Ever since the Facebook IPO debacle last May there’s been a
lot of fretting about the real value of social media platforms. Facebook’s
stock opened at $38 a share, and today trades at about $21, a loss of 45% or
about $25 billion dollars, or the equivalent of the GDP
of a small country – say Cyprus or Panama.
Of course not all social platforms have disappointed so
magnificently. LinkedIn, the social professional networking platform, IPO’d in
May 2011, and first day investors have made
a healthy 50% return. There are other success stories.
The valuation of social platforms isn’t just about investor
returns. We need to consider the value proposition to users and to those that
will provide income to these platforms – potential sponsors. Most social
platforms have at their core an advertising model for making money, and
advertisers have also begun to express their value judgments. Responses have
been mixed. Back in May this year, shortly after Facebook’s roller-coaster IPO, GM
announced that it was withdrawing advertising support, citing poor
performance. Many other companies have taken a measured approach to all online
advertising, although according
to Forrester, advertising revenues for social platforms are expected to
rise by 34% through 2014. To some extent, advertising on social is a victim of
its own success: clutter and saturation make any advertising or sponsorship
difficult. And many potential sponsors see an opportunity to disintermediate
all media, and reach out directly to potential customers with their own
tailored content. Then there’s the Transparent ROI Problem – online is so
amenable to measurement, smart companies are able to precisely gage the hard
returns on investments (or lack thereof), and increasingly are discounting
softer brand benefits.
One thing is certain – the value proposition to users of
social is beyond compelling. For most teens, Facebook is as necessary to life
as oxygen. For most everybody else, social is an ingrained and everyday part of
life, like the morning cup of coffee or, dare I say it, like the daily newspaper
used to be. It is this collective addiction to social media that is
fuelling a social media investment bubble, but until we find a clearer conjunction
of shared value between users, sponsors and the platforms, the real potential
won’t be realized.
To some extent, LinkedIn shows the way and for sponsors and
users, the meeting point for shared value is bound up in the idea of community.
This is where we find the common values of like-minded users of a product, or
passionate followers of a brand. In LinkedIn's case, they attract professionals who want a
mediated way to network with colleagues and companies, and businesses want a
way to find talent. Everyone sees value. Today, too many social platforms are hoping to exploit
business value by mining users’ personal information, marketing this data to
companies. Trouble is, users don’t see the shared value – they see
exploitation, and that’s not good news for social media companies.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Monday, April 9, 2012
The Emperor Wants Clothes
We used to have an assumption that is the digital world we
remained cloaked – almost anonymous – unless we choose to reveal ourselves, and
even then we were able to invent a self of our choosing. Not anymore.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, everyone now knows that as we rummage around in the virtual world, our digital trail is soon followed: What we do, where we go, who we are, and what we think can all be discovered and refactored with unnerving ease. Our online selves are laid bare.
Us marketing types are very happy with this situation. We like naked consumers who cavort online as if well-dressed, because this unrequited intimacy allows us to target them very effectively. Knowledge is always powerful, and in marketing circles the manifold details we can gather online make us giddy with excitement about how we can tailor loving entreaties the better to woo prospects.
The whole thing is a parody of the old children’s story of the Emperor’s Clothes, expect that in this version the Emperor is starting to demand we give him his old wardrobe back.
Punters know they’re being digitally stripped searched and they’re not thrilled. They want some protection, some dignity, some rights. Enter Do Not Track. As early as 2007 the US Federal Trade Commission was approached about creating a “do not track” list, similar to the “do not call” lists that exists to suppress telephone solicitations. Over time, a more practical, technical solution has become favored: The implementation of a HTML header field that automatically signals a user’s willingness to allow tracking. This is a small step in the inevitable direction of giving consumers more rights to privacy, but it may not be enough to placate regulatory bodies like the FTC or EU regulators.
So, what do we marketing types do when the Emperor has robes again? More permission-based marketing is one outcome. A reliance on cultivating trust and a relationship with prospects is another. Certainly, the crutch of unfettered access to consumer information may soon be gone.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, everyone now knows that as we rummage around in the virtual world, our digital trail is soon followed: What we do, where we go, who we are, and what we think can all be discovered and refactored with unnerving ease. Our online selves are laid bare.
Us marketing types are very happy with this situation. We like naked consumers who cavort online as if well-dressed, because this unrequited intimacy allows us to target them very effectively. Knowledge is always powerful, and in marketing circles the manifold details we can gather online make us giddy with excitement about how we can tailor loving entreaties the better to woo prospects.
The whole thing is a parody of the old children’s story of the Emperor’s Clothes, expect that in this version the Emperor is starting to demand we give him his old wardrobe back.
Punters know they’re being digitally stripped searched and they’re not thrilled. They want some protection, some dignity, some rights. Enter Do Not Track. As early as 2007 the US Federal Trade Commission was approached about creating a “do not track” list, similar to the “do not call” lists that exists to suppress telephone solicitations. Over time, a more practical, technical solution has become favored: The implementation of a HTML header field that automatically signals a user’s willingness to allow tracking. This is a small step in the inevitable direction of giving consumers more rights to privacy, but it may not be enough to placate regulatory bodies like the FTC or EU regulators.
So, what do we marketing types do when the Emperor has robes again? More permission-based marketing is one outcome. A reliance on cultivating trust and a relationship with prospects is another. Certainly, the crutch of unfettered access to consumer information may soon be gone.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
The Gladwell Effect
A virulent meme of the moment is 10,000 Hours – the idea, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, that
brute force persistency is the route to greatness.
In his best-selling book, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success and acclaim. Looking at everyone from Robert Oppenheimer to Bill Gates, he concludes that success is largely predicated on having the stamina and determination to work at a task for a total of around 10,000 hours – what he calls the 10,000-Hour Rule.
Really?
One of his examples is The Beatles, who Gladwell points out spent much of their early days in a daze, in Hamburg, playing and playing and playing. Having read about their exploits in Germany, it’s actually amazing they even survived the experience, never mind rose to acclaim. But to say that the critical ingredient that led to their fame was being on stage together for months on end is, at best, misleading. There’s just so much more to account for.
For one thing, The Beatles adroitly (or fortuitously) surrounded themselves with great talent. To take an example, their producer on most of their recordings, George Martin, was enormously influential on their musical development, making the studio an instrument in itself and pushing the band to explore more complex sounds. Then there’s Brian Epstein, who took their raw talent and turned it into a mop-haired product for worldwide consumption. Oh, and in case we forget, Lennon and McCartney wrote some pretty good tunes, a talent that transcends anything they might have picked-up at the Ratskeller.
Perseverance is undoubtedly a characteristic of greatness. So is its near-neighbor, obsession. I’d actually argue that the real driver here is passion, an ardor for what you do. But this is never enough and to argue otherwise is an oversimplification.
Gladwell can’t be entirely blamed – although some, like scientist Stephen Pinker, have claimed his whole argument is flawed. Gladwell’s idea is more nuanced, but the popular interpretation is a reduction to a direct cause-and-effect: If only we all tried harder, we’d be rock stars.
It’s a very human failing to try and account for all results by isolating a single variable. In marketing, we do this all the time – be it attempting to understand what led to a sale, why that video went viral, or what caused our competitor to beat us on a deal. It’s too easy to say it was all down to the salesman, or the clever script, or the fact we didn’t have that one specific feature in our product. Usual this reductive reasoning is all wrong.
In marketing, don’t expect simple answers. And don’t anticipate that repetition and persistence alone will drive success.
In his best-selling book, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success and acclaim. Looking at everyone from Robert Oppenheimer to Bill Gates, he concludes that success is largely predicated on having the stamina and determination to work at a task for a total of around 10,000 hours – what he calls the 10,000-Hour Rule.
Really?
One of his examples is The Beatles, who Gladwell points out spent much of their early days in a daze, in Hamburg, playing and playing and playing. Having read about their exploits in Germany, it’s actually amazing they even survived the experience, never mind rose to acclaim. But to say that the critical ingredient that led to their fame was being on stage together for months on end is, at best, misleading. There’s just so much more to account for.
For one thing, The Beatles adroitly (or fortuitously) surrounded themselves with great talent. To take an example, their producer on most of their recordings, George Martin, was enormously influential on their musical development, making the studio an instrument in itself and pushing the band to explore more complex sounds. Then there’s Brian Epstein, who took their raw talent and turned it into a mop-haired product for worldwide consumption. Oh, and in case we forget, Lennon and McCartney wrote some pretty good tunes, a talent that transcends anything they might have picked-up at the Ratskeller.
Perseverance is undoubtedly a characteristic of greatness. So is its near-neighbor, obsession. I’d actually argue that the real driver here is passion, an ardor for what you do. But this is never enough and to argue otherwise is an oversimplification.
Gladwell can’t be entirely blamed – although some, like scientist Stephen Pinker, have claimed his whole argument is flawed. Gladwell’s idea is more nuanced, but the popular interpretation is a reduction to a direct cause-and-effect: If only we all tried harder, we’d be rock stars.
It’s a very human failing to try and account for all results by isolating a single variable. In marketing, we do this all the time – be it attempting to understand what led to a sale, why that video went viral, or what caused our competitor to beat us on a deal. It’s too easy to say it was all down to the salesman, or the clever script, or the fact we didn’t have that one specific feature in our product. Usual this reductive reasoning is all wrong.
In marketing, don’t expect simple answers. And don’t anticipate that repetition and persistence alone will drive success.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Can social media predict the future?
We all know reporters love to prognosticate, their opinions
respecting no temporal boundaries. But now a whole other industry has grown up
that lives off their stories, trying to predict future events based on today’s
news coverage.
Companies like RavenPack have built a
business by sifting through news stories in near real-time, looking for the
sentiment of coverage related to publicly-traded companies. They claim this
information can be profitably used to predict fluctuations in stock prices.
Predicting stock price moves based on current media sentiment has logic to it – readers are also traders, so if we see a string of gloomy stories about IBM’s recent product announcement, then some of us will likely dump the stock. And our likelihood to take action is proportional to our trust in the news source: If we see negative reporting in the Wall Street Journal that outweighs positive opinions on iLoveIBM.com.
Now we have social media and the prediction game has got a good deal more complicated. Researchers at the USC Annenberg School have been working hard to see how social media traffic can be used to try and predict future events. They started by looking at new movies and tried to correlate Twitter messages to first weekend receipts. They managed to get very good at estimating this, often better than industry experts, and what they found has broad implications for social media marketing.
The Annenberg team discovered that the best predictor of box office outcomes wasn’t the volume of traffic related to a movie, but the net sentiment expressed. In other words, quality beats quantity in predicting outcomes. A new movie might get a lot of buzz, but that wasn’t predictive of making a lot of money. This confirms what companies like RavenPack have long known: it’s the tonality, not the totality of coverage that really matter.
The takeaway from this? We need to be very careful how we measure social media outcomes. Measuring retweets, mentions and the raw volume of coverage for your brand just isn’t enough. Yet this is what most people do today.
Annenberg, in co-operation with the LA Times, are now trying to see if they can use their system to predict the outcome of this week’s Oscars. If you believe them, we should expect a big upset: The winner for best movie will be Midnight in Paris. Here I’ll make a prediction of my own: Much as I liked it, Midnight will lose.
Remember, I said that being able to predict stock fluctuations worked because readers are also often traders; the same logic does not apply to Oscar voting. The Oscar outcomes are based on the opinions of a mere 5,700 members of the Academy. Winning others awards such as BAFTA are a much better indicator of Oscar success.
The lesson here is that listening to everyone’s opinions is often a mistake. Instead, we need to target on influential audiences – potential customers, shareholders, employees – and understand clearly how they impact our brand and business.
Predicting stock price moves based on current media sentiment has logic to it – readers are also traders, so if we see a string of gloomy stories about IBM’s recent product announcement, then some of us will likely dump the stock. And our likelihood to take action is proportional to our trust in the news source: If we see negative reporting in the Wall Street Journal that outweighs positive opinions on iLoveIBM.com.
Now we have social media and the prediction game has got a good deal more complicated. Researchers at the USC Annenberg School have been working hard to see how social media traffic can be used to try and predict future events. They started by looking at new movies and tried to correlate Twitter messages to first weekend receipts. They managed to get very good at estimating this, often better than industry experts, and what they found has broad implications for social media marketing.
The Annenberg team discovered that the best predictor of box office outcomes wasn’t the volume of traffic related to a movie, but the net sentiment expressed. In other words, quality beats quantity in predicting outcomes. A new movie might get a lot of buzz, but that wasn’t predictive of making a lot of money. This confirms what companies like RavenPack have long known: it’s the tonality, not the totality of coverage that really matter.
The takeaway from this? We need to be very careful how we measure social media outcomes. Measuring retweets, mentions and the raw volume of coverage for your brand just isn’t enough. Yet this is what most people do today.
Annenberg, in co-operation with the LA Times, are now trying to see if they can use their system to predict the outcome of this week’s Oscars. If you believe them, we should expect a big upset: The winner for best movie will be Midnight in Paris. Here I’ll make a prediction of my own: Much as I liked it, Midnight will lose.
Remember, I said that being able to predict stock fluctuations worked because readers are also often traders; the same logic does not apply to Oscar voting. The Oscar outcomes are based on the opinions of a mere 5,700 members of the Academy. Winning others awards such as BAFTA are a much better indicator of Oscar success.
The lesson here is that listening to everyone’s opinions is often a mistake. Instead, we need to target on influential audiences – potential customers, shareholders, employees – and understand clearly how they impact our brand and business.
Friday, February 10, 2012
The social deluge and market saturation
Here’s a fun statistic: every 10 days, over a century’s
worth of video footage gets uploaded to YouTube. Here’s another: there are over
27
billion likes and comments added to Facebook every day. Or try this: last
week, the number of Superbowl tweets peaked at over 12,000 per second.
If you’re a marketing type, then your first reaction to all this is probably salivation – all those eyeballs, all that attention!! – but dwell on this for a moment and you’ll quickly despair. The astonishing growth in social media – the unbelievable volume and velocity of messages, news, and information – is quickly leading to saturation. As users of social, we’re all increasingly unable to deal with the cacophony and clutter.
There’s another, related effect. In his book Data Smog, David Shenk estimated that the average American consumer was exposed to about 50 commercial messages a day in the 1970s; by 1997, that number had grown to 3,000 messages a day. Today, some put the number of marketing messages as high as 5,000 per day, with most of the increase coming from online and social sources. Commensurate with this dramatic increase in message density is a dramatic decrease in advertising effectiveness. The effectiveness of commercial messages is inversely proportional to the number of messages received.
If you’re a marketing type, then your first reaction to all this is probably salivation – all those eyeballs, all that attention!! – but dwell on this for a moment and you’ll quickly despair. The astonishing growth in social media – the unbelievable volume and velocity of messages, news, and information – is quickly leading to saturation. As users of social, we’re all increasingly unable to deal with the cacophony and clutter.
There’s another, related effect. In his book Data Smog, David Shenk estimated that the average American consumer was exposed to about 50 commercial messages a day in the 1970s; by 1997, that number had grown to 3,000 messages a day. Today, some put the number of marketing messages as high as 5,000 per day, with most of the increase coming from online and social sources. Commensurate with this dramatic increase in message density is a dramatic decrease in advertising effectiveness. The effectiveness of commercial messages is inversely proportional to the number of messages received.
Getting attention in social media is getting harder and
harder. The effectiveness of pushing any messages through social channels will
only diminish with time. This isn’t solely an advertising problem.
There are several consequences to this. First, social platforms that rely wholly on advertising for revenue will slowly see growth-rates falter as smart, data-driven companies begin to see waning returns from their advertising investments. The irony here is that the runaway popularity of social platforms will be their undoing.
Second, marketing pros will be forced to rethink old ways of engaging with consumers. Heavy-handed corporate marketing in a social world won’t work. Getting heard amid the social din will require an authenticity and empathy that is alien to many old-school marketing pros. It will require careful targeting and impeccable timing.
Finally, marketing professionals need to educate their organizations on what can realistically be achieved with social media. Engaging through social marketing will require clarity of message and intention, as well as focus and agility – and resources.
There are several consequences to this. First, social platforms that rely wholly on advertising for revenue will slowly see growth-rates falter as smart, data-driven companies begin to see waning returns from their advertising investments. The irony here is that the runaway popularity of social platforms will be their undoing.
Second, marketing pros will be forced to rethink old ways of engaging with consumers. Heavy-handed corporate marketing in a social world won’t work. Getting heard amid the social din will require an authenticity and empathy that is alien to many old-school marketing pros. It will require careful targeting and impeccable timing.
Finally, marketing professionals need to educate their organizations on what can realistically be achieved with social media. Engaging through social marketing will require clarity of message and intention, as well as focus and agility – and resources.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Pottingers, Wikipedia, & WikiLies
Last week, The UK newspaper The Independent revealed
that Bell Pottinger, a leading PR agency, had engaged in the covert
manipulation of Wikipedia entries related to some of its clients. Using
multiple, anonymous accounts, staff at the agency had eradicated negative
information, inflated positive references, and altered the facts of numerous
Wikipedia entries. It also became apparent that agency executives routinely
pitched to clients and prospects their ability to alter Wikipedia entries as
part of their services.
I propose that henceforth we name an entry in Wikipedia that has been willfully manipulated a "Pottinger" in their honor. I challenge readers to create the "Pottinger" Wikipedia entry.
Your immediate reaction to this story might reasonably be this – how stupid can you get??? My reaction was a little different: I’m a marketing professional with over 15 years’ experience running PR programs for big organizations, and I must confess to having altered Wikipedia entries too.
A few years back I started a new job at a well know technology company, and on my second day got a call from the CMO: Could I come to his office immediately. When I got there he showed me the Wikipedia entry for a senior executive. I was shocked. The entry had been altered by several anonymous people and contained openly slanderous statements. Some of the changes seemed downright bizarre. I had a Wikipedia account (I’d created a number of entries years ago), and I worked to get the changes removed and details corrected. It was an uphill struggle because I didn’t disguise who I was, but eventually things were made right (then right again, as the entry continued to be changed). We made no attempt to catch the perpetrators – that was too complex and time-consuming.
Of course, unlike Bell Pottinger, my actions didn’t breach any of Wikipedia’s guidelines (that I know about) or hide any truths – in fact, the reverse. And I’m not alone: I know of many instances where company employees or agency staff altered entries related to their employer or client, almost all correcting wrongs, adding missing information, or providing context. Wikipedia is a crowdsourced entity, open to anyone; laudably democratic, but ripe for abuse, neglect or simple error. Fixing things can feel unnecessarily arduous and often frustrating.
Needless to say, none of this excuses the stupidity of Bell Pottinger. They’re dolts, with a history of ethical issues.
However, you can’t argue BP is a unique case, or even out-of-the-ordinary. Far from it. There’s a long history of Wikipedia abuse. WikiScanner, Wikipedia Review and others have catalogued many examples over the years, and others have pointed to the inherent problem with a trust-based, crowdsourcing model for gathering information. Indeed, Wikipedia deletes over a thousand entries every day.
In general, crowdsourcing anything should invite scrutiny and skepticism. We certainly shouldn’t assume that Wikipedia is the bastion of unalienable truth. And unfortunately, nor should we think of Bell Pottinger as an anomaly – expect continued revelations of WikiLies as Wikipedia, already the sixth most visited website worldwide, gains in significance.
I propose that henceforth we name an entry in Wikipedia that has been willfully manipulated a "Pottinger" in their honor. I challenge readers to create the "Pottinger" Wikipedia entry.
Your immediate reaction to this story might reasonably be this – how stupid can you get??? My reaction was a little different: I’m a marketing professional with over 15 years’ experience running PR programs for big organizations, and I must confess to having altered Wikipedia entries too.
A few years back I started a new job at a well know technology company, and on my second day got a call from the CMO: Could I come to his office immediately. When I got there he showed me the Wikipedia entry for a senior executive. I was shocked. The entry had been altered by several anonymous people and contained openly slanderous statements. Some of the changes seemed downright bizarre. I had a Wikipedia account (I’d created a number of entries years ago), and I worked to get the changes removed and details corrected. It was an uphill struggle because I didn’t disguise who I was, but eventually things were made right (then right again, as the entry continued to be changed). We made no attempt to catch the perpetrators – that was too complex and time-consuming.
Of course, unlike Bell Pottinger, my actions didn’t breach any of Wikipedia’s guidelines (that I know about) or hide any truths – in fact, the reverse. And I’m not alone: I know of many instances where company employees or agency staff altered entries related to their employer or client, almost all correcting wrongs, adding missing information, or providing context. Wikipedia is a crowdsourced entity, open to anyone; laudably democratic, but ripe for abuse, neglect or simple error. Fixing things can feel unnecessarily arduous and often frustrating.
Needless to say, none of this excuses the stupidity of Bell Pottinger. They’re dolts, with a history of ethical issues.
However, you can’t argue BP is a unique case, or even out-of-the-ordinary. Far from it. There’s a long history of Wikipedia abuse. WikiScanner, Wikipedia Review and others have catalogued many examples over the years, and others have pointed to the inherent problem with a trust-based, crowdsourcing model for gathering information. Indeed, Wikipedia deletes over a thousand entries every day.
In general, crowdsourcing anything should invite scrutiny and skepticism. We certainly shouldn’t assume that Wikipedia is the bastion of unalienable truth. And unfortunately, nor should we think of Bell Pottinger as an anomaly – expect continued revelations of WikiLies as Wikipedia, already the sixth most visited website worldwide, gains in significance.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Fortune 500 Lag in Social Media Adoption, To Their Great Cost
At the end of last month McKinsey
published the results of their fifth annual survey on the ways
organizations use social technologies.
For the most part, the results are a snooze: The adoption of social media tools, from Twitter to Quora, is steadily rising; measurable benefits are steadily if slowly increasing; and the sophistication in the way organizations use social media has seen significant gains. All good, although hardly ground-breaking news.
But wait. The McKinsey people aren’t anything if not thorough, so they also tried to show a correlation between adoption of social media and self-reported organizational performance (that is, market share gains, operating margin compared to competition, and being first in industry market share). To my surprise, on the latter measure – showing a link between market share leadership and adopting social tools – the correlations are mostly negative. This suggests that the adoption of social media is adversely associated with being a market leader, a counter-intuitive and strange result. If it were so, then the good people at McKinsey should be telling the titans of industry to flee Facebook, ban blogging, and terminate Twitter post-haste.
But wait. The researchers’ explanation of this is that “while market leaders may use social media technologies within the organization, they might be less inclined than market challengers to push for a full range of benefits [and use social media externally].” So, according to McKinsey, they suspect that market leaders as a group are actually under-utilizing social media.
This sounds plausible. Indeed, very detailed research by UMASS Dartmouth shows that for blogs, about 23 percent of the Fortune 500 (large, market-share leaders) have corporate blogs, compared to well over 50% if the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing companies compiled by Inc. magazine. There are similar results for corporate adoption of Facebook and Twitter – the Fortune 500 lag the rest of industry, especially the fastest-growing companies.
Put these two pieces of research together and we have strong data suggesting that large, market-share leaders – think companies like WalMart, Exxon-Mobil, Proctor and Gamble, Hewlett Packard, Boeing and Dow Chemical – are collectively failing to extract value from the social media revolution. These findings play into the stereotype of the lumbering, bureaucratic multinational that often enjoy a market-share lead but fail to take first-mover advantage of new innovations.
And the research clearly shows that the price of late adoption of social media is very high indeed.
For the most part, the results are a snooze: The adoption of social media tools, from Twitter to Quora, is steadily rising; measurable benefits are steadily if slowly increasing; and the sophistication in the way organizations use social media has seen significant gains. All good, although hardly ground-breaking news.
But wait. The McKinsey people aren’t anything if not thorough, so they also tried to show a correlation between adoption of social media and self-reported organizational performance (that is, market share gains, operating margin compared to competition, and being first in industry market share). To my surprise, on the latter measure – showing a link between market share leadership and adopting social tools – the correlations are mostly negative. This suggests that the adoption of social media is adversely associated with being a market leader, a counter-intuitive and strange result. If it were so, then the good people at McKinsey should be telling the titans of industry to flee Facebook, ban blogging, and terminate Twitter post-haste.
But wait. The researchers’ explanation of this is that “while market leaders may use social media technologies within the organization, they might be less inclined than market challengers to push for a full range of benefits [and use social media externally].” So, according to McKinsey, they suspect that market leaders as a group are actually under-utilizing social media.
This sounds plausible. Indeed, very detailed research by UMASS Dartmouth shows that for blogs, about 23 percent of the Fortune 500 (large, market-share leaders) have corporate blogs, compared to well over 50% if the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing companies compiled by Inc. magazine. There are similar results for corporate adoption of Facebook and Twitter – the Fortune 500 lag the rest of industry, especially the fastest-growing companies.
Put these two pieces of research together and we have strong data suggesting that large, market-share leaders – think companies like WalMart, Exxon-Mobil, Proctor and Gamble, Hewlett Packard, Boeing and Dow Chemical – are collectively failing to extract value from the social media revolution. These findings play into the stereotype of the lumbering, bureaucratic multinational that often enjoy a market-share lead but fail to take first-mover advantage of new innovations.
And the research clearly shows that the price of late adoption of social media is very high indeed.
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