Invite colleagues
There are many academics and marketers' pondering the future of 'social media' and publishing their bold visions. A key requirement in the shaping of ideas for driving innovation, competition and more broadly, the social media industry. Interestingly, I recall only five to six years ago being part of the discussion where the question of social media being a 'fad' was still being hotly debated.
Thankfully, at the time I was one of the voices predicting some of the social changes and impacts to business that have resulted. That said, this is by no means a phenomena that has come to an end but one that can be seen as a continuously evolving set of technologies and behaviors (online and offline). Social Media's impact on management theory is already profound and lets wait and see but I expect in the next 5 years we will shift thinking from hierarchy, org charts and out-dated mechanistic business process to more dynamic fluid types of organizational collaboration and connectiveness.
When I look to the future (near future), I start imagining Corporations leveraging social platforms beyond the simple 'push/engagement marketing' models we have today. I believe that companies will have teams listening to digital channels and using this information in product research/enhancements, customer support, competitive positioning to staff recruitment. This type of leverage for an organization will require both Corporate culture change and technology improvements in social intelligence platforms.
I found an image created by Dion Hinchcliff that I think helps represent this idea of transitioning company cultures.
In terms of corporate culture, many companies are already embracing social media for online promotions and others are working on mediating through internal policies on usage of Twitter/Facebook etc. Firms are seeing their workers blast out internal meetings and personal opinions about the employer and this is quite a worry for many in the leadership and for others a recognition their business has changed fundamentally. For some further insights on this, take a look at John Bell's post: The C-Suite Cares About Social Business
Technology is vastly improved for monitoring and analyzing social media content but I argue is still in it's infancy for what will come over the next year or two. The number of vendors playing in this space has also grown rapidly but 10-15 have broken out and seem to be consolidating with a strong commercial position. I see our SIP:Enterprise taking the position in China (for Western MNC) and Radian6, Lithium, Attensity360 leading in the Western markets. However, we are going to need the social intelligence vendors to come up with increasing simple ways for organizations to leverage the social information in different ways more broadly across an organization. Clearly, with the Salesforce.com purchase of Radian6 it shows that I am not the only one thinking of this and business requirement going forward.
Are organizations going to embrace social media in more areas than just marketing? Is Dell, who is using Twitter for support monitoring an early pioneer or simply maverick? Would you use Facebook or Twitter to identify your next employee? Is China ahead or behind in this organizational thinking?
Write a comment below and let me know what you think?
Written on Sunday, 01 May 2011 09:54 by Matt McDougall