Business Users Explore The Value Of Social Media

Business Users Explore the Value of Social Media

By Elka Popova, Program Director, Unified Communications & Collaboration, Frost & Sullivan

Social media has emerged as an extremely powerful phenomenon with millions of users posting status updates, comments, links and pictures on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other similar sites every day.

However, social networking has so far spread mostly among consumers. Businesses are only now beginning to acknowledge the benefits of using social media to enhance employee collaboration, improve customer interactions and drive growth. Most line-of-business and IT managers are still trying to understand the various implications of integrating corporate communications and customer-care technologies with public social media tools and private collaboration and networking platforms.

Frost & Sullivan recently completed its 2010 communications & collaboration technologies end-user survey, which targeted 200 North American C-level executives. The survey identifies business investment priorities and adoption drivers for advanced technologies including IM/presence, UC, audio, web and video conferencing, telepresence, and collaboration. Interestingly, 43% of respondents say enterprise social media tools are used within their organization, and 41% claim they personally use such tools. An impressive 69% are aware of enterprise social media tools. Of those using such tools, 52% use them on a daily basis. While we specifically asked about "enterprise" social media tools, it is possible that users are referring to both public and private tools, as the penetration of sophisticated, enterprise-grade social networking platforms is still quite limited.

Consumers typically have no specific agenda when using social media tools. They join social networks with the general idea of "staying in touch" with relatives and friends. Some users more frequently broadcast their opinions, ideas and various pieces of information, while others prefer to quietly view other people's status updates or pictures, sharing little about themselves. Businesses need a more structured approach, however. Random use of social media for business purposes could end up being disastrous rather than advantageous for some organizations. But to develop a social media strategy, including whether to use public or private tools, businesses need to first figure out what objectives they are looking to accomplish and what specific benefits they should anticipate to gain.

Of all users of enterprise social media tools, 24% say they use them primarily to improve customer service. In fact, 57% rank this as one of the top three benefits of using social media. About 20% of users claim they use social media tools to improve collaboration and productivity among geographically dispersed teams, and a total of 38% rank this as one of the top three benefits.

As businesses become increasingly familiar with the available social media platforms and their benefits, and vendors further enhance their solutions, usage of such tools is likely to increase. About 42% of current users plan to increase usage over the next 12 months; another 49% expect their usage to remain the same. Those who plan to use social media tools more extensively, appear to be pursuing a number of objectives, including: improve customer service (54%), accelerate decision making (51%), help advance corporate environmental goals (44%), enhance employee mobility (41%), and reduce costs (41%).

Non-users are about equally split between those who plan to implement social media tools within the next 2 to 3 years, on one hand, and those who are considering, but have no plans to implement yet, and those not considering at all, on the other. Those delaying implementation explain their decision with the general economic environment. However, 50% of those having no plans to implement social media believe such tools have little value to their organization.

Social media is no panacea. It is not for everyone either. But it does resonate with the changing realities of today's business environment. The key success factors in a fast-evolving marketplace are agility and scalability, and social media enables businesses to quickly and cost-effectively reach a large number of people to both broadcast and solicit information, opinions and ideas. Internally, social media can help create a more collaborative environment that accelerates decision making and drives revenue growth. Externally, it can help establish new ties with customers, improve the quality of products and services, increase customer retention rates and decrease customer service costs. Combined, these benefits can lead to improved top and bottom lines. Therefore, to remain competitive, end users and vendors should look to explore the untapped opportunities in public and private social media tools.

-- The Nation 2011-01-17