Mike Lagastes
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17
Last Tuesday morning, eight IABC members and their senior Executives gathered for an Executive roundtable breakfast with Deloitte Digital CEO Pete Williams (@rexster) the topic of Social Media, Control, Trust and Innovation.
Any time spent with Pete is a windfall - guests were treated to a wide-ranging discussion that covered off Wikileaks, absorptive capacity, social insects and complex adaptive systems.
The participants were keen to discuss the following issues:
- When to jump in: active versus passive participation
- Loss of control
- Dealing with fear
- Resourcing
- How companies are using Social Media for Growth
- Driving engagement (push / pull mechanisms
- What’s the next big thing in Social Media
Some of the key points stressed by Peter were:
- The necessity of an ‘entangled web’ e.g. ensuring that all of your community facing technologies enable communities and cross pollination of content and information
- The only way to protect a companies reputation is to be authentic and on point
- The web world is self-organising, pointless to try and control
- The growing value of crowd sourcing (e.g. crowds can provide what you need quicker and more effectively)
- The value in using Facebook for business is that you are situating your business where your community already lives. (Pete predicts Facebook will become the most important website in the world)
- The growing trend of nano-campaigns (tiny, targeted niche campaigns)
- Innovation is not having the ideas, it is also the execution (e.g. forget about stage-gate and innovation models, just try it and test, use micro funding, come up with a prototype, just try it and test)
- When innovating, it’s OK to launch things that aren’t perfect. Launch things people like and build on it from there.
- Engaging with social media and being agile requires a highly permissive culture
- The hidden benefits of yammer include decreased turnover of staff, reduced email volume
- Conduct social network analysis to understand who your influencers are (e.g. draw from telephone, email and social media data)
- Some data will always be sensitive - common sense tells you what not to publish
- If people are abusing social media (e.g. Farmville at work), don’t ban the media, call out the behaviour
- Use a digital dinosaur mentoring program (use digital natives to mentor older staff to becoming digital immigrants - wisdom is transferred both ways)
Participants left the breakfast highly enthused and ready to take their new learnings back to their own organisations.
Pete is a sensation - he’s credible, cool and extremely clever. With a pedigree including accounting and IT geekery, he has the perfect blend of credibility to inspire, explain and debunk the myths of social media. This was the best session I have been to in years and I would recommend it to everyone in communications, or indeed, anyone in any business today.
- Larissa Garvin, Director, Strategic Communications and Engagement at Worksafe
IABC Victoria is committed to bringing you the thought leaders of your profession. We will be actively looking for more opportunities to deliver outstanding speakers to our members in 2011. If you have a particular area of interest that you would like us to explore, please leave a comment or contact us at info@iabcvic.com.au
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[…] wrap up of the Executive Breakfast on Social Media with Pete Williams […]
[…] As well as are regular events, we continuously seek opportunities to bring major international and local experts to the chapter to conduct workshops across the full range of strategic communication […]