Innovation with Social Media – a talk for Ernst and Young

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I spoke last week at the masterclass session of Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur Of The Year (the northern finalists stage).

I’d been invited to speak via WRG and thanks to both them and Ernst and Young for the invitation. Tweets from this event and other regional finals can be found here.

As the general theme for the day was one of innovation, I talked about ‘innovating your business through social media’. I’ll create a short version of the presentation and share on slideshare asap.

My main points were that, via social tools, you can:

– understand your market with listening / sentiment tools (albeit there are still efficacy developments to be had, e.g still relatively early days around sentiment / intent / context of keywords)

– discover what people are looking for (in a business like yours) via search tools

–  innovate products or services with collaboration and / or co-creation tools, at speed and at scale.

And that there’s ‘something for everyone’ in the vendor toolset; from startup / low budget to enterprise / global platforms.

Hopefully the talk sparked some thoughts amongst the finalists and good luck to all those across the UK.  I take my hat off to everyone who got to this stage, a look at the north finalists list showed some excellent businesses.

And I was glad I caught the panel discussion at the end of the day. Four guys (all CEO or Chairman) who’ve built really successful businesses. It was great to get insight into what works for them and their philosophies for work and life in general. They were:

Lawrence Jones, CEO of UKFast – https://twitter.com/Lawrence_Jones  (This man owns some of Snowdonia – jealous, me?)

Paul Gilbert of The Gym – http://www.thegymgroup.com/about-us/the-management-team/

Peter Schofield of Tetrosyl – http://www.tetrosyl.com/index.cfm?page=160

Haraldur Agustsson of http://www.globus.co.uk/

 

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