VietNamNet Bridge – While e-commerce experts believe that social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter could be used as an effective “weapon” to learn information about competitors to set up their reasonable business strategies, domestic enterprises still keep indifferent to the weapon.

The useful and free-of-charge addresses

In order to compete effectively on the market, enterprises have to learn about their rivals: which strategies have been used by the rivals to succeed? What are their advantages and disadvantages? Enterprises are also interested in other information such as the one relating to the market share held by competitors, organization structure, distribution system, business culture, advertisement campaigns and product business promotion plans.

Nguyen Hoang Long, a senior official of the E-commerce Development Center (EcomViet) under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, has suggested that Vietnamese enterprises can improve their competitiveness by using the free information shown on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Xing.com.

According to Long, Linkedln now has more than 100 million members, and every member of the network shows sufficient information about individuals, enterprises or institutions, which allows businessmen to seek information about many companies, offer to sell products, seek workers and partners, and build up brands. Xing.com is a similar social network like Linkedln, but it has a smaller scale, which is the destination of about 45,000 trade experts.

“The enterprises which register to become the members of the network, can easily exchange viewpoints with experts in order to get useful advices,” Long said.

He added that big social networks can become efficient supporters for enterprises, and that Facebook and Twitter are the two big names which deserve enterprises’ attention. Facebook has advantages in the searching capability, image uploading and information updating, while Twitter is the network which provides “micro-blogging”, allowing users to send and read updated information from other users, thus, helping build up and develop enterprises’ brands, and seek information about the products of the same kinds and understand the moves of the rivals.

Long has also advised enterprises to pay attention to some websites and other searching tools, like Slideshare.net and Google.com/alerts. Slideshare.net, for example, is the leading community website in the world in terms of sharing information through presentations. Therefore, the website will help enterprises access to the presentations about the products of competitors, as well as the analyses and predictions by leading experts in the business fields they are interested in.

Meanwhile, www.google.com/alerts has an interesting function which allows enterprises to update more information about interested competitors. Businessmen just need to type the keywords, and then Google Alerts will continuously search and email to enterprises all the information relating to the keywords (from different sources such as websites, blogs or videos.

Domestic businessmen keep indifferent to social networks

In the digital age, social networks are considered the “powerful tools” in the marketplace. However, domestic businessmen still do not think of using the “power”.

An official from the Thai Nguyen Provincial Industry and Trade department said, that many problems still exist in the application of e-commerce, and that there are still many barriers that hinder the use of the “power” in doing business.

Especially, enterprise leaders do not have deep knowledge about the possible efficiency and impacts that online tools can bring to enterprises. Besides, enterprises still do not have the qualified workers who can seek and exploit the information in the most effect way.

According to Le Van Loi, Head of the Business Informatics Institute under the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI), there are about 530,000 small and medium enterprises in Vietnam and most of them still keep cautious with e-commerce, because they think e-commerce requires high application expenses, while enterprises still do not have good staff to run e-commerce.

Long thinks that this is the big barriers because of which businessmen still hesitate to use online tools to compete with rivals.

Source: Buu dien