WSJ Take on Google Plus Epitomizes Market Myopia and Opportunity reveals how conventional wisdom misunderstands Google+ and how to take advantage of the situation.
Most people have the whole “web 2.0 thing” sorted out by now. They have accounts in LinkedIn for business, Facebook for personal and Twitter for I-don’t-really-know-but-I’m-on-it. They also know that Google “doesn’t get social” as the search behemoth has littered carcasses of failed ventures around the web.
Alas, as I have argued here and in conference presentations since Google+ launched, this misunderstanding is completely understandable—and wrong. Most interesting here, it elevates opportunities and threats for market participants.
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 The fascinating post in the Read Write Web outlines a new trend, “Relocalization” or the inevitable “Local 2.0” that’s a backlash against malls, industrial “retail” and online “community.” It predicts a resurgence of “face to face” interaction, and people paying a premium for locally produced products and “townish” community.
It’s a new synthesis: people increasingly don’t believe in commuting, and many workers are accustomed to working “from home” or in Starbucks or other public coworking spaces. Local 2.0 carries a strong green, anti-carbon tinge as well. And it’s not at all incompatible with periodic jetsetting, everything can interoperate. Definitely worth watching!
Here’s a useful financial services social business example from Forbes. It details how a Midwest financial services firm grew at competitors’ expense by using LinkedIn, Twitter & legacy communications.
Notice that Jefferson, an investments firm, engaged its channel (financial advisors), using LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and legacy marcom. Their momentum enabled them to maintain their pricing while competitors felt compelled to lower theirs.
Another powerful lesson is, during “downturns,” don’t follow the herd and cut sales and marketing investments, especially when you can use social business to magnify impact as Jefferson did. Well done! #li
In case you missed it, this seminal post from the New York Times shows a startling example of “big data” hitting retail. Data collection and mining have enabled Target, for example, to predict what degree of pregancy young mothers are in—based on the kind of things they buy.
Although Valley visionaries and enterprise data engineers have been talking about “big data” for years, this post brings it down to the personal retail level. Due to the growing appreciation of social data and behavior, data scientists and marketers now have the glue to use data to increase relevance to customers and clients.
In this post’s main example, data engineers analyzed purchase behavior of pregnant mothers, sifting through voluminous retail data, and they found plenty of patterns that indicated that women were pregnant, down to the trimester! Obviously, enterprises have a large responsibility to use data in ways that won’t violate trust, and many will make mistakes in their efforts to pump up quarterly numbers.Put another way, buying transactions are *very* social, so retailers, whether bricks and mortar or ecommerce, will unleash tremendous intelligence in […]
As I read Jill Konrath’s excellent post on how to ask for “referrals” and mistakes that most salespeople make, it occurred to me that salespeople could do even better by breaking that model completely. Jill’s excellent point is that salespeople are uncomfortable with asking for referrals, so they cop out and do it badly by using a throwaway “Do you know anyone..” But I would tweak her suggested, “Whom should I meet” even further by focusing on client, not [salesperson’s] company.
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Google Plus Disruptive Potential Reflected by Conference Audiences summarizes insights from audience reactions to Google+ presentations. CSRA launched the Executive’s Guide to Google+ because we thought it had significant disruptive potential for many of our clients, and our recent conference appearances (link to presentation below) have only underlined two of Google+’s unique attractions: your competitors don’t understand it and Google is managing it as a completely different animal, not a social network. Here I’ll share audience reactions to my recent Google+ presentations at public social business conferences and private corporate meetings.
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Silicon Valley Watcher offers up a useful riff on disruptive potential of Google+ – but it nonetheless has glaring holes and reflects arbitrary assumptions. I recommend reading it to learn about this argument, which is based on this questionable logic: “social data degrades the ‘quality’ of search results.”
The real answer is far less satisfying, “It depends.” Some search results will be improved with social data while others won’t. Search, SEO/SEM and other players dislike Google+ when it disrupts their businesses. Expect, and listen to, these arguments, but realize that they are often biased.
Redrawing Your Map: Selling in the Knowledge Economy explains how the 21st century and digital social networks are changing client behavior, and sales, forever.
Having started in business in the 1980s in Chicago, I have had a front row seat to the waning of the Industrial Economy, which has created unprecedented human wealth through fabrication, distribution and scale in countless iterations. Its meltdown sets the context for a profound shift in all businesses, and it holds the key to understanding the new ways to bring new business to your firm. The Industrial Economy practice that is known today as “selling” is on life support in the ICU, and it won’t survive in most areas of the economy. Here I’ll explain how profoundly things have shifted and how you can use this understanding to revitalize how you bring new business to your firm. I’ll close with how social business empowers this disruption.
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Sam Fiorella, writing in The Social CMO, put together some fresh thinking on how to disrupt publishing, drawing some parallels with the music business in Open Letter to Media Publishers. Since their comments are turned off, I’ll offer some additional thoughts here.
Sam, thanks for one of the most intelligent posts I’ve read on the disruption of print I’ve seen in ages. Reading between the lines, I’ll offer this iteration.
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 Thanks for being one of the first visitors to Social Business Services, which launched on 3 February 2012. The site has many moving parts, so please let us know by commenting on any page or post if something seems awry; we are still in the process of final tweaking and testing.
Social Business Services aims to be your front row seat to the disruption and transformation of B2B sales and marketing as well as other functions like client/customer service, human resources, product development and IT. B2B clients will change your business because they are finding and educating each other very quickly. This creates fantastic opportunity for the firms that understand and react.
Thanks for visiting!
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