I recently carried out a piece of preparatory work on the financial services industry, in particular the Insurance sector and its use of social media. I thought it would be worth writing a blog post to share some findings. Hopefully this is of use to anyone in the same industry/sector. And while the emphasis is on the financial services and heavily regulated industries, I highlight some challenges that could be faced by any organisation so learning could be more broadly applied. A key premise could be “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” :) Please share your thoughts in a comment and also any articles or research that you believe do a great job of covering the industry/sector or topics.
Research
The financial services industry and other big social business challenges
- April 24, 2012
- Research, Social Business
- No Comments
Organising for the social marketplace of ideas aka Open Innovation
- February 20, 2012
- Innovation, Research, Social Business
- No Comments
A current area of focus for The Work Foundation is how the UK develops a strategy for open innovation. They are building a new employer-led research programme to examine the effectiveness of innovation ecosystems within organisations. One key question which forms the basis of this new research is what strategies organisations need to adopt to successfully manage people in an open innovation era and from this, whether social technologies help, or hinder? There are other questions but I will be focusing especially on the latter part of this question (related to social technologies) and use this blog post, leading up to a related workshop that I’m attending, to gather my thoughts and some references and ideally get some feedback from you dear reader :)
Comparison of 100 Top Companies on Social Business and Innovation
- January 25, 2012
- Innovation, Research, Social Business
- 2 Comments
This post is inspired by an excellent post with a very similar title and purpose but different angle. Jay Baer just a few days ago looked at a Comparison of 100 Top Companies on Social Business and Corporate Culture. He took data from Dachis’ Social Business Index for the most social businesses and correlated it with FORTUNE’s 2012 list of 100 Best Companies to Work For to see if being a good place to work for impacts Social Business or being employee-centric inherently impacts the social business aptitude of the company. I thought he did a fine job and wondered about the correlations with Innovation.
Social Business evidence mounting: best research, cases 2011
- January 11, 2012
- Research
- 12 Comments
Amongst the plethora of annual predictions that come out at this time of year, with some very worthy efforts, I thought it useful to look backward. I’ve listed some of the excellent articles, cases and research reports from the last year that show with mounting evidence, that the case for social business is mounting positively. I’ve tried to capture the gist of my understanding and a major takeout for each report in a brief paragraph. This is mostly for my own aggregation and learning purposes and possibly for some still sceptical prospective clients but I hope you find it useful too :) The most rigorous, evidence based research reports are clustered at the top.
How to select and implement social software
- September 26, 2011
- Projects, Research, Social Business
- 3 Comments
I was recently asked by a global financial services firm’s UK office (staff 4500 in UK) to conduct a robust evaluation/selection process for a new social idea management system. The system would replace one already in existence that was developed in-house and the main intention was to improve companywide innovation efforts. Alongside the final decision, a framework was needed for addressing implementation and adoption considerations. I have made the “case study” available for download via this site and ask only that you subscribe to my newsletter to gain access (if unsatisfied you can easily unsubscribe at a later date). Embedded Slideshare after the jump
Analysis of Gartner Analysis: Social Business Hype Cycle and Magic Quadrant
- September 1, 2011
- Research, Social Business
- 8 Comments
Two reports just released by Gartner are analysed (perhaps “light review” are better words but analysis makes for a better title :). 1). Hype Cycle for Business Use of Social Technologies, 2011. Firstly this report examines how businesses use social software technologies. It is distinct and separate to its companion report, “Hype Cycle for Social Software, 2011,” which tracks the actual technologies and also from the more generic “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” (Hype Cycles explained). 2.) Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace explores vendors of social applications, enterprise platforms and business applications.
The use of Web 2.0 in businesses – Latest McKinsey Survey
- December 14, 2010
- Research
- No Comments
I came across the fact that McKinsey has updated their long standing assessment of businesses using the social web. I don’t have access to the actual report and after a cursory search have not been able to find it. I discovered the fact that McKinsey released their latest survey findings through an article on the FT (registration required so I thought I’d summarise the main findings here – at least the ones I found interesting – with some limited permissible extracts).
Social web for enterprise workshop
- June 30, 2010
- Research
- No Comments
I recently ran a workshop session which was kindly hosted by local business support organisation. It was a resounding success in terms of attendance, participation and feedback :) This post is a report which tries to summarise the key discussions and learnings from the event.
Enterprise 2.0 Redux
- January 24, 2010
- Research, Social Business
- 1 Comment
This is by no means an exhaustive analysis of the landscape (no time ) just a fairly spontaneous snapshot and partly an attempt to consolidate my thinking.Thought it would be useful to chunk this post and believe the holy enterprise triumvirate of process, people and technology (covered below) will do the job just as well as any other set. I also thought I should revisit some thinking I did a while ago to see whence I’ve come from and possibly contrast this with the current state of play and my thinking. Below is a deck of slides I put together when I was still working at Sony in 2005. It preceded my departure and the start-up of Netociety (now Socialwrks) and was used as a basis for collecting my thoughts so it is perfectly applicable here!
Who?
Twitterwrks
- gigaom: Facebook’s foreign foes: five countries to conquer for new growth http://t.co/B17gx6w1 May 19, 2012
- DavidGurteen: Event: KM Brasil 2012, 22 - 24 Aug 2012, Sao Paulo, Brasil http://t.co/QEq5N4iu May 19, 2012
- TechCrunch: Hyperlinks Are Dumb And Bleeding Money; How To Ensure Yours Aren’t http://t.co/0Zk5bruT by @oroup May 19, 2012
- HarvardBiz: Do You Know What You Are Feeling? http://t.co/NvrpD4MS May 19, 2012
- smashingmag: A BIG announcement: the site and the ticket sale for the upcoming @smashingconf will start at May 25th. Just 350 tickets are available! May 19, 2012
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