Inexpensive and efficient, social media can give customers more extensive explanations of their offerings than traditional marketing and advertising can.

In a new Babson Executive Education survey of over 900 global executives, managers, and individual contributors, researchers identified Social Media Customer (SMC) Leaders as the companies where employees “strongly agree” with the survey statement: “our organization has embraced social media (like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook) to improve its responsiveness to customer needs.” At the other end of the spectrum are SMC Laggards, who strongly disagree with that same statement.

Leaders say they are putting more sweat equity into retaining customers, and social media is one way to keep in touch with clients: “In these uncertain times our company has invested more in client relationships and building stronger client teams,” noted one respondent.

Additionally, aggressive adoption of social media can be a signal that an organization is more dynamic and innovative in the first place. For instance, SMC Leaders are two-and-a-half times more likely to strongly agree with the statement, “My company puts more emphasis on innovation and growth today than before the recession” (43% vs. 17%).

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Author H. James Wilson is a Senior Researcher and Senior Writer at Babson Executive Education (BEE) in Wellesley, MA. At BEE he is a contributor to an ongoing Social Media research study led by Dr. PJ Guinan. Wilson has written for numerous publications including The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, and HBR Online where “Innovation Teams Lack Data, Structure” appears.

A World Without Barriers

So why do we call it a “Flat World?” The world is being referred as a flat world, thanks to Tom Friedman’s book The World Is Flat. The world is now so well connected with the ubiquity of technology in all areas which gives you, me, all of us the power to collaborate, coordinate, produce and distribute seamlessly across borders, and cultural and language divides. In a flat world, everything of value is now connected — no more barriers.

Welcome To Our Flat World — The Good News

For connected individuals and forward-thinking corporations who are able to embrace change, there has never been a time where we’ve had more opportunity. There is little need for the organizational system as we once knew it. The power to create a global network to collaborate and coordinate effort is seamless and typical organizational structure just gets in the way of productivity. If organizations are able to recognize this and embrace this, there can be little doubt that operational efficiencies can be extended exponentially.

Welcome To Our Flat World — The Bad News

In a flat world, there are connected individuals and disconnected individuals. Unfortunately, this gap can only widen. To date, there are about 1.2 billion connected individuals. We are the conceptual and technical class. Our opportunity holds no bounds. However, for the disconnected individuals, there is a barrier being constructed. Technology changes is changing so fast that it has the possibility to create another sad state of human affairs. I am hopeful though. With the ubiquity of technology, the speed at which it has spread in the last decade and the low cost of connectivity, I cannot image that we will not have a connected world — one where knowledge is freely shared, data is relational and accessible and where the human spirit and innovation can come together to solve many of the world’s problems (and, of course, create new ones).