Social Networking in the Mining

Abstract

South Africa lags behind more developed countries in terms of the global digital divide. Furthermore, many organisations globally are utilising Social Networking effectively for business benefits. They have formalised their approach to Social Networking by developing specific strategies around this and are reaping the rewards. Given the availability of infrastructure in South Africa, this research focuses on whether Social Networking forms part of the current corporate strategy in the mining sector of South Africa, the reasons for employing this approach to strategy and to evaluate how, and why (if at all), Social Networking is utilised. The mining sector was selected for this study since it forms a large part of South African industry and is responsible for revenue to the approximate value of 5% of GDP. It is also a large industry that employs approximately 670 000 employees either directly or in related industries. A qualitative research methodology was used since this research was not attempting to answer a simple yes or no question, but intended to probe deeper into the topic and gains an in-depth understanding of why mining companies in South Africa adopted this approach to strategy. The research is divided into two sections: the first attempts to ascertain if South African mining companies have a Social Networking strategy, while the second part assesses how and why (if at all) they use any form of Social Networking for business benefit. An extensive literature review exercise was conducted to broach these two sections of study. Various key themes emerged, which are investigated in this research. The proposals emerging from this exercise were that South African mining companies should have a Social Networking strategy and that they should use Social Networking for business benefits. Even though the mining industry is large in South Africa in terms of employees, relatively few companies employ them. Most of these companies are members of the South African Chamber of Mines, which controls various mining interests. iii The researcher has used the Chamber’s member list as the population and derived a sample from this. Each organisation in the sample was approached to participate in an unstructured interview on the topic. The researcher ensured that every mining sector in South Africa was represented. This however did not influence the outcome in any way. It was discovered that many organisations did not have a Social Networking strategy. However, it was also discovered that many organisations did in fact use some aspects of Social Networking mainly for Knowledge Management and collaboration, even though they did not have a Social Networking strategy. This outcome supported the proposal that South African mining companies should have a Social Networking strategy so that these activities could be managed and controlled. It was clear that some organisations with a strategy were utilising Social Networking for business benefits. For organisations that did not have a strategy, or were planning one, the researcher probed their perceptions of the benefits of Social Networking. The outcome was strongly in favour of recognising that Social Networking did deliver business benefits. This outcome again supported the proposal that South African mining companies do (or could) use Social Networking effectively for business benefit. The key message from this research is that South African mining companies cannot use the reason of a lack of infrastructure for not having, and implementing, a Social Networking strategy and that it can in fact deliver many business benefits