Impacting the Bottom Line with Social Integration by Paul Kim – Profit Magazine, Oracle Corporation

From the early days of social media, business and industry have seen a great deal of potential for targeted marketing. While doing digital marketing in the social media space has become mainstream, companies are starting to ask very practical questions: they may have many followers and “likes,” and capture great customer insight on a real-time basis, but why doesn’t their success in social media impact their bottom line?

The nature of the challenge of capitalizing on social media lies in the fundamental mechanism of the way business has been operating for centuries: business is not a silo, but a highly complicated web of functions and processes across the entire value chain. So, the data companies capture from social media—in terms of customer, market, supplier, and partner insight, or even talent recruiting pools—should be able to navigate well through the entire business activity value chain or life: from marketing to sales to finance and analysis, and then back to marketing. Many companies whose business practice in social media is driven by a point solution end up with another silo of data sets. The question is how to effectively incorporate social into their business practice in sales, commerce, human resources, supplier and partner management, and other enterprise functions.

Typical challenges in capitalizing on social:

Siloed customer data from the point solution approach
Difficulties in leveraging customer and market insight for bottom-line impact

Companies can answer this question by taking an integrated social capability approach, using an integrated platform for their solution and eliminating silos of data from the social media space. With an integrated platform, data from social monitoring in shared with the customer relationship management (CRM), commerce, and business analytics systems. For example, real-time social monitoring data on customer sentiment and marketing awareness from Twitter can be automatically used for targeted marketing campaigns on Facebook along the workflow, and integrated with the CRM system for campaign management.

The opportunities from integrated social capability:

Integrated customer insight data across sales, commerce, marketing, analytics, and other crucial business functionalities

Capability for rapid innovation with social media

An integrated social media platform can enhance marketing campaign effectiveness, help improve brand building across the enterprise, and make a real impact on sales and the bottom line. Integrated social capability brings another great benefit by keeping the enterprise updated with the latest innovations in social media. Sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are constantly innovating and updating their collaboration tools, content-sharing formats, etc. With integrating social capability, customers do’t need to change business functions in sales or marketing to catch up with these changes.

In today’s much-hyped world of social media marketing, integrated social capability can make a direct and positive impact on the business.

Paul Kim is senior director of Insight and Customer Strategy at Oracle.
read more at: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/profit/current-issue/big-ideas/042213-pkim-1937901.html