 "Businesses Use Social Media To Drive Initiatives Based On Bidirectional Feedback")
The fifth annual International Data Corporation (IDC) Social Business Survey revealed a clear focus on using social media to drive initiatives based on bidirectional feedback rather than just a one-way broadcast communication mechanism. This is evident across all social experiences, both inside and outside the business.
“Companies will continue to learn from social deployments, and as social capabilities are applied to an increasing number of use cases, a more granular set of business value metrics will emerge,” said Vanessa Thompson, Research Manager, Enterprise Social Networks and Collaborative Technologies. “However, there is still a broad set of business use cases in customer experience, employee experience (empowerment), and partner experience (including partner and supplier enablement) that can be augmented by additional social capabilities to drive increased business value.”
Additional findings from the IDC survey include the following:
Over the next 12 months, the most sought-after business initiative companies will look to social software to provide will be online communities, with 35 percent of respondents looking to this capability. Ideasourcing will be sought by 27 percent of companies, and innovation management, qualified as a more complex process than ideasourcing, will be sought by 26 percent of companies.
79 percent of North American survey respondents have deployed a corporate-sponsored enterprise social network solution.
The skills gap is becoming an increasing challenge, with 35 percent of survey respondents strongly agreeing that they did not have the internal skills to support social software.
This study, IDC’s Social Business Survey, 2013: Driving Influence and Relevance with Social Solutions discusses the results of IDC’s annual Social Business Survey conducted in February 2013. The survey polled 701 senior executive-level decision makers in the United States on their current and future technology and business plans, perceptions, and experiences related to the use of social media/networking for business purposes and corporate-sponsored enterprise social software.