Last night I went to an interesting event sponsored by the MIT Enterprise Forum. It was part of their Innovation Series: From Social Insights to Social Business Innovation. I have the pleasure of attending an earlier event for startups where my Darwin Ecosystem partner Thierry Hubert presented our story. It was a very useful and innovative format where both a panel of experts and the audience provided feedback on our presentation. Once we presented we could not talk but only listen. This event was quite different and played to a much larger audience but no less useful. Here is the event description:
“The rapid growth and usage of social media by consumers and businesses has created a seismic shift that affects every aspect of our lives today. We predict that this social movement will have the same impact on society and business as Guttenberg had over 600 years ago. Social is making the Global Village possible, it is truly flattening the world, and thus is impacting not only business disciplines such as marketing, sales and customer service but the very core of business itself. New and powerful business models are emerging – models based on social innovation.”
Lora Kratchounova, Scratch Marketing + Media, led the event. Francois Gossieaux, Human 1.0, moderated the panel discussion. He asked the panel for their context that led them to be on the panel.
Betsy Aoki, Bing, said she was recruited to Bing from XBox where she had introduced some social aspects. I interviewed her in 2004 for a business blog book I was doing at the time. She was the funniest interviewee then and she is keeping up with this skill.
Ekaterina Walters, Intel, does social media work and social networks within Intel. They have been doing social media and blogs for about 5 years. Their Facebook community has 3.5 million members
Nathaniel Perez, SapientNitro, is the head of social at Nitro, a PR firm, but they do not use the term, social media, but social experience instead. He is most passionate about generating experiences that lead to innovation, as well as real time insights.
Marcus Nelson, SalesForce.com, is Director of Social Media at Salesforce.com. He was the first one in the group and now they have about 15 globally. They are measuring a lot now that they have acquired Radiant6.
Francois asked the panel about the human aspects of social media, as opposed to the technology. He said that humans are hard wired for reciprocity. I would agree but in my experience this is not universal across all people. There are many who will exploit this reciprocity.
Francois added that we are also hard wired for power and status. If you allowed knowledge to equal power you get knowledge hoarding and this stifles innovation. He also found that people lie to you in interviews and tell you want to hear. For example, Jet Blue asked people what type of snacks they wanted. They said healthy so they provided them and no one ate them. He asked the panel how social innovation got started in their firm.
Betsy said she was the blog queen at Microsoft and helped blogging get started at Microsoft in 2004. Microsoft was one of the first firms to allow employees to blog on a mass scale. There were so many individual bloggers that created a portal in 2004. They still have it as their Microsoft Community Blogs section on their site with a directory to find weblogs about Microsoft technologies written by Microsoft employees. The site said you can ‘Use these blogs to get insights and opinions about using (and creating!) Microsoft technology and software.” There were 385 blogs listed in 2004 when I first wrote about it.
Ekaterina said that half of the population is under age 30 and grew up with social and real time communication so they are attuned to using social tools for innovation. Nathaniel said that you need to go beyond tools and create connections based on human experience for innovation to happen. Marcus talked about PR campaigns generated informally that had a single focus. These can trump the most well funded ones. He gave an example of a $10,000 video that Levis did about walking across America that has had over 8 millions views.
Ekaternia said they are trying to get all employees to help answer customer questions through social media. Nathaniel countered by saying there is a difference between waves and ripples and the waves need more careful planning.
Francois asked how they measure success. Marcus said share of voice is one: how to get people talking about us more than competitors. However, he noted measurement is hard. What is the ROI on your mom? Nathaniel countered by saying that you can measure everything and you should. I sense a contrarian trend here. He added that brand health and perception are key measures. Ekaternia said that for Dell they saved millions through social media based customer service that took traffic away from call centers. Nathaniel said you can design initiatives for measurability.
The audience asked what is the biggest misconception about social media. Ekaterina said the idea the social media will solve everything and do it for free. Marcus said that more input is not always better. You can just get more confusion.
The audience asked if the goal is to find good ideas in the middle of too many bad ones, how do you find the good ones. Francois said use the crowd to find the bad ideas. They are good at that. Marcus said one issue is deciding who you hand off the good idea or insight to get something done with it. He also made fun of the audience members who left early as they were leaving. I guess he wanted to keep the crowd thing going.
Marcus said that people want to be helpful but they do not know the answer so they make it up on the spot. This is a weakness with crowd-sourcing. Nathaniel said that the number of followers is a bogus measure. I would certainly agree here since you can simply buy them if you believe all the ads I see. Key influencers are not effective. Ashton Krucher is an example. Betsy said there are other people who are influential because they are smart not because they are popular. Marcus said the true influencers do not worry about their followers. They just act.
Francois asked about stories. Betsy and Ekaternia talked abut the amplification effects of social media through personal stories. Nathaniel said the potential is limitless. He told about a person who bought a house that had video cameras in every room and he looked at his son’s early sounds. He could trace the evolution of the use of the word “water.” The content is there for many questions but we need the means to analyze it. Marcus talked about how the world can come to you through Twitter before it gets presented in the mainstream media.
I came away feeling that while social media has the potential to provide significant insights we have a ways to go to make the most of these insights. There are certainly examples of success here but we are still in the frontier phase. This is not a bad place to be as the opportunity ahead is huge.
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