Blog

Becoming a “Social Business” (Part 3 of 3)

Already long before I founded SOMESSO I have been interested in how communities work and behaviour within communities. My career so far and my friends around me can confirm that I believe in the strength of word-of-mouth. It has brought me where I am today – I’ve also been actively focusing and live-exploiting many networks during studies and professional career.

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Becoming a “Social Business” (Part 2 of 3)

For the past two years SOMESSO has organised conferences throughout Europe on the topic of social media in businesses. Each time we noticed that there’s much confusion about how to name the things that we are talking about. In 2009 we did a 2-day conference about social media in banking and finance at Swiss Re premises. Most of the leading local brands from the financial services industry were represented, including UBS, Credit Suisse, and Zurich Insurance. We did a so called “Swiss Re Risk Talk” where we arranged thought provoking individuals to speak: Marilyn Pratt – community evangelist at SAP, and Anne McCrossan – CEO of Visceral Business. In front of them were around 90 bankers and I am not exaggerating when I say 95% of them were males above 50 in traditional dark suits.

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Becoming a “Social Business” (Part 1 of 3)

This is my first of a series of three weekly posts on large companies trying to reach the state of becoming a “social business”. A “social business” is an organisation that has embraced social media to enable dialogue with its environment, like its customers and employees, to react and adapt to their continuously changing behavior patterns and needs. To be a “social business” or “social organisation” is the new state-of-being companies aim for, because they understand that those who listen and those who are in ongoing conversations with their customers will keep their competitive edge – now and in the future.

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Innovation in Switzerland

Just google “innovation in Switzerland” and it’s surprising to learn that there’s hardly anything recent (in neither the German nor English language) on the topic popping up. One of the very first search results is a joint study of the Swiss–American Chamber of Commerce and the Boston Consulting Group dated from 2008.

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Existing Corporate Social Media Usage Guidelines and Policies

Last Thursday at our first Swiss Corporate Social Media Meetup I was quite impressed about the amount of questions that were being asked from the audience (summary impression in German language can be found here). Having over 100 corporate stakeholders attending this three hour meetup about social media for business usage was – I think – a big breakthrough in Switzerland. The great majority of the crowd were decision makers from large companies in or around Zurich. We received questions from „can we ban social media in our bank?“, to „what is social media?“, which the four speakers tried to give a first insight to.

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