Social media (again) - timing is everything
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Sorry to keep banging on about social media, but the developments are coming so thick and fast at the moment that there’s no avoiding them. Recent product announcements from Salesforce and Autonomy seem explicitly timed to back up predictions from Gartner, while one sector that really does need friends at the moment – retail banking – seems to be the very one that’s hanging back.

Customer relationship management specialist Salesforce has at last announced the public version of Chatter.com, a service that allows every company to create a free private social network. Incorporating all the usual social media features – profiling, following, real-time feeds – the claim is that it will make it easier to collaborate and increase employee productivity.

It’s been a while coming (it was first announced back in 2009) – but now it’s here it seems to have got the timing just right; one of Gartner’s recent predictions is that, by 2013, spending on social software to support sales, marketing and customer service processes will exceed $1 billion worldwide.  “Over the next three years, social CRM will continue its exponential rise, software as a service will become routine, salesforce.com will reshuffle the market order,” Gartner declares.

Meanwhile Autonomy has seemingly taken two bites at the same cherry.  On the same day as it proclaimed its new cloud-based information management platform for the legal market, it also announced new capabilities for identifying, preserving and collecting social media for eDiscovery.

New solutions, powered by Autonomy’s ability to recognise sentiment, patterns and concepts in data, allow businesses to incorporate social media into their electronic data discovery processes, the company claims.  Again the timing seems spot on; according to Gartner, by the end of 2013, half of all companies will have been asked to produce material from social media websites for eDiscovery.

Gartner goes further, in fact; if a technology creates content that can’t be archived, and that archive is required by law, employers will have no option but to ban its use. On this basis, Gartner reckons, 50% of companies will be attempting to block access to some or all social networking sites by the end of 2012.

Banks, though, haven’t even got this far. According to the technology analyst Ovum, almost two thirds of the world’s retail banks have no plans in place to use social media in any way. Just 6% currently use it to deal with customer queries, and only 14% for marketing, with few planning to change their stance.

Ovum thinks they’re being dangerously short-sighted – especially at a time when consumer confidence in them is so fragile. So have they been left way behind?  Or have they been cautious enough to be able to get it right from now on?

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