Browse by Tags

In many homes the CEO, CTO, and CFO goes by another three letter title: M O M. Moms get credit for a lot of things, but they rarely are mentioned as driving forces of innovation and early tech adoption. At Marketing Profs , Ayaz Nanji shares some data that shows the impact moms have on mobile commerce and social media. Here's a sample: -Compared with the general population, 49% more moms have smartphones (81% vs. 54%). -In a year-over-year comparison, smartphone ownership by moms is up 25% and tablet ownership is up 79%. -89% of moms with smartphones access Facebook on those phones, and moms are four times more likely to prefer to check social media on their smartphones. -45% of moms say they are emailing less and communicating more through social media. Don't forget that moms have the purchasing power in most households. So social engagement leads to online spending. Read Moms More Likely to Use Social Media and Mobile, and to Shop Online here .

As Data Editor for The Economist , Kenneth Cukier has been watching the impact of big data on global business from a front row seat. At the moment, that has meant watching the growth of social media companies and trying to understand how they "datafy" our lives and relationships. But Cukier says we are really at the beginning of the era of big data, and there will be so many new ways to use data. In this Big Think interview, Cukier discusses datafication today and in the near future:

CBS set new records for viewers of the Super Bowl during our de facto national holiday last Sunday. But most of the advertisers who helped make it a great evening for CBS failed to fully realize how consumers are using technology beyond the television to experience big events, says ExactTarget 's Jeffrey Rohrs . Rohrs lists Oreo as a key exception: Sure, the press today is giddy with praise over Oreo's quick-thinking, news-jacking, real-time marketing effort -- a picture of an Oreo in the dark that has been retweeted nearly 15,000 times as of this writing. It has led many to say that "Oreo's Tweet Won the Super Bowl." There's no arguing that what Oreo did was fast, witty, and a helluva lot less expensive than their "Whisper Fight" Super Bowl commercial which was the only ad driving viewers to an Instagram page during the entire game. The real reason Oreo won the #BrandBowl, however, was because both their free and paid efforts sought to build and engage audiences. Their ads weren't just "one & done," they walk away from Super Bowl XLVII with bigger followings on Instagram and Twitter--and those are audiences they can activate long after the Ravens' victory has faded from memory. Rohrs offers some key lessons to other marketers and company leaders here . And ExactTarget's graphics team put together this infographic to drive home the point:

Don Tapscott says that it is time for organizations to shift their internal communication platforms. Out with email. In with effective use of social media. But don't make the mistake that he is making a simple point about just about how workers send messages. This is about decision making and knowledge management, Tapscott says. In this interview at the McKinsey Quarterly , Tapscott says that knowledge management "has failed." And the only way to fix the problem is to take knowledge out of a "container" and focus on "content collaboration":

The disruptive force that is social media has only just begun to show its influence on global business, according to McKinsey analysts Jacques Bughin , Michael Chui , and James Manyika . In a new article for the McKinsey Quarterly , the authors say that companies have not really begun to see the full potential of the "value creation" social tools provide: Since “social” features can be added to almost any digital application that involves interactions among people, the range of uses is immense and measurement correspondingly challenging. Thus, we cast a wide net. We studied several hundred cases of organizations using social technologies around the globe. In addition, we examined the patterns of knowledge work within organizations and drew insights from data covering several years of surveys involving thousands of global executives on the ways their companies use social technologies. Our analysis of successful uses served as a basis for modeling potential improvements across the value chain. Of late, some bearish sentiments surround social technologies after disappointments for several companies in the capital markets. It’s worth noting, however, that today only 5 percent of communications occur on social networks. Moreover, almost all digital human interactions can ultimately become “social,” and jobs involving physical labor and the processing of transactions are giving way, across the globe, to work requiring complex interactions with other people, independent judgment, and the analysis of information. As a result, we believe social technologies are destined to play a much larger role not only in individual interactions but also in how companies are organized and managed. We estimate that using social technologies to improve collaboration and communication within and across companies could raise the productivity of interaction workers by 20 to 25 percent (Exhibit 1--below). These dramatic gains would occur thanks to shifts in the way these workers communicate—from using channels designed for one-to-one communication, such as e-mail and phone calls, to social channels, which allow “many-to-many” communication. Specifically, our research indicates that interaction workers typically spend 28 percent of each day (13 hours a week) reading, writing, and responding to e-mails. A huge amount of valuable company knowledge is locked up in them. As companies adopt social platforms, communication becomes a new form of content, and more enterprise information can become readily accessible and easily searchable rather than sequestered as inbox “dark matter.” Employees will be able to find knowledge in the organization more readily and to identify experts on various topics, given the expertise implied by their patterns of social communication. We estimate that 25 to 30 percent of total e-mail time could be repurposed if the default channel for communication were shifted to social platforms. Read Capturing business value with social technologies here .

When it comes to social media in global business, McKinsey & Company 's Roxane Divol , David Edelman , and Hugo Sarrazin say the experimentation stage is over. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets are an integral part of the corporation-to-consumer relationship, and now executives of global brands know that. But, as Divol, Edelman, and Sarrazin write in the McKinsey Quarterly , "few have a deep understanding of exactly how social media interacts with consumers to expand product and brand recognition, drive sales and profitability, and engender loyalty." Despite offering numerous opportunities to influence consumers, social media still accounts for less than 1 percent of an average marketing budget, in our experience. Many chief marketing officers say that they want to increase that share to 5 percent. One problem is that a lot of senior executives know little about social media. But the main obstacle is the perception that the return on investment (ROI) from such initiatives is uncertain. Without a clear sense of the value social media creates, it’s perhaps not surprising that so many CEOs and other senior executives don’t feel comfortable when their companies go beyond mere “experiments” with social-media strategy. Yet we can measure the impact of social media well beyond straight volume and consumer-sentiment metrics; in fact, we can precisely determine the buzz surrounding a product or brand and then calculate how social media drives purchasing behavior. To do so—and then ensure that social media complements broader marketing strategies—companies must obviously coordinate data, tools, technology, and talent across multiple functions. In many cases, senior business leaders must open up their agendas and recognize the importance of supporting and even undertaking initiatives that may traditionally have been left to the chief marketing officer. As our colleagues noted last year, “we’re all marketers now.” The authors go on to outline successful approaches to integrating social media into global marketing and corporate growth strategy, and share some examples of effective models. They also provide a basic structure for leaders to consider, as a way of focusing social media efforts at key "touch points." Click here to read about examples of companies engaging with customers at these touch points.

There may be new apps and new gadgets to facilitate our engagement with one another and with retailers and other companies, but surely social media will only become a bigger part of our daily lives this year. It will be interesting to watch how companies push new ways of interacting, and what trends develop. At Harvard Business Review , David Armano makes his predictions. Armano is executive vice president of the interactive arm of global communications for Edelman Digital, and he predicts that some social media activities that started in 2010 or 2011 will take off in 2012. Namely: Convergence Emergence. The Cult of Influence. Gamification Nation. Social Sharing. Social Television. The Micro Economy. Read Armano's descriptions for these trends here . And then weigh in, either by offering up your comments , or in discussions with your peers/classmates. What has to happen for these activities to become meaningful trends? What social media trends do you anticipate being a big part of commerce in 2012?

Mark Thoma tackles the question of why--and how--the field of economics retreated from what he calls its "public mission," in an essay for the Institute for Public Knowledge . While once a discipline that engaged routinely with citizens and leaders in the public sector, Economics spent much of the latter half of the twentieth century exploring issues that, while important, were not part of the general discourse. Thoma calls this "The Great Disconnect," and he examines several reasons for it: Mathematics and the Desire to be a Scientific Discipline ...Michael Bernstein makes this point as well, as the discipline became more and more mathematical – the language we speak is increasingly symbolic rather than verbal – it became less accessible to outsiders. Positive and Normative Economics ...economists have become less willing to take sides in public debates, and more importantly unwilling to wade into public debates when doing so can be perceived as supporting one side over the other. Sociological Factors ...As economics has become increasingly mathematical and theoretical, it has also become more cliquish. Interest in Different Questions ...The fact that those inside and outside of academics are interested in different questions may have also play a role in severing the ties of academics to the outside world. The result, Thoma argues, is bad for the field, for economists, and for society in general: For all of these reasons, economics lost communication with policymakers and practitioners leaving room for all sorts of “charlatans and cranks” to fill the void. In doing so, academics ceded important ground to think tanks aligned with one party or the other, to self-appointed economic experts, to business economists maximizing profit rather than public knowledge, and to a media that doesn’t always comprehend the economics that underlie a particular issue. Even in cases where there actually was fairly wide agreement among academic economists about a particular policy proposal, the public debate in the media did not convey that economists were largely united on the issue. But there is good news. The last five years have brought about a lot of positive change. Thanks to social media and blogging, more and more economists are writing for a public audience. Thoma has seen the benefits of engaging with the public through his own blog, Economist's View (one of many daily reads for The Watch). He extols the virtues of blogging and writing for the public at large in the second half of his essay. Read New Forms of Communication and the Public Mission of Economics: Overcoming the Great Disconnect here .