One of my projects is to reflect the core concepts and learnings of Digital Marketing to some business students. The challenge in an academic forum is to bring real world learning into the classroom.
The use of social media to engage in a meaningful way between individuals and businesses is part of a not so quiet revolution in business. Social is a window on the world rather than a broadcast by the brand owner.
One of the best commentators on these changes is Brian Solis who manages to get inside the behavioural dimensions of social capital. His books Engage and The End of Business as Usual are important markers for any exploration of social capital.
One of the things that marketing (students) marketeers do is an review of competitors. Not so long ago that would have resulted in a relatively static idea of capabilities and profile.
No so now. Now you can search on a hashtag or make a wordle of a brand or other tag and get an idea of what current perceptions are of your social capital.*
Now that individuals and companies / brands have digital footprints that are not the carefully manicured personas of a past era it is much easier to get a grip on the relative ambiguities of digital life.
In this video from the TEDxPresido in September 2012 he walks us through many of the key intersections around brand, individual and corporate identity.
So what does your social capital look like ?
* Note – here is that brand wordle for an un named airline mentioned by Brian during his talk.
With 98000 tweets per minute on twitter there is a tidal wave of data coming on stream all the time. Here’s What Happens Every Sixty Seconds in the World of Data