How can new media technology help in cost reduction in an organization.

If you consider social media as a set of overlapping circles with special interests, there are millions of such circles that enterprises are trying to penetrate to market their products and services. Social media easily reaches target customers; the penetration of social media is much more effective than conventional marketing. The cost of marketing is low, interaction with the target audience is global, and products can be defined and refined in real time, based on customer needs.

The social circles are goldmines for ideas and information that can be turned into potential business opportunities. For example, customers enquiring about a particular feature or talking about certain features in a product might help organizations to understand the market requirements and bring out the exact products users ask for. The return on investment on social media-based marketing is high enough for enterprises to embrace. For example, Proctor & Gamble (P&G) believes that using new media rather than traditional media can help it save up a lot of money.

Also enterprises realize that the voice of their customers reverberating through these circles can make or break their business. One instance of negative feedback online reaches out to millions and can spoil the party in a much faster way than letting customers express their grievance through the conventional issue tracking system. For example, when a disgruntled passenger with United Airlines posted a song on YouTube (4 million hits in just ten days), it caused enough dent to the company’s reputation. The bad public relation caused United Airlines stock price to plunge by 10%, costing shareholders $180 million. On the other hand, great feedback fetches loyal customers—again in millions. Old Spice launched their campaign in social media sites to rejuvenate the image and drive sales of new products. The total campaign cost of about  1 million increased their sales by more than  20 million. So it has now become imperative for the enterprises to invest in these social circles.

 Some enterprises have taken the use of social media a step further—including it in their development processes. These enterprises have replaced status reports, meetings, brainstorming sessions, and so on, with instant new media because they cost less than the conventional conference calls. Of course, new media cannot completely replace face-to-face meetings and teleconferences, but these new media can replace day-to-day routine calls. Apart from monetary benefits to the organization, employees find the well-documented, recorded, social posts more reliable than physical meetings. At  Technologies, we asked one of our teams to do away with stand up calls and post their daily agile development status in a chat group instead. Later, when we considered returning to the conventional reporting system, the team members opposed the idea. They wanted to continue with Chatter because this social media tool made it easy to post their status in a centralized location, it was easy to understand, made it possible to leverage each other’s work, avoided daily emails referencing the status, and reduced the gap in understanding the deliverable early in the development cycle. In addition, global teams improved their work-life balance because they could post the status at their convenience.

BY JOSHUA HELENA M.

BAPRM 42571