McKinsey

How Social Technologies unlock value and productivity in the social economy

McKinsey&Company has led the charge in studying the impact of social technologies on business. In this seminal July 2012 148 page report entitled “The Social Economy” the McKinsey Global Institute lays out a bold series of predictions and benchmarks the current state of 2012. McKinsey publishes annual reports and special reports on the state of social business and social technologies. You may find an excerpt here of the January 2015 Survey Transforming the Business through Social Tools. The entire 148 report from 2012 is excerpted by McKinsey is a 4MB PDF so it is way too long to cover here! You can find a PDF of The Social Economy here. Of particular note are these two exhibits below.

Social Technologies are Pervasive

The point I would like to make is that Social Technologies are pervasive. Although many organizations start out thinking about PR and Marketing, the fact is that social technologies can aid an organization in almost any organizational or management process. As people in general incorporate social technologies into their personal lives the internal adoption of social business technologies becomes easier. You also do not have to pick PR or Marketing as a place to start implementation of social technologies. In fact, I would argue that it might be better to work on internal uses of social technologies to help bring the organization up-to-speed and develop competency prior to developing external facing practices. Not sure? Let’s talk.

Social Businesses can broadly utilize Social Technologies

McKinsey Global Institute proposes that there are at least ten ways that social technologies can add value to organizational and management process. Ten is simply a starting point. There are two types of people in the world, lumpers and splitters. If you disagree you are a splitter. MGI has lumped together 10 areas of approach. There are as many areas to tackle as you have organizational processes. The question is how to identify a use case that will help your organization develop social technologies. How can we measure the impact and value add of the social technologies? How we can manage the change management processes? How can we broaden the adoption of social technologies throughout the organization? These are all excellent questions. Companies that have been early adopters of of Social Business are well past answering these questions and instead are quickly and pervasively broadening out their use! Want to get started? Call me.

McKinsey&Company Survey on Social Business Tools

McKinsey publishes an annual survey on the effect of social technologies on business. The January 2015 survey is entitled:Transforming the business through social tools. Some conclusions of note:

• Adoption of Social Technologies is becoming commonplace.
• It is still difficult to measure the impact and value of using social tools
• Early adopters are seeing disproportionate value and extending their use

As seen above, early adopters of social technology, those well on their way to becoming a Social Business, are finding unexpected impacts to how their business runs! As knowledge workers incorporate social technologies into their day-to-day the impact accelerates. As McKinsey states in their survey:

To achieve this impact and increased productivity across the entire business, most companies must become better at engaging more employees, customers, and external partners through social tools, then capturing new benefits and measuring them in a systematic way. At the companies seeing the greatest benefits from social interactions, respondents are much likelier than others to say these tools are highly integrated into all processes, not only their sales-and-marketing activities.

The Future of Social Business is Bright

McKinsey concludes that the vast majority of organizations, seventy two percent, are increasing their investments in social technologies. With that said, nearly all of the executives surveyed believe that social technologies are transformative yielding positive changes to organizational processes and management processes. There are a wide variety of expected impacts. I suspect this is due to how and where an organization started implementing social technologies. The important thing to note is that the early adopters are seeing increasing impacts and accelerating the use of social technologies. The adoption of social technologies creates a virtuous, positive feedback cycle and the rich get richer. McKinsey “looks ahead” and offers this advice:

• Start with a Focused Approach
  • Nominate a specific use case and implement for success
  • Broaden out once you’ve established a center of excellence
• Build in Metrics
  • Benchmark existing practices
  • Development a measurement framework to then track how social technologies improve upon “as is”
• Realize it is a Change Management Effort
  • Social Technologies will change how people work with each other
  • Good old fashioned OE or Organization Effectiveness processes can be used in conjunction with the rollout of social technologies to aid the the implementation

Read the full survey by McKinsey&Company by clicking through the PDF Survey McKinsey Transforming the business through social tools or contect me to discuss your Social Business needs!