Social Media & Business Organizations 2011 – Emerging Markets leading Adoption

According to a report from KPMG International, more than 70% of organizations across the globe are active on social media and businesses in the emerging markets are leading in social media adoption compared to mature markets due to fall in cost of internet and devices. Social media is being used by business organizations for customer relationship management, engaging employees and other stakeholders in the organization innovation process for developing new product and services and improving the existing ones. Businesses too have realized that there are risks associated with social media engagement and are looking for ways to reduce the risk and use social media to improve their brand image and organization reputation. Organizations are also training employees about social media usage and are told to strictly adhere to the specific social media policies and rules formulated by the respective companies which also help them to reduce the risks associated with social media engagement. The policy should be clearly communicated to all the stakeholders and without a clear social media engagement policy it will be disastrous for the business organizations.

4,000 employees including 1800 managers in major markets gave their feedback and the research found that organizations are still underestimating the benefits of social media but 80% of businesses with an active social media program said they had seen and measured the benefits of social media engagement. Businesses are using analytical software to monitor their social media presence and are also trying to measure the ROI in the social media engagements. Job satisfaction of the employees has been better in organizations with open policies on social media as they feel motivated and valued for their engagement and they voice their opinions freely through the social media channels and there is no point in restricting employees to access social media as they will find ways to go around the firewalls and still use them. Moreover employees are bringing their own devices like the smartphones and mobile phones with internet access to the workplace and companies have no control over them. Employees don’t know that organizations are monitoring their social media activities and face severe consequences of loosing their jobs for wrongly using the social media platforms. KPMG suggests businesses and organizations to actively listen to the opinions and feedback on various social media platforms and accordingly engage and develop their social media strategy.