Actiance Forecasts 2013 Social Business Trends

Company Predicts Social Governance, Compliance and Producing Tangible Results From Social Will Be Top-Of-Mind for Sales and Marketing, Compliance and IT Departments


BELMONT, CA--(Marketwire - Jan 15, 2013) - Actiance, helping organizations benefit from new forms of communications and collaboration, today announced its predictions that will impact enterprises across regulated and non-regulated industries in the coming year. Spanning compliance, legal, IT, sales and marketing professionals, the company expects social governance, compliance requirements and the increased use of social networks to directly affect social business strategies for 2013.

"Today's worker isn't limited to just one type of real-time communication -- he or she uses them all. With so many communication options, employees need to work efficiently without running into compliance or control snags, something that will come to a head in 2013 as companies place a huge emphasis on social business initiatives," said Kailash Ambwani, CEO at Actiance. "Two years ago, institutions were focused on whether compliance in social media was even possible. A year ago, the focus shifted to using social media for engagement. Now, the pendulum is swinging toward streamlining the operational details, scaling, and achieving ROI."

According to a December 2012 report from IDC, the worldwide enterprise social software application market is expected to grow from $788 million to $4 billion by 2016. The analyst firm expects the continued strong growth in the software as new features are defined and incorporated to meet emerging business needs, with solutions changing rapidly to meet the demand. Supporting this surge, the 2013 predictions from Actiance's executives include:

  • Social media scale will create complexity challenges: 2013 will be the year that businesses take the step toward scaling social media management, as previous efforts focused on finding solution providers and educating employees. The level of scale projected will require companies to leverage tools that can streamline the content, approval and execution process in order to achieve the desired ROI.
  • C-Suite will demand social marketing results: Social marketing will move beyond focusing on the number of followers and likes, and instead shift to the sales impact and bottom line increase from those efforts. The demand from the C-Suite to see the results will drive marketers to implement sophisticated strategies for social media marketing. 
  • BYOD will introduce voice and social into UC and collaboration: The adoption of BYOD policies, and realization that enterprises must support employees no matter where they are, will soon transform traditional UC technologies to incorporate social media and voice. The improved collaboration will decrease overall costs and increase productivity and customer service outcomes.
  • Actionable big data will derive from all forms of communication: The volumes of traffic and data available from employee interactions across social and traditional online communication channels have increased dramatically. Financial institutions and businesses will finally start to harness that information, streamlining the integration of social media activity within the enterprise, using operational data to guide their strategy.
  • The lines around compliance, content and distribution will shrink: Social media has become an integral element in every aspect of personal and professional capacities. In some cases, social communities have replaced traditional methods of communications, which has caused challenges for regulatory bodies, such as the SEC and FINRA. We'll see more requirements and guidelines with respect to social corporate content, the distribution of that content and how to ensure compliance to applicable laws.

Actiance allows companies to unleash social business with compliance and management of an organization's real-time communication, collaboration and social networking in order to adhere to strict interpretations of regulatory, legal and corporate requirements. With the ability to control, monitor, capture, search and archive conversations, content and activities across the broadest spectrum of networks, a company is able to leverage a social business strategy with confidence. For more information on Actiance or its products, please visit http://www.actiance.com/. Actiance is on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/actiance. To read the company's blog, please visit: http://blog.actiance.com/.

About Actiance
Actiance is a global leader in communication, collaboration, and social media governance for the enterprise. Its governance platform is used by millions of professionals across dozens of industries. With the power of communication, collaboration, and social media at their fingertips, Actiance helps professionals everywhere to engage with customers and colleagues so they can unleash the social enterprise. The Actiance platform gives organizations the ability to ensure compliance for all their communications channels. It provides real-time content monitoring, centralized policy management, contextual capture of content and smart archiving which improves the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of eDiscovery and helps protect users from malware and accidental or malicious leakage of information. Actiance supports all leading social media, unified communications, collaboration, and IM platforms, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), Twitter, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), Skype, IBM, (IBM), Jive (JIVE), Microsoft (MSFT), Cisco (CSCO), and Salesforce.com (CRM).

Actiance is headquartered in Belmont, California. For more information, visit http://www.actiance.com or call 1-888-349-3223.