I recently finished some consulting work with a great group of critical thinkers at The Devil's Advocate Group. We looked at the impact of social media on the worlds of investing, investor relations and corporate governance. I primarily helped with the study portion of 30 major financial Web sites – here's more info on my competitive assessment of social media sites.
What came out of the work was a surprising number of misconceptions–but also a huge amount of opportunity. In this public report, Chunka Mui and Paul Carroll highlight 5 Misconceptions that could contribute to ill conceived initiatives, or to missed opportunities in social media for investing. The report also lists 6 ways it will, in fact, be powerful in the long run in this industry.
They also identify significant questions that remain even if one skirts the misconceptions and focuses on the real drivers of social: timing, reputation management, regulations and compliance, and privacy/security.
Here are the 3 concluding recommendations for folks pioneering the social media space in investing:
- Understand Your Doomsday Scenario: Getting a clear inventory of threats and how they might play out across your business lines and customer segments is necessary to steer the right course in a very complicated, emerging world.
- Build a Common Perspective: By getting doomsday scenarios on the table, management teams come to a real consensus on timing and can move forward in more unified fashion. It's also valuable to maintain a tracking mechanism so that, as the months and quarters go by, it's possible to see whether change is coming faster or more slowly than anticipated.
- Win with a robust innovation process: Once everyone is on the same page in terms of the forecasted environment, determine how to innovate by thinking big, starting small, and using the nature of social media to learn fast and scale. I'm always happy to help you with that!
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Be sure to download and read the PDF and add your own additions and challenges to this thinking - we'd love to hear from you!
My props to Chuck Callan and Bob Schifellite of Broadridge and Janey Place and Tom Waite of the Devil's Advocate Group who I had the pleasure of working with on this.
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