Today, we are seeing major changes in the way people use IT both at home and at work.
Recent figures show that for the first time ever, social networks are more popular in the UK than search engines. In May 2010, Experian Hitwise UK found that social networks accounted for 11.88% of UK Internet visits with search engines accounting for just 11.33%. The trend is even more pronounced for mobile users. According to a February 2010 study from the GSM Association and Comscore, Facebook dominates UK mobile use, with nearly half of all smartphone browsing time (2.2 billion minutes) spent on the site.
This shift is happening not just in the domestic environment but also in the business world. A recent poll carried out by market research company OnePoll into the workplace habits of over 1,000 UK office workers found that nearly half of them (46%) use social media at work every day. This presents an opportunity for businesses to take advantage of this trend and drive productivity in the workplace by providing a model that allows employees to work together more efficiently in real-time.
Today, we are seeing the emergence of a new approach, which we call Cloud 2. This approach takes all of the core benefits of the first wave of cloud computing including ease-of-use, reduced upfront capital expense and maintenance costs, speed of upgrade and enhanced mobility and adds to it all the advantages of social networking and real-time access to information.
SMEs are best placed to benefit. Hard-pressed senior managers within these organisations are today focused above all else on growth, profitability and competitiveness. With little time for close engagement with colleagues or customers, they have historically struggled to keep on top of everything going on within their companies.
All SME employees will be familiar with the frustration of constantly missing out on critical internal information because existing collaboration tools are complicated and require users to do most of the work searching out information relevant to their daily needs.
The arrival of Cloud 2, and with it a more structured approach to social media in the workplace, is set to change all this.
Today, a new generation of real-time, social and mobile tools is emerging, which will provide a solution to many of the daily challenges SMEs will be familiar with.
One key benefit is the ability to pull a team together quickly and efficiently. These tools allow managers within SMEs to quickly identify the most appropriate selection of employees for a given business activity. Real-time feeds also allow employees to stay abreast of everything that matters to them, with personalised updates from people, applications and documents.
Employees can seek expert advice across departments, share and download updated documents and the latest collateral. Teams can work together on fast-moving items, such as sales leads, customer projects, customer support issues and marketing campaigns, with greater efficiency.
Just as important, the real-time collaboration supported by this new approach enables staff to reduce the time previously wasted searching through in-boxes or on file servers for important business documents or content.
All these benefits mean we are likely to see a revolution in the attitudes of businesses to social media. These organisations already see social networking more as opportunity rather than threat. And as the approach gathers momentum, growing numbers of SMEs will first switch to the new approach and then start reaping the rewards.
Steve Garnett is the chairman EMEA at Salesforce.com
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