by: Karl Long
The most dangerous thing about social media for “big business” is that it’s influence is barely noticeable on traditional measurement systems. Market share, mind share, recognition, recall, all measure the mass market.
Would any big company recognize .5% of their market-share disappearing? Should they really give a fuck about that paltry number, is it going to hit their share price? Their volume?
What if I said that was the best, most passionate, most creative, most talented most vocal, most evangelical .5% of their customers leaving, to go and create something amazing with another company? A company so small you’ve never heard of it, and won’t until it’s big enough to eat your lunch.
Not only that, these companies that engage that amazing, magical, .5% of the customer base are not going to spend a dime on advertising, and are going to grow organically through word of mouth. Oh, and their viral campaigns will work better than yours as well because they have that tiny percentage of influencers.
How are you going to keep that .5%? Hmmm, not only that, how are you going to gainfully employ their passion and creativity?
Case in point, the new community edited “user manual” for the new Q Phone from Motorola. Essentially Motorola has set up a wiki, using the same software as wikipedia, that anyone can edit to serve as the new phones user manual:
Because the possible applications for the Q will always expand, the “ideal” user guide would also be able to grow and change. This wiki is an attempt to do that. It’s a place to capture and share the knowledge of the greater community of Q users. If, for example, you have added a new application to your Q, you could post instructions on how you did it here, for the benefit of all Q users.
Again, only a tiny percentage of the customer base will actually contribute to this wiki, but it will provide a huge amount of value to the larger community.
Tip of the hat to Joseph Jaffe
Related:The co-creative business show - episode 2 - why co-creation is disruptiveAttract and motivate through customer experienceCreating passionate userschurch of the customer
Original Post: http://blog.experiencecurve.com/archives/why-social-media-is-dangerously-disruptive
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James Thomson says:
13 Jul 2006, 20:33
as Karl knows I am a slight sceptic to whatever "exceptional insights" co-creation and web 2.0 social media tool fans aspire to.
What we as a business structured for the future engagement and collabourative economy think is that the balance of consumer power (cheaply aggregated with these social tools) versus big-business power is shifting. But is it a big deal? Not really; many big companies will change very slowly; some new ones will use the tools very quickly and other big ones, led by bright people, will make themselves even more competitive against their major big competitors by adapting enough into social media trends of whatever to gain an advantage. But so what. These broad realities are not new. Some people get ahead and some people remain complacent having made their pile. Are we just hearing a whole lot of "I'm a useful consultant" posturing around this web 2.0 hype? mainly yes I think.
tobto says:
07 Feb 2007, 09:49
In case of Q Phone I agree with James: Some people get ahead and some people remain complacent... Good point.
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