Opening up social media for business

To begin, I’m not a media analyst of any kind, just want to share my insider thoughts on the topic. The social networking phenomena is with us for a several years already and constantly growing, starting with largest lithuanian network one.lt, largest user growth in the world in facebook.com, career profiles on linedin.com, social messaging idea from twitter.com or video messaging in 12seconds.tv, and continuing with many specialized sites such as last.fm for music, sailingnetwork.com for sailing communities or even lastmessagesclub.co.uk for your last words after death… The graph by Google Trends below represents internet traffic in leading lithuanian websites one.lt social network (red), delfi.lt news portal (blue) and facebook.com (yellow). If the unique website visitor trend continues we will approach fundamental internet media transformation in few coming months.

Delfi.lt / One.lt / Facebook.com internet traffic flows development

While this social media phenomenon is here with us, the knowledge on how to make the best use of it is still lagging behind. Obvious that it opens up a range of opportunities, especially for small and medium sized companies, entrepreneurial start-ups to create awareness and brand their products as well as interact with customers in a low cost manner, but that’s not it! Further in the post I put up several distinct social media use areas, which comes to my mind and could be highly leveraged by businesses today:

1. Advertising. Compete for attention, increase brand awareness, engage loyal consumers.
2. Customer relationship management (CRM). Those who are lazy or shy to call your quality line, might post you a message. It’s one more way to add to your brand and your consumer friendship.
3. Consumer research. Possible in open or hidden (e.g. quiz) formats, sampling might be difficult, but its an obvious low cost option for SME’s.
4. Co-creation in product development. Ask for advice in no cost, your customer is willing to help you improve “his” product.
5. Open innovation. Access to worldwide network of specialists, some of your product inventions may come from outside the company.
6. Recruitment. Who’s your current employee and who’s the prospect. Make informed recruitment decisions.
7. Employer branding. Specialized career networks will make employer image way more transparent for future employees.
8. Enterprise architecture. Analyze informal networks within your company, try to avoid network biases and bottlenecks by reshaping your organization accordingly.

I believe it is possible to get even more creative with this list, please post your ideas in the comments below

Fundamental transformation: self organizing society?

This morning I have discovered interesting movie on youtube.com called “Us Now” about representative democracy and participatory government as possible coming future. I highly recommend you to go thorough it, the link is just above the post and notice that there is 7 separate segments of the movie as separate clips on youtube.com

Basically the movie challenges view on traditional hierarchical government (You vote – I rule) with participatory government approach, which is nothing else, but a technology enabled self-organizing society. As an example, movie proposes a real football club managed through an online community, where thousands of club fans proposes team management decisions instead of a coach hierarchy. The essence here is than those who govern the club are really motivated in making decisions and well informed about the players, the quantitative data is used for decisions rather than personal opinion of coach. It is off-course just an experiment, but it certainly challenges traditional transaction costs based organizational theories by R. Coase (1937) & O.E. Williamson (1975) by proposing open models of organization, where enhanced technology decreases coordination cost (fast information transfer among individual participants, easy access to logical information structures, fast collective decision making) and cooperation cost (those who are truly motivated in issues are involved, “smiley’s”, public opinion or other techniques protects from opportunistic behavior). Transition from current governance structures may be slow due to path dependencies, economic ties, political & social pressures, but argument for a firm as nexus of contracts, minimizing on transaction costs should make less sense today. That might be too utopian vision for now, with range of unanswered questions, for e.g. what about the complexity, priorities, etc. of millions and millions of ideas comming together?

Bearing in mind that in e-communities decisions can be made by somebody who is motivated and cares about the outcome, rather than those who are just paid for that service, we can come up new uses of technological infrastructure to advances government, public services, business, etc.

Just imagine if a country could run like an self organizing e-society. Lithuania as the “brave” country could be the first one to implement it