During the last seven
years the internet has changed from an interactive information tool where you
as a costumer could tell the corporation about what they have told you. This
was a one–to-many communication. The change which made all social and made the
social media, was when the communication changed to many-to-many and went out
as collaboration between costumer and corporation.
Corporate value creation from Social technologies
Corporate business is
still not using the fully potential of the social technologies. An estimated
1.5 billion[1]
people around the globe have a social network account. Corporations are not
using this potential fully to collaborate with this huge amount of potential
costumers. The reason for most corporations not fully using social media and
networks is the lack of control towards the costumer – this is not only a one-
way communication where the corporation informs the user of their products it
is a new arena where you as a corporate business will get immediate feed-back
on your product, and performance a collaboration will occur between corporation
and costumer. It is here the value creation appears from social media and
technologies – you get a feedback, which can generate new opportunities for
your business.
Costumers part of the value creation due to social
technologies
The costumers has created
a new and more powerful role in the entire world of sale and marketing – today
you must not expect that costumers just buy your product, information. Costumers
starts putting questions about your product and services; they even create news
and make regimes fall (the Egyptian spring 2011). The important question for a
corporate business is how will social media create value for the corporation?
Thousand of corporate
business has found that social media and communication can generate rich new
forms of costumer insights – at a lower cost and faster than conventional
methods. Products as perfume and services are being re-launched to costumers on
YouTube and in blogs to cut cost and trying (with success) to engage costumers
directly on the social platforms. The
value created is unfiltered feedback and behavioral data – do people like your
tweet your YouTube video or even your brand. Corporate business are beginning
to discover that social technology platforms, provides a much more efficient
way of communication and collaborating. A further benefit is that on social
platforms, communications become content – forming a searchable archive that
can be continually enriched with comments from costumers, experts and other
stakeholders. The latest example I have heard on this is by open up service
platforms, where costumers are able to check service status on their own
equipment on a social platform. This creates a much more efficiently and
effectively use of the data opening up for the costumers to use the corporate
business collected data. Further more opening up for data is creating value to
both the costumer (Easy to access data) and time consuming for the corporate
business not sending abstracts on email to costumers on data they can get by
themselves.
Corporate value creation on social media demands
openness.
Participation on social
media using the technologies, in turn, depends on having an environment of
openness, information sharing and trust. This sort of culture, that is acquired
to create value out of the social media investment, is not established fully in
many corporate organizations. This change of mindset in behaviors and in
corporate cultures to get the value out of social media and technologies
demands an openness and sharing which is a challenge to corporate
organizations.
The award for the ones who
really creates the conditions of openness and trust in the corporate
organization and are able to let this openness and sharing reach the costumers
in real collaboration, will find that the value and benefits from using social
technologies and media, will make the corporation more adaptable to changes and
crisis in their business and in the society. The ability to absorbing and
acting on new ideas and possibilities and even threats is another value of this
transforming from an information corporation to a collaboration corporation.
