottom rung. However, the program now faces a new challenge — how can they scale-up a program that relies so heavily on relatively scarce senior employees with above-average expertise and dedication?
It's beyond Twitter where it is hard to find results. MediaRoom supplied a more social media enabled platform to support Qwest's media relations. In the press release MediaRoom state that Qwest were very social media aware and have "aggressive social media initiatives".
Anyone with experience of what else is happening with Qwest?
