Social Media Today recently interviewed Ted Shelton, a strategy consulting leader at PwC and author of Business Models for the Social Media Cloud to discuss topics that will come up at the Social Shake-Up Conference where Ted will be speaking.
When asked to describe why companies should focus on how they use social, mobile, and cloud technologies, he replied, “Over the last decade as the Internet has matured, first of all, our ability to have persistent access to the Internet because of mobile devices has become ubiquitous. It’s amazing when you think back at the first thing we now think of as a smart phone was introduced only in 2007. It’s only been a few short years, and yet we now take for granted the idea that anywhere we are we can access the Internet, and that means instant access to information and people and services on demand, all the time. So that’s the mobile piece.”
He then discusses his book, “In the book I talked about digital kinesthesia. Kinesthesia is your body sense. If you hold your hand behind your back, you know where it is. We’re starting to evolve the digital kinesthesia, a sense of knowing where presences online even though we can’t see it. Carrying that mobile device around lets us interact with workflow in decision-making and staying informed and reacting in shorter periods of time to customer inquiries or employee inquiries.”
Shelton said that the technologies are not new but they been evolving for quite some time. Social and mobile have reached a “mass adoption level” and have “combined in such a compelling way that allows us to really change the operating models for business in fundamental ways.” He continued, “The reason I attach cloud to that is the only way that this new operating model functions is by having, at the back end of it, the ubiquitous computing and data storage and networking infrastructure that is 100 percent reliable, agile in terms of being able to give me new functionality on demand, and ubiquitous not just to me but to all my trading partners, customers, vendors, employees, everybody in my social graph. So it’s the three coming together that suddenly creates a transformation opportunity for business.”
When asked to discuss how social, mobile, and cloud technologies are impacting marketing departments he responded, “We did a survey at the end of last year were my team had the opportunity to speak with 20 heads of digital brand marketing in the US who were all working for firms that are in the Ad Age 100. We looked at the distribution curve across marketing organizations, and there was a clear tipping point line. When companies started to cross over between 20 and 25 percent of spend, there was a really interesting thing that happened. Before they got to that point, all of the information they had about how digital was working was antidotal. They did a bunch of experiments, but they were at such a small scale in the competencies and these organizations were so early in their development that it was hard for them to make a strong case that digital was working, or at least working better than traditional.”
He added, “But once you crossed over a certain point, there was really clear, statistically significant data that showed how effective digital marketing was. This allowed them to make an argument to senior leaders in their organizations, who by the way, uniformly are much more comfortable with staying the course of traditional tools. But they were able to make the case that, look, I can actually show you where a dollar spent here is going to result in this much in sales, and I can track that process in a statistically- significant way to show you what the impact to the business is.”
Source: www.socialmediatoday.com
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