Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President, Oracle 

On September 13, 2012, I sat down with Altimeter Analyst Jeremiah Owyang to talk about how enterprise businesses are approaching the management of both their social media strategies and internal structures.

There’s no longer any question as to whether companies are adopting social full throttle. That’s exactly the way it should be, because it’s a top online behavior across all age groups. For your consumers, it’s an ingrained, normal form of communication.

And beyond connecting with friends, social users are reaching out for information and service from brands. Jeremiah tells us 29% of Twitter followers follow a brand and 58% of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand. Even on the B2B side, people act on reviews and recommendations.

Just as in the early 90’s we saw companies move from static to dynamic web sites, businesses of all sizes are moving from just establishing a social presence to determining effective and efficient ways to use it. I like to say we’re in the 2^nd or 3^rd inning of a 9-inning game. Corporate social started out as a Facebook page, it’s multiple channels servicing customers wherever they are. Social is also moving from merely moderating to analyzing so that the signal can be separated from the noise, so that impactful influencers can be separated from other users.

Organizationally, social started with the marketers. Now we’re getting into social selling, commerce, service, HR, recruiting, and collaboration. That’s Oracle’s concept of enterprise social relationship management, a framework to extend social across the entire organization real-time in as holistic a way as possible.

Social requires more corporate coordination than ever before. One of my favorite statistics is that the average corporation at enterprise has 178 social accounts, according to Altimeter. Not all of them active, not all of them necessary, but 178 of them. That kind of fragmentation creates risk, so the smarter companies will look for solutions (as opposed to tools) that can organize, scale and defragment, as well as quickly integrate other networks and technologies that will come along.

Our conversation goes deep into the various corporate social structures we’re seeing, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. There are also a couple of great examples of how known brands used an integrated, holistic approach to achieve stated social goals.

What’s especially exciting to me is the Oracle SRM framework for the enterprise provides companywide integration into one seamless system. This is not a dream. This is going to have substantial business impact in the next several years.