Part I of a Series on Social Media’s Role within Global Businesses

Ironically, not attending SxSW and liveblogging the National Human Capital Summit produced an unintended result: New perspective. While many social media industry members were in Austin enjoying a culminating, industry-wide (and, dare I say, slightly myopic) slap-on-the-back, new visions of global business and social media were experienced at the Summit.

The biggest shifts came courtesy of C.K. Prahalad. Prahalad represents one of the country’s brightest minds, according to BusinessWeek, often consulting the likes of Bill Gates and prime ministers on global business trends. He believes business can work to make profits eradicate poverty, and make the impoverished new sources of innovation.

At the Summit, he gave us a sneak preview into his new book on social networks and their impact on the way businesses execute. The premise: Businesses are now engaging in co-creation experiences with their global employees, customers, and vendors.

In my mind, co-creation is the actual process that we call the Long Tail or the Meatball Sundae (which according to Seth is really a derivative of the Long Tail, anyway). Prahalad published his first book on co-creation two years before Anderson’s Long Tail. 

Here’s the core of it: Mass is not good. Instead you need customization of socially enabled platforms and creative engagements to get to a unique and better business result.  Examples: Nokia’s Mosh, Dell’s Idea Storm and subsequent products, your Google front page, Mini Coopers (image is Bobasonic’s custom Cooper), Build a Bear, etc.

Takeways from Prahalad’s Speech

Here were the prescient points C.K. made that resonated:

1) The U.S. economy, workforce and the country as a place to live is no longer dominant.  Foreign talent does not feel compelled to come to our shores.  They study here (in some cases, they study abroad) and return to opportunities in China, India, etc.

2) Companies like GE, Ford, and IBM are seeing tremendous growth… abroad. To successfully execute within international regions, many global companies are engaging talent in other countries (India is the second largest home of IBM’s employees).  Social networks and communication tools are used to unite these forces.

3) Today’s millenials, heck, today’s socially enabled people expect to be included in co-creation processes often through collobarative communication tools.  These co-creation processes are internal, customer experiences, and partnering engagements.

4) For businesses to succeed, social engagement across the organization using communication tools need processes.  Processes must eliminate ethnic, religious and cultural barriers to co-creation.  The world must flatten through the communication tools so that businesses can successfully develop platforms for all business purposes.

5) Micro-roles will become prevalent.  Micro-producers, micro-contributors, micro-consumers, everyone and anyone connected to the globes’s social networks can participate.

The future suddenly seems different now. The party seems small in scale to the actual global movement by the world’s information and industrial complex as it shift’s gears to stay competitive in the next economic environment.  Social media releases pale in comparison to great equalization movements caused by worldwide economic forces acting through social connectivity. Yes, we market with and advance social media but collectively, this ends somewhere much bigger.

The U.S. will have its role, but it will be a new, less dominant one thanks to global and industrial use of this new communications environment we are all so actively trying to figure out. And Silicon Valley’s mastery of social technologies?  Well, like many things, while it may have  been invented there, it could very well be mastered somewhere else.

More coming on Monday.