Week 4

Social technology earns benefit?

People around the world are availing the benefits of social technologies in their personal and professional both lives. Social technologies have made social interactions within the organization among employees or outside the organization with the buddies and relatives very convenient and fast. The use of social technologies is not limited to the share of information in corporate culture or in the personal lives of people. Rather, today they are being used for political movements, for selling of products or for marketing purpose. Millions of information is shared through these social media platforms world widely.  Few benefits reported in 2009-2011 survey are mentioned in below chart.

Companies use this forum to reach targeted customers in various unique ways like they can create solicited messages after obtaining information about the consumer or corporate clients. With proper insight of customers, organization can better target them and can better exploit the needs of its customers to make sale to them.

However, it has been observed by Gartner, Inc. that by the end of 2015, 80% of efforts made by social technologies will not be in good directions and hence, will not be achieving expected benefits due to wrong supervision and over reliance on technology. Carol Rozwell, Vice president, Gartner Inc. said, “Businesses need to realize that social initiatives are different from previous technology deployments”. He differentiated between the push and pull approach of using technology, according to these technologies if employees were trained for conventional technology like ERP or CRM then they are expected to follow “push” approach like they are trained and then they will use these technologies. On contrary, on social networks, social initiatives are required “pull” paradigm included continuously innovative methods and ways of keeping workers engaged and make efforts towards improving the ways to work. In the second case, organization cannot force their employees to use this technology rather; they can only be opted by employees themselves.