Business
Corporates befriend the Facebook crowd
Instead of ignoring social media, organisations of all sizes should begin to define their strategy, and most importantly, the rules for employee engagement. Photo/FILE
Posted Monday, March 15 2010 at 00:00
A lot has been written about the impact of social media and utilities — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs etc — on business.
There’s no doubt that social collaboration platforms mobilise the “power of the crowd” in many different ways.
They let communities create and share knowledge in a highly collaborative way. Indeed, the interaction is at least as important as the actual content that is being created.
According to Gartner Predicts for 2010, the number of active Facebook users —already the largest social networking community — is expected to rocket to more than a billion by end of 2010.
The impacts of this technology on corporate and individual brands have been enormous. Today, corporate and personal brands are accentuated or destroyed overnight by the lightning-fast way that information zips through the clouds.
Just look at what’s been happening to Tiger Woods recently; there was nothing even remotely gradual about the descent of this previously unassailable icon.
You also hear the example of the employee who expressed disdain for her boss on a social networking site only to receive a letter of dismissal through the same medium.
Take the advertising executive who travelled to a client’s town and Tweeted his disdain to colleagues: “I’d rather die than live here.” The client saw the Tweet and cancelled the contract!. And so on.
Basically two broad categories of corporate responses to social media have emerged: Users (whom I will call early adopters) and Non-Users. Let’s begin with the latter.
Research carried out by a reputable marketing firm showed that 51 per cent of company executives feared the potential negative impact of social media on employee productivity, and 49 per cent worried that they would damage the company’s reputation.
Besides this, security was also cited as a main concern.
Such corporates have employed strategies that included blocking employees from accessing social media while at work, creating resentment, mischief or worse.
On the other side is the other breed of corporate users who have overcome the fears associated with social media and who believe that they can be valuable.
They have gone ahead to implement social media connect application programming interfaces (APIs) and protocols to interface on their devices, applications and websites an interoperability that is becoming critical to the success and survival of social networks, communication channels and media sites.
Having gone through the discovery and experimentation phases of its life cycle, social media has simply become too big for firms not to factor it into their B2C strategies.
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