2011 has seen
rapid expansion of business change that is being driven by the social customer,
empowered employees, and a convergence of new technical capabilities. IDC SVP and Chief Analyst Frank Gens,
believes that 2011 is the year we tip from the PC/Server-dominant era to the
era of Social/Mobile/Virtual (the latter effectively meaning cloud computing).
The new era is driven by advances in four key technologies – social media,
analytics, intelligent devices, and broadband networks. He suggests that
high-value growth will result where industry-specific challenges mash up with
these technology trends. Social commerce, for example merges retail + mobile
intelligent devices + social. Telemedicine mashes healthcare + mobile broadband
+ analytics. . According to International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide
revenues for message and social media archiving applications will increase from
$1.15 billion in 2011 to $2.04 billion in 2015. IDC said 62 percent of US businesses already have message archiving, and
increasingly, corporations are looking to store social media data that's
searchable within a data storage system.
IDC's Forecast for Management Survey, 2011, shows that over
the next 12 months, more than 24 per cent of IT decision-makers will deploy
social media or collaboration-type applications via platforms that allow the
business to build applications in-house. Social business survey by International Data Corporation (IDC) shows that 41% of respondents have
some sort of social business initiative underway. This leaves 59% who
have not implemented a solution. However,
these projects vary greatly – from grassroots bottom-up employee initiatives to
sophisticated and strategic social customer engagement programs – as do the
maturity of the businesses and their social strategies. Companies can
set up all the technology and programs they want, but getting people to
participate is another matter. Slightly more than 50% of companies said this
was a major problem. Companies are hiring journalists, content strategists,
content managers, and various influencer relations professionals among other
new roles. IDC surveys show 51% of
workers in the United States
As social media matures, more tools become available for
managing and while business units remain involved in picking these
technologies, IT helps select and implement them. According to Michael
Fauscette, an analyst at IDC, social media tools are spreading "across all
departments" sales and customer service. When IDC first conducted the
survey three and a half years ago, marketing dominated the results. Fauscette
says social media is used internally for collaboration and idea generation, and
externally for marketing and crisis response. When it comes to managing the
strategy behind social media, however, marketing still rules -- it handles that
responsibility at 48% of companies -- and IT isn't involved at all. Corporate
communications is second, cited by 29% of the respondents as one of the
departments that handles social media strategy (multiple answers were
permitted). Meanwhile, 26% of the respondents named product development, 23%
said customer service, and 16% cited sales. Fauscette calls this shift a sign
that the social media market is maturing. He says this means the technology
will begin to become part of IT's purview. IT shows up in the integration and
implementation of the tools and when social media moves out of marketing's
control, moves beyond experimenting then IT department will take over and look
at broader perspective.
In an IDC study- Determining the Value of Social
Business ROI: Myths, Facts, and Potentially High Returns states widespread
industry adoption of enterprise social software is relatively immature and
executives want a clearer understanding of the potential gains, costs, and
return on investment that social business initiatives can have on a company’s
bottom line. When conducting ROI on social business initiatives, the
traditional rules of business still apply. This is regardless if a company
deploys social business initiatives to assist customer service, marketing,
public relations, product innovation, employee collaboration, or other
functional areas of the organization. One of the obstacles to getting a clear
ROI is that much of the well-publicized social media use cases have been in the
area of marketing, an area where ROI is more elusive.
IDC research says that people are using social media outlets
to access, distribute, share and influence the entertainment consumption of
others. And that, says IDC analysts, is fostering a new "addressable"
advertising category that is worth billions of dollars and growing fast. The
report, "Social Entertainment 2.0: What Is It, And Why Is It Important?"
estimates it will grow from $2.5 billion in 2010 to $5.8 billion in 2015,
averaging 18% growth per year. And that's just in the U.S. Globally, IDC
estimates worldwide social entertainment ad spending to be about twice that
volume. Based on a survey of U.S. adults 18 to 34 conducted by IDC in April,
the top five Internet destinations for entertainment content and news are
Facebook (74%), YouTube (71%), Google (68%), Yahoo! (47%), and Hulu.com (31%).
The top 5 regularly visited on mobile phones were similar: Facebook (63%),
Google (45%), YouTube (39%), Yahoo! (25%), and Twitter (17%).
According to IDC’s Matt Healey, with the rapid growth of
social media platforms, most enterprises are have embraced this form of
communication from an outbound marketing perspective. There are few
organizations that do not have a corporate Twitter account. However, using
social media for outbound marketing represents only a small portion of the
power of social media. Most organizations now realize that they need to monitor
the conversations that are not started or controlled by their marketing
departments. The problem is that traditional IT systems have not been designed
to address these needs. As a result, several startups have begun to develop
technology to monitor and analyze social media. As these organizations begin to
mature, they will increasingly be the target of acquisition by larger SW
vendors that are looking to incorporate this technology into their CRM or other
enterprise applications. IDC expects that in the next few years, this type of
social media analysis will move from a standalone application to an integrated
part of larger systems. 2011 saw two acquisitions, acquisition of Radian6 by
Saleforce.com and Twitter acquisition of BlackType.
