As part of our previous social media study as referenced from our customer. they have graciously agreed to release the benefits portion for adoption of social media.  These are the partial results of the study and is a condensed portion of the entire study.  We think this would provide great insight to organizations thinking about social media and vendors alike on possible positioning options when trying to sell social media solutions to customers.  As some of the results were a little unexpected.  Enjoy and please retweet if you find it useful.  Previously we posted another part of this study on our blog.

The same participants that participated in the previous results were asked .  The participants were allowed multiple answers hence the varying percentages.  Identified are the top nine responses.  These results were based on the original n=156 organizations ranging in size.  The demographics can be seen by the first social media results post for company breakdown.    The question was asked to our participants  “What are the benefits that your organization perceives that would be gained by social media ? ”

Results Findings:

• The medium to large organizations identified that customer experience enhancement was most important to them if engaging in social media.   The top 4 criteria are indicative of companies where budget is not much of an issue but part of the marketing strategy.

• Surprisingly improving productivity was a tipping point.  However, improving employee collaboration scored higher at 52% this refers to internal employees.  The difference here `between collaboration and productivity here is described as the entire organization being more productive. This includes being able to access real-time information, a central repository for storage for marketing materials, pricing sheets, lead times predictions, visibility to work in process orders, procurement statii for material etc.  The ease of aggregating the information will automatically drive up customer satisfaction.

• All organizations deemed customer experience and satisfaction were the most important benefits that can be gained by joining the conversation of social media. An interesting point of note here was that larger organizations engaged in multiple channels of social media.   Larger organizations  used more  Facebook, MySpace than SMB, while most SMB used LI,  Twitter and Youtube was more common with the medium to large companies.

• As expected the more technical aspects of implementing social media the bottom 4 criteria were lower as the survey was based mostly on business users and not as much IT.   Organizations did not feel that social media would dramatically give them a competitive advantage against competitors.  It was viewed as a necessity as the participants felt their competitors had already engaged in social media and they must keep up.

• It was discovered that SMB tended to engage more in forums and niche platforms.  They were more active than the larger companies by spending more time on social media.  This was also true for blogging. This may be due to blogs provide a cost effective way to enter social media market and not as many controls for employees in smaller companies but more time consuming.  SMB’s in our study were more influenced by peer recommendations and feedback from experts in the niche platforms towards their purchasing decisions.

• Employee satisfaction/morale  was rated highly among SMB and large companies.  This might reflect that the gen x and millenials in the work force that use these networks personally has translated and persuaded their employers to engage in the conversation.  Gen x that are in management positions would be more open to the new technology. This is a newer technique to encourage employee loyalty as tenures with companies are now shorter than before.

Summary

As can be seen by the results of this study, there are many different perceptions from the participants as to the benefits to adopt social networking as a corporate enterprise application.  Some of the results proved a surprise on how we think of social networking while most of the responses seemed indicative of the age and position it represented.

Vendors within the social media space can use some of the information provided here for better marketing strategies and how to position their solutions.  There was a lot of information about traditional on premise and cloud vendors that we were not allowed to release.  Vendors interested in this can reach out to us for strategic consulting, application road mapping, positioning and analyst created material.

About Us

Eval-Source is a consulting firm that arms you with fact-based information which enables you to make the right decisions for your organizational needs when selecting enterprise software.  Our innovative products and services allow organizations and vendors to connect effectively by bridging the disconnect that exists within the software buying process.   Our Tru-Eval method and professional services offer an impartial end-to end approach in selecting system software while our Tru-Benchmark kits offer a definitive position of where your current system ranks amongst the industry.

Eval-Source is a specialized firm that offers enterprise software evaluation, benchmarking, investment evaluation reports, outsourced procurements services to organizations. Custom research, strategic consulting and evaluation services are also available for organizations looking to adopt technology or scope out the benefits and examine the constraints. Contact us for special requirements.

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