Next month I'll be spending half a day with a group of professionals from New York City and the Greater Philadelphia area making sense of the future of social#.
Or, as Frank Eliason (now Citi's Director of Global Social Media) put it in his event description discussing why and how companies are shifting away from social toward the next “big thing.”
After the keynote, we will focus the conversation on current state of social media and how it is changing the way we work.
This is where we'll get down to brass tacks and examples from a variety of experiences. Take a look at the panel's credentials.
Joining the panel are Augie Ray, who is Director of Social Media at a F100 financial services company and former social lead at USAA and Forrester Research, and Marc Monseau, founder of MDM Communications and former communication lead in social at J&J.
And of course me, with a diverse background spanning two continents, a couple of cultures, three languages, five industries, and corporate and agency side of business, now working on omnichannel strategies and experiences that are responsive, social, and data-driven for a roster of clients in retail, financial services, healthcare, and media.
The aspect of social I focus most on is that of business intelligence. Through semantic research and data analysis, identifying/uncovering job to be done and through user research inviting user input and feedback at early points of development.
This can help create better minimum viable products (MVPs), and improve existing service design experiences, products, and processes before release, then iterate.
I look forward to learning about the next big thing from Frank. For my part, I'll bring examples from work I've done, as well as thoughts on what I see as 5 themes for the next few years.
5 Themes on the Future of Social
I've been wrong about pull technology completely replacing push -- see for example this post on Web 3.0 dated November 2007. However, I have been tracking fairly well with some of the themes on what I see as the future of social.
To start the conversation, here are the themes I've been thinking about:
(1. ) user experience for design of service will become critical -- multiple screens and context being part of that, of course. And also places, as in physical experiences.
(2.) dealing with data takes a whole new meaning -- both due to the growth of social networks and rapid technology adoption. Big data being the new shiny object and either gold mine or headache, depending on the level of tech integration and analysis available.
(3.) harnessing the power of pull AND push -- find the R-spot (for relevance) by working 1 and 2 and marketing is sexy again. It's no longer a matter of where to find business intelligence. Now it's about the query set.
(4.) operational execution takes center stage -- rapid prototyping, testing, iterating all take operational savvy and execution chops. Strategy, measurement framework, MVP and program management are all happening in rapid fire sequencing and collaboration.
(5.) connecting the stream with action is how business becomes social -- tech and business intelligence, applied to the first four themes creates the adaptive DNA. It's what I called uploading humanism in my Ignite Austin Talk.
Balanced humanism is what we need as active agent in increasing the options, choices, and possibilities of others.
[image courtesy]
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her to speak click here.