As a thought leader who introduced thousands of professionals to a variety of social media strategies before it was even called ‘social media’ I have always been frustrated by peers and company executives adopting severe tunnel vision based upon reading some garbage marketing whitepaper or enthralled by a bad vision claiming amazing business impacts.
The reality has always been about the data.
This is what every silicon startup and mega corporation is after. All our favorite technology brands are in a race to consume, restrict, encourage, and monetize data.
Your goal is to generate a business impact.
If you are building a unique and defensible business asset you must think not only outside of the box, but off the paper too. You need to think of the largest blank canvas you can imagine and work towards a meaningful piece of art that is yours.
#innovate #imagine
The amount of data you consider represents the number of colors you can create your masterpiece with. Those subtle shades and tones are representative of interest and trends that affect your business.
Explore your digital world…
One of the basic steps of engaging core data resources is to list out the supplies you have access to and what they represent. As an example, the graphic below shows how social content shared online provides a quick network of possible connections to other types of data.
Many digital strategies fail to implement this foundation to identify the core resources and possible impacts they might have to the business. Most fail to understand how much or how little a social post (or 10,000 social posts) can drive revenue, impact organizational performance, and define market trends that are the lifeblood of your success.
Almost all of them think about social content in context of being the realm of marketing.
The successful ones who are quietly making global impacts and generating money hand-over-fist are utilizing it for product development, community education, stakeholder engagement, competitive intelligence, talent acquisition, and market leadership.
What things do your favorite pieces of content connect to?