What would you say some of the biggest communication challenges your organization faces? How would solving or improving any of these better your business (or organization)? What does your customer (even if that’s a b2b customer or an internal customer) need the most from you, and what does your organization need from your customer? How can you improve your customer’s life (in any way)? What would simplify any of your customer’s challenges?
And from these bigger questions, can you find a smaller action? Can you find the miniaturized first step that would bring you in any of those directions?
So often, social media are portrayed as a bottom-up phenomenon. The individual take control of their own needs using these tools. This is certainly one approach that is hard to stop because the tools are so easily implemented and used.
But a larger, more strategic approach can also be extremely useful. This takes a longer, more top-down view to see where the holes exist. Bottom-up approaches can leave gaps between what the user wants and what is also useful for the organization.
Answering these ‘big’ questions can be as useful as answering ‘little’ ones. The organization just has to make it part of their process.
While the regulatory side of new media has been muddled by recent FDA contradictions in what it says and what it does, the media themselves continue to develop. Twitter, in particular, has enjoyed both growth and high visibility. And, not only are there increased uses for Twitter, but there are increasing ways to monitor and analyze trends among Twitter users.
First, let’s talk about the increasing number and types of people utilizing Twitter. There are not exact numbers that can be quoted in terms of the number of people who are starting Twitter accounts, but anecdotally, this can be said. On March 17, the Eye on FDA Twitter feed had 700 followers. Three weeks later, that number increased by about 28%. That is substantial growth in less than a month. In addition, I noticed that the number of followers that many new followers and the number of updates have been on the low side, indicating that they have not been on Twitter very long as of yet.
Twitter is becoming the place to go in order to find out close to real-time information. There are corporations, foundations and journals all using Twitter.
The power can be seen by this experiment:
Why are they coming to Twitter? It is fast. Here is a graph that demonstrates a Tweet I sent out not long ago that asked my followers (700 at the time) re-tweet to followers, which 40 of them did. I counted the followers of those 40 who re-tweeted the message and found that it went out to 26,000 people – within 6 hours of the original request. Twitter allows you not only to keep in touch with your constituency, but to extend your reach beyond to people and networks who might otherwise never notice you.
This, coupled with the ability to follow specific terms used in these online conversations, means that a very large group of people can get the information very rapidly.
And there are a slew of applications that can make Twitter even more useful.
I was fortunate to be able to call together a great group of people at a moment’s notice to host a flash panel at the Pepsico Podcast Playground at SXSW. I wanted to talk about a Wall Street Journal article where AMD blogged about something and then Intel said blogs weren’t the place to talk about important issues. I pulled together George Smith, Jr, from Crocs, Christopher Barger from GM, Keith Burtis from Best Buy, Bonin Bough from Pepsico, Pat Moorhead from AMD, and Morgan Johnston from JetBlue for a conversation.
What follows is a video from the flash panel. I hope you’ll watch it and share your thoughts.
Not only is this an very nice discussion of corporations and Web 2.0 approaches, it is also a video of an ad hoc meeting that could not have been seen just a few years ago.
The content is very interesting with charismatic people talking about something they are really focused on. The panel was put together very rapidly rather than planned out long ahead of time. It demonstrates the need to be agile and resilient when it comes to being innovative.
The technology that allows us to see this video requires tools that we now take for granted. It requires easy access to video to record the presentation. It requires a tool to permit the video to be edited and then a tool that allows the video to be displayed online.
This is a mashup of so many technologies, all to display a discussion about corporate blogs.
All to allow us to hear and see real executives, real people, discuss the problems and benefits of a particular Web 2.0 technology. It is a wonderful example of how ad hoc meetings can very rapidly disburse information to a large group of people.
What would you say some of the biggest communication challenges your organization faces? How would solving or improving any of these better your business (or organization)? What does your customer (even if that’s a b2b customer or an internal customer) need the most from you, and what does your organization need from your customer? How can you improve your customer’s life (in any way)? What would simplify any of your customer’s challenges?
