Social Media: Opportunity and Risk

Posted by Glenn Gow on 05/19/07 at 05:52 AM under "Opportunity Analysis","Interactive Services"

Denise Shiffman writes about a report on the Inc. 500 by the Center for Marketing Research that speaks to smaller companies moving to social media faster than large companies.

The reason smaller companies are earlier adopters is that they perceive they have a lot less to lose. The larger companies are worried about their proprietary information getting out. They’re worried about losing control of their messaging. Their worried they won’t look good. They’re worried (by the attorneys) about legal issues.

This is not dissimilar to IBM’s early attempts to embrace Apache as a web server platform. “Oh no, we’ll get sued! We can’t control that code”, is what the attorneys said. And yet, IBM adopted it with a vengeance and rode a wave that really helped them grow their services business, because they saw the market opportunity and managed their risks.

THAT is what bigger companies need to do. SEE the market opportunity and if they’re concerned about risk, manage it, but don’t run away from this revolution because of it. In many ways, this is like cannibalization. Either you step in and be part of the revolution, or it will happen to you without you gaining from it in any way.

Big companies no longer have the control over messages that flow to decision-influencers, that they used to. Full control is gone. Big companies need to step in now to “participate in conversations”. Yes, this is a paradigm shift. That’s why they need to do it now and learn how to do it really well.

The world has already changed.

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