Blog

Social networking platforms and tools are being embraced in a big way by organizations around the world. The business has become more globalized, mobilized and virtual, so collaboration has become an imperative then a requirement. Besides companies have realized that employees are no longer working as silos but are connected to their friends, relatives, colleagues, customers, employers.
There are some fundamental benefits in employing collaboration across the organizations, few of them being:

1. Increase in productivity and efficiency – When employees have access to previous references and solutions achieved, they save time in rehashing the same activity. It can result in saving of innumerable hours of employee’s time leading to increased productivity.
2. Promotes innovation – Collaboration fosters innovation by aggregating and increasing the availability of research and information.
3. Increased knowledge transfer -It also leads to increased knowledge sharing amongst the employees
4. Establishes the sense of social community – Increased accessibility to peers, colleagues leads to enhanced sense of social community amongst the employees resulting in healthier and more satisfactory work environment

Across the value chain– An organization cannot decide to implement a social media campaign at the end of marketing process by putting up a facebook site or anyoutube campaign.  Participation by partners, customers, employees and other stakeholders including the market and industry allows the organization to assess the strategy and tactics to increase the bottom-line.

• HR- social media can play a powerful role in the human resources by its efficiency in attracting talent, vendor referrals and community building ( of former and future employees)
• Marketing – Social media could be useful in generating leads, increasing sales ( through contests and discounts), increased conversion, branding and PR, audience engagement and community building
• Customer relationship management -Inviting the consumers to have an open dialogue in the initial planning process helps to incorporate valuable feedback. During the marketing and selling process, social media could be used to generate brand awareness, brand promotion through deals and discounts and fostering brand loyalty and advocacy. After the sales has been achieved, social media could be used to gather valuable feedback from customers

There are some issues acting as roadblocks in comprehensive adoption of social media by organizations

• Accountability – It is not clearly defined as to who owns the social media in the organizations, which leads to the responsibilities about owning and managing becoming ambiguous.
• Lack of formal social media implementation policies and procedures
• No clear guidance on amount of money, resources and time required in the implementation for different organization sizes

Maintaining security, privacy, ownership and managing risk.