Burberry CEO on being the Social Enterprise
Burberry’s CEO Angela Ahrendts wants her customers to be able to touch the brand everywhere. The reality is her customers are social. So she wants her entire business to be social.
Here is a talking about the development of Burberry’s Social Enterprise. It is introduced in trademark style by Marc Benioff, CEO of SalesForce.
Burberry is combining monitoring, employee and product social networks and mobile apps with social dimensions to reach their mobile audiences.
Many companies are going to be re-born social. Some will choose. Others will have it imposed upon them. Here at ItsOpen, and at the Social Media Leadership Forum, we are helping companies along this path by providing guidance, sharing experiences and hearing from the world’s leading internet thinkers like Don Tapscott and Jeff Jarvis, who are all speaking with members this year.
Essentially this business model/concept is for those companies who want their products and services to be ‘liked’. They want to be the enterprise that has lots of ‘friends’. They want their news to be ‘retweeted’ for positive reasons. They want to leverage social networks internally for greater productivity and better collaboration, and to stimulate innovation and more efficient ideas sharing. They want to understand what their customers like, as expressed freely through social networks, and want to be in a position to meet their needs in totally different ways.
Your progress towards becoming a social enterprise will I believe define your success as a business in the years ahead.
Burberry’s practices will eventually be the norm. For now, it is an innovative leader. The revolution, driven by the pervasive nature of new technologies, the powerful global web platform, and grown up digital users entering the marketplace, is gathering pace. CEOs will love it. Bottom-up staff will enjoy it. Middle managers will have some issues adjusting, as information is openly shared freely vertically and horizontally across the enterprise.
