WisconsInnovation

I recommend watching this video interview by host Erik Michielsen of CaptureYourFlag.com. It's interesting to hear Mike talk about his battles with larger B2C companies about engagement with social media for innovation and how they have changed their perspective. Two years ago, they were thinking that social media was a flyby tactic. Now they have changed their minds and are using more avenues to integrate into the entire product cycle.
Today, in working within the B2B space and with many manufacturers who have technical products, the same story resurfaces.

What they say is, "It's a waste of time and resources. It's an incredible time sink. That is our intellectual property we might be sharing. " Ironically, in the same breath those same companies tell me that they rely on word-of-mouth, referrals, and relationships to get the work they do. Strange that the statistics show that 90% of B2B executives refer to online networks for recommendations of companies and products to work with.

What is your experience?

Infographic: The Most Valuable Digital Consumers | Nielsen Wire

If you like statistics that might support your push to move your company into the social/mobile/local space, print this infographic and take it to your executive team or business owner.

This subject is particularly relevant for most the students on this blog because we are either looking for jobs/internships or have been recently hired...

I found an article at www.bankrate.com about innovative job search strategies. One of the strategies that was mentioned was using Facebook to connect with potential employers. One freelance writer placed an advertisement on Facebook in which she simply said 'I want to work for Harper Collins, can you help me?' Along with the ad she included a link that took the reader directly to her resume. Although the writer didn't get a gig with Harper Collins, she did get connected with about 100 people in a 2 week span, and even received a job offer from one. Instead of searching for someone who would take her, she instead had potential employers doing the work and looking at her qualfications and connecting her.

I think that the article and innovative strategy to find a job is thought provoking. Obviously this is not the most direct way into a specific company, but it is a creative way to potentially meet someone in the industry, or network with people who know people. At the very least it shows that perhaps trying something new in the job search and wandering off the beaten path can be a good thing, as it is a way to sepate yourself from the other 100 resumes in a dusty pile in the Recruiting Directors office.

Backed by Netscape, the new social media-based browser "RockMelt" was launched today. The browser, developed conjointly by innovators Tim Howes and Eric Vishria (in complete secrecy), has been dubbed a "social browser" and holds the intention of "build[ing] your online connections into your Web browsing experience." As social media and the social nature of the Internet has crescendoed, Howes and Vishria noted that many users spend the vast majority of their online time interacting with sites like Facebook and Twitter. Consequentially, the browser seeks to integrate user profiles into the browsing experience.

It is easy to assume that the level of user created content on social websites is exploding like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Our recent discussions regarding user creation and innovation can only lead us to believe that this online imagination will no doubt foster the futures of many new businesses.

Although it's been around for a few years, the last six months has shown frenetic growth for an emerging social media platform known as Twitter. And it's a platform that has tremendous potential to help marketers better understand and interact with their customers -- leading to improvements in new product development and innovation.

Many may be skeptical of this claim. In fact, you may not have even heard of Twitter before, but if you question whether it is becoming mainstream, consider that the Wall Street Journal has published no less than 30 (as of this posting) different articles mentioning Twitter since September of this year -- including an October piece that headlined, "Twitter Goes Mainstream." A pretty bold statement.


What is Twitter?

Katherine Boehret wrote a "Mossberg Solution" column in the Wall Street Journal explaining the service: "In short, Twitter is a free social-networking tool that keeps people connected with one another and with sources of information. Twitter users submit updates about whatever they're currently doing, and these updates cannot exceed 140 text-based characters."

Some refer to it as 'micro blogging.' Basically, you write updates on what you're doing, thinking about, seeing, etc., in real time, and the sum total of these items is your Twitter stream (your micro blog). People then choose to Follow your stream, and vice versa, much as you would via the RSS stream on a blog. It's very stream of consciousness, which from a marketing research standpoint is very intriguing.


How can it can it help improve customer insights?

Twitter has tremendous potential for garnering customer insights, and in fact many businesses, including Comcast and Ford are already engaging in Twitter-moderated interactions with current and potential customers.

Some normative examples include:

• Ethnographic observation of Lead Users,
• Customer sentiment tracking and
• Live, real-time interactive focus groups.

There also have been some great recent articles and blog postings on this topic -- pointing to using Twitter for engaging with customers.

> Observing behaviors and actions: Chris Wilson, who writes The Marketing Fresh Peel blog, posted a recent presentation in which he focused on how businesses can use Twitter for customer insights. "I stressed the importance of understanding people’s behaviors and actions," he notes on his blog, "because no matter what happens to Twitter years down the road, behaviors will be the same."

> Making dialogue two way; not getting caught up in the medium: On my own Propelling Brands blog I posted a response to a blog post by Tony Hung on the Conversation Agent Blog in which he commented on the role of Twitter in brand management. He points out that the key is to facilitate what is a two-way dialogue with customers, and he argues that brands using Twitter should "really listen to customers, show your commitment to participating in direct dialogue and identify and interact with true thought leaders." My additional thoughts, which I posted in my response, were that, "[t]he issue is that too often the medium becomes the message and as marketers we forget the role each channel plays in the ongoing dialogue between brands and customers. Also, all too often, we treat these mediums as a chance to shout at customers but never to really communicate with them."

The key to using Twitter for garnering customer insights is to keep in mind that it's just another tool in our arsenal. As marketers and marketing researchers we should have an objective in mind, first, and then assess whether Twitter is the right venue for communicating with our channel.

But this is the case for any social media technology. I presented on this topic last week, together with some other colleagues at the Wisconsin School of Business. We looked at the role of social media in new product development innovation, including providing points on how to assess whether any given platform is the right fit for the type of insight you wish to garner. You can check out the presentation on SlideShare here.


How can you begin using Twitter?

Set up an account, follow other's Twitter feeds and give it a try!

In an age when video games are differentiated by specifics such as HD graphic resolution, Sony sought to take a step backwards and develop a product with broad enough appeal to attract as many consumers as possible. This challenge, however, did not rely on piecing together the ultimate gamer market segmentation report. Rather, Sony needed to create an approach that did this groundwork for them, fast. The Wii gamer segment, where users are personalizing their machines and game profiles to interact with an online community, is growing steadily and, most recently, out-sold Sony's PS3 over 4 to 1 (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3171305). Further, video game production costs, 3 years ago, ranged between $3 million and $6 million (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4442346.stm). Estimates today place costs upwards of $20 million. New video games, thus, need relatively strong ROI.

So, then, how might Sony safely reach as many customers as possible? Meet LittleBigPlanet. LBP is a world where gamers guide 'Sack puppets' through any challenges made available to them. These 'Sack people' range from being entirely new to resembling characters from various other popular games. And, of course, they can be customized.

But Sony did not stop at this simple functionality, which is found in a majority of today's games. LBP is a semi-open game platform in the form of a developer's kit. Players can build their own worlds quickly, customized however they please. These worlds can then be shared online amongst the PS3 LBP community. Appropriately, LittleBigWorkshop's catch phrase is Play. Create. Share.

While there were 50 pre-built levels included with the game, Sony looks to the community of LBP gamers to create worlds of play applicable to their demographic or something to which their segment is emotionally tied. For example, there is an up-cropping of worlds resembling the early Mario Brothers games. This externalization of NPD (albeit partial because gamers do not truly create an entirely new product) is apparently a fun process for the user and results in a products personalized to a broad spectrum of segments. This is not the first game to provide this capability; level building dates back to at least 1991 in a game by Epic called ZZT (http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/10/first-impressio.html). However, this does represent a shift towards NPD via social media, where gamers add value to their own community through co-creation. The result thus far, though muddled by the current recession, is reasonably good. After its launch completed early this November, LBP's sales placed it in the top 10 titles for October with only a few day's worth of availabilty accounting for that ranking (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3171305).

Another interesting and, perhaps, more poignant insight is that this same approach and capability, including all the community communication elements, were available for PC games decades ago. Sony's LBP model is hardly a new concept for innovation. Yet, perhaps users were not yet conditioned to develop and share as readily as they are today.

I was conducting research on the topic of Internet marketing in the era of Web 2.0, and I ran across some interesting data points. In the early years of Web growth, ad-supported news content and consumer e-mail were the two greatest drivers of the top global Web sites such as Yahoo!. But trends such as social networking and blogging have changed this dynamic.

Two data points speak to how much this has changed -- especially with respect to how much customer co-creation is driving the future of the Web:

> Growth among traditional, ad-driven news sites is flat: "[O]nline news audience growth is flat and the market is highly fragmented, with nearly one-half of traffic going to sites that are below the top 100 news sites," according to a press release from technology industry analyst firm Jupiter Research from March of this year. And this is even as the number of Web sites globally continues to grow at a rediculous pace.

> Participation dominates the top global Web sites: Among the top 10 Web sites globally, according to Internet site tracking service Alexa, 5 out of those 10 are now based on user-generated content -- i.e., they are social media, social networking or user-contributed media sites. The list includes: YouTube (3), Facebook (5), MySpace (7), Wikipedia (8) and Blogger.com (9).

Do you have any examples of acceleration of this paradigm shift? If so, please share them.