Shree Parthasarathy, Senior Director and Anand Venkatraman, Senior Manager, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Private Limited write about the potential of Social Media in the enterprise
The use of Social Media tools is exploding in popularity across the real and virtual worlds. Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube and other social networking tools are experiencing sustained growth rates way above anything seen in new technologies previously. Social media has been instrumental in influencing geo-political changes, even leading to the change of governments in several countries. Considering the rate of internet growth through traditional as well as the mobile channel within India, Social Media in India is expected to grow at a rate of almost 100%.
Opportunities in Social Media
These trends highlight the facts that it is difficult for the businesses across all lines to ignore this powerful medium to connect to their target audience but doing so effectively possess a challenge for the companies. Corporations are now beginning to realize Social Media, like the Internet in the 1990s, is a revolutionary phenomenon that has transformed the way business is done in the global economy. Used strategically, it offers organizations an unprecedented opportunity to actively engage employees, customers, suppliers and other interested stakeholders and benefit from their collective ideas, knowledge and experiences
Organizations have typically started adopting social media to:
- Enhance customer and partner relationships: This helps to open the lines of communication beyond typical spokespeople such as marketing, sales, and PR and provides an avenue for other important stakeholders to gather firsthand feedback from customers. Also, allows customers to access help beyond traditional means, with networks that provide peer-support and a user-generated knowledge base while monitoring customer perception.
- Increase employee productivity and operational efficiencies: This helps to create a lightweight institutional memory system for a company’s intellectual assets to be easily captured, stored and accessed reducing the net volume of email and allowing users to “pull” information at their convenience, as opposed to spending time reading through mass-email chain.
- Foster creativity, innovation, and collaboration: Social media helps to harness product, process, and service innovations by unlocking creativity and ideas from any area of the company.
- Crowdsourcing: These helps in generating information and idea from general public and even get feedback on specific concepts. Gone are the days of conducting focus group sessions to collect feedback on products, organization today leverage their Facebook page preview their new products and solicit feedback.
Unfortunately, most organizations in India are merely dabbling with Social Media and some may have totally failed to understand its potential. However, some Indian enterprises as well as multinationals that operate in India—companies like Samsung, Ford, Flipkart and Maruti Suzuki—have leveraged the power of Social Media to enable their business. They have managed to create a thriving presence on major Social Media platforms and implemented successful Social Media based campaigns such as photography competitions, product launch announcements, crowdsourcing of ideas etc. These campaigns have been successful in converting and influencing socially networked Internet savvy youth into buyers of their products.
Social Media in many aspects enables business processes and offers a new and effective channel to reach out to external as well as internal customers that ultimately results in increased enterprise value. However, adoption of Social Media does have its own set of challenges.
Social Media Risks
Social Media presents a unique set of challenges and risks that organizations need to mitigate. By combining new technologies and methods of engagement, social media can pose new risks to organizations and magnify existing ones. Some of the key risks include the fact that users divulge unprecedented amount of private information on these networks, which could result in identity theft.
Then there is the matter of reputational and brand impact because of disgruntled employees or customers going viral on social media. Other factors include the increased ability to perform social engineering, loss of intellectual property or enterprise information because of malicious intent or un-intentional disclosure of information, the fact that malicious software could be easily sent as an attachment via the Social Media and short URLs used by Twitter could be easily targeted for spoofing activities and that employees are spending extended time on these networks during work hours potentially having an adverse effect on productivity.
Before organizations embrace Social Media, they should consider the organizational risks and ensure there is an appropriate risk management plan in place. Organizations should consider whether they are taking advantage of the communication and stakeholder engagement opportunities presented by various social media platforms, if they have strategies and policies that address the risks and opportunities posed by social media in place etc. They also need to place controls to manage emerging risks created by social media.
Despite the many specific risks introduced by social media, organizations must also evaluate the growing risks of doing nothing. For instance, while organizations worried about potential productivity losses, the new worry is that restricting social media access may deter candidates from joining.
