It's time to befriend social media. A few of the benefits:
- Manage your company's reputation
- Keep the conversation going with customers
- Generate leads for your products or services
- Promote your brand by building internal and external communities
News flash: More people use social networking sites than Web-based email. Or maybe you read that on Twitter already. That compelling statistic from the Nielsen Company's April 2009 report sums up social media's high-profile impact, even if analysts are still unclear how to maximize these tools for business gains.
Time spent on social-networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook rose 73 percent in the last year. So with more than 60 percent of online users in America alone relying on some form of social media, is it any wonder that organizations are eager to leverage it to communicate their brand with customers and prospects as well as to reach their own employees?
Using a social media tool helps organizations manage their reputation and provides the enterprise with “eyes” and “ears” like never before. Marriott, JetBlue, Comcast, and Zappos.com are just a handful of organizations that use Twitter to build community with customers and prospects. As customer problems or praises arise, companies monitoring their “tweets” and other social-media tools can immediately respond. For instance, after a JetBlue customer complained on Twitter about flight booking, the company responded. The result? The customer turned into an advocate, and sent subsequent tweets to friends raving about the great service he received.
Enterprise Growth
But those advantages aren't just external. Employees who are up to speed on the latest trends, tools, and emerging technologies give you an incredible competitive advantage, says Bernardo Huberman, Ph.D., senior HP Fellow and director, Social Computing Lab, HP Labs. “At HP, being aware of new social media trends allows us to create new tools and new technologies to exploit this and actually sell successful products,” he says, adding that the fast adopters among his team—typically the younger members—thrive and expect this type of environment.
According to Boston-based research firm IDC, 51 percent of workers in the United States use social media in the enterprise. Roughly 5 percent are part of a corporate initiative while about 33 percent of employees embark on a self-directed initiative. Fifteen percent of businesses are using social media for work, according to IDC data.
“Social media is a major trend—not a fad—that we're starting to see bleed into enterprise,” says Caroline Dangson, social media research analyst with IDC's Digital Marketplace group. “Workers now see the advantage of these social networks.”
But Where's the ROI?
So how does a company build value from something so seemingly intangible? Even though determining hard ROI from social media is difficult, Dangson says that's no reason to ignore it. Enterprises realize that if they are not there to participate, then they miss the opportunity to join in the conversation. The bad news: You can't control social media conversations. You can, however, steer them as your company is being discussed on Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere.
“Organizations must look at their business objectives behind social media and not as something separate that 'I have to do,' ” Dangson says. “Expectations are a bit lower today, but I think they will increase over time.”
The bottom line is social media is a newer channel of communication and just another way of communicating with customers and employees. Dangson suggests community is the ultimate goal, which must be created and nurtured over time.
Some organizations are able to directly quantify the results of their social media campaign. As a result of targeting the 18- to 25-year-old market through blogs, Twitter, and YouTube, more than 250 new members joined the Texas Dow Employee Credit Union (TDECU) near Houston, Texas, says Trey Reeme, the credit union's director of channel integration.
Again, building that sense of community has internal rewards as well. Since 2007, HP has experimented with WaterCooler, one of its own internal social media tools that allows roughly 3,000 active users to exchange ideas much more effectively than a casual conversation over a coffee break. WaterCooler aggregates shared internal social media and cross-references it with an employee directory for research, insights, and even community building by areas of interest and hobbies.
And it's working: 61 percent of users in a recent survey reveal WaterCooler changed their perception of collaboration at HP while others say it makes the company feel more personal. The ultimate goal is to eventually sell it as a service, Huberman says.
Balancing Act
Concerns about productivity remain one of social media's largest obstacles in the workplace. Will it distract users from their work? Ensuring that productivity doesn't suffer is key, Huberman says, as is relevance to individual job duties. But organizations must carefully consider their involvement with social media and how quickly to join social networks. After all, learning about the true needs, concerns, and preferences of employees and customers builds community and rewards that outweigh the risk when done correctly. And how tweet that is.