The socialisation of business or why "Social" will drive business in 2012 (not without engagement though!)
With 800m+ Facebook users, 300m+ Twitter users and 116m LinkedIn users we have all heard the astonishing numbers often quoted amid the social media hype (not to talk about Pinterest's rapid growth!). Perhaps the time has past when many business still had to be convinced that social channels were something worth bothering about. We are there (almost).
Social media has become a great tool for companies and businesses to market their products, to connect with their customers and had irremediably changed the way they interact with each other. While it is easy to get caught up in the hype, part of the challenge now is knowing when and how to recognize opportunities. As Brian Solis recently noted “still too many organizations and companies are not designed to be adaptive. They are designed to optimize efficiencies and processes. But times have changed and disruptive technology is not as easy to recognize and capitalize on without a greater mission and purpose, or an infrastructure to identify trends, experiment, learn, and scale. […] To keep up is a perpetual investment as innovation is constant and it is only increasing.”
Understanding how to strategically benefit from the accelerating growth of social media is central to the Digital Agenda Assembly.
In this respect, which are the major challenges entrepreneurs and innovators are facing today, especially in the European ecosystem? How some of the biggest trends in technology are impacting your business or markets today and how they are going to influence your behaviour in the future?
We would love to hear from you!
Group audience:
Comments
I agree with the post above
I agree with the post above and i have a "counter-question" I would like to ask because i am not fully able to answer myself: business-wise, discussions about social media focus on the importance for companies to be adaptive, to value social media more and to interact online with their customers. All true words to be engraved in stone. However I notice the tendency to separate the importance of social media for companies, from the fact that social media are companies, and quite big I d say.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Google + need to make a profit at the end of the day. What i want to say is that the post above concludes with a question " how they [technology trends] are going to influence your behaviour in the future?". If we now substitute "technology trends" with "innovative profit-driven business companies", does it sound different?
Yes it does. The companies
Yes it does. The companies you mention have gained enormous social and economic influence. Not bad in itself; they enable personal communications to thrive, innovation and welfare. But such influence also should entail responsibilities, with privacy being a frequently mentioned issue but others are coming up, i.e. see recent complaints of market abuse against a big search engine companies. Public authorities have a role to play here, but which one and how? The answer is not easy in these times of rapid changes, not only technological but also social and market changes.
Great point Michele. You
Great point Michele. You touch on one of the most fundamental aspects of social media. If you think about the great innovations from IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Bayer, Roche and many more, they all needed enormous marketing budgets to convince consumers or businesses to buy into their innovation. To the contrary, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest didn't spend a penny.
The Reason:
They don't influence our behavior as much as we influence their functionality. Our society is evolving more rapidly than ever before. More individualism, more constructive contribution and more democratic engagement.
The large social media companies are finding ways to satisfy our needs and make a profit at the same time. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are already demonstrating that.
Social media are business
Social media are business performance accelerators that sustain for instance Kotler's Marketing 3.0, and the term "flawsome brands" as mentioned by Trendwatching.
I've written an article on how the openess of business (more than the socialisation, which is the enabler of transparency, trust etc) will drive operationalization of organizations:
http://www.9010group.com/9010-netherlands/gianluigi_cuccureddu/linking-k...
Interesting article indeed!
Interesting article indeed!
Elena - right on. We do need
Elena - right on. We do need to strategically engage. That kind of implies the creation of rock solid goals, a clear understanding from where we are coming from and and agreement on what actions we will need to make as well as what resources are required to achieve those goals.
I actually started to put that into a proposal here on this site "Social Media Strategy Europe"
This is an example of
This is an example of failture to "do the numbers". The destabilizing network effects of accumulating powers in the hand of a few is the main problem rather than a "trend".
You should not embrace and support, but combat this.
My point is not that social networks are not good, but that the control needs to be distributed AWAY from any central nodes and back in the hand of citizens.
These networks are abused for controlling society processes rather than adding value.