12 Days of Digital – Day 1: Origin of Social
Today we welcome Kate Pickering our guest blogger and friend of Wavelength to LIVE. Kate will be writing our “12 Days of Digital” series for us, leading up to our event on 13th September.
Former BBC producer Kate Pickering has worked in broadcast, innovation and digital media for 14 years. She is Director of media140 delivering events and workshops in the UK, mainland Europe and Australia on the transformation of business using social technologies. A collaborative innovation enthusiast and a firm believer the web is for good as well as play Kate is focused on what’s new and what’s next to better business. She has recently become Innovation Programme Leader at Co-operatives UK.Connect with Kate.
Origin of Social
‘Social media’ is a misnomer that simply can’t live up to the transformational impact collaborative technologies have on benefiting business.
We have come through social media fever with a raft of new job titles, agencies and ‘gurus’ we never imagined ten years ago. Many organisations have either dipped their toe with a what’ve-we-got-to-lose approach so as to not ignore the latest fad or gone kamikaze into catastrophe by being brave but blind (not mentioning any names, Pepsi).
It is now time to truly embrace the potential of what we’ve started. And yes I do mean ‘we’. Social, Collaborative, Networks – use any word you like but at the heart of each are people, on- and offline. As markets and opportunities continue to evolve companies need a more structured approach. It’s time to stop talking about ‘social media strategies’ and talk more about doing our jobs with the best tools available.
Throughout this series of blog posts we’re going to focus on different areas of who and how organisations are using social technologies to their best advantage. It seems sensible, then to start at the very beginning. In a world where VC pocket strings are getting tighter and formalised lending is showing few signs of recovery how do you find that all important pot to get your business or project off the ground? The answerCrowdfunding, best summed up by Wikipedia, everyone’s favourite crowdsourced site: ‘the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money and other resources together, usually via the internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations’. For further reading and examples of crowdfunding sites to find your potential investment click here.
In this period of Digital Darwinism it seems appropriate to hark back to the father of evolution, ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change’. Hats off to those who are still plugging away to get it right (yes I mean you Pepsi, but more on that later…).