Rapid change in technology, as exemplified by Moore’s Law, is a given. Even at that, the pace of change for enterprise social technology has been remarkable.
Personally, I embrace change. I started my career on the marketing side, then fell in love with the start-up world. Two years ago
Since then, the environment around enterprise social software has exploded in a fury of innovation, acquisition and integration. As evidence, check out the chart below, which shows all of the new features and capabilities that have been added to Oracle Social Cloud in that timeframe.
I offer that brief bit of history to bring context to a lesson I believe CMOs and CIOs should take to heart: yesterday’s enterprise social strategy won’t work today, and today’s won’t work tomorrow. Why? Well, let’s examine a few core principles of the social environment.
Social is global. It’s important to realize that at least 75% of the traffic on Facebook and Twitter comes from outside the United States. To borrow a phrase, the world is flat. It’s a global marketplace, thanks in part to social networking, and brands are launching globally. No matter what type it is or where it’s located, a company today needs to have a presence that scales globally.
That’s where social marketing can play an important role. Social takes marketing global—but only if the capability is built in. That capability includes, for example, support for multiple languages, including idioms and slang, and for multiple social platforms, such as
Social is ubiquitous. At work, employees want to use the same tools, and have the same online experiences, they have in their personal lives: content sharing, newsfeeds, messaging, etc. Similarly, customers want to interact with their vendors the same way they interact with their friends. Today’s consumers don’t buy products; they invest in brands. And they don’t want to interact with a department; they want to do business with a peer.
In terms of enterprise strategy, social entered by way of the marketing department but is rapidly extending its reach across organizations’ various divisions. For example, human resource managers have realized that they can use social capability to help retain their best employees as well as to
Social is real-time. Twitter upped the ante in terms of the time element involved in social networking. In the Twitter-sphere, conversations begin, explode and trail off in what seems like the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, the damage to a company’s reputation incurred from a negative Twitter blast can last a very long time.
Learn To Listen
Early in my career, I was a big fan of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of those habits is especially relevant to social marketing: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
That translates to “listening” to the interaction going on in the social environment before imposing a marketing message from the outside. Social marketing technology can provide the capability to tap into digital conversations as they proliferate throughout the online world.
The flip side of the real-time imperative means reacting to social media interaction in a very timely manner. According to social media research, almost half of the customers who call out their vendors on Twitter expect to be responded to within an hour; a third, within 30 minutes.
Those are the elements of the social environment as it has evolved over the last few years. Enterprise technology, for its part, has mostly kept up. For instance, the roadmap referenced earlier represents social technology capability in the areas of analytics, content management, listening, media buying, publishing, response management and sentiment analysis. In terms of global reach, the technology’s administrative tools and user interfaces support more than 30 languages; sentiment analysis covers more than a dozen languages, including parsing slang.
Even if your social strategy today incorporates many of these capabilities, the enterprise social landscape is going to maintain its rapid pace of evolution and innovation. For instance, the industry will continue to focus on engagement with customers and consumers—not on “likes” or “followers” but on features that drive deeper relationships.
At Oracle, the imperative of real-time marketing is pushing our roadmap toward more collaboration and integration. There is an effort toward more congruency across strategic technology areas, for example between our social cloud and our marketing cloud.
Which points to an important recommendation on how best to embrace the evolving market for enterprise social software: through the cloud. A cloud-based approach to social technology will allow your organization to exploit current capabilities while positioning it to take advantage of that rapid pace of innovation.
Ultimately, the goal is to really leverage the social environment, to make it an integral part of your communication strategy. It’s a dynamic environment that is growing and changing as we participate; your company’s social strategy must be dynamic, flexible and forward looking in the same way.
Reggie Bradford is Senior Vice President, Product Development, Oracle.
Click timeline above for high-resolution image. Source: Oracle
