Jan 16, 2011 | Change, Marketing, Social Media
Social media to many “50 something’s” who run most of our large businesses, is just code for wasting time that should be spent productively, but the reality is that social media is rapidly evolving into a potent business tool in several pretty fundamental ways.
- As we can see what is needed, and where far more quickly, the old resource allocation processes have become totally redundant. Allocating resources based on a plan now 12 months old is, as my kids would say “so 20th century”, it needs to be done in response to things happening NOW, and requiring response. This has huge implications on the way organisations democratise decision making at the front lines of market contact.
- As social media becomes more dense, it opens opportunities for collaboration not possible before. This is particularly potent in its ability to immediately mobilise numbers around a cause, location, or combination of both.
- Geographic barriers are no longer relevant as an organising principal. Most multinational businesses face this fundamental change in the dynamics of their organisational structures, but so to do social organisations such as the church.
- The power of social media as a marketing tool is only just starting to be recognised. We have long understood that personal recommendation is the best endorsement you can have, and the web can now offer an electronic version of the recommendation qualified by numbers and independence. Amazons system of recommendations shows the way.
And now, Hollywood has made a film about the beginnings of Facebook, and the motivation and foibles of its founder, surely, that is a sign that social media is now of age.
Jan 13, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
Pixar is amongst the great “innovation factories” of recent decades, along with PARC, 3M, Apple, and a very few others. Part of what makes Pixar so effective is a question answered in this McKinsey interview with Brad Bird, the director who won two Oscars with “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles” after joining when Pixar had achieved enormous breakthroughs with “Toy Story”, “Finding Nemo”, and other smash hits.
The core of his success has not been just the great people, but the environment created for them to work in, the processes evolved to manage the execution of creativity, and the restless curiosity and determination to be better, every time.
Jan 11, 2011 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
If I were managing a business in financial services, I would be asking myself if I had missed the second wave of the “net-boat” that is rapidly becoming a force in financial services.
Banks and other financial institutions have reduced their costs enormously by leveraging the capabilities of the net to receive and process payments electronically in developed countries, but even there, PayPal has carved a growing share of transactions, but more importantly, opened relationships with millions of customers who use the web for shopping. Just as the retailers missed the potential of consumers to use the web to seek the best prices, banks have allowed PayPal to build a customer base to pay for them.
In the developing world, millions are not serviced by the financial infrastructure of the developed world. predictably, alternatives are emerging, powered again by the web, and businesses that have no existing financial services infrastructure to protect, are able to move quickly to provide a cost effective and easy to use service to customers and potential customers not serviced by banks.
It is unlikely in my view that banks will become the recording companies of the early 2000’s and ignore the competitive threat until it is almost too late, but their influence, particularly in the developing world will be substantially diminished from what it could have been.
Jan 6, 2011 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
Word of mouth advertising has always been the best sort, people put great store in recommendations from those they trust. The extension of this recently has been what I call “word of mouse” advertising, enabled by the networking capabilities of the net.
Taking the idea further, the potential to engage your customers via various forms of social media, to the extent that they become advocates of your product is not only possible, but should be a key marketing objective.
Call centers have progressively taken over the function of a sales force, and technology, and India has progressively taken over the call centers. Perhaps there is an opportunity for high end goods to reverse the trend, use technology to facilitate the transactional end of a relationship with a consumer, but invest in call centers to build the engagement of consumers by personal contact.
Jan 3, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
The Microsoft business model has resisted all efforts to introduce open innovation practices into its markets, and many would argue, has stunted its growth and innovative potential as a result.
How rapidly things can change, even when you resist from a position of strength.
Microsoft introduced “Kinect” in the US just before Christmas, with the objective of wresting back some of the gamer/activity market into its X-Box offering which has suffered at the hands of the Wii. At the heart of Kinect is a chip with advanced capabilities, and very quickly hackers have found how to add open source access those capabilities, and are starting to explore applications that would not have occurred to Microsoft, or would have cost too much to pursue.
U-Tube is being used extensively to communicate the astonishing stuff being done, this one being the use of the Kinect chip extracted from a Kinect device bought for $150, to create 3-D images.
The message in all this is simply that open source innovation that engages the crowd outside the boundaries of your ability to harness IP is the exploding as the driver of innovation.
IP is almost unprotectable nowadays, the management task is now a question in two parts,
- “How do we create the conditions for the development of Intellectual Capital around our “patch”? ,
- ” How do we evolve our business model and monetarise it?
Dec 30, 2010 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
On the eve of a new decade, it is perhaps useful to consider the changes that have occurred, recognise that the pace of change is still accelerating. For myself, and I suspect most of my readers, to even try and anticipate the changes to come in the next decade, on top of absorbing the impact of the last decade, just hurts the old brain.
However, where there is change, there is opportunity, and the opportunities that emerge will all require that the individual and the group is “connected” and using the communication and collaboration tools of the new decade. Part of the challenge here is throwing off the pre-conceptions of a disconnected world, the one we have all lived in to date, and to see the world through a different lens.
Chance favors the connected mind, so in 2011, get connected!
