As companies are increasingly looking outside of the organization to obtain new ideas, social media platforms are becoming a popular channel for innovation management. By monitoring their company, brand, products or services on social media channels, companies are at the advantage of gathering information, sharing them, and analyzing them in cost-effective ways. This brings in ideas the business can use for easier innovation management, and gives them a competitive edge.
Benefits of using social media for innovation management
According to the Global Alliance Intelligence, a strategic market intelligence and advisory group, the following are the main advantages of fostering innovation management with social media:
- Improved understanding of existing and future trends in the market
- Early warning of disruptive technologies / innovations within or outside your industry
- Identification of alliances and networks within your ecosystem
- Unbiased information about the market attractiveness of shortlisted innovations or existing technologies and products
- Improved understanding of customer needs and their likely development in the future
Tips on using social media for innovation management
The GIA went on to explain that “the most straightforward method of using social media for innovation management simply involves finding experts who are already discussing your areas of interest online and gathering their unbiased input. This is already happening thousands of times every day in corporate forums and online communities.” Here are some useful tips that they provide:
Source information from everyone
Avoid “corporate blind spots” and use social media to gather information from customers, employees, and third-parties such as consultants and suppliers.
Be creative
Share images and videos both inside and outside of your organization. The GIA gives an example of an automotive company that features competitor commercials taken from YouTube as the opening screen of their in-house information portal. This allows their staff see what their customers watch in different markets, and encourages them to think ‘out-of-the-box’ with greater exposure to market realities from around the world.
Monitor comments
Continuously monitor online conversations in your market’s environment. As the GIA puts it, “blogs, for example, are an excellent source of continuous information on industry issues, customers and competitors. People with similar interests tend to cluster into different online communities for information exchange, and no longer feel like they have to be experts to express their observations and opinions through blogs and forums.”
Integrate ideas gathered through social media into the innovation management and life-cycle process
Collaborate and share information within an organization or a network of partner companies involved in innovation projects, and enhance co-creation and the innovation management process.
Discover more tips about innovating with social media from the GIA here.
OneDesk + Social Media = Innovation Management
Using OneDesk’s social media monitoring tool, companies can search the social web and find out what is being said about their companies, competitors, industry, brand, products and services. OneDesk facilitates the integration process by allowing you to categorize social media comments and immediately bring them into OneDesk for internaland external parties to view and work on. Learn more by reading the related blog posts and tutorials.