Communications and Technology Industry Research

Social media are growing exponentially and can no longer be sidelined. Even corporate entities are waking up to the fact that they need to use it to their advantage by shifting their perspective and treating social channels not like advertising channels but more like communication channels. At least, that's what IDC (News - Alert), in its annual 2012 study, urges businesses to do.

Organizations are able to increase productivity and improve knowledge, as they use Facebook , Twitter and YouTube (News - Alert) to share best practices and expertise. Apparently, however, there's much more that can be done.

For instance, the study points out that retailers are making strong investments and those that succeed are the ones that have integrated their mobile, analytic, and social media strategies into a single approach.

Merely advertising the company's brand on the social media is no longer sufficient, the study noted, for businesses need to humanize the brand and engage the social media to manage, track posts regularly to increase awareness about the product, services and everything that customers ought to know.

Customers need to be kept satisfied and happy and the most popular and easiest way of doing so is to deliver personalized offers direct to a consumer's mobile device and use the social media to market the company's products, offer CRM and customer support in near real-time.

"Industries that are consumer focused such as communications, media, and recreational services are spending a larger percentage of their IT budget on social media as it is easy for them to make the shift to adopting the way consumers communicate," said Eileen Smith, program manager, Global Technology (News - Alert) and Industry Research Organization at IDC.

IDC conducts an annual vertical view survey to understand the needs across 24 industries. The present study, conducted from February to March, is the first in a series of presentations on emerging technologies and IT trends.

The study highlights the adoption of social media as an emerging technology across six vertical markets and revealed that B2C companies, rather that B2B companies were actually responsible for driving social media adoption.

IDC noted that companies, especially B2B, are not taking full advantage of the communications aspect of social media and are using it just to gather feedback or push brand messaging across to a wide audience and this needed to change.

TMCnet reported that DotNetNuke (News - Alert) released its DotNetNuke 6.2 product, which helps companies create the foundations of a social network, one that can be adapted to meet individual organizations needs.

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