Social Media - Changing Society Forever

I have recently discussed the power of Social Media where I argued that these are key tools that are generally off limits to most product market managers – which was a mistake because social media tools provide you with the ability to communicate with a large group of people, for the group to share information and to coordinate and organise very quickly all at almost zero cost – a marketer’s dream. I also discussed the fact that social media has the proved ability to provide the tools needed to organize a revolution – of citizens and consumers (See Social Media Strategies & Social Media Revolutions)

In this post I will reflect on the far reaching nature of social media and explain why it is therefore critical to the way that we converse with our customers.

One of the most far reaching changes in civilization was made by Johannes Gutenberg around 1439 when he invented the moveable type printing press – essentially enabling the economic mass production of books. This destroyed the market for manuscript copiers and more importantly allowed knowledge to be acquired by the masses and not just the privileged elite. This (the ultimate disruptive technology) invention changed the balance of power in civilizations forever.

I think that many of us would regard the Internet in general as being of similar importance as it provides almost everybody with access to limitless information. However, I think that the Internet is not the complete information revolution.

I think that the true Gutenberg style Internet revolution will be driven by two factors:

1. The Kindle (& similar devices) as a reading book is of equal or greater significance – allowing people to simply build, access, annotate and store their personal library.
2. Social media as a way of sharing pre-selected information that interests me; and is probably of at least mild interest to some of my friends and an economic way of sharing commenting and discussing this information.

Sharing and discussing information with social media is incredibly powerful. It is without doubt apologetically subjective personal information. However, it is incredibly compelling information – cleverly presented and recommended by a friend. In many cases a discussion emerges among the social circle. We start of with small pieces of information or knowledge and refine and enhance it by sharing. This in my opinion is similar to the invention of the printing press – I have access to all the information and will generally glance (at the very least) at these recommended items – instant access to important or pre-selected information.

This accessibility and relevance explains why we often see small localized businesses investing in Facebook and other social media. They know that they are not going to get thousands of followers – that is not the objective. Their objective is to be significant among their customers – to be part of the conversation and be part of the small instant information exchange. It is pure customer engagement and customer centric communications.

Equally so discussing what the business has done wrong is trivial and stunningly effective (see Social Media Revolutions) over social media. I believe that it is essential that we understand that society has changed with social media and that we need to embrace the new world – for the sake of our product and our customer engagement.

In my final comment (for now) on social media I would like to recommend this post from Jeff Cole discussing Google +.

Jeff makes some excellent points that are directly and indirectly relevant to product managers – in particular, I would like to reflect on the difficulty in being an expert in social media – and the very best never call themselves experts. This is often the case in many fields. My takeaway from Jeff’s article is that this is such a new and dynamic space there are many right and many wrong ways to do it. Think about what you want to achieve and the best way to do so – but most importantly get out there use the social media tools and do something – social media is enabling revolutions and it is changing society forever - your product and your customers can’t afford to be ignored.

Spotting Disruptive Technology - Timing is Everything!

In the first post in this mini series on Disruptive Technology I discussed why we need to expect the unexpected - in a nutshell most of us spend our working days involved in our daily routine trying to plan develop and market our product. Meanwhile, whilst we aren't looking or dreaming in other directions there are groups of people who have dedicated themselves to doing something completely different and destroying our product and our market. It's nothing personal - its just (to paraphrase) - all is fair in love, war and technology development. Its been happening for a long time - think of the canal owners who suddenly had a new competitor with a new bigger faster technology called the railway. Or carriage makers just before Mercedes, Benz and friends came along.

In this second post we will discuss the timing impact and various key questions that are really just questions of timing and product timing decisions.

So we have made firm resolutions and have spotted some disruptive technology lurking somewhere away on the horizon - what's next?

Unfortunately, spotting these potential disruptions is only the tip of the iceberg, it is all to easy to be drawn in by the hype and buzz around these new areas. Firstly, curiosity is a strong human trait (and it is generally well developed in Product Team Members), the buzz can be more exciting than our regular work and in big organisations it can seem to be a way to stand out from the crowd (guru).

On the other hand, it seems that everybody is doing this. Remember, there are people out there who earn their salary creating this impression. Without being too cynical, the technology hype pays their bills.

For those of us who played team sports as kids remember how everybody used to chase the ball - didn't matter if you were defence or attack you ran after the ball. Later on we developed more discipline and strategy and stopped chasing the ball and started to play the game. That is one of the challenges of disruptive technology - to figure out when to chase and how to play the game.

So in analysing Disruptive Technology we must then exercise our judgement on the probability that the technologies will mature, that they will impact our area, and finally the hardest question of all - when? What is the relevant time frame?

Getting these factors wrong can ruin a perfectly good business or product strategy no less than ignoring or not spotting the technology. By way of example in the Telecom space around 2005 everybody was buzzing about IMS and how it was going to change the Telecom industry as we knew it. There were almost daily announcements of new products, initiatives and commitments. It seemed that overnight all our calls would be IMS based.

Looking back the objectives of were valid, the overall impact of IMS and IMS like technologies has been profound and are on going - but from a telecom's industry perspective "the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated" (Mark Twain). In summation without getting into a theological argument (IMS believers vs. IMS non believers) by 2011 we can say that IMS is not yet main stream and whilst it has impacted many businesses it has not (yet) fulfilled its hype of 2005.

Clearly, companies that assumed that IMS was the next best and greatest thing made the wrong call. Whether this was to develop new technology products based on IMS or to build consumer and business services over IMS they are probably somewhat disappointed. Equally so you could have made the decision to stop investing in current development (to favour IMS) and missed out on a lot of opportunities in the last 5 years or so.

The point of this post is not to analyse IMS in depth, but to use it as an example (from our own industry) of the dangers of incorrectly analysing the impact and the timing of the impact on a product space. Many companies made the wrong judgement call.

Looking back the single most important error was probably the lack of business case to justify such a large risk and technology change. (A reminder to always use business fundamentals.) There was huge hype and like the example of team sports earlier, everybody was chasing the IMS ball. There were only a few brave solitary voices in the wilderness calling out with a different message.

Overall IMS is a good example of a disruptive technology that many spotted, but very few managed to answer the key questions of the probability that the technology would mature, its impact on their industry and most critically on when it would impact. Ultimately, all these questions become a question of timing - when will it happen?

The product teams involved had to set their product requirements, make their product decisions and position their product based on their assumptions about the impact of this disruptive technology. Many errors were made.

Clearly it is key to our product and business strategy that we actively seek and successfully spot disruptive technologies. However, we also need to be able to stand back from the hype and think strategically and coldly analyse the likely impact and timing of the new technology.

The final posts of this series will discuss some practical ideas for systematically discovering and analysing new technologies.

Spotting Disruptive Technology - Why It Matters

This is the first part of a mini-series on how to identify, analyse and react to disruptive technology. On this article we discuss why we need to be constantly looking for disruptive technologies.


As a PM one of the hardest things is to keep an eye on disruptive technologies and their likely impact on our product lines. In many cases it is nearly impossible to find time just to keep up to date on developments in our own field. Like in any other job we are focused on the daily routine and immediate needs of our product and on its internal and external customers. It is hard to find time to look beyond the immediate and work out what is happening out there in the big wide world.

Yet identifying disruptive technology is one of our most critical tasks – to bring a trivial yet valid example; there were probably teams of PM all working diligently on the latest features of typewriters such as electric, quieter, better ink ribbons whilst over at IBM, Microsoft and Apple they were busy working on mass produced PCs with word processors. There are numerous examples of major disruptive technologies appearing from no where and killing an industry dead almost overnight – DVD and videos – digital and film cameras.

However, identifying disruptive technologies is actually a difficult task, for several reasons -

1. It requires a substantial on going investment in general reading and research – something that we will all normally put off until next week when things are quieter.
   
2. It is often very difficult to identify where the challenge is coming from; in many cases the threat comes from out of market and not from our traditional competition. Did the typewriter teams keep an eye on the emerging computing market? Did Nokia spot what Apple were planning? Apple were a new player in Nokia's market, yet managed to blend their existing product capabilities with some new technology and a Palm Pilot concept and Nokia are still licking their wounds several years later.
   
3. The speed of development – all too often by the time you have heard of the threat it is (almost) too late.

Unfortunately, without have constant focus on disruption, we will always be surprised. Our natural focus is on incremental features and customer requests. This is often the case even when planning the Next Generation magical market leading product. We will become focused on meeting our product and time objectives and forget to understand what is going on outside our company.

To be fair, not all disruptive technologies will stop an industry in its tracks, but, by definition they will substantially change the way we could or should do business. If we spot them early enough they could be a substantial differentiator in our favour; on the other hand if we spot them too late .....

So one of the key tasks for any successful PM is to dedicate part of their working time to reading around – focus on your own industry (your customers and competitors) and segment but also look around you at other areas what's happening in other industries and let your imagination run wild about the possible impacts and changes.


Of course expecting the unexpected is hard and predicting the unpredictable is much harder than that – but we need to do so. It is hard to conduct a strategic product review or to make intelligent product decisions without understanding the bigger picture and looking at the potential impact of disruptive technologies.


In the next blog we will look at ways of finding the information that we need, the dangers of trying to figure out the timing and how to promote discussion within the organisation. We will also discuss some formal methodologies that we developed to analyse the impact of these technologies on our business.