This monthly post chronicles and analyzes updates across social platforms popular in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. In an ever-changing global social and economic landscape, it is Dachis Group’s belief that multinational corporations should remain aware of the social opportunities and challenges that await them in some of the world’s most promising emerging markets. Here’s
What can we learn from the online social engagement of leading retailers and how much of an influence was this on their performance?
The Great Splintering Watch an early episode of Mad Men and marvel at the poor lads (and occasional lass) trying to wrap their minds around television and print. It’s cute. Now, fast-forward to the age of socially-driven, digital interactive experiences. Shield your eyes as the design department fractures into dozens of specific and overlapping disciplines.
Today, I know I am lucky to be surrounded by a group of brilliant colleagues who understand—and innovate on—every facet of the social business. I am also lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Just as my parents eventually realized I wasn’t wasting time on my first social network, companies are overcoming their fear of social and are ready to take their relationships with customers to a new level. This shift can’t be attributed to luck. Luck is too dismissive. This is the natural progression of the business world, and we knew it would come sometime.
Distributed, decentralized complexity of organizations breeds significant problems and opportunities in managing social business. How do you share policies and procedures when it is unclear who is participating in social media? How do you cross pollinate best practices and innovation that rises up from the genetic diversity offered by mostly autonomous execution? When crisis hits, how do you quickly identify and coordinate the individuals that need to be on message with a response?
How do you know that you’re keeping track of all the critical metrics that you’re supposed to be measuring and discarding all the “nice to have”, but largely unnecessary, ones?
Last week I was at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, discussing myths in social media.
I was in San Francisco last week for Dreamforce, the yearly confab for Salesforce that has had a major focus on social business the last couple of years. There’s little doubt that Marc Benioff clearly sees the very near future of business, and it’s something he calls the social enterprise. While you can read my blow-by-blow of the opening presentation, which was one of the most impressive cases for becoming a social enterprise yet made in my opinion, the process of social business transformation is a complex one and isn’t going to be made so explicitly by many firms.
Recently I’ve been tracking the growth of social analytics and the means of delivering well on it. Connecting it to the needs of the business is the next step beyond basics of collating, aggregating, and identifying patterns in what the world is doing that affects your organization. On ZDNet recently, I explored the rapidly growing trend of big data. Collectively, big data represents a set of highly innovative new ways that companies are developing to distill value from the sheer scale, richness, and complexity of today’s vast networks of people and their data, of which the Internet is just the biggest example. It is social media in particular, however, where big data and business value intersect.
The figures vary but in the last several years a major change has begun in organizations around the world. Sometimes the efforts are small and unsanctioned, sometimes they are big and bold, but increasingly businesses are employing social media strategically to engage deeply with both their workers and customers. We see this all the time