Consumer power through social media – Impact on companies?

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Video from Gary Vaynerchuk, king of social media. Long story short: Asian girl orders pizza at Papa Johns & gets called “lady chinky eyes” on her receipt. Girl posts a picture of the receipt on Twitter and it gets viral. Papa Johns fires the employee and is spending huge amounts of time recovering from the PR damage.

Social media – as we could see in the Arab spring revolutions – is a truly powerful. Similar things like crowd buying / crowd sourcing / etc … are attempts to shift buying power. Interesting times.

Check out the video here:

Social media gives consumers power

 

Little Bets: Innovation Through Little Bets – How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

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Just found this interesting book from Peter Sims titled Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries.

He provides examples of innovations at Pixar, Procter & Gamble & 3M that originate from small ideas with very low risk. Typically they are cheap to design, develop & test. The advantage of such an approach is that small projects (vs large projects) are not hindered by perfectionism or excessive planning. It’s about constant experimentation, accepting that a lot of experiments will fail. Which is fine. As some of the experiments will grow into something bigger, meaningful and profitable.

Check out the book here.

Edit: just 5 minutes after I posted this, I read this post on grass roots innovation at Microsoft on news.com. The provide the example of the Lync Conversation Translator. An app which allows people who speak different languages to have an instant message conversation in their native tongue. The application prototype was built in an engineer’s spare time …

Inspiring presentation on Netflix corporate culture

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Don’t those empty sounding corporate values make your stomach turn? Typical boyscout, empty-sounding nonsense.

Lots of companies have nice sounding value statements displayed in the lobby such as :

  • Integrity
  • Communication
  • Respect
  • Excellence

Enron had these values displayed in their lobby …

Netflix argues that the actual company values as opposed to the nice sounding values , are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted or let go. Actual company values are the behavior & skills that are valued in fellow employees.

Check out this presentation on corporate culture and how it is the basis for their success.

How To Screw Your Customers – Lesson From The Banking World

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Just figured out that my bank is charging a ridiculous amount of money to let me download my bank statements in PDF format. While you can legally download entire programs, books, news, music, pictures and other high value content for free this bank is charging customers for a stupid pdf download of bank transactions.

Can someone please tell these guys that the public recently saved their asses and that asking money for this is outrageous.

End of rant.

Augmented Reality Maps From Microsoft’s Bing @ TED 2010 – This is so cool

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I previously expressed my fascination and strong belief in augmented reality. Now have a look at this cool video from the latest TED conference. Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft Live Labs demonstrates augemented reality maps. Actually what he’s showing is more like reverse augmented reality (virtual maps superimposed with real live data). Anyway, just have a look for yourself.

My head is spinning thinking about all the business possibilities.

For more TED coverage check the TED website.