I recently participated in a study in at Harvard. It was about emotion, cognition and aging. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the experiment and the methodology but found the follow-up interview valuable in that it validated my own work. The interviewer was not only surprised about my grasp of concepts like emotional and cognitive embodiment, but that I’d integrated them in my methodologies and blog and had conceived them through my personal and professional experience and development as well as my auto-didactic learning and training.

One of the criticisms creative professional service providers get is about the supposed difficulties of being in the same space as those who have the hard research to back up their theories.

So here’s the thing.

• If your ideas, solutions and content are unique, forward-thinking and deep, then there’s a high probability that there’s a lot of current research available in the public domain to validate them. So use it.
• If the research in any way contradicts your fabulous ideas, solutions and content, well there’s a great point of differentiation and positioning for you.
• If the research is non-existent or in a nascent stage, and you think its important to moving your work forward, then you can apply for a grant.

Social Media - Medical Device Industry

I have a former background in machine-tool, as a controller and later, a partner. A key market was medical device which has continued to grow, 6% annually in the U.S., which manufactures a large percentage of global product.

Despite industry consolidation, approximately 80% of the more than 8,000 U.S. medical device firms employ less than 50 people. What they lack in resources, they can make up in agility and responsiveness to highly specific customer needs and requirements which include R&D partnerships and new market applications for existing products and processes.

Success for the small medical device manufacturer requires continual research, a focus on promotion, internal knowledge sharing and collaborative partnerships. For these reasons, as well as their insistence on getting the biggest (measurable) bang for their media investments, medical device companies can greatly benefit from social media.

Return on Natural Influence - RO(n)L

In previous posts I’ve talked about Social Networks: The Pre-requisites, a model for Social Network Community Segmentation, and also Integrating Social Media and Networks (using RedShift as a case study).

Clients, of course, want to understand the ROI, in quantitative metrics, of their investment in social media and networks. That’s understandably important to them.

But its helpful to first understand ROI from a qualitative perspective to ensure that there’s a success path that makes sense and that can be simply and effectively communicated to gain support and participation. If you can’t do that, you could go the wrong way and reach a dead end when you try to quantify the return on your social network investments.

Its important to understand that the link between your investment and the quantifiable return is “indirect”. You need a map to get from one to another.

Three major roads on the RO(n)I map are:

• Social Capital: shared information, support and strengthened ties that facilitate business actions and inter-actions.
• Brand Awareness: the cumulative trust-building effect of proving the brand promise, demonstrating the brand message and building the personal/business reputation.
• Sense Response: unique individual and collective skills and abilities that result from practicing a new way of listening and interacting so that you respond to change before it happens and unmet needs before they’re expressed.

The map may have different signs and paths, depending on your specific business and industry. But having one is critical to avoid getting lost in a failed social network initiative.