Sarah Goodall twitted a really insightful social media report from McKinsey a short while ago. The five page document is extensive, but only two of the charts (pictured here) really surprised me. 

The first one on page 2 (Exhibit 3) tells me that customer satisfaction is the least impacted benefit since 2009 (3 point delta). No good. However that’s just a hair under “Reducing marketing costs” - these tell me that (1) most still haven’t figured out how to use this social stuff to make customers happier and (2) we’re still underestimating the costs of doing social.

The second one on page 5 (Exhibit 7) is a little more shocking to me. Why? As the report notes:

“…the greatest number say their companies use these tools to scan the external environment for new ideas”

Which tells me that innovation is not coming from internal resources! If companies are scanning outwardly for new ideas, they’re not tapping their own people. Or their own people have no innovative ideas - which I find unlikely. Or maybe companies are also tapping internally, but clearly not using social media technologies to do so. I find that disturbing.

This is *the* (or one of *the*) future of social support. I don’t care how nuts you think I am (hint: plenty). But the day you connect machines, software, and people on the same digital bus (Twitter, private network, mobile, whatever) is the day you actually make a dent in the existing mess of enterprise support infrastructures. Heck, even Instructables gets it…It’s the social graph stupid! :)
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This is *the* (or one of *the*) future of social support. I don’t care how nuts you think I am (hint: plenty). But the day you connect machines, software, and people on the same digital bus (Twitter, private network, mobile, whatever) is the day you actually make a dent in the existing mess of enterprise support infrastructures.

Heck, even Instructables gets it…It’s the social graph stupid! :)

“Ideation” is the concept of crowdsourcing applied to innovative ideas. The “crowd” typically comprises either internal (employees) or external (customers/fans) - or both. It’s a pretty hot concept and been around for a while. Dell, for one, knocked it out of the ballpark with its IdeaStorm platform. But the reason Dell succeeds at it (and many others don’t) is fairly simple: they actually have a plan and process in place to take the ideas, filter the crap out, and bubble the winners up to implementation.  It’s easy to ask customers or employees for ideas - and appear progressive and “social” in the process. But if you can’t or won’t follow up on the firehose afterwards, then you’re just posturing - and it shows. It’s best to let people know you don’t care one bit about their ideas (which is actually quite okay) than to create the illusion of the contrary and appear less than authentic in the process.
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“Ideation” is the concept of crowdsourcing applied to innovative ideas. The “crowd” typically comprises either internal (employees) or external (customers/fans) - or both.

It’s a pretty hot concept and been around for a while. Dell, for one, knocked it out of the ballpark with its IdeaStorm platform. But the reason Dell succeeds at it (and many others don’t) is fairly simple: they actually have a plan and process in place to take the ideas, filter the crap out, and bubble the winners up to implementation. 

It’s easy to ask customers or employees for ideas - and appear progressive and “social” in the process. But if you can’t or won’t follow up on the firehose afterwards, then you’re just posturing - and it shows.

It’s best to let people know you don’t care one bit about their ideas (which is actually quite okay) than to create the illusion of the contrary and appear less than authentic in the process.