Social Media Industry + Challenges = generational problem?
Jeremiah Owyang has highlighted challenges the social media industry has to face in the current state. He has listed in the challenges the industry has to overcome market actors over population, amateurism, and lack of industry standards to measure ROI (read the full article here). That’s all due to the youth of the Internet market. Though that youth some industries are very experimented and we should be taking more attention to them: porn and gaming. They are the real social media thought leaders and we have a lot to learn from what they’ve done.
Social media is in its first years but some companies are already doing just awesome, have a look on FreshNetworks or CommuniSpace that are working on social media area, helping companies connecting and engaging with their customers. And SalesForce Ideas (Dell IdeaStorm and Starbucks My Ideas) has proven the deep impact and ROI companies can benefit from social media. These companies are focused on one aspect of social media: crowdsourcing for insights, feedbacks, and ideas sharing.
But looking at gaming (or porn) industry, we can find more interesting examples, related to CRM, PR, word of mouth, and advertising. The best-in-breed example is World of Warcraft, not just because it’s one of the world class game, but because it has spread beyond the gaming world frontiers. Blizzard, owner of that game, has created for long a community to evangelize gamers, a community platform to engage with players and invite people to jump into the game (yes they’re doing online recruitment), a CRM program to make people play more and longer, they just jumped into real world advertising with the latest campaign with famous actors like William Shatner (lead actor of TV show Boston Legal). They’ve got one of the most influent and large gamer community, for which they have to create content, manage and spread generated content from creative people within the community, and create regular but always innovative events (online and offline).
That firm is currently dealing with issues all companies willing to develop social media digital age communication (including using social media tools) would have to deal with. And they’re not in need of new ways of ROI calculation, nor any issue I have seen in the comments following the Jeremiah post. Blizzard has since long taken in the “social media” hype and is using it as tools to run their business. They have taken social media as a tool, and we don’t measure tools, but their effects. And above all, they’ve managed to turn their communication online, since all their customers are online.
I don’t mean by this example that everybody has to go full online and deeply modify their way of working. It would be absurd. But it’s time to get ready for a new era, where people are both online and offline, and where companies have to compete not just with other business field competitors, but with other activities (you already know the concept of 1-click away). The companies that are to jump the generational gap would be the best placed to welcome new market shares. Are you aware of the change of mindset?
Photo Credit: xflickrx
Equran Institute | March 11th, 2009 at 2:19 am #
Interesting information