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Six collective human behaviors that lead to enterprise value
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 02 March 2011, 10:14 IST
Bangalore: The research firm Gartner analyzes that many social media efforts are failing because some enterprises just don't understand how to employ social media to facilitate collective behaviors. Through the use of mass collaboration at scales previously unachievable, social media technologies have greatly enhanced the business value of collective behavior. Enterprises can employ these collective behaviors as the link between business value and social media technologies.
"Social media is not an end in and of itself - it is an enabler," said Anthony Bradley, Group Vice President at Gartner. "Social media technologies are tools and, like any technology, it is how people use those tools that delivers enterprise results."
"Enterprises that understand the importance of harnessing the power of collective behaviors to drive positive business change will be the ultimate winners with social media," said Bradley.
These tools can be used to examine a target community and formulate new ways that people can interact to achieve enterprise value. By understanding the most prevalent technologies, collaborative behaviors, business use cases and business value for six collective behaviors, enterprises can more effectively plan for successful community-based social media initiatives. The six collective behaviors include:
1. Enable collective intelligence for operational effectiveness
Collective intelligence is the meaningful assembly of relatively small and incremental community contributions into a larger and coherent accumulation of knowledge. Enterprises looking to improve internal operational effectiveness through enhanced collaboration, especially around product delivery, customer service and creation of a corporate memory, should examine employing blogs and wikis. Pursuing collective intelligence to achieve operational effectiveness is one of the most successful social media adoption trends.
2. Employ expertise location for sales effectiveness
Expertise location involves specific expertise from the masses of people and among the often staggering amount of available content. Enterprises should look into the potential of social networking to enable expertise location behaviors associated with product delivery, product utilization and customer service. The research shows a strong CRM-related social media adoption pattern in employing social networks for expertise locations.
3. Unearth emergent structures for operational effectiveness
Emergent structures are structures that are unknown or unplanned prior to social interactions but emerge as activity progresses. The goal of emergent structures is to gain insight into the true "nature of things" to more effectively organize, manage or interact with a community. Enterprises advancing their use of social media should explore emergent structures as a means to better understand how organizations actually behave and accomplish work.
4. Increase sales through interest cultivation
Interest cultivation is the collecting of people and content around a common interest, with the goal of growing the community of interested people and increasing their level of engagement. Enterprises pursuing social media for brand awareness and sales effectiveness should employ social media to foster mass interest cultivation.
5. Engage in mass coordination for rapid response
Mass coordination involves rapidly organizing the activities of a large number of people through fast and short mass messaging that is often spread virally. By effectively employing mass coordination, enterprises can more rapidly marshal a powerful response to an important occurrence. However, mass coordination is an emerging collective behavior and comes with the risks associated with immaturity.
6. Build Relationship Leverage for Brand Awareness
Enterprises pursuing social media for brand awareness and sales effectiveness should examine the potential of the relationship leverage collective behavior. Facilitating relationship leverage experience benefits in brand awareness and customer engagement and relationship leverage is often a cost-effective and lower-risk social media effort.
Gartner conducted a 10-month effort collecting data and analyzing 200 successful social media implementations to identify how enabling collective human behaviors can lead to enterprise value.
