No presence on Facebook means no credit

Facebook will be the biggest bank in the very near future, social media guru Ken Rutkowski declared during a recent visit to Sydney.

Of course, Rutkowski doesn’t mean Facebook will be storing your literal dollars and cents. He’s referring to social value - a person or company’s worth in the eyes of others.

As such, if your company doesn't have some presence on Facebook, Rutkowski reckons you’re in trouble.

“If you have not built up a profile on Facebook no one is going to know what your ‘credit rating’ is,” he said at a discussion on the impact of social media on the contact centre held by Interactive Intelligence and Communications Australia.

Rutkowski helps corporations understand how to leverage innovations in the media, entertainment and technology industry.

“A photo is worth 10,000 words because it gives so much information,” he said.

He demonstrated this by showing one photo on Facebook and how people could work out your ‘credit rating’ from what the photo depicted.

A few Facebook laggards put up their hands to indicate they were not on Facebook. Never mind said Rutkowski, “Facebook will create a ‘credit rating’ for you anyway.”

And what these new media companies - Twitter, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, AOL and HULU - have to say about you is important, given how popular they’ve become.

“There are 680 million Facebook users, 185 million Twitter users and each minute 36 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube,” Rutkowski said.

Rutkowski, as the guest speaker at the Interactive Intelligence and Australian Communications strategic partnership announcement, made the point that businesses must embrace social media and customise solutions for their multimedia contact centres.

Communications Australia’s CEO Mario Vecchio and Interactive Intelligence’s ANZ Managing Director, Brendan Maree, announced the two companies have forged a strategic partnership to market the cloud-based contact centre solution as Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS).

Vecchio also announced that Communications Australia has spent tens of millions of dollars and seven years developing COGILITY, a search engine which can contextualise information and combine it with customer information so a call centre can feedback accurate information in an automated way to a customer.

“We will consult customers on how they want information delivered to them and then customise the information for them,” said Vecchio.

Interactive Intelligence and Communications Australia will work jointly on prospects.

“The relationship has expanded our footprint regionally as Communication Australia is strong in the mining and resources markets,” said Maree.