Jeremiah Owyang

Guess what? For corporations, social media doesn’t scale.

Below is my keynote presentation at the Ragan Cisco conference in the heart of silicon valley in San Jose today. I was asked to present, where I see the future of social business, and I believe that many companies are headed towards a very challening cross roads: they won’t be able to scale.

Why can’t businesses scale with social technologies? If you work for a healthy company, you’ll always have more customers than employees. As social network adoption continues to move “up and to the right” in adoption graphs, the amount of discussion generated from customers is only going to increase while your internal social strategists and community managers may only marginally increase.

In the above presentation, I give three pragmatic examples of how businesses can –and must scale–when it comes to social technologies. They include:

• Using all the voices in your ecosystem (the Rings of Influence) not just being the only ones to talk.
• Develop more customer to customer technologies that leverage your customers to do your marketing, sales, and support.
• Invest in Social CRM systems, while immature now, they will eventually help companies respond in real time –and maybe even anticipate customer need. (read the full report on Social CRM)

In addition to talking about the challenge, I give specific strategies, examples of who’s doing it, and pragmatic insights on what to do.

I look forward to speaking at your internal or public event, contact me anytime.

Thanks to David Thomas from SAS, he still practices the live practice of live blogging, see his notes here.