A guest post by Charles Oben, a London based social media commentator, on his review of Mobile Library
“In the long history of humankind those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed” – Charles Darwin
The above quote is directly relevant to the response of commercial enterprises to the rise of social media. In large part this is due to the fact that social media has led to a fundamental re-evaluation of the way in which companies can, and should interact with consumers for maximum effect. Market leaders such as Facebook, which reached 1 billion active users as of September 2012, are responsible for a nascence of new marketing practices centred on interacting with the public within this new online environment. This ongoing trend is equally shaping the transformation of information management and information sharing within the corporate world. Few information management software platforms exemplify a more creative adaptation of the power of social media than Infotrieve’s Mobile Library.
Of note is that although the majority of commercial enterprises have been keen to adopt one or more social channels to better engage with relevant stakeholders, social media has been used almost exclusively for external communication. Generally speaking, the official social media channels of commercial organisations are run by their marketing departments and individual employees. This tightly controlled approach to social media is driven by the necessity to avoid valuable corporate information or corporate intellectual property from reaching the public domain. Nevertheless, the business value of leveraging STM e-content across the enterprise, facilitated by easy to use, familiar tools is undeniable. Corporate leaders have long understood the immense value of technology enabled collaboration and information sharing.
Therefore, a secure social media platform presents the perfect opportunity to facilitate effective collaboration by building upon people’s natural desire to share information using tools that they are instinctively comfortable and familiar with. Such a platform would especially appeal to information centre managers and IT leaders keen to offer clients easy to use, secure social media tools. Infotrieve’s innovative Mobile Library utilizes secure social media features precisely for this purpose.
Infotrieve’s one of a kind Mobile Library is specifically designed for users of corporate libraries and information centres and comes with a built-in secure social media feature. These secure social media tools are designed to replicate the user experience of the tools that people use in their personal lives. That familiarity dramatically increases the adoption rate and most importantly, the usage of the secure social media tools for collaboration.
For global enterprises, research and development is inherently collaborative in nature. The social media interactions that take place within a project team are centred on merging their collective research. Mobile Library’s secure social media tools enable R&D and other project teams to achieve effective collaboration in all areas associated with their specific tasks. This all takes place within a highly secure environment. Security is of course of utmost importance considering the highly sensitive corporate information and valuable intellectual property at hand.
Collaboration across a global workforce is a well documented driver of business innovation and market leadership. Infotrieve’s Mobile Library facilitates high value business collaboration in a way that has simply never been done before in a corporate library platform or a document delivery service.
To read Infotrieve’s E.U. Leadership Briefing on Mobile Library and Secure Social Media, click here.
