Ten technology-driven business trends to watch

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Christian

The McKinsey Global Institute recently published a paper describing 10 technology-driven business trends that are reshaping the business strategy across all industries. The surging web technologies, the increased computing power, and fast and ubiquitous communications are reshaping every aspect of business, from human capital, sales and marketing, customer care, R&D to organizational structures.

Trend 1: Crowdsourcing
Trend 2: New Boundaries for Organizations
Trend 3: Collaboration Networks
Trend 4: The ’Internet of Things’
Trend 5: Data Exhaust
Trend 6: Tech’s Environmental Footprint
Trend 7: Software as a Service (SaaS)
Trend 8: Multi-sided business models
Trend 9: Bottom up Innovation
Trend 10: Government 2.0

The rapidly shifting technology touches every aspect of a company, hence executives need to think strategically about how to adapt management and organizational structures to meet these new demands and opportunities.

The impact of the first six trends will often vary considerably in different parts of the organization and should be managed assigning the responsibility for identifying the specific implications of each issue to functional groups and business units. In addition, because some of the most powerful applications of these trends will cut across traditional organizational boundaries, executives should also identify parts of the company that are handling similar issues and make them work together.

Software-as-a-Service, Multi-sided Business Models, and Bottom up Innovation are causing far-reaching changes in the business environment that require shifts in a company’s strategy. CEOs and their immediate senior teams should start monitoring these issues to generate the interdisciplinary, enterprise-wide insights needed to take full advantage these trends. Once opportunities start emerging, senior executives should quickly test these on a small, closed environment and then expand successes quickly to other areas.

And finally the tenth trend, using technology to improve communities and generate societal benefits by linking citizens, requires action by not just senior business executives but also leaders in government, nongovernmental organizations, and citizens.

Your social media plan in four steps

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Christian

You realized your company needs to get involved in Social Media, but don’t know how to implement it? Follow these four proven steps to create your Social Media plan:

Define the engagement type of your customers
It is crucial to know what your customers are already doing– your strategy should leverage this activity. Define whether they tend to be creators (of content), critics (posting ratings, reviews, etc.), collectors (of information), joiners (of networking sites), spectators (reading blogs, listening podcasts, etc) or are simply inactive. A helpful tool for this assessment can be found here.
Define your Social Media goal
Your company can pursue five basic goals with social media:
- Listen: The use of Social Media for research and better understanding of your customers
- Talk: The use of Social Media to extend the existing digital marketing spreading messages about your company
- Energize: The use of Social Media to fuel viral marketing via your most engaged customers
- Support: The use of Social Media to enable customers to support each other
- Embrace: The use of Social Media to crowd-source your product/service development
Define your Social Media strategy
Basically the Social Media strategy should provide an answer to the questions: a) how will you engage your customers? and b) how will this engagement grow over time? Keep always in mind that the Social Media strategy should align the type of engagement of your customers with your company’s Social Media goal. For example you don’t want to build a social media strategy to enable customers to support each other (Support Goal) only to find out that your customers are more like to join social networks like Facebook (joiners group).
Define your Social Media platform/technology
Last but not least, it is relatively easy to decide on the appropriate technology (blogs, wikis, widgets, social networks, etc.) once you defined the engagement type of your customers, your social media goals and strategy.

Social technology growth marches on in 2009

Posted on August 25, 2009 by Syndicated Author

Josh Bernoff, co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Harvard Business Press, 2008) and Senior VP at Forrester Research released the latest analysis regarding the adoption of social media and its technologies: This year more than four out of five online Americans are active in either creating, participating in, or reading some form of social content at least once a month.

First of, a little background information. Forrester analyzes consumers’ participation in social technologies with a tool called the “Social Technographics Profile” (check my post and use the same tool of this analysis here). The profile puts online people into overlapping groups based on their participation. Groups and behaviors are graphically shown in a ladder (Figure 1):

The ladder categories are kept consistent to allow Forrester to make year-to-year comparisons, across ages and genders, and across geographies. Thus, more interesting than the results of 2009, is the trend over the last 3 years (Figure 2):

Trend of Creators, Critics and Collectors:
In the US, social technology Creators and Collectors grew slowly, and Critics didn’t grow at all. Creator activity appeals only to those who like to create or upload content, and regardless of the ease of blogging and YouTube uploading, this doesn’t appeal everybody. As for Critics, those who react to content, this group hasn’t grown at all. According to Bernoff, this is a result of a small but actual decrease in the number of people contributing to discussion forums due to the fact that much of this activity has been sucked into social network sites like Facebook.
Trend of Joiners, Spectators and Inactives:
Joiner activity exploded and Spectators became nearly universal. The explosion in Joiners from 35% to 51% of online Americans reflects the appeal of Facebook, as both press coverage and invitations from friends suck more of us into social networks. Spectators — those consuming social content — reached all the way to 73% of online Americans.
Trend by Age:
Looking at the data by age, the participation among those under 35 is nearly universal (less than 10% Inactives) and even among those 55 and over, is about two-thirds.
International Trends:
Europeans adopt these technologies more slowly than in the US, with about 40% Inactives in the countries where Forrester does surveys. The Netherlands and Sweden have the most participation, Italy has the most Creators, and social networks are most popular in the UK.

Summary:

This data should end any skepticism about whether social media is real. The trend is clear: soon, if a person is online, it will almost certainly be consuming some sort of social technologies. With the level of social content being put out there, it will be virtually impossible for anyone online not to be a Spectator. And last but not least, social media is usually thought to be a way to engage younger generations, but the data shows that participation of older generations is considerable and growing at faster pace than that of the younger ones.

Today a successful digital marketing strategy should always include social media, either in the company’s own site, microsite, etc. or in a social a networking platform such as Facebook, Twitter and the like.