What role do you think social media plays or will play in the success of organisations?

Social media is emerging as a very powerful tool for advertisers, marketers and public relations gurus..

As social media sites continue to gain in popularity with people seeking on line connections and networking opportunities, and traditional media opportunities for advertising get replaced by online news, podcasts and ad-free TV, clever organisations will acquire demographic information regarding individual users to create target audiences.

Trevor Young the PR warrior demonstrated recently that a change in attitude allows business people including CEOs to use social networking to their advantage. He described good practice in this area by corporations like Microsoft that allows its staff to blog customers, creating good customer relationships and instant feedback.

The growing influence of social media is addressed by articles such as
Your Facebook secrets: jobs under threat

and the growing number of
You Tube self help videos.

What is social media?

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Social media describes the online technologies that people use to share opinions, experiences and contacts.

Its success is that it is immediate, tailored, raw, honest and personal. It acknowledges our social nature and our need to communicate and connect with others.

Celebrities and musicians have been quick to embrace this type of connection with fans to enable instant access to music and information. Music can be downloaded and enjoyed freely with customer feedback provided directly to the source.

It is estimated that there are currently about 200 social network sites and is a credible way of communicating. –

Teaching Twitter could become a class act
Fargo uses social networks to fight flood waters

The shape of a social network helps determines its usefulness. Smaller, tighter networks can be less useful to their members than networks with lots of loose connections that are more likely to introduce new ideas and opportunities to their members.

What are entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship?

Entrepreneurship involves risk taking leadership where the entrepreneur puts much time and capital into an uncertain venture.

To the entrepreneur the vision is clear but the details vague and evolving. It is the passion and commitment to the final result that realises the vision. Entrepreneurs are positive thinkers and decision makers who promote their vision with enthusiastic passion.

See:
Walt Disney, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, Henry Ford, Coco Chanel.

Intrapreneurship utilises all these skills but without the risks involved. It occurs within organisations that use systemised business models to allow creative and innovative ideas to develop.

By trying things until successful, learning from failures, attempting to conserve resources, etc. it adds to the potential of an otherwise static organisation without exposing those employees to the risks associated with entrepreneurial failure.

See:
3M, Sun Microsystems , Sony Corporation,
Swinburne University.

What is change?

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Change is the difference between how something was and how something is, or will be. It is the process of becoming different.

Change affects everyone constantly, eg physiological change, social change, climate change and technological change, with change management being a vital business tool.

Change management is a set of processes that is employed to ensure that significant changes are implemented in an orderly, controlled and systematic fashion..

The way that people react and cope with change is the basis for: Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnston. This story of mice and men delivers positive messages of how to successfully deal with change - change happens - anticipate change - monitor change - adapt to change quickly - change - enjoy change - be ready to change quickly and enjoy it again and again.

What is creativity?

Creativity is the process of doing something in a new way. It produces new ideas or concepts. It is different from innovation which applies the creative idea to a specific context.

Creativity is now an important part of successful businesses. Creativity techniques can be used to develop new materials for artistic purposes or to solve problems. Some of these techniques are:

• randomness
• improvisation
• lateral thinking

Creativity and emotion are in the right handside of the brain and associated with lateral thinking.

There is a huge element of chance in creativity - it is important to come up with many ideas to be able to discard the useless ones.

or a personal perspective on creativity see

Twyla Tharp a renowned dance choregrapher and

Edward Be Bono an expert on creative and lateral thinking.

What is innovation?

Innovation achieves an outcome in a significantly different and better way. It is the significant difference that determines innovation.

Innovation means the application of the idea and process rather than the invention or tool required to achieve it Innovation involves and requires creativity but is different from it, as it involves acting on the creative ideas and bringing them to life.

Innovation is used as a valid measure of business success and is now the subject of the international innovation index and related studies.

Examples are e Commerce - on line shopping negating the need for retail businesses to exist in any form but on the internet, and hybrid car technology that uses a combination of battery and petrol power as the energy source