Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise – Part 2
- by Michael Snow
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Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President, Oracle
On September 13, 2012, I sat down with Altimeter Analyst
Jeremiah Owyang to talk about how enterprise businesses are approaching the
management of both their social media strategies and internal structures.
There’s no longer any question as to whether companies are
adopting social full throttle. That’s
exactly the way it should be, because it’s a top online behavior across all age
groups. For your consumers, it’s an ingrained, normal form of
communication.
And beyond connecting with friends, social users are
reaching out for information and service from brands. Jeremiah tells us 29% of Twitter followers
follow a brand and 58% of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand. Even on the B2B side, people act on reviews
and recommendations.
Just as in the early 90’s we saw companies move from static
to dynamic web sites, businesses of all sizes are moving from just establishing
a social presence to determining effective and efficient ways to use it. I like to say we’re in the 2nd or
3rd inning of a 9-inning game. Corporate social started out as a Facebook page, it’s multiple channels
servicing customers wherever they are. Social is also moving from merely moderating to analyzing so that the
signal can be separated from the noise, so that impactful influencers can be
separated from other users.
Organizationally, social started with the marketers. Now we’re getting into social selling,
commerce, service, HR, recruiting, and collaboration. That’s Oracle’s concept of enterprise social
relationship management, a framework to extend social across the entire
organization real-time in as holistic a way as possible.
Social requires more corporate coordination than ever
before. One of my favorite statistics is
that the average corporation at enterprise has 178 social accounts, according
to Altimeter. Not all of them active,
not all of them necessary, but 178 of them. That kind of fragmentation creates risk, so the smarter companies will
look for solutions (as opposed to tools) that can organize, scale and
defragment, as well as quickly integrate other networks and technologies that
will come along.
Our conversation goes deep into the various
corporate social structures we’re seeing, as well as the advantages and
disadvantages of each. There are also a
couple of great examples of how known brands used an integrated, holistic
approach to achieve stated social goals.
What’s especially exciting to me is the Oracle SRM framework
for the enterprise provides companywide integration into one seamless
system. This is not a dream. This is going to have substantial business
impact in the next several years.
