Business apps in the social community environment

Social communities are here to stay. So why not unleash the power of social communities on the business apps too. We have ample business applications focussing on varied purposes and uses today. However, the concept of deploying these business apps on the cloud has slowly begun while I am focussing this blog post on deploying these business apps on a community that exists on a cloud based b2b social collaboration platform. In simpler terms, you can securely share your business apps with a select set of companies and professionals.

Though the concept of sharing business applications can be imagined on various apps, I would like to take the example of RFX app on the business community.

Say, there is a company “A” that has a business requirement of IT infrastructure and seeks other businesses to provide the necessary products / services. Now company “A” makes use of the RFX app on the b2b collaboration platform consisting of the active business community to post its requirement in real-time. On the flip side, the same RFX application will help marketers in other companies who can provide the required product or service to receive the same as inward RFX queries. In our case, say company “B” that is into infrastructure solutions will receive the business requirement posted by company “A” as an inward RFX inquiry.

For clarity, when you post your business requirement in the form of an RFX, you can set specific criteria including the industry from which you expect a response. When you do this, the RFX application will post the requirement to all the relevant companies that match the criteria selected by you. All this happens in real-time. So, you are not only enabled to obtain quicker response to your queries but also a response from relevant companies that could provide you the right product or service matching your requirement.

Since all this happens in the same business community, the credibility of the vendor – buyer relationship is enhanced as all the details like customers, employees, their individual profiles, testimonials etc of both buyer and vendors are readily available for verification.

In addition to this, significant cost savings can be experienced by both company “A” and company “B”. Company A need not spend time, effort, and money on seeking vendors while company B can save on its marketing costs as the RFX enquiry can be a bonus lead.

Here is a YouTube video where I have exactly depicted this with an actual example. Please do watch the same and share your thoughts.

Similarly, community apps (like Jobs, Products, Groups, Events, Blogs, Answers etc) can be built and shared by the b2b fraternity and spectacular benefits can be realized.

Ready to get started? Create your company account for FREE and experience a new saga in B2B social media or social media for businesses!