Nonlinear Thinking

Eluding the Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist: [tsīt’gīst’, zīt’gīst’] n. The spirit or genius which marks the thought or feeling of a period or age.

The bandwagoneers that comprise and embrace much of the Silicon Valley monoculture have increasingly not been among the vanguard of enterprises that are delivering real change and innovation within and across traditional value chains and business models.  Perhaps that is the result of a zeitgeist that manifests in the Valley on a regular basis in which the thinking goes that if one successful business launch makes sense, then several dozen more incremental versions of said business make even more sense.  Paypal founder Peter Thiel has even commented: "There is so much incrementalism now."  Umair Haque, Director of Havas Media Labs, discussed the problem in a Harvard Business Review article back in 2008, lamenting that “… the malaise is deep and systemic. Many of you may disagree – but I’m vastly disappointed in the moral and strategic bankruptcy of today’s crop of venture investors and so-called revolutionaries.”

In a zeitgeist market, the number of new entrants is usually high, the ability to create differentiated offerings with unique value propositions (the strongest predictor of new product success) is more difficult to achieve, and new forms of business model innovation are required for success (e.g., service and solution innovation rather than product and process innovation; experiential innovation; legal rights and bundling innovation; privacy rights innovation; agency innovation, where businesses act on behalf of customers).

There are reasons for this creeping incrementalism and much can be blamed on the democratizing nature of the Internet as the ultimate platform for idea sharing.  Additionally, the ability to rapidly access formidable compute capacity, other technology infrastructure and agile development tools via the cloud allows today’s garage startups to create stepwise iterations of already buzz-worthy offerings in record time.  The “sharing” economy dynamic has already become over-saturated with new enterprises springing up to compete with the innovators that broke trail in the space – uber, lyft, airbnb, Getaround, Zipcar, Homeaway, TaskRabbit, Liquid, Dog Vacay, Fon – you get the idea.

Innovation Zeitgeist, a book by entrepreneur/author Alistair Davidson, drilled deeply into this dynamic several years ago. 

What I have observed is in the rush to make individual companies and product successful, managers have missed a larger trend - a Zeitgeist influence on what is getting developed and launched. Simply put, there are more entrepreneurs launching similar products than ever before. And because of the Internet, these product leak into other markets quickly.

Far more companies in Silicon Valley think they are creating viable business models and services that deliver real economic and societal value than those that truly are creating something both lasting and impactful.  Eluding the zeitgeist and focusing on addressing real issues, problems and opportunities is the challenge that needs to be met.

Diverse thinking is critical to an effective culture of innovation and Silicon Valley’s challenges with respect to diversity, particularly when it comes to enterprise leadership, has been well-publicized.  That issue/challenge may be the central contributing factor in a culture that eschews business model innovation for incremental uniqueness and a “me too” entrepreneurialism.

When we stop and ruminate on the many macroeconomic and core societal problems the world faces today, can we really say that there is a need for yet another social network variant that succeeds only in chewing up time and mindshare – Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, blah, blah, blah.

I don’t know.  Perhaps these are only the cynical musings of someone who thinks we can do much better, must do much better.

The Social Enterprise of the Future

We have discussed the impact that social media and the channels that have emerged based on social technologies will have on the enterprise previously here and here.  Rob Harles, of Accenture Interactive has a nice article on the social enterprise of the future on CMO.com, including a terrific graphic of what that enterprise might look like.  From the article:

Within five years, “social enterprises” could completely redefine customer value. We will see organizations emerge that will go way beyond polishing their presence on social networks and channels. Instead, they will make social media–the channels, the data, the users, the approach to collaboration–a part of every activity that zooms in on the customer.

The future of social enterprises (see figure, below) will be defined by how these organizations incorporate a real-time stream of predictive insights and personalized messages into their businesses, and how they define customer relationships and experiences by the level of complete digital integration and influence. Social enterprises will notice the redefinition of management roles, with each part of the business responsible for managing, synthesizing, and acting on ongoing torrents of digital information and content received in real time.

 

Additionally, they will depend more on the integrated views of the customer across multiple touch points and channels–such as combining social with physical call centers–to maintain customer happiness, with access to the most up-to-date customer data in real time.

As new technologies and digital strategies need to be developed almost every day, social enterprises will need to constantly adapt to their evolving landscape and anticipate what the social enterprise of the future will look like. This moves away from social strategies that are siloed within the business, focused only on expanding reach and “engagement,” and closer to a landscape where social is everywhere, driving real-time actions tied firmly to measurable business objectives.

If companies get this right, social can increase intimacy and relevance with their customers, which can become the tipping point between buying or not buying and remaining a loyal customer or going elsewhere.

White Paper - "Content is King, Context is Queen - Together They Rule!

One of the core themes of this blog over the years has been the impact of technology on the marketing art and science.  With the advent of digital, social, and mobile media, the strategy and execution of marketing has embraced and leveraged many new channels as avenues to influencing the target customer.  I have long viewed the development and management of quality content as critical to this new process, perhaps even more than during the decades of analog-only marketing.  With the "always-on" nature of digital/social/mobile communications today and the ability to gather real-time data on prospects, context is becoming increasingly critical to ensuring that valuable content is delivered at the most optimal point in the customer's decision process.

I thought this new model was important enough to author a white paper on it and you can access it by clicking on the image or link below.  Comments and critiques are welcome.

Download Content is King

The Complexity of Digital Marketing

This "transit map" from Gartner visually represents how hard it is to be a marketer today.

Inbound Marketing the Hubspot Way

We don’t really endorse products/solutions/services per se here at Nonlinear Thinking but we were to make that leap, we couldn’t find a better company to endorse than Hubspot.  They have done nothing short of inventing and then reinventing the concept, process and practice of inbound marketing.

Having used Hubspot almost since its inception, the endorsement comes from practical experience.  It just makes your marketing better.

The key components in their definition of inbound marketing include:

• Content Creation - You create targeted content that answers your customer's basic questions and needs, and you share that content far and wide.
• Lifecycle Marketing - You recognize that people go through stages as they interact with your company, and that each stage requires different marketing actions.
• Personalization - As you learn more about your leads over time, you can better personalize your messages to their specific needs.
• Multi-channel - Inbound marketing is multi-channel by nature because it approaches people where they are, in the channel where they want to interact with you.
• Integration - Your publishing and analytics tools all work together like a well-oiled machine, allowing you to focus on publishing the right content in the right place at the right time.

Addendum: Social Business Gains Traction

As an addendum to an earlier post on social business, this chart from the second annual MIT and Deloitte Social Business Global Executive Study and Research Project survey on how businesses use social media suggests that the concept of social business is being adopted aggressively across all industries.  How well and how strategically it is being adopted is still an open question.

 In all 12 of the major industry sectors covered by the survey, the percentage of respondents who said social software or social business was “important to their organization today” increased from the previous year’s survey. No industry sector declined and none remained flat.

Interestingly, the industry sector with the strongest year over year increase in the survey was energy and utilities, moving from 7% of respondents ranking social business as “important” in 2011 to 29.1% in 2012.  That exponential increase may be linked with the increasing adoption of smart grid technologies that allow utilities to more easily interact with their customers.  A 2012 research report by Navigant Research predicted that by the end of 2017, the number of utility customers using social media to engage with the utility companies would rise from 57 million in 2011 to 624 million.

Unsurprisingly, for the second year in a row, the technology/media/telecommunications sector respondents were most likely to rate social business as important to their organization with 87% saying that social business was important or somewhat important to their organizations in 2012.  A bit more surprising was that the education (82%) and professional services sectors (76%) followed closely behind.

Another finding from the survey was that while companies in most industries are generating social data from their initiatives, few businesses were analyzing the data or integrating it into their organization’s systems and processes.

The new study from MIT and Deloitte will be released in July.

On Becoming a Social Business

Call it the tipping point, the moment of truth, a watershed event or any other synonym for when things have arrived at a point of irreversible, no-going-back, change.  Is 2013 going to be the year when social media truly becomes social business and social business morphs into business as usual?

Probably not.  Reams of data suggest that most companies are using social media.  Most of those are still really just dabbling.  Truly embracing social media as a core element of business going forward requires a belief and commitment that is still difficult to find in companies with more traditional business models and a bias towards the tried-and-true.  But with proof points on the efficacy of the practice/process/technology/culture of social media becoming more and more plentiful, it would seem that the more programmatic embrace of social media is coming closer to a need-to-have more than a nice-to-have.

The concept of a “social business” is still probably nascent enough that there remain a number of definitions running around.  In a recent report from Altimeter Group, Charlene Li and Brian Solis outlined the difference between a social media strategy and a social business strategy:

A social media strategy lays out the channels, platforms, and tactics to support publishing, listening, and engagement. A social business strategy is the integration of social technologies and processes into business values, processes, and practices to build relationships and spark conversations inside and outside the organization, creating value and optimizing impact for customers and the business alike. The most important criteria for a successful social business strategy are twofold: clear alignment with the strategic business goals of an organization AND organizational alignment and support that enables execution of that strategy.

Social media broadly permeates society (perhaps too much!) and that means it permeates business operations on all levels.  Ad hoc social activity runs rampant across the enterprise so it stands to reason that sooner or later, every company will want to formalize and harmonize these activities into a coherent strategy and plan.  Social business technologies help people connect, communicate, and share information and, whether informal or formal, use of those technologies allow companies to respond more quickly, take advantage more easily, and create competitive advantage.

Companies have historically tended to demonize those things that impact their business but remain beyond their control.  Though it may be stating the obvious, social media is one big, fat dynamic that is altering the playbook for business and not just in the marketing discipline.  De facto, every business today is a social business; they may just not have internalized it yet.  Possessing a strategy is merely the first step in the formal embrace of social.  That way, all those “Likes”, “Friends”, “Links”, and “Follows” can mean something more than a distraction.

Along those lines, here is a video from GE on their progression towards becoming a social business.

 

 

 

Successful Social Media Business Models - LinkedIn

From the Business Model Innovation Matters website, an interesting analysis of the LinkedIn business model using the Business Model Canvas developed by Alexander Osterwalder.

How Content Becomes Viral

This terrific graphic from Infographic World has been making the rounds quite a bit lately, but I thought it was such a great visualization of how content (presumably good content) can so easily go viral, I wanted to pass it along.

Compendium/Miscellanea/Almanac 01.12.2011

Stuff that I find interesting.  Maybe you will too.

• Budgets, Innovation Squarely in CMOs' Sights in 2011 (Advertising Age) 
• Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch  (McKinsey Quarterly) 
• How Tech Will Be Critical to Corporate Sustainability in 2011 (Greenbiz) 
• Light My Fire: The Matchbook Makes a Cultural Comeback (Fast Company) 
• How Aha! Really Happens  (Strategy + Business) 
• Swimming Against the Tide: How Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Companies Can Prosper in the New Economic Reality  (Boston Consulting Group) 
• Eric Berlow: How complexity leads to simplicity  (TED)  
• The AI Revolution Is On  (Wired)  
• The Battle for Control of Smart Cities  (Fast Company)