Video: Social media: the voyage of discovery for business 

Social media: the voyage of discovery for business
Social media, as we know, has been growing enormously in use with the general public over the last few years. Facebook, Twitter, and others, phenomenal growth around the world and Australia’s been no different.

And in fact in terms of usage, Australians spend as much or more time on Facebook than any other country in the world. So from a business point of view, you really want to be out there and spending time engaging with your customers, your audience, because that’s where they’re spending their time.

So KPMG undertook some research on external use of social media within business as we see it in Australia today. And what we found was actually under half of Australian businesses currently have an active social media presence. So there’s a fair gap to bridge between what business is currently doing and where their customers are spending their time.

So we wanted to undertake some research to find out why people have not yet started on that journey, and possibly more importantly, to see what lessons can be learnt from people who’ve already been on that journey.

How are Australian businesses using social media?
From an external point-of-view, social media has many uses and one of them of course is in your whole marketing and sales proposition. And it needs to though not just be a straight replication of what you do in other channels.

It needs to be something that’s specific to social media and that works in the same idiom as consumers act in that space. The language for example is clearly different when you’re in Twitter you only got 140 characters. So you have to use the mode of conversation that your customers will use.

One of the big areas of social media from an external point-of- view is around recruitment. LinkedIn in particular is a very efficient way of recruiters, be they from in-house in your organisation, or through an agency, to get a much broader reach and access to candidates than they would of had previously just from internal databases.

Our research found three main reasons why more organisations are not using social media.
The first one was a concern that it might be resource heavy. The second one was a general risk aversion and concern about possible downside risks and the third was a lack of management buy- in. We think all of these things can certainly be overcome particularly if you stage your entry put appropriate risk controls around the way that you enter and just start with small steps.

What should organisations consider when starting their social media journey?
The first thing that we would recommend, and the survey certainly backs up, is just go and listen. You can go and listen to people in social media without an obligation to respond. It can be very enlightening, it can be very challenging for a lot of people obviously it’s not going to be positive, everything you hear. But you do need to just go there and listen.

A strong message that we got from our survey, which was interview as well as quantitative survey, was just go out an experiment. It doesn’t need to be a massive change to the organisation you don’t need a major strategy to do it. Just go out there and experiment with something.

Another critical learning from this is that it is absolutely inevitable that you won’t get everything right the first time. Mistakes will happen but that’s a part of the process and it’s not a reason to put it off. In fact we would say that the biggest risk is actually not doing anything.

How can KPMG help?
KPMG works with clients in all phases of the social media journey. So from those who haven’t yet started who really just want to know more about trends and role models in their sector either locally or around the world. To others who are just ready to take the first step.

So they just want to go on that listening journey. But they want to put a framework around that and constrain the resources not get too deeply in too quickly. To others who are much more mature and actually are now making it an embedded part of their overall go-to-market strategy or their customer support strategy and putting the IT infrastructure and everything else that’s required around that, process change, change management. That’s for really mature organisations.

Where to next?
So as we know social media is a very large and permanent part of the landscape now. People of all ages are using it. They’re using it very actively and for long periods. They gain a lot of information from it. They form a lot of judgements from it. They make references from it, they make recommendations from it. You absolutely cannot afford not to be in it as a business certainly if you have any sort of business to consumer environment.

The biggest risk we would see is not being in it at all.