Last week I was privileged to participate in “SOME teollisuudessa” –seminar organized by Teknologiateollisuus ry in Helsinki. The event gathered corporate representatives and other experts to hear and discuss practical experience of using social media for creating competitive advantages in industrial business.

The keynote speaker of the event, Lee Bryant from Dachis Group, gave an overview of the trends in social media usage around the world and argued that we are moving from social media hype to a more rational stage where firms are focusing on genuine benefits that social media use may generate. While a multitude of manufacturing firms are nowadays operating in low-cost countries, Bryant perceives that ensuring product quality and building brand recognition and customer intimacy are the best competitive weapons for European companies to attract loyal, less price-sensitive customers. Again, social media is gaining power as a tool to build strong brands and more intimate customer relations.

Sosiaalinen media teollisuudessa – Lee Bryant, Dachis Group from Teknologiateollisuus ry on Vimeo.

Samuli Savo from Marketvisio/Gartner presented a similar kind of perspective. The most interesting part of his presentation concerned a Gartner study about the objectives of social media across industries. The study clearly pointed out that in all industries strengthening customer relationships and enhancing brand awareness are the major goals for using social media. This is line with many other remarkable social media reports, but however, these reports are very contradictory to what we learned from company representatives during the seminar who stressed the role of social media benefits in internal communications.

In the matter of fact, Juha Anttila (HT Laser Oy), Lassi Otranen (Reifer Oy) and Ville Kilkku (Fastems Oy) were all sharing their success stories of how to share and manage information efficiently through internal social media applications, such as wikis. Interestingly, Amos Ahola (Wärtsilä Oyj) was the only one who presented the use of social media for external communications and still stated in the end that the greatest benefits of social media can be found from internal knowledge sharing.

All in all, the seminar was inspiring from the industrial business point of view and I believe it removed the suspicions from those who might still have thought that social media is not for every company. Finally, here are the key takeaways from the seminar:

1. There are social media applications that generate business benefits for each and every company.

2. Social media use requires strong management commitment and cultural change within an organization.

3. Start exploring the opportunities of social technology by internal knowledge sharing and management with social media applications. That’s where the biggest competitive advantages for an industrial firm often lie.

Joel Järvinen

M.Sc. (Econ.), Project researcher

University of Jyväskylä

joel.jarvinen(a)jyu.fi