While those people working with social are getting some value of it, most don’t know how to take social technologies and adopt processes to it, said Esteban Kolsky, analyst with thinkJar after his presentation at the CRM Evolution 2012 conference in New York City.
Kolsky’s analyst firm questioned over 300 people in a study about the adoption of social technologies in business.
Here are some of the key findings from the study:
- Confusion of the value of social networks does not hinder adoption. In general, across all CRM services (e.g., marketing, sales, service) the social aspect still has lots of confusion.
- Virtually everyone believes that social media will become a key communications activity with customers.
- Social media is a new set of channels for the business to use, nothing more.
- The volume of social media information to track and access is overwhelming.
- Today, adoption of video and pictures is huge. Esteban argues that people relate to the images more.
- 1 out of 4 senior managers “get” social media as a business tool.
- Two of the biggest hindrances to adoption of social media are, in order, security issues, not understanding the benefits, and not sure which business cases can leverage social media.
- The survey was split into thinking and adoption. When it came to questions about adoption, there was about a 50 percent drop off.
- Marketing is using social simply to provide information.
- Only 37 percent see social as an area for escalation which is the opposite of what customers do. On Twitter, 93 percent of interactions get escalated.
- Knowledge creation and knowledge management are going to drive social in the service space.
- For employees, they found usefulness with their corporate blog, Twitter, video, pictures, and the social business platform.
- 43 percent have been using social media for more than 24 months.
- 39 percent of people believe that social CRM is not applicable, are not using it, and are not interested in using it. Esteban believes this number is low since they sent a certain percentage of surveys out via social media.
Current state of social
Right now, content is the key aspect of social CRM. There’s little understanding as to how generation, management, tracking, and reporting work with social. There’s no strategic plan, yet. Next stage is analytics and measurement and then finally the goal will be a collaborative enterprise, said Kolsky.
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