Social tools improve service, research, collaboration

New Q&A: Social Business at Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente uses Twitter to gauge customer reaction to specific initiatives, such as valet parking.

Social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook have helped Kaiser Permanente — the nation’s largest nonprofit health care provider — grow its positive media mentions close to 500% in the last five years, says Vince Golla, who oversees the organization’s external digital reputation. From counseling the people behind more than 100 Kaiser Permanente Twitter accounts to using social media to see what customers are happy and angry about, the foundation of Golla’s work is to “help folks understand that when they are engaging in a social media conversation on behalf of our brand, it is intergalactic and travels at the speed of light.”

In a new interview with MIT Sloan Management Review, Golla spoke about how Twitter helped the company find an audience of over a million people for an event that was only attended in person by a couple hundred, how the company’s internal intranet IdeaBook is changing the way employees communicate, and how Facebook helped reassure customers during a blackout that the company was open for business. Read the interview »

Social business survey: How fast to mainstream?

Preliminary findings from last fall’s survey on social business, conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, indicate that there is a significant gap between how people in different industries perceive the importance of social business. Read more »

Info equals power: Nokia’s SMS services for farmers

University of Cambridge’s Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu write that since 2009, the cell phone company Nokia has worked to use cell phone technology both to empower and to target the world’s rural poor. Read more »