John Cant

Group: Innovation in Financial Services

Nurturing my Inner Maverick

14/05/2009 18:20:41

Apparently travel broadens the mind, at least that’s why I am travelling to Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium with alliance partner Rob Woolley (SVP EMEA of Globant) to the Somesso “Creating Social Capital” event. For those of you who don’t know Globant, it is the leading Latin-American IT Services & Software Development group, and they have developed widely used innovative solutions and services with their clients Google and LinkedIn, as well as a range of financial sector firms. So the link to social networking is not as obscure as you may have first suspected and I think this explains part of the reason it is becoming an increased focus for MPI Europe.

At the Somesso event, which draws together some of the leading thinkers in this area, we will hear from Google pioneers (presenting the keynote – “Nurturing your Inner Maverick”) and participating in sessions aimed at “redesigning organisations through social tools” from firms such as Headshift. As well as adding to our knowledge, I am keen to perform an experiment to see what can be done with existing social/web 2.0 tools including “live” blogging on Finextra.com during the course of the day, as well as use of Twitter and LinkedIn to keep you informed.

The intention is to make this as interactive as possible, so please get involved, share your views and help understand more about what works, and indeed what doesn’t. The choice is yours. Either simply “listen” by revisiting this blog, or the LinkedIn discussion during the day or even follow me on Twitter, or for those of you with an inner maverick streak please feel free to comment on this blog, discuss in LinkedIn or even tweet! At the end of the process, I will report back on what we have uncovered.

Comments

15/05/2009 09:52:03 John Cant, MPI Europe Ltd - London added:
Interesting comment from Google presentation at Somesso is the quote "A happy user is the best marketing that money can buy" - is this some of the value of Twitter?

15/05/2009 11:06:09 John Cant, MPI Europe Ltd - London added:
Regulation is a significant potential inhibitor to the use of social media in the financial sector. However, these regulatory challenge are not insurmountable as shown in other industries such as wines and spirits. One of the presentations at Somesso emphasises the use of buy-in, collaboration with Legal & Compliance, education, moderation and an ability to react quickly as required, as ways of overcoming these.

15/05/2009 14:24:30 John Cant, MPI Europe Ltd - London added:
Several presentations this afternoon have asserted that 21st century organisations need to be organised on collaborative, person based principles rather than control, mass based 20th century "industrial age" principles.

17/05/2009 16:20:28 John Cant, MPI Europe Ltd - London added:

As promised, a quick summary on the results of this process. The first impact was that the process of generating "blogable" and "tweetable" (if there are such words?) content did help increase involvement in most of the presentations. However, the short format of Twitter did not help when trying to generate value added comments whose value would persist beyond the day. I am still in two minds as how to make best use of this, however it is clear it is a communication channel for immediate news, reaction, comment and soundbites rather than full analysis. The work to generate short "real-time" blog entries was useful although a mix of technical issues and British reserve meant that not all of them made it onto the web. In terms of generating increased engagement, the process was helpful with material additions to Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections and significantly LinkedIn discussion group membership. More preparation and "advertising" is required to get intraday blog comments - the readership of the blog stream on the day was not wide enough. As with most social media initiatives, it is important to try things to see what does and doesn't work. So overall, a useful experiment for me, and one I hope to repeat in the near future so as to exploit by enhanced "inner maverick", apply the lessons I have learnt so far and gain more experience in this interesting area.

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