Since the early days of ARPAnet, the internet has reshaped the way that business and outsourcing is conducted, creating vast distribution channels, an instantaneous autonomous medium for the dissemination of private and corporate messages, as well as exponentially expanding the human capacity for networking on personal and professional levels.
“Everything has become highly time sensitive and as a result you now have to make business decisions much more rapidly” Says Xinquan Zhu – Associate Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney. “The whole world connects through Optic Fibres… because of the speed, because of the convenience it is changing the way that companies are doing their business”
The biggest change in the last 5 years has been the mass adoption of social media in the business arena. Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Blogs, Vlogs and the like, have all given companies (big and small) access to an exponentially large audience and the ability to connect with customers and other stakeholders on individual and mass levels.
From an outsourcing perspective this has also lead to a much more dominant digital sector in the BPO world, as well as the development of new service offerings based on an identified need and increased demand.
“10 years ago it was only websites that got outsourced. We’ve seen a boom in digital, and today we see that in addition to website maintenance, companies are allocating a great amount of their marketing budgets to the creation and ongoing maintenance of corporate social media profiles” Said Martin Conboy, Director of Outsourcing company FooBoo Online.
While it is possible to monitor social activity in-house, new services such as Social Network Listening are making it easier to manage online corporate identity and present new found business advantages.
Social Media industry specialist and researcher at UTS, Suresh Sood, said “Listening is the first step, it will give you some of the mechanisms, the next steps, to create actions. No matter what size of business, you must be prepared to listen. A social Network listening service can give us information flows that allow us to act immediately after we see the information.”
Conboy, Sood and Zhu, all strongly believe that the social media revolution will continue to change international business operations. The current point to point system that is in widespread use will potentially be superseded by a network to network model that will form the basis for “human computing” – the process where, instead of the individual, groups of people (such as organizations, companies or common-interest groups) operate as a single informational organism designed to work towards a common goal.
“Social media will become the giant as it morphs with commerce” Said Mr Sood. “We’ve moved to a many-to-many model [of communication] and the mechanism to enable that is social technologies”
While the move to a network-to-network model has started, it is an art that is far from perfected. Over the coming years we are sure to experience a ‘fine tuning’ of social practices in the business arena that will lead to a dominant new economy and a complete overhaul of standard business practices as we know them.
Great story and we are in full agreement with your conclusions regarding the phenomenal power of social media. The visual story component is vital and underscored by the fact that Youtube is now the world’s second largest search engine. Social media has created a paradigm shift for marketers who are struggling to come to terms with the fact that they (and their advertising) are not welcome in this largely private world. This is the strategy driving new social media tools like BRAND STORIES™. The concept is simple, brand stories are seamlessly woven into a mini-movie designed to entertain and be virally ‘sneezed-on’ by a particular audience. It is literally an on-line Trojan Horse built around great entertainment.
Despite all the hype around about expertise in the new social media phenomenon, nobody else is doing what Reedcomm are with Brand Stories. And few people have the creative ability and cross over experience across brand marketing and narrative driven story telling for the screen. Find out more and see sample brand stories on line at reedcomm’s facebook page: to view: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Reedcomm/3
Apologies but the facebook link I sent earlier is incorrect Should be: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Reedcomm/362543961827
thanks !! very helpful post!
Good article. There is absolutely no doubt that the developments on the Internet is changing what is possible when it comes to outsourcing. In our field, publishing outsourcing, you can say that outsourcing would be completely impossible without the last 10 years of digital development.
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