Becoming socially enabled a major priority for firms, says Oracle

Social business has been a buzzword for some time but new research from Oracle has shown that becoming a socially-enabled organisation is a key priority for business executives.

The global survey of more than 900 marketing and technology executives looked at the challenges and opportunities of integrating social technologies and practices and found a staggering 97% believe it’s important for organisations to become socially-enabled enterprises.

Additionally, 72% said that leveraging social media will be very important for their organization’s future success.

So what stages are businesses currently at in the social business transition and what kind of organisations are leading the pack? According to the survey, larger firms are faring better – 46% of organizations with 50,000+ employees claimed that they are already socially enabled, compared to nearly one third of companies with less than 5,000 employees.

And for those that are socially-enabled, measuring performance is still very much in its infancy with marketing metrics, such as awareness, customer satisfaction, and share of voice, the most widely used, followed by lead generation and sales and new product development.

But change is, of course, never easy. The survey showed that 43% of executives expect that it will take their organizations more than a year to truly leverage social throughout their businesses.

Meg Bear, group VP of Oracle Social Cloud Platform, said: “By weaving social capabilities into the fabric of their daily operations, organizations can achieve significant improvements in areas ranging from marketing and sales to customer service and employee collaboration.

“As this study shows, business executives now understand that creating a socially enabled enterprise can create better customer experiences, enable more responsive internal networks and drive organizational efficiencies. This combination gives organizations of all sizes a significant competitive advantage.”

Meanwhile, Oracle quizzed respondents on their attitude to social customer service and found that 60% of those surveyed plan to social business metrics into customer care initiatives in the next 12 months.

MyCustomer.com’s recent series on social customer service examined the current state of social service, as well as outlining how to build a social customer service strategy and the tools to help you make your initiative a reality.