The Web continues to change the way we work, and the latest milestone in this evolution is social media. How socially networked is your supply chain? Are you using tools like LinkedIn and Facebook to connect with your supply chain partners? Are you networked and engaging partners through user or sub-groups? If not, you are missing an opportunity to directly engage and collaborate with peers who have significant influence on your supply chain’s effectiveness.

While foodservice businesses have long known that social media is a powerful way to connect with consumers (think viral promotions and social networks for like-minded shoppers and coupons sharing), working social media into supply chain collaboration has been a slow-moving process. While the culprit may be skepticism of social media’s staying power, I believe the more likely culprit is time. Who in the precision world of supply chain management can spare even a moment for blogging, tweeting, updating their Facebook page?

What is important for supply chain managers to consider is how social media is changing the way people get information-even the information we rely on to do our jobs. How we research, get news and find referrals has migrated quickly to the Web due to social networking. Just a few years ago many supply chain professionals relied heavily on trade publications to give them insight into business trends and emerging technologies. Now more and more are meeting up online through groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media sites to get the information directly from industry resources, peers and colleagues.

 As information sources and idea-sharing shift to online networks-supply chain professionals can use these mediums to create greater opportunities for collaboration. How? Here are several ways you can begin to leverage social media to your supply chain’s advantage:

Dedicate a Team Member
The realm of social media expands every day-as do the tools people use to connect and interact. It’s important to have one person on your supply chain team who can dedicate part of his/her time to researching where clients and partners are connecting online, building and maintaining communities, updating core sites with fresh content and staying on top of important trends.

Expand Your Network
If you and your team are only just getting started in social networking, the first step is to build your networks by registering on core sites-LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter-and building up your contact base. However, the big names are not the only names in social networking. Industries and interest groups are rapidly forming new social networking sites every day, so do some exploring to find out which niche industry and professional networks you should consider joining.

For example, there are many emerging sites for the supply chain and foodservice industries. Logipi recently launched an online business community dedicated to supply chain professionals while networks like Biteclub, FohBoh and Foodservice Rewards focus on the restaurant and foodservice industries. No matter how focused your career, interest or hobby, you are sure to find a social network dedicated to it today. Find a handful that are useful to you professionally and try them out.

Once you’ve built your online communities, get the word out to your customers, prospects, employees, personal contacts and other industry partners who you work with regularly. Place links directly on your website to your networks and start an email campaign inviting others to join.

Build a Common Interest Groups/Web Community
You can build an online group/community for your key supply chain partners. A small, focused online community allows you and your supply chain partners and suppliers to easily share ideas, ask questions and discuss best practices in a low-maintenance forum. It takes very little work and you would be surprised how quickly these turn into use information resources you and your peers turn to when stumped by a supply chain challenge.

Write a Blog
Business blogs can be a useful tool for sharing thought leadership and trends with your key partners. It allows you the chance to share a bit of expertise-establishing credibility-while giving your readers the chance to respond and create an interesting dialogue.

You can invite your partners to follow your company’s blog to help them understand your business better and you can do the same by following their blogs and news. The key is to make sure content is refreshed regularly and you are sharing information that can help your partners and clients do their jobs better.

These four steps are a good way to build a foundation of social networking activity that can bring you closer to the supply chain collaborators with whom you want to stay in close contact. As your networks strengthen, you will find that you are rewarded for sharing valuable content by partners and peers who will reciprocate with knowledge, referrals and news that can help you do your job better and improve your supply chain management.

For even more insights, news and resources; check out ArrowStream’s online communities:

Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/arrowstream)

LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?trk=anet_ug_hm&gid=2121229&home=)

Twitter (http://twitter.com/ArrowStreamInc)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Industry Trends, Supply Chain, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.