According to
Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media lab, the social media bubble is about to burst, here
is an excerpt from his post on HBR March 23, 2010, “I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all
the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as
much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what
I call thin relationships.” You can read the full editorial and it is actually
quite an interesting myopic look at the new world of Internet communications: http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/03/the_social_media_bubble.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-WEEKLY_HOTLIST-_-MAR_2010-_-HOTLIST0329&referral=00202
What is most
fascinating about this post is that he tries to draw a connection in the form
of a metaphor on the subprime loan business? Quite bizarre indeed if you think
about it, the subprime loan scenario evolved from the perfect storm of:
·
Giving
anyone a loan that could fog a mirror.
·
A
spectacle of American greed where banks and investors were not and are not
being held accountable even today, so much for Sarbanes Oxley.
·
Digitization
of mortgage loan origination systems where loan processing leveraged business
process management software to take loan processing time down from months to less
than several days.
(There were
business rules engines in the BPM systems that could easily kick out those with
low credit scores, but somehow they were tweaked to let those less worthy in.)
I simply
don’t get this metaphor, do you?
Trust Enters the Global Social Media
Landscape
All right
lets attack this hypothesis. The customer is king and has just been given a new
pen that moves at Internet business velocity and the only thing slowing down
the social customer’s influence (word of mouth marketing) are time zones. One
of the issues that Mr. Haque argues is that social media sites lack trust, well
that may be the case for some sites that are blurring the lines between our
personal and professional lives, but they are not creating fake thin
relationships in my world. In fact we decide to enter into them and they are
bringing us closer to our friends, past friends and relatives that we still
want to know more than any other platform. In the business world we know
exactly how social media helps to bring us closer to our customers and how they
are leveraging the platforms to drive change.
One of the
key findings from our SNCR research last year was that professionals do trust
information and relationships on social media sites. This is key for any
business and for many companies it’s all about influence because trust is the
foundation of influence on the social media planet influence flows like water,
it’s everywhere. This is why I always say that social media is the new word of
mouth marketing. In several of my previous posts I have demonstrated how
P&G, Indium, Kodak, SAP and others are gaining competitive advantage
through social media. Is your company leveraging social media to their greatest
advantage?
Why the Internet is the Greatest
Innovation of Our Time
When Proctor
and Gamble decided to build a social network of more than six hundred thousand
mothers, do you think they were worried about trust? Probably not, but what
they did was build and leverage a social network to build their brand and get
competitive advantage. This is a story best told by the most social customer of
us all Paul Greenberg, the inventor of Social CRM. The Internet has not only
connected us in ways that are innovative and great but from an anthropological
standpoint it is melding the cultures of the world.
As a member
of the WWW conferences I had the pleasure of working with many early Internet
pioneers who would have never predicted the social media tsunami. At the time
we were still babbling about how a protocol standard called TCP/IP had just
created a global area network called the Internet and debating the nuisances of
stateless vs. stateful protocol streams. Remember that this was just sixteen
years ago. For those of us that have gray hair we remember how Microsoft fought
the Internet and would not endorse this routable protocol even though theirs
wasn’t routable. Wow times sure have changed, but guess what, now I am a social
customer, author, participant and B2B marketer.
·
I
don’t think my relationship with the hundreds of people that read my blogs each
week is weak or fake.
·
I
don’t think that sites like YouTube are a fad.
·
When
I don’t like something in a business I go Yelp about it.
·
When
I need information I do a search.
·
Before
I buy a product I do a search.
·
My
sales friends are using Facebook and LinkedIn to do “digital hard rock mining.”
·
When
I need to find old friends and relatives I go to Facebook and most of them are
there and I don’t think my relationships are weak.
·
When
I join a professional group I go to LinkedIn.
·
When I watch
baseball now it’s on the IPhone with MLB.com.
·
And today I did not join 304,059,724 against
Obama's Healthcare takeover.
·
I would
really like to know how the Havas Media lab positions itself as a platform for
a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs and firms
experiment with, craft and drive radical management business models and
strategic innovation.
Net/Net:
The Internet
has rapidly expanded to become a global network of seamlessly connected
computers and devices that has revolutionized information sharing and
communications, challenged governments, broken down cultural barriers and
driven innovation and business velocity to levels never before imagined. One of
the most important successes of the Internet is how it is enabling
globalization and more importantly business model innovation. Today’s most
successful companies are driving product and business model innovation from
outside their own walls by leveraging the Internet as a collaborative community
building platform. This platform has allowed organizations to harness the
innovation power of the community and not just individual innovation.
There are many
that would argue that many of the enabling technologies that drive the Internet
and Web 2.0 today have been around for some time. The reality is that we are
finally leveraging their potential in new and exciting ways, there is more to
come, because the Internet is all about innovation.
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