Enterprises grasp social network nettle

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 04 October 2011 10:22

Business IT - Networking

Australian enterprises are among the leaders in Asia Pacific in terms of their uptake of social media and collaboration tools with double digit growth rates expected to persist through to 2015. But at present most organisations are focussing their social networking internally, and only dipping their toes in public social networks, potentially putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

According to Audrey William, ICT Research Director for Frost & Sullivan; 'A lot of organisations are at a very cautious stage. This could put them at a disadvantage because if your customers want to reach you through these mediums, and you aren't using them, you are shutting them out.'

Those customers might instead opt to do business with companies which had a more obvious social networking strategy. Ms William said that organisations running contact centres in particular could not afford to ignore social networks as a customer conduit.

She said early adopters which were at least monitoring Twitter or Facebook had a better understanding of what was being said about a company's brand and services, allowing them to react to customer concerns ahead of rivals. A number of companies do actively monitor Twitter to mine social sentiment - Telstra for example was one of the early pioneers in the local market, and Ms William said that the banks were increasingly starting to monitor social networks.

Some are becoming even more adventurous. The NAB for example famously harnessed social media when it launched its 'break up' campaign encouraging Australians to move their bank accounts to NAB initially on social networks. Its internet-only brand UBank also relies heavily on YouTube, Twitter and FaceBook as customer conduits.

NBN Co is also developing its social media strategy to communicate with potential end users of the service.