Social Media opportunities and possibilities for enterprise 2.0

It is obvious that there are challenges which an enterprise has to work on using Social Media and the use of this in the marketing communication. It has been clarified that the use of social media is a way of collaboration among enterprises, employee and consumers. An important thing for the enterprise 2.0 is how it can use collaboration as a competitive advantage which is an opportunity to be explored. Frost & Sullivan (2006) has in their whitepaper search about collaboration found that there is a positive impact on enterprise 2.0 and the business performance. On quantitative measures, such as profitability and sales growth, collaboration is a key driver of success. This is strong evidence of a clear return from collaboration solutions in enterprises. In other words a good strategy and market opportunities can impact product quality, development and innovation, but when these activities are performed collaboratively, it is collaboration that is the stronger catalyst. The significant impact of collaboration on labour productivity, costumer satisfaction, product development, innovation and quality further implies that collaboration can also shape success that is more intangible  which the Frost and Sullivan whitepaper find in their research. To fully prosper the collaboration and get the

value for the enterprise marketing and development and innovation must include the consumer not as a target for products but as co-producer of experience. Collaboration with the consumer becomes more important than just sending simple messages to the consumer. From the social media perspective the enterprise could divide the consumer in 6 social technographic profiles according to their participation levels in the collaboration process (Li and Bernoff, 2008):

Technographic profile	Application used	Content created
Creators	Publish a blog/website	Upload created video/music; write articles or stories and post them
Critics	Post ratings/reviews	comment on blogs and forums; contribute to articles or wikis
Collectors	Use RSS feeds	add tags to web pages or photos
Joiners	Maintain a profile/ an account on social media site	Social network, content community
Spectators	blogs or customer reviews, watch video or listen to audio	podcasts
In actives	None of these activities	None of these activities

Table 2.8 – Source: Li and Bernoff, 2008 – Social Technographic profiles

It is important to know how the social technologies are being adopted by the costumers so the enterprise could make the business context and strategy according to the social profile. Marketers in the enterprises 2.0 should be especially concerned about 2 of the 6 social profiles above, the “Creators” and the “Critics”. The “Creators” is the trend setters and brand evangelists  (Hoegg et al, 2006) and the “Critics” is the trouble makers whom you have to work with respectfully but focus on “Creators” who are positive in order to establish and build a group of followers.

Looking at the enterprise 2.0 it is clear to see that using the possibilities of collaboration gives the enterprise an opportunity of better performance especially when they know how to address the collaborators whom has a different angel to the enterprise according to the technographic profile they have. With the proper application of collaborations capabilities and quality, high performance the enterprise 2.0 can create and enliven a collaborative culture in a space that can help contribute to the company’s results and bottom line. So the enterprises do not only have to look at the limitations but they have to see what the collaboration and hereunder the social media can do to help the enterprise 2.0 to gain prosperity and success together with the costumers/consumers.