Amazon.com, which happens to be the most successful e-commerce site on the planet, looks like this on a…
If your storefront cannot take the first and transform, on-the-fly to the later two, then you are missing out on a fast growing percentage of customers. (The speed needs to increase as the size shrinks too.)
photo: Amazon.com
Maybe you were curious to see how the UK would stack up against the awe-inspiring spectacle the Chinese gave the world four years ago? Maybe you like Danny Boyle? Maybe you fancy meeting a royal. Whatever the reason over 42 million people in the US tuned into the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics in London.
The UK’s opening ceremony was a valiant attempt but didn’t quite match up to Beijing, at least for me.
The budgets, crowds, viewers, and medal counts are not the only big numbers coming out of these games. NBC reported ad sales for the 2012 Olympics at over 1 billion dollars. No doubt other media, particularly in the UK, are seeing an increase in sales too.
Where are those numbers and why are governing organizations or companies not touting them?
I suspect it has a little to do with fragmentation and even more to do with marketing. You might want to pick up that torch and run with it too.
photo: Jim Mead
According to the McKinsey Global Institute, improved collaboration and communication using social technologies• could add between 900 billion and 1.3 trillion dollars to the economy. These impressive gains stem largely from the flow of information feeding today’s “knowledge worker.” Today’s worker spends around 70% of her time communicating (e-mail, etc.), looking for information, and collaborating with colleagues. Social technologies reduce the friction for finding, sharing, and using information which translates into big productivity gains and money in the bank for adoptive companies.
Although McKinsey found 70% of companies using social technologies, policies and culture can get in the way. As Quentin Hardy reported in the New York Times, “The main challenges are organizational and personal, as managers have to develop nonhierarchical cultures, where data and knowledge are exposed and shared, not hoarded.”
Too often companies and employees are guilty of restricting and resisting the flow of information. Companies who resists equipping their knowledge workers with modern social tools, be it smartphones or wikis, are actively handicapping their operations. Employees who prescribe to a similar mentality, often under the false pretense of added job security, might find similar repercussions to growth.
As with any technology, disruption comes before adoption. With a trillion dollars at play, it should make adoption a much easier pill to swallow.
• For the scope of the study, social technologies are defined as “IT products and services that enable the formation and operation of online communities, where participants have distributed access to content and distributed rights to create, add, and/or modify content.”
