The social media phenomenon has fundamentally changed the ways in which people communicate and businesses are not taking full advantage of its potential, according to new research conducted by management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, Accenture.<\/p>\n
According to findings from the Accenture Technology Vision 2012, Facebook<\/a>, LinkedIn, Twitter<\/a>, and other forms of social media are powerful catalysts that are changing the ways customers, employees, and partners use technology to interact with the world around them.<\/p>\n \u201cMost organisations have yet to catch up to that reality, and almost none take full advantage of it. They must,\u201d the group stressed.<\/p>\n Accenture noted that In the US, Facebook is largely supplanting e-mail and text as the primary tool for communicating with friends. The group filed papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week (Wednesday 01 February), the first step to an initial public offering that could raise as much as $10 billion, valuing Facebook at $100 billion.<\/p>\n \u201cThe opportunity is to capture, measure, analyse, and exploit these social interactions in new ways.<\/p>\n It means that social media must be seen as much more than a new \u2018bolt on\u2019 channel; it has to be viewed as a catalyst for revisiting everything \u00a0that touches a company\u2019s customers and, \u00a0increasingly, other communities of stakeholders,\u201d Accenture urged.<\/p>\n The group predicted that organisations will soon start applying social platforms and social design mechanics to manage interactions across all communication channels to consumers, fostering greater intimacy with their customers, more efficiently, and with better outcomes.<\/p>\n \u201cThey will also see value in using enterprise social platforms for connections with and among employees\u2014and even among enterprises,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n Accenture said that social media provided a pathway to convey to the rest of the firm what has been learned by listening to consumers. \u201cThe most immediate implication is that a company\u2019s call centre applications, its Web presence, its customer relationship management<\/p>\n (CRM) applications, its mobile experience, and other consumer channels all need to all be integrated with each other and be \u201csocialenabled,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n The consultancy called for businesses to establish a core IT team to design and pilot cross-functional social media platforms, and put in place the technology to support the business\u2019s need to monetize its \u00a0social interactions rather than simply \u00a0communicating via social media.<\/p>\n \u201cIf they fail to engage with social, enterprises will essentially be encouraging their organisations\u2019 customers to be lured away by competitors that are increasingly interacting with those customers in the ways that the customers want to communicate,\u201d Accenture warned.<\/p>\n