How My Collaboration Journey Led Me to Social Edge

Advocacy for people has been the center of both my personal and professional life for over 15 years. I have worked for many companies in collaboration where I partnered with organizations in the midst of change to encourage leadership teams to communicate with the "boots on the ground,"and vice versa. I saw firsthand that we are facilitators in helping companies evolve their business, communications, relationships and access to information.

Now that I joined Social Edge as the VP of Customer Success, I realize this is the first company with which I've worked that can truly cite its own collaborative behaviors in relation to its client recommendations. As soon as I came onboard, I experienced how Social Edge uses Jive to communicate with me about benefits and expectations. Once I was inside Edgeville, the name of our Jive community, I was not only embraced by the team but pointed towards the various libraries of knowledge within the evolution of their brand, client backgrounders, relevant players - everything I needed was at my fingertips. If I needed more context, I could start a discussion and anyone on the team responds. What an amazing experience. Since then, I've been jumping right in on resolving resourcing challenges and general crowdsourcing of all of the legacy knowledge that resides in Edgeville, our Jive community.

At Social Edge,we bring our whole selves to each client situation by blending our personal and professional lives, and we are seeing the benefits at each engagement. We are facilitators in helping companies evolve their business, communications, relationships and access to information. This is a place where I feel we are truly making an impact on how people work and serving the greater good through collaboration. I embrace the collaboration industry because technology has finally caught up to facilitate direct relationships where everyone has a voice to inform decisions.

Collaboration is the one thing that stretches over every part of a company with multiple integration points to access information. It is the starting point for both employee and customer engagement. At it's base, collaboration is a behavior rooted in a company's cultural value system. It is supported by a customizable technology platform but requires the design, strategy and community management to realize success. The super power of internal collaboration is in the ripple effect of engagement it creates when you streamline and connect your employees with the people, tools and resources they need. Happy employees who feel supported and empowered have a direct correlation to customer satisfaction through the level of engagement employees will pursue to support customer experience.

There are many nuanced pieces in mobility, apps, and commerce that can impact customer experience, but none greater than collaboration. The collaboration industry is often addressed as two camps of internal and external but in fact they deeply rely on each other. A solid external customer experience requires a streamlined collaborative back office.

At Social Edge, we believe the collaboration journey actually begins with the launch of the Jive platform and the building of communities for both employees and customers. Learning and listening are key to success to be able to adapt to users needs based on their input and feedback. Social Edge brings emotional intelligence across technology, design, strategy and, of course, community management to acclimate collaboration to not only the current client culture but to drive a collaborative evolution to build lasting relationships with the brand and the people.

I'm excited that my journey has lead me here, and I look forward to learning and listening from everyone I meet in my new "home."