A few weeks back I was invited to speak at the Social Media Club of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We had a crowd of about 40 people, a fun sochu tasting from Haamonii, and a great conversation about social media and how to think of it in the context of the enterprise world.
After presenting how the corporate ecosystem is changing and discussing elements of Social Media strategy for enterprises, we then put things to the test and broke into small groups--each tasked with developing a Social Media strategy for a company in the retail, tech, of financial industry. It is not always easy to shift from thinking of Social Media in traditional terms of campaigns and demographics and speaking in "Twitter" and "Facebook" terms but most groups came back with real strategies, not just tactics (although we had fun ones too--like putting executives in high heels with Dr. Scholl inserts. Okay. Maybe you had to be there).
One thing I'd like to emphasize is that Social Media isn't a "fix" or a "thing" organizations now must do. It is a manifestation of new capabilities we have in a Web2.0-3.0 world. As a result, the ecosystem itself is changing in large corporations: what used to be a closed system between corporations, their partners, and their customers, is increasingly open and fluid; partnerships, once limited to large and established vendors or consultants is now expanding to include startups and their solutions--which means startups need to learn how to communicate the value proposition in their products in new ways; A traditional corporate-controlled push/pull model for customer feedback and marketing is now dynamic: customers can tell corporations what they need and want whether corporations ask for it or not--this also means that corporations can count on their customers to speak about those things they're excited about and spread the word at a fraction of the cost. Just yesterday, Sandy Carter, VP IBM Software Channels and Social Media Evangelist demonstrated how IBM was able to save $100,000 on maketing campaigns using Social Media tools to mobilize customers (more about this later this week).
Here's the presentation I shared. Also check out David Libby's thoughts on the topic.
You can also download it from Slideshare.
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