Social networks – companies still aren’t ready
Jinfo Blog

10th November 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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As business becomes more social and social network users become more business-savvy, is business ready to cope? One analyst believes not. Collaboration is one frequently touted solution that social media offer business. Having previously integrated its collaboration platform with Microsoft Sharepoint (http://digbig.com/5bctxw), social software specialist Socialtext has now added a connector to the customer relationship management community operated by Salesforce.com. Socialtext’s links to other communities allow activities carried out elsewhere to be injected automatically into its own proprietary activity stream (http://digbig.com/5bctxx). ‘Rich metadata’ accompanies each message, the company explains – but with a facility allowing customers to build their own additional connections, the risk of message overload is ever present. Endorsement is another solution that social media promote to business. LinkedIn has been extending its reach from executives to companies lately, allowing its users to ‘follow’ companies since last May (see Penny Crossland at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e30837 for details of LinkedIn’s newer social features) – and now it has announced a facility enabling companies to showcase their products and brands directly. Launched with a handful of LinkedIn’s ‘charter’ corporate customers, Company Pages allows businesses to highlight product and service recommendations from their peers, so their reputation grows virally by word of mouth. ‘When you promote and curate these recommendations, you have some of the most credible, authentic endorsements of your products on your Company Page’s Product tab,’ LinkedIn claims (http://digbig.com/5bctxy for press release or http://digbig.com/5bctya for blog posting). Well, yes – but you could risk attracting ‘credible, authentic’ panning of your products too. On the consumer side, for example, people in the United Kingdom are apparently becoming particularly adept at seeking out the best (and worst) deals in one particular industry – insurance – and using social networks to help. According to a new report from market research firm Datamonitor, only 11% of British consumers automatically renew their car insurance annually, compared with an average of 36% globally. Infatuation with price comparison sites, along with a high regard for personal recommendations (both face-to-face and online) is the reason – and it’s impelled one major insurer, Churchill, to open no fewer than five different social media contact points through which to attempt to woo them (http://digbig.com/5bctyb). Given all this corporate social media activity, of which these recent developments offer only a snapshot, you’d expect companies to be gearing up rapidly to integrate its use into their business processes – with help from the vendors themselves of course. ‘No’, says technology analyst Gartner. In the period up to 2015, 80% of organisations will ‘lack a coherent approach for dealing with information from the collective’, it claims (http://digbig.com/5bctyc). Gartner’s focus is on IT – but to judge from these recent examples, many of the underlying issues fall squarely into infopros’ territory too.

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