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IBM issued a report that found while most companies are adopting social media, many are struggling to figure out social media plans.
For the report, “The Business of Social Business: What Works and How It’s Done,” 1,160 IT professionals were surveyed. The report shows that nearly 46% of the organizations increased their social technologies investments in 2012, while one-quarter are prepared to incorporate social tools into their daily business.
The report says the key to accelerating widespread social media adoption lies in an organization’s ability to build social business expertise among employees, while encouraging behavioral changes that may influence a wider cultural shift. However, only one-quarter of companies believe they are fully prepared to address the cultural changes that are associated with this transformation.
Companies at the forefront are doing more than developing a presence on major platforms. They are taking their external social tools and embedding them into core business processes and capabilities. They are using social approaches not only to communicate better with their suppliers, business partners and, perhaps, most important, their employees.
The rise of social business is a challenge for corporate culture at some companies with more than 75% said they are under-prepared for the required cultural changes.
Executives are concerned because social business represents a different way of thinking about employees, customers and how work is accomplished, as well as the potential risks of increased organizational openness and transparency, the report says.
About 20% of organizations are keeping track of key performance indicators of social business efforts. Analytics can make it possible for organizations to integrate social and traditional data sources to make more effective decisions about customers and the workforce. By examining the residual data from social activities, organizations can develop valuable insights not previously available.
Respondents to the report said attacks on their brands, legal issues, data security and privacy, and unintended disclosure of company information are some concerns about the use of social business tools.
“With the effective use of social technologies, organizations can integrate and analyze massive amounts of data generated from people, devices and sensors and more easily align these insights to business processes to make faster, more accurate business decisions. By gaining deeper insights in customer and market trends and employees’ sentiment, businesses can uncover critical patterns to not only react swiftly to market shifts, but predict the effect of future actions,” IBM stated.
The case for why more organizations are implementing social business practices comes down to sustaining their competitiveness and profitability in economies in which rivals, partners and customers are adopting new ways of conducting business, the report says. More than simply using social media tools, enterprises have entered a new period of fundamental transformation in the way work is done at all levels of the enterprise and across all organizational boundaries.
