MANILA, Philippines -- Three years ago, the hash (#) was no more than the button you pressed to get to the next set of instructions on an automated phone system. Today, with the invention of the hashtag, it has moved up the echelons of social consciousness to become part of everyday vernacular as 175 million Twitter users use it to mark keywords in their tweets. The use o f social-esque technologies in business is not new. Over the last decade, many companies have invested in enterprise instant messaging and virtual team spaces. This has contributed to the development of what many are calling “social businesses”. A social business is one that leverages the opportunities created from consumer-side models such as Facebook and Twitter to tackle business challenges. With a social framework, an organization will be able to empower its sales force, discover new ways to identify expertise, and establish deeper levels of trust with its customers.

Redefining Competition

There are many successful stories from the United States and Europe, where the use of social media and social technologies has become essential to marketing and branding. In these mature markets, social media is radically reshaping the way businesses compete.

In the UK, London-based online fashion retailer ASOS manages a twitter account, @ASOS, that it uses to inform its 80,500 (and growing) followers of discounts. On a typical business day, it tweets between three to seven times. It also maintains a subaccount, @ASOS_HeretoHelp, which serves as an issue resolution channel between customers and its helpdesk.

Through this live channel, refunds and exchanges can be made quickly and easily. Conversations between the retailer and its customers are public and trackable, which adds discipline in the way the company responds to queries. This has helped the organization to create a consistent online voice, which in turn develops consumer trust and advocacy over time.

Is Asia Ready?

While no one denies the growing impact of social media in our lives, the question being asked today is this: Are businesses in Asia ready to evolve into social businesses?

A 2010 study by Burson-Marsteller found that only 18 percent of the top 200 Asian companies have an active corporate social media presence. The same study also revealed that information pushing, as opposed to stakeholder engagement, has been the primary use of social media in Asian businesses (this, according to “Few Asian Firms Dabble in Social Media,” “Marketing Magazine Asia,” November 2, 2010).

Unfortunately today, social media remains often an afterthought as opposed to a key component of marketing and communications. A business might use its Facebook page to inform its fans about one-off online contests and giveaways, but that would be as far as where the engagement ends.

Yet, social media offers huge opportunities for organizations to take business to the next level–far beyond publicity generation via a few tweets. Simply using social media and technologies in surface level marketing activities does not turn a company into a social business. It requires a strategic approach and conscious decision to use these platforms and content to connect people and information, make innovation accessible, and demonstrate clearly to customers that the company is really listening to them.

Changing the Game by Combining Analytics with Social Business Tools

According to IDC Asia-Pacific, a game-changing development has emerged for enterprises in Asia to make smoother transitions into becoming true social businesses. “Socialytics”, an IDC-coined term, refers to the genre of apps that fuses social and collaboration software with business analytics into a single solution.

These new and upcoming socialytics apps will give enterprise users the tools they need to monitor and analyze data created in Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, blogs, and more. For instance, the recent social media upgrade of SPSS, a set of data and predictive analytics tools from IBM, will enable companies to incorporate text sources from various social media into predictive models. By analyzing sentiment in social media, companies will be able to predict consumer trends, understand how customers are responding to their products, and ultimately make better business decisions.

The ‘Legacy’ of a New Generation

Social media conversions are happening right now, every day. As the Millennial generation (a.k.a. Gen Y), fed on a diet of social media, leave school or assume greater responsibilities in workplace, they take along with them a new legacy of social media awareness.

Just to make a point , the Philippines is ranked as the 8th largest country on Facebook with 21,560,240 users as of March 2011 according to www.socialbakers.com. That’s 21.58 percent of the whole Philippine population and 72.59 percent of all Filipinos online.

Given these trends, ignoring or refusing to participate in the social transformation is not a viable strategy. Even in organizations that impose a blanket ban on social media activities due to security reasons, enforcing control is often difficult, since these can be easily bypassed with the use of 3G phones and handheld tablets.

Rather than pretend that social media does not exist and run the risk of obsolesce or confidentiality breaches from ignorance, it’s perhaps more prudent for organizations to embrace social media in a controlled and secure environment that fosters informat ion sharing amongst authorized employees. Organizations should also consider extending their networks to bring customers into their social connections.

Undeniabl y, s o c i a l medi a represents a fundamental shift in the way businesses interact with their employees, stakeholders, and customers. An essent ial requirement, as Asia greets the dawn of social business, is the new and unprecedented ability to adapt to its ebb and flow.

Ferdinand Macatangay is Lotus Brand Manager, Software Group, of IBM Philippines.