8 posts tagged community

It will come as little surprise to readers here that businesses this year have been getting increasingly serious about social media as they find that their customers are spending a rapidly growing amount of time there. The most recent numbers show that Americans are spending nearly a quarter of their online time in social networks, far ahead of other forms of Internet activity. The numbers worldwide aren’t much different and implications for businesses are many and varied. I’ve explored these extensively before and it goes well beyond such ideas like “Facebooking” the enterprise. Yet due to the top-down way most organizations operate, businesses continue to fall behind what’s happening in the marketplace today. Unfortunately, the underpowered, non-scalable, expensive, and fundamentally limited value creation techniques of yesteryear won’t begin to suffice in today’s rapidly emerging Social Business landscape.

In the mid to late 1990’s, before I began working professionally within the social media industry – we called it the online community industry back then – I spent a number of years researching and writing about life online. My particular focus was on how individuals create an identity, form relationships and build communities in what were, at that time, largely text based online environments.

I have been writing about and working with open supply chains for some years now, specifically how businesses are increasingly opening up their borders to much more dynamic, scalable, and valuable supply chain and partnership scenarios. Up until recently, the story of advancement when it came to supply chains has been one of technological improvement. Most recently, large enterprise suites and hand-crafted proprietary solutions have started to give way to SaaS and cloud approaches to supply chain management, which will be state of the art much sooner rather than later.

As social media evolves, I’ve been wondering if the adages we all know still apply; for example, “customers are in control.” But should they be?

Intuit is frequently referred to as one of the rare examples of a successful social business that operates within the confines of a regulated industry. Christine Morrison, Intuit’s Social Media Marketing Manager and architect of much of this success, recently shared some lessons learned from Intuit’s journey at Social Business Summit 2010.

Tumblr is a fascinating example of how to get user generated and community sites right. Fundamentally it’s a microblogging platform, but I think this sells it very short of the whole picture.

Anyone who follows my movements online will have noticed that I’ve been rather quiet recently. This is because I have, for the past month or so, been part of a Headshift team, which at various times drew upon the experience and skills of more than ten people, working to deliver a piece of strategic consultancy [...]

Dachis Group researches, tracks, and utilizes many different technology tools on behalf of our clients. We thought it would be a good idea to share our initial efforts and ask for contributions to make it better.