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søndag den 2. september 2012

How valuable is Social Media for corporate business in 2012 and ahead?


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.  


[1] According to Mckinsey latest research 2012