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How Strategic Imagination Happens

That's this: thinking differently about strategy is impossible - or, perhaps worse, that it's naïve.

Let's take a second to explore.

Jeremiah Owyang discusses how web tools and social media enable companies to connect with customers Forrester Wave Report: The Leaders in Community Platforms for Marketers (Part 4/4)

Key findings of the 9 vendors

First of all, this is still a very young market, with the average tenure of a company being just a few years in community. Despite the immaturity, we evaluated nine and were impressed with Jive Software and Telligent Systems who lead the pack because of their strong administrative and platform features and solution offerings.

"I think the whole consumer economy is being recalibrated," said Kampler. "It's something that's not been done in decades. I think it will be a three-year recalibration of consumer behavior and expectations."

40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them

We all know brands are using Twitter — whether or not you want them around. Some of them don’t quite get the medium and just tweet self-serving links or marketing speak, but you won’t find any of those brands here. We’ve handpicked 40 of the best brands experimenting with the micro-blogging platform, and asked them a few short questions about how they’re using Twitter. If some of their responses seem short, well that’s because they are. I asked each brand correspondent to answer our queries in 140 characters or less. Most of them got the point, a few rambled on a bit too long, and only asked me if “u” was acceptable in lieu of “you.” All in all, we’ve found some amazing people, doing some pretty powerful things at big companies, and all via Twitter. Smart brands use Twitter in meaningful ways, and most of them use their brand name as a way to make sure customers can find and recognize them. This piece, and the knowledge I learned from the incessant hours invested, demonstrate why brands do belong on Twitter. No other medium gets you inside a business or brand quiet like Twitter. And if you’re a brand that didn’t make our list, let us know why your tweets deserve consideration in the comments.

Chevrolet

When you gather people together in any sort of group, a social structure most always arises. Leadership is something that comes natural to some, and others have it thrust upon them.

Mobile social money, the final frontier? In the final part of discussions of social networks, media, banking and money, I thought I would turn attention to the use of mobile devices as access media to these networks. Mobile usage in banking has grown to a crescendo in the past year, after bubbling away nicely since the turn of this century. This is in part down to the fact that the latest smartphones allow a bank to deploy fully functional internet banking services to mobile devices using the same platform as their main websites. In other words, it is now cost-effective and appropriate to do this. However, the challenge with mobile finance is that we tend to discuss mobiles as one homogenous group of devices when: (a) there are many devices; and (b) the use of mobile devices to access financial services are not homogenous. Let’s look at (a) first.

Internet Banking: 2010 and beyond I’ve been reading a range of articles about the next generation internet, or the semantic web as it is called by those in the trade. Semantic is a method of looking for the meaning and relationships between things, and the semantic web effectively moves us away from files and downloads to databases and integration. In practice, this means that rather than going on to the internet to pull things out and push emails and files around, the internet continually monitors you and your tastes and finds things to push at you which match your electronic lifestyle. In other words, it makes everything online much more relevant to you as an individual, and moves us away from having to search because the semantic web will find for you. Take the way we use Google today. When you go into Google and search, it is very rare that you find what you want straight away. In fact, you often have to crawl through screen after screen, and change searches three or four times to even come close. The semantic web overcomes these difficulties because you will not have to search. The semantic web knows you and finds for you. It knows you work for a bank or technology firm, and therefore knows that when you say ‘payments’ you mean it in a professional sense, not a generic sense. Therefore it senses the most relevant things to the way you search and your profile of usual interests.

Webank | Are people replacing institutions?

Is the democratic and social nature of the internet changing the way we understand finance?

While in the past web-enabled innovation in the sector meant online banking and web-access to front-end customer services, there is today a growing set of organisations which remove banks and other institutions as intermediaries altogether.   Welcome to the world of peer-to-peer finance.

Yet another reminder of the old saying “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach.” You couldn’ be further from the truth. Facebook, or more generically any social networking platform, has significant advantages such as the ability to instantly add/configure/customize/network an application. This dramatically lowers the barriers to entry (correct on that point), but it also lowers the cost of switching for users. Yes, creating a standard (massive usage) creates a barrier to switching, but not an insurmountable barrier. Frankly, “social networking” as application is boring to me and it may prove to be a fad. I don’t really care about the minor personal gestures of my 400+ friends. But the social platform is exceptionally compelling to me as a user, developer and visionary. Social discovery and vetting of application is huge. I’ll drop one app and add a competitor in 2 minutes. My friends will do the same if it offers a compelling value. Your application of the old school metrics of the PC platform to a social platform ignores the low switching costs, social discovery of applications, incredibly low marketing costs and all of the other benefits of a social platform that will power future applications. The fact that one person in a dorm room can write a killer app that can spread virally is exceptionally powerful. That simply cannot happen on the PC. It can happen on the web, but having done it a couple of times myself, I can tell you it is costly. Will Facebook become the ultimate platform, will OpenSocial win, will browsers encapsulate social connectivity across all websites/webapps, will the semantic web finally deliver? I don’t know the winner, but social apps are here to stay. Yes there will be a lot of crap apps, but the social fabric will help separate the wheat from the chaff. Sorry, but I give your analysis an F :)

Facebook’s most important strategic asset is not its community of developers but its network of users.

Does Platform build or leverage this strategic asset?

I think that just like the invention of the printing press hastened the decline of church power, the invention of the corporation hastened the decline of government power, the Internet will probably hasten the decline of corporate power.