Nurturing my Inner Maverick

Interesting comment from Google presentation at Somesso is the quote "A happy user is the best marketing that money can buy" - is this some of the value of Twitter?

Regulation is a significant potential inhibitor to the use of social media in the financial sector. However, these regulatory challenge are not insurmountable as shown in other industries such as wines and spirits. One of the presentations at Somesso emphasises the use of buy-in, collaboration with Legal & Compliance, education, moderation and an ability to react quickly as required, as ways of overcoming these.

Several presentations this afternoon have asserted that 21st century organisations need to be organised on collaborative, person based principles rather than control, mass based 20th century "industrial age" principles.

As promised, a quick summary on the results of this process. The first impact was that the process of generating "blogable" and "tweetable" (if there are such words?) content did help increase involvement in most of the presentations. However, the short format of Twitter did not help when trying to generate value added comments whose value would persist beyond the day. I am still in two minds as how to make best use of this, however it is clear it is a communication channel for immediate news, reaction, comment and soundbites rather than full analysis. The work to generate short "real-time" blog entries was useful although a mix of technical issues and British reserve meant that not all of them made it onto the web. In terms of generating increased engagement, the process was helpful with material additions to Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections and significantly LinkedIn discussion group membership. More preparation and "advertising" is required to get intraday blog comments - the readership of the blog stream on the day was not wide enough. As with most social media initiatives, it is important to try things to see what does and doesn't work. So overall, a useful experiment for me, and one I hope to repeat in the near future so as to exploit by enhanced "inner maverick", apply the lessons I have learnt so far and gain more experience in this interesting area.