Assessing the Benefits of Social Networks for Organizations - Report on the first phase of the SEA-SoNS Project

The first phase of the SEA-SoNS ("Assessing the Benefits of Social Networks on Organizations) project aimed to analyse the current market situation for a limited number of social media stakeholders, to identify and analyse best practices for these selected stakeholders, and to define and prioritise relevant policy options. It was observed that while social media technologies present several potential benefits to organisations, there are considerable challenges and bottlenecks affecting adoption that may warrant policy intervention. To accomplish the objective of developing suitable policy options, the project undertook a range of research and data collection activities, including: An exhaustive and critical review of the academic, business and policy literature on the organisational use of social networking tools and social media platforms, as well as regular engagement with academic experts in this area A scoping workshop hosted in Brussels in March 2012, at which the IPTS engaged various stakeholders and social media experts to identify and prioritise the major opportunities and challenges for organizational adoption and deployment of social networking and social media platforms Ten semi-structured interviews with both technology providers (supply side) and organisational adopters (demand side), to understand and assess their perspectives on the organisational benefits of social technologies, the attendant challenges, best practices, and the wider policy environment An online 'animation' of stakeholders whereby a larger number of users and experts (n=50) were able to reflect on the main benefits and bottlenecks as regards business and public administration use of social technologies, and to feed these insights into our parallel research activities A brainstorming workshop in early June 2012, held in Seville, the main objective of which was to distil and synthesise the most important benefits, challenges, best practices, and policy options that emerged from the literature review, stakeholder interviews, and online stakeholder animation A presentation at the Digital Agenda Assembly (DAA) 2012 that summarised our research to date and focused mainly on policy options for Europe in the area of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) adoption of social media technologies and, in particular, how these technologies can help to facilitate economic growth and job creation