Social media makes you rich?!
Here is a great piece of research from McKinsey (via the excellent The Wall Blog) that indicates companies embracing new Web technologies to connect with employees, customers, partners and suppliers are seeing the rewards in terms of market share and margins.
McKinsey theorise that by forging relationships with customers, involving them in support and product development which in turn correlates with a great market share, when compared with competitors not embracing social media technologies. As such business leaders need to avoid the “critical mistake” of falling behind in these networks and make every effort to become a fully connected enterprise.
To achieve these goals they offer these steps to get there:
- Integrate the use of Web 2.0 into employees’ day-to-day work activities.
- Continue to drive adoption and usage. Benefits appear to be limited without a base level of adoption and usage.
- Break down the barriers to organizational change. Fully networked organizations appear to have more fluid information flows, deploy talent more flexibly to deal with problems, and allow employees lower in the corporate hierarchy to make decisions.
- Apply Web 2.0 technologies to interactions with customers, business partners, and employees. External interactions are correlated with self-reported market share gains. So are internal organizational collaboration and flexibility, and the benefits appear to be multiplicative. Fully networked organizations can achieve the highest levels of self-reported benefits in all types of interactions.
Great to see McKinsey examining the power of social media engagement, we can’t agree more that companies only stand to benefit from interacting with their customers or potential customers online (and to engage customers you need to be listening to them first!). Which are your favourite examples of companies using social media well, and who is using it badly?
Leave a Comment January 13, 2011
