After much thought and discussion with both colleagues and clients, I have decided to write a book. The topic is one that I believe needs much clarity and a new perspective – Social Media for large Enterprise.
Being a student of history and the classics, I tend to look for patterns in today that are echos of the past or mimic other aspects of life or nature today. Essentially I believe everything is linked and if we can understand how it is linked, we can unlock a great many new insights. So, as I have watched the Social Media frenzy unfold, it struck me that it has tremendous parallels to Darwin’s teachings on Natural Selection.
The book, now approaching completion of the first chapter, is aptly named: On Social Media: How Big Business Can Leverage Natural Selection in Social Media to Become a Dominant Species. (It’s a bit of a mouthful, but I’m working on that.)
The premise of the book is really quite simple, to help companies understand:
- The process of Natural Selection in Social Media environments.
- Explanation of the struggle for existence for companies venturing into Social Media
- Designing favourable social traits and avoiding injurious social traits
- How the Social Media ecosystem works including dominant (consumer and media) species
- Profiles of current dominant species (and none of them are companies!)
- How to create favourable social environments (think customer and branded communities)
- Brand procreation. Think of a tree metaphor dropping seeds for birds, animals and insects to carry those seeds to new areas, where seeds are positive experiences and ideas.
- Social Experience Design – designing specific experiences for targeted customer segments
- Social experience strategies for B-to-C and B-to-B
- Changing paradigms – looking at how customer relationships and evolving human communications are forcing change to new models – C-to-C and C-to-B
- Demand Generation in Social Media environments.
- The road ahead – looking at where evolving human communications is going to lead us in 2-3 years, including communication convergence and mobile society.
- As well as many current case studies and examples to illustrate the thinking of course.
I will be blogging on many of these concepts and hope that anyone reading this and these posts can help me to improve what I believe will be a fresh new perspective on what Social Media is and how to best leverage it for profitable business.