A good report from McKinsey – “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies.” It is all about how the business entrepreneur can add value by applying social technologies.
Check out our thoughts on customer focus.
Related post: Customer Loyalty …10 Ways to Gain, Build, and Retain It
Here are some things you will find useful from this report …
First, McKinsey provided a helpful and succinct definition of social commerce;
Business entrepreneur … add social commerce
Purchasing in groups, on social platforms, and sharing opinions (McKinsey more broadly defines social technologies as “products and services that enable social interactions in the digital realm, and thus allow people to connect and interact virtually”)
Overall, $940 billion of annual consumption in some US and European categories could be influenced by human input. That is the best reason you should be interested in social technologies and their application.
Related post: How Good Is your Learning from Failure?
But there are more reasons to pay attention … social commerce is only one of ten ways social technologies can add business value.
Co-creating products
Forecasting and monitoring
Distributing business processes
Deriving customer insights
Marketing communication
Generating Leads
Social commerce
Providing customer care/service
Improving intra/inter-organization collaboration/communication
Matching talent to tasks
Overall, two-thirds of the value creation opportunity afforded by social technologies lies in improving communications and collaboration within and across enterprises. In other words, much of the value potential of social technologies lies in collaboration, not commerce; particularly, professional collaboration between colleagues and businesses.
Some further useful statistics from the McKinsey report of note:
$2xPotential
value from better enterprise communication and collaboration compared with other social technology benefits
>1.5 billion social networking users globally
80% Proportion of total online users who interact with social networks regularly
70% Proportion of companies using social technologies
90% Proportion of companies using social technologies that report some business benefit
In May 2012, Facebook logged its 900 millionth user (this is now 1 billion users from September reports). It is estimated that 80 percent of the world’s online population use social networks on a regular basis
In the United States, the share of total online time spent on social networking platforms more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2011, from 7 percent to 15 percent
By adopting social technologies internally, companies could raise the productivity of knowledge workers by 20 to 25 percent.
Further Report Insights:
Social technologies enable unique insights, by allowing marketers and product developers to engage directly with thousands of consumers and to monitor unprompted and unfiltered conversations
Social technology has an almost primal appeal. It is a fundamental human behavior to seek identity and “connectedness” through affiliations with other individuals and groups that share their characteristics, interests, or beliefs. Social technologies have given these basic behaviors the speed and scale of the Internet at virtually zero marginal cost
For electronics, 16 percent of shoppers rely on social input for purchasing decisions; in home goods, the figure is currently just 2 percent
Social technologies enable social behaviors to take place online, endowing these interactions with the scale, speed, and disruptive economics of the Internet.
Business entrepreneur … everything is an idea
Let me share an example with you.
A little while back, my wife was talking to me about her Facebook page. She’s an aspiring social media consultant and, as such, uses her page a lot to talk about books, news of interest, and the like.
One of the things she said as she found it hard to come up with ideas, given that there’s only so much you can talk about plot and print.
I asked her if she’d ever considered being more personal. Let readers get to know the real person behind the page.
What inspires here; what she’s afraid of; what her goals are beyond sales and recognition.
As a result, she started to publish more personal posts, with one, in particular, getting over 700 shares on Facebook and more than 30 comments.
From my own experience, even though I stopped writing directly about business on my blog in 2014, I still get business inquiries, along with emails and comments on how certain posts aren’t restricted to the personal topic I’ve written about.
Which makes sense – because our whole lives are one big blog post idea.
The beauty of the sunset, and how that can inspire a new beginning in business when the next dawn rises;
The innocence of children, and how that can make us better business leaders without ego or ignorance fuelling us;
The friendly neighbor
who’ll do anything for another human, and how that can make us more accountable as colleagues;
The love of our pets, and how that can instill the importance of loyalty and reward when it comes to our customers.