By M. Isi Eromosele

Social media is global, mobile, networked and spreading. Digital communication is fast evolving as social networking platforms proliferate. Consumer adoption and usage of social media and related technologies have soared to astronomical proportions on a global basis. With the above in mind, it is imperative that companies make the cultivation of their customers and collaboration with them top priorities in the implementation of their marketing campaigns.

Social media tools are bringing brands and their customers together in new and innovative ways that are creating deep and lasting changes in the building of interactive relationships. In the process, companies are now utilizing social networking and web tools such as blogs and social networking sites to engender collaboration with their customers. Increasingly, they are enlarging their audience scope by building communities and providing interactive tools that facilitate internal and external collaboration between their brands and customers.

To advance further, these companies need to use social networking tools to actively engage their customers to transform communications from a one-way broadcast to two-way conversations. This would enable them to meet a broad range of objectives, such as improved marketing campaigns, demonstrated thought leadership, collection of market intelligence, generation of leads and driving of web traffic, among others. Social media and networking tools should become an integral part of an organization’s marketing and communications initiatives.

There is an absolute need for social media tools and platforms to be flawlessly integrated with an organization’s business and technology infrastructure and applications. The business applications should be automated so that employees can be connected to a centralized system that facilitates the transmission of transactional data between the company and its customers. The automated business applications should be closely aligned with the communications tools they use. This greatly enhances the collaboration process.

It is apparent that the tools and complexity of social media will continue to evolve and deeply influence the way brands and customers relate to one another, moving forward. Organizations that choose to ignore this trend or ignore the power and impact of social networks will encounter diminished market share and loss of customers. Forward looking companies need to support and benefit from the collaboration that social networks and linked tools provide to them. Ignoring the increased use of social networking tools leaves companies at the risk of having their reputation misrepresented.

Organizations could empower themselves to new levels of innovation by integrating social media tools into their enterprises. They need to pay attention to the following trends:

• Integration of multiple collaborative tools will help form the evolution of new delivery channels
• The organization will become more transparent to its target audience
• More meaningful and profitable connections will be cultivated with segmented audiences

In order to accrue maximum business benefits, organizations must use underpinning technology to refine social networks to make them secure, integrate them into the corporate architecture and support processes to provide expected business results. The goal would be to design a collaborative architecture which would lessen the risks linked to social networking, which would then enable the building of a customer friendly environment that seamlessly facilitate real-time interactions.

It is imperative that organizations understand the necessary relationship between business, operations, internal culture and technology underpinning and how their integration can bring about optimal collaboration, which would drive optimal business achievement.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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