Idea and Innovation Blog

Today, I thought I would talk about the recent changes that Facebook incorporated, and the new Twitter design, and offer my advice on what this means for companies, and how you can use this new design to grow your social media efforts.

New Facebook Profile

On December 5th, 2010, Facebook introduced a new look and feel of its user profile page. They re-organized the way your profile page is displayed, and made it more intuitive. You can now highlight featured friends, share your interests and activities, and they've improved photo browsing.
The most interesting part of this recent change is that now they really emphasize your career. In addition to listing your jobs, including company name, job title, the time you spent there, and a brief description of your work responsibilities, you are now able to add projects you’ve worked on.  You can also include the people who’ve worked with you on those projects, and tag them, therefore staying in touch with your colleagues.  (It makes me wonder if LinkedIn should be worried.)

This could have huge implications for the innovation management industry, as now users will want to highlight teams, ideas they’ve built, ideas they’ve worked on, etc...

New Twitter Design

Twitter is a communication platform that helps businesses stay connected to their customers. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time feedback, and build relationships with customers. Twitter recently introduced a brand new interface that makes it incredibly easy to view videos, photos, slideshare presentations
Instead of approaching Twitter as a place to broadcast information about your company, think of it as a place to build relationships.
BestBuy is a great example of a company using Twitter to properly connect with customers. In addition to their @BestBuy username, they have an account called @twelpforce (a mix between Twitter and helpforce), and have used it to answer around 20,000 customer inquiries.
Companies can use something called “hashtags” to tag their posts, and potentially end up as a trending topic on Twitter, or search for conversations about your brand. Ford did a very creative product launch for their Ford Fiesta using a Twitter hashtag. Ford was launching the car in Argentina, and what they did was, they gave the most followed twitterer in Argentina a brand new Ford Fiesta, with the condition that he drive it for 5 straight days, tweeting about his experience using the hashtag #FordFiesta. After just 5 days, the campaign had reached over 200,000 people(or 50% of all Twitter users in Argentina).
Another interesting idea for companies is to do something called a “Tweetup”. A tweetup is simply an in-person meet-up organized via Twitter, often spontaneous. Companies use them for things like hosting launch parties, connecting with customers and introducing like-minded followers to each other.

Anyone in the innovation management industry should check out http://innobeer.com/, a tweetup for “people interested in innovation and beer; not necessarily in that order”, using the hashtag #InnoBeer.