Challenge 11: Are you prepared to promote your innovation on social media?

Diagnosis

Social media is not only an online environment where you can share and engage, but also an important source of inspiration and a quick way to promote and launch your products when properly used. As a company, if you have clear strategies and objectives, you can use the significant opportunities the collective creative power of social media offers to support your innovation and your new products, services, or processes development.

For the small companies that want to innovate in order to gain a competitive advantage on a dynamic market, social media use to get creative insights, test own ideas and promote them efficiently, can be a powerful and low budget tool.

The less you are open to the power of collective thinking and creativity offered by social media, the less you can maximise your innovation output. The resources your company ca gather from within your organisation, even if the external stakeholders, are limited compared to the millions of potential customers active on social media. And this is a good reason to seriously take into consideration including social media into your innovation strategy.

To try to understand the importance of social media for innovation, please analyse the aspects presented in the table below.

Positive aspects	Negative aspects
Have you already allocated some budget for social media? Do you have a dedicated person that monitors key platforms and follows customer input?	You have not yet considered that you need a dedicated person to monitor social media and have not allocated any budget for this.
Do you understand how social media works? Have you analysed and decided which social media platforms are best for your business? Have you actively listened to what people are saying on social media platforms? What is your competition doing?	You have not got the time to analyse social media platforms in detail. All of them seam similar. Why losing time choosing only some of them?
Have you paid attention to the trends circulating on social media? Can you draw some conclusions on which are your potential consumers’ activities and preferences?	You have not paid too much attention to the trends on social media as you consider them too volatile. You have not involved in trending conversations with your potential customers either.
Have you conducted customer surveys on social media or organised focus groups to receive an immediate and more accurate feedback on your ideas, products, or services?	You do not consider that these types of activities on social media will make people more actively involved in giving a better feedback and help you be more successful on your way to innovate.
Have you monitored what people are saying about your competition? Have you analysed your competitors’ customer responses to look for clues on how better organise and communicate your innovation campaign?	You have not thought of analysing competition and its customers on social media. You do not consider that the complains and frustration visible in social media and related to different products must be considered as general truth.
Have you got your customers involved in the innovation process as early as possible so that you significantly improve the time to implement innovation? Do you consider yourself lucky to receive instant constructive feedback, either positive or negative, that help you move faster with your project?	You get overwhelmed by the huge amount of feedback from social media and cannot organise it properly. You do not have the skills or dedicated person to manage customers and stakeholders’ insights wisely.
Do you show your active collaborating community on social media that you really listen to their opinions and feedback? Do you constantly react to their postings, so you create a communication channel and feel your community engaged?	You do not react fast to messages on social media, do not encourage feedback or create a motivation and incentive program for your customers to keep them engaged.
Have you customized your approach to each platform you are active on? You know that the key to receive valuable insights from your followers is to have unique approaches to each platform, from professional to casual.	You do not adapt your messages to the social media platform you are acting on. You get often unpleasant feedbacks related to your messages being too professional, without human touch, or the quite the opposite.
Do you use the social advantage of social media channel? Do you offer your online community the opportunity to socialize, communicate, share ideas, get socially validated, supported, encouraged?	You do not consider that you are responsible for the social validation of your followers. You consider that debating other issues apart from the main idea of your innovation does not help you much and it is time consuming.
Are the employees open to any kind of feedback offered by clients and try to use it for products and services improvement?	The employees do not care about the clients’ feedback and do not use it for further company and product development

1. Fill in the table with your initial assessment regarding each aspect and the way it is reflected in your company.

2. Take 1 – 2 weeks to intentionally observe the social media activity of your company accounts and your company’s and community’s behaviours according to every area stated in the table.

3. During this period, observe your own behaviours and cognitive biases towards social media involvement in promoting innovation. Try to find out as much as possible about social media – benefits, weak points, strategies, communities, needs and interests of your followers – and the financial savings you can make vs. the huge visibility and social support gained in the process.

4. At the end of the selected period, organize a meeting with managers and employees directly involved in communicating innovation and discuss the conclusions of what you have identify as weak and strong points in your organisation from the social media involvement point of view.

Actions for implementation

If you observe that negative aspects are common in your company, while positive aspects are barely present, you must take seriously implementing and improving social media presence and increasing innovation awareness within your online community.

Your objective should be to develop a dedicated communication strategy that links social media to product, service, or process developments in your company, being also constantly aware of the corporate objectives. Each company present on social media should always know its goals regarding the outcome they expect to receive such as: developing new ideas, improving solutions to technical problems, enhancing creativity, and creating new concepts with the use of the online community.

Actions to be implemented to improve your social media strategy can include:

1. Impress your audience by running contests, creating polls, giving them limited time exclusive offers, creating loyalty programs to show them your appreciation. The basis of any successful social media marketing strategy is represented by how well you know your target audience.

2. Use eye-catching infographics which are perfect to present technical or not so appealing information depending on the industry, in an interesting and easy to remember way.

3. Use high-resolution images with the right size for the post you are creating so that you are perceived as credible by your online community. Paying attention to your online materials shows appreciation and respect for your followers.

4. Use a special editing program for your online materials and posts so that you save time and get the best quality and consistency from corporate design, images, layouts, messages point of view with the possibility to adapt them to each social media channel (e.g., canva.com).

5. Use audio for your online posts. This type of materials help you get closer to your audience. The online community get the chance to know you and your team, receive greetings, and short company, products, and team presentations.

6. Post only relevant, clear, and easy to understand content. Use key words easy to detect by the search engine. The message should include information about industry trends and technology, common issues the industry is facing, short educational material, and last, but not least, some funny hint to help your audience better remember your post.

7. Use the best time to post on social media so that your messages are more effective and reach a wider audience. Depending on the social media channel, you must investigate which is the best time to be online and organise your communication strategy based on this information.

8. Use social media targeting options when you want to send messages to a selected group of people. You can customize your posts within the same social media channel to reach different types of target groups.

9. Create short materials with appealing information about company, industry, innovations or educational hints from your business experience that can be downloaded for FREE from your website, and posts. This will add value to your communication campaign and will be much appreciated by your online community.