Guy Cranswick

Social media is nearly ubiquitous in every market. So far social media ventures have done extremely well commercially, if not in real money, well then, at least in some discounted financial value accounting methodology. This year the whole game, so to speak, goes up a degree with Facebook more than likely to go public with its IPO in late May according to latest reports. Forecasting what...

The intense focus on social media and related technologies and how it will influence organisations has increased in the last year. Nor will it dim. The catalyst for the change has emanated from four companies and their products which have significantly altered behaviour and interaction with technology – in particular with devices. Business and IT executives wishing to understand the forces of consumerisation and social media (Social IT) and its impact within organisations need to look at the compound effect brought about by network connections between those four companies and how people connect with them.

The challenge of servicing customers well through various channels and over many devices has added considerable complexity to operations. The blindness of monitoring how well the IT operation is working has been removed and now data flows in huge amounts. The principal goal is to provide high quality customer experience and not simply rely on dashboards to churn out machine data reports. The skills of analysis and insight should be more keenly applied to the data in order to reveal and clarify the value of the data. How the reams of data can be used for an organisation to deliver a high customer experience remains the main task. Organisations that believe that solely monitoring data to support transactions will likely miss the significance of what the data can yield and strengthen their customer contacts.

The forecast growth of data transmission over the Internet in the next decade means the role of content distribution networks will probably rise. As demands on bandwidth grow, efficient management of online data will be at the centre of many organisations’ online delivery strategy. While it may seem that improved broadband and the arrival of the NBN (when that occurs) will solve the issues of speed, it will not because more users, richer media and more applications will fill the bandwidth. Consequently a content distribution network (CDN) strategy ought to be part of any organisation’s online planning.

Adding analytics is essential to any social media strategic initiative, whether it is well organised or just experimental. Without using analytics an organisation is blind to market interaction and therefore cannot modify or understand how to modify tactics. However, avoid simply trusting the data alone to provide the answers and set directions. To gain the most benefit from such analytics tools will require skills in interpretation, analysis and judgement in when to implement actions and or revisions.

The seemingly growing deployment of enterprise social media may add another layer to organisational communications and collaborative suites; or it may replace them altogether. At this stage definite judgement is not possible, given the varying feedback on usage, value and overall benefits. Ostensibly these tools are being introduced to improve collaboration and productivity. Yet the evidence is not conclusive on those criteria. Nevertheless, it is not necessary to rationalise such deployments on efficacy criteria alone.

Crafting a durable social media strategy is a challenge. How social media tools and behaviour will mature, and the lessons taken from the early phase, will define how it will be implemented later. To manage the social evolution, adequate guidelines can serve as a strategic path. The two key elements to have in creating a social media strategy are: 1) a robust view of how users and user behaviour is evolving and 2) practical and tactical techniques and tools to deploy and measure in order to produce the information to grow competence.

NBN’s price model combines two different views of telecommunications market pricing: how the markets actually operate and; what the policy designers of NBN perceive it to be. Without complete agreement to resolve the price model, there are many problems being stored for the future. Inevitably these will affect NBN adoption, profitability and also the layout of the telco landscape. In addition they present challenges to organisations and entrepreneurs with plans to utilise the NBN. The current NBN price model also appears to stop the industry trend of falling prices for telecommunications services.

As a consequence of the Internet, and with it, the development of several technologies, and e-commerce (and piracy, too) and now, all things ‘social’ there is an expectation that disruptive innovation is critical to success. More than that: disruptive is the key to success, and without it businesses will die. Survive or die; it’s either/or. The choice is clear. In the...

Social media networks may appear to have developed businesses that can only continue to grow, but they have a real challenge ahead. Demography is everything and with social networks it’s the crucible which will affect the organisations that use social media for their communication and marketing objectives. Organisations should take a 3-5 year view with Facebook and other social media to build strategies that can evolve with the channel over the period.