Thursday, July 17, 2008

Let's work out this Social Media for Business thing....

This morning on Twitter @AmandaChapel (strumpette to some) took a line of fire on @ChrisBrogan regarding the "social media elite prove their disconnect from business" based on this article about GM layoffs.

Amanda Chapel tweeted, "Social Media Elite Demonstrate Complete Disconnect With Business http://tinyurl.com/6hqty3 @chrisbrogan, 'But GM uses Twitter?' WTF?"

Everyone including GM, Amanda and Chris are right and there is perhaps a potential for more intelligent debate to continue in order for the community to arrive at a common voice about strategy, objectives, tactics, measurement and efficacy in this emerging media or medium (you choose).

To prove the point that we in the web and software space have known this all along I took a blog post from Mercury Rising's Scott Annan over at Mercury Grove and did a find/replace on software/autos.

Read it here:

The next generation of autos will be built by companies with vision, the ability to execute, and a vibrant, engaged, and active customer community that will drive product innovation.
The idea is pretty obvious and the execution is pretty radical.
Today autos companies use a prescriptive approach to autos design - the autos defines how people should work (”A better way to do things!”) - and use forums, salespeople, and conferences to create a passive feedback loop with their users.
This leads to innovation being led by a small number of marketers and engineers who want to develop autos to make money.
The future of autos will move the company from the center of the innovation process to the periphery, replaced by the people who use the autos who will drive innovation by engaging in discussions about best practices, success stories, shared metrics, and ideas for radical improvements.
This leads to innovation being led by a large number of subject matter experts who want to use autos to achieve business objectives.
Which makes a lot more sense.
Success will be determined by the strength of the community, the quality of the ideas that come from the community, and the ability of the company to execute them - which is radically different than the current model with success being defined by winners of “feature wars”.
At Mercury Grove (ed: out here in the social media world), we believe that the foundation of community-driven autos requires three ingredients:
1. Professional, passionate people with the proven ability to execute.
2. Effective, transparent processes that actively and aggressively engage people.
3. Passionate people who want to be involved in the process of achieving more with autos
This is the future of autos.

...that's it. Nothing changes but the names... Hopefully Scott Annan won't mind what I did with his thoughts to prove the point.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

great post Ben.

I don't mind you quoting me at all :-)

Yeah! Boo! said...

I can't decide whether this post is funny or not. It seems to actually pointing to Capitalist Banter as a source. That's like using the Onion as a source. Satire is dead. Long live satire!

Maybe "Amanda" could use some of the other posts about the "4 Minute Workweek" or "Girls Gone Wild to Release New Series: Parents Gone Wild," to prove some of her other "points." If this is an actual attack by "Amanda Chapel" it's funnier than we all think.

Unknown said...

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