 A lot of social business experts note that some enterprises, far from all, have a real social media strategy based on a real web monitoring and community management. For example, as you can read on the last Altimeter group’s white paper on social business, there is different stage of maturity (planning, presence, engagement, formalized, strategic, converged) and the majority is far from the strategic or converged level where the internal collaboration is part of the strategy.
However in an enterprise 2.0 logic, the integration of the  the external flow with the internal flow in a collaborative perspective is most of the time to set up. This in and out process remind the monitoring one. How to be inspired by it, let’s see that.
 As explained by Jacob Morgan, you can’t split internal and external (if one of the purpose of the enterprise 2.0 is to break internal silos and external borders of the enterprise have to be overpass as well to work with its external stakeholders and become a global enterprise), you are in a « continuum experience » of management of the information flows. External information and knowledge are absorbed by it to be treated and set out again toward the external. We are in a permanent action-reaction process. In this integration process of external information integrating a business process, you can find the same pattern as in a monitoring process. Let see how it works in that case.
As for a monitoring unit, the different BU of the company make their requests to the leader of the community management team who will make the dispatch. Regarding the topics, expertise, needs, he will staff his team related to the different issues and the final target (I don’t go in details for that, it is not the purpose of this post). But community managers can’t answers to all issues or manage all the client resquest or other interactions with external stakeholders (you can’t manage alone HR matters, R&D issues, support request, sales questions…).
The community managers will have a job of human filter/dispatcher to drive the right information/request to the right person (directly or through the hiearchy, depends of the company process/culture and th issue) inside the company who will be able to manage it. Then the community manager will give the « anwser » to the external stakeholder, or a more expert content is expected, then the community manager will support his colleague to give an answer in the right way, linked to the culture of the social media used.
This process will strengthen the knowledge of each one (expertise and culture) and the result could be capitalized on a enterprise social network or more specially a Social CRM tool. There is a continuum experience in the information management, through a collaborative process with all the stakeholders. It’s the information cycle adapted to a social business view. Here is a quick view of this process. Of course it is just a sum up and you can add some players or develop a process in a more complex organization. It is just the simple cycle to introduce the concept on a daily work basis.
