As I researching for my next book, which focuses on the intersection of open innovation and social media, I want to share some of blog posts and articles that I find interesting.
There were many good insights and I have inserted snippets for each read to give you an idea on what to expect. I am sure you can find lots of inspiration here!
Please leave a comment if you can share other good reads or cases!
Is Social Media Really Collaboration in Disguise?
“The best and deepest results are yielded if collaborations hover at about 150, with an upper max of about 230. Why? If team size gets larger than this upper bound, “you don’t have enough work in common,” and the group fails to have enough common context to hold them together as a coherent unit.”
Idea Spark: Social Marketing Use Case #7—Product Development & Innovation
“Listening to consumer chatter to learn what consumers perceived was the value of the product helped the brand to tap into a new market need. What happened here wasn’t a product innovation per se, but a marketing shift to meet the perceived market need. The MARKET identified the value proposition, and the marketer tapped into that value prop through monitoring social media.”
Using Social Media to Harness Innovation
“First and foremost, decentralize contributions. Your best ideas may come from where you least expect it. Enable it. Innovation shouldn’t be confined to the R&D department. It needs to be accessible throughout an organization. The UK Department for Work and Pensions created a platform called Idea Street that allows its 120,000 staffers to contribute innovations through a gaming environment. In a matter of months 1,000 ideas were harvested and 63 are under development.”
First Direct Innovation Lab Crowdsources Customer Feedback on Products and Services
“The Lab features a “Live Tests” area that allows users to review and comment on the latest innovations, while the “Tried & Tested” section (currently empty) will display ideas that have previously been open for review, along with any updates.”
Three benefits of combining solicited feedback with social media discussions
“By relying solely on one type of information the complete picture might not be visible. However, if both solicited and social media discussions are viewed together it will accentuate areas of the business that impact both forms of feedback.”
“Social media is a switch from monologue to dialogue: therefore, consumers expect to be listened and answered. Complaints, ideas, comments, all need to be processed and addressed in a timely manner, monitored and measured through dashborads: the help of a community manager is not a superfluous commitment.”
Inside Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center
“The goal of the project, says Hassan, is to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into largest participatory brand in the world.” To that end, the company’s not only monitoring its brand on social media, but giving its fans increased access to its athletes and scientists.”
3 Ways to Use Social Media for Product Research and Development
#1: Establish your roadmap
#2: Pose relevant questions and collect the data
#3: Put the data collected to work
5 Social Media Tools for Monitoring Customer Feedback
“When running a business, there is no better critique than your customer. Customers can give you the best suggestions and feedback, because they’ve had first-hand experience with your service. And with social networks being so popular now for sharing views, opinions, giving feedback and more, it is only wise you turn to these for getting the information. Here are 5 tools that you can use to stay abreast with business trends and customers.”
Social Co-Creation – Vitamin Water’s Social Media Product Innovation Experiment
“Product Development using Social Media need not be an exercise in apprehension – by keeping the crowdsourced process controlled yet fun and exciting so that the Facebook audience feels that they’ve contributed in a real way to the development and design of your product – you not only create brand ambassadors – you have influenced that many more purchasers of your product.”
Crowdsharing and Beyond: Innovation Lessons from O2
Employees from around the business with a problem or challenge to solve, come to my team to use O2 Crowd. We design and set up a challenge for them and ask the crowd to help.
It would be great if you can share other good reads. Leave a comment!
