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For many of us studying and working with social media the overall concept makes perfectly sense. How connectivity between vast amounts of people produces content through social interaction. However, it can be very difficult to share this understanding with nonbelievers. Especially in short sentences at social gatherings, in a bar or where you tend to speak about social media in looser terms. Even if we’re not Don Draper, everyone knows how important these conversations can be for business.
Personally I have been a fan of Jonathan Harris work for a long time. It all began with wefeelfine. WeFeelFine is the illustration I always turn to when talking to nonbelievers about the potential of social media. WeFeelFine is a mash-up algorithm fetching content from the blogosphere. In this particular case it is content related to the word feeling, but it could be anything. Your brand, your product, your euphorisme etc.
If you start out with ‘madness display’ on WeFeelFine the dots flow freely. It resembles randomly searching for something out there on the web. If what your looking for means something to someone, it is already out there. Then there is Murmurs, one of several different modes, where updates are listed chronologically. Murmurs resembles structured folksomomy searchs or search in tags or # on twitter. This is where the business perspective lies.
IBM have a B2B program called Intelligent Listening. It is a program that allows IBM to monitor social media for sales opportunities. They monitor conversations like “I’m looking to replace my old server” or “Does anyone have recommendations for what kind of storage device will work in this in type of situation?”
Here is what Mr. Linde had to say about the program in an interview with eMarketer magazine:
“I would say Listening for Leads has been our best initiative so far. We have uncovered millions of dollars worth of sales leads through our intelligent listening program and we’ve closed a lot of business and we expect to do more. That’s going to be a big growth area”
If we go back to WeFeelFine and look at what happen when we went from Madness to murmur. It is the same thing. And with this picture in everyone’s head it should be easier to explain the enormous potential of social media. What it is today and what it can be tomorrow.
The thing is, if you are able to share your enthusiasm in a fully understandable way, the chances are better that your client will integrate social media into their business. Not just add it. And that is a big difference.
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