Add Business Value by Applying Social Technologies

 

 

There was a good report from McKinsey a few months back – “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies”.  It is all about how to add business value by your ability to apply social technologies.

 

Here are some things you will find useful from this report …

 

First, McKinsey provided a useful and succinct definition of social commerce;

 

Social Commerce: Purchasing in groups, on social platforms, and sharing opinions  (McKinsey more broadly defines social technologies as “products and services that enable social interactions in the digital realm, and thus allow people to connect and interact virtually”)

 

Overall, $940 billion of annual consumption in some US and European categories could be influenced by social input.  That is the best reason you should be interested in social technologies and their application.

 

But there are more reasons to pay attention … social commerce is only one of ten ways social technologies can add business value.

 

Co-creating products

 

Forecasting and monitoring

 

Distributing business processes

 

Deriving customer insights

 

Marketing communication

 

Generating leads

 

Social commerce

 

Providing customer care/service

 

Improving intra/inter-organization collaboration/communication

 

Matching talent to tasks

 

Overall, two-thirds of the value creation opportunity afforded by social technologies lies in improving communications and collaboration within and across enterprises.  In other words, much of the value potential of social technologies lies in collaboration, not commerce; particularly, professional collaboration between colleagues and businesses.

 

Some further useful statistics of note from the McKinsey :

 

• $2x Potential value from better enterprise communication and collaboration compared with other social technology benefits
• >1.5 billion Number of social networking users globally
• 80% Proportion of total online users who interact with social networks regularly
• 70% Proportion of companies using social technologies
• 90% Proportion of companies using social technologies that report some business benefit
• In May 2012, Facebook logged its 900 millionth user (this is now 1 billion users from September reports). It is estimated that 80 percent of the world’s online population use social networks on a regular basis
• In the United States, the share of total online time spent on social networking platforms more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2011, from 7 percent to 15 percent
• By adopting social technologies internally, companies could raise the productivity of knowledge workers by 20 to 25 percent.

Further Report Insights:

 

Social technologies enable unique insights, by allowing marketers and product developers to engage directly with thousands of consumers and to monitor unprompted and unfiltered conversations

 

Social technology has almost primal appeal. It is fundamental human behavior to seek identity and “connectedness” through affiliations with other individuals and groups that share their characteristics, interests, or beliefs. Social technologies have given these basic behaviors the speed and scale of the Internet at virtually zero marginal cost

 

For electronics, 16 percent of shoppers rely on social input for purchasing decisions; in home goods, the figure is currently just 2 percent

 

Social technologies enable social behaviors to take place online, endowing these interactions with the scale, speed, and disruptive economics of the Internet

 

 

Now it’s up to you. Choose one social technology idea to start with. Have a meeting around it. Discuss how to implement it. Then, do it and repeat the process, creating something good for your customers to talk about! Soon you will receive much stronger social commerce values for your business.

 

Please share a social commerce business experience with us.

 

Read more:

8 Popular Social Media Initiatives for Customer Engagement

Social Commerce Business … What Ben and Jerry’s Knows That You Should Know

12 Ways to Build Social Commerce Business through Great Customer Service

 

Call Digital Spark Marketing today for a free consultation.

Let us give you some more recommendations on improving your social technologies, on-line and in person.

 

More reading on customer engagement and social technologies …