I admit, I have had some lingering questions in the past year or so about the role of Twitter in a comprehensive B2B marketing strategy. I've even questioned what Twitter can do for me personally - is it information? is it entertainment? And then I had a sort of social media epiphany as colleagues were gearing up for the Front End of Innovation US conference yesterday in Boston. I was really wishing I was there as I had worked with our President, Matthew Heim, and our panelists from clients Hallmark, Philips Consumer Lifestyle and Sealed Air over the past couple months to prepare for the event. I knew that FEI had invited people to live blog and Tweet from the event, but when I finally tuned in I was impressed. This was real content that made me feel (almost) like I was there. Here are some of the key takeaways I learned through the Twitter coverage:
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Hallmark's Esselman: once "open innovation" mindset was formalized, existing suppliers became extremely competitive
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Philips' Graham Mott: continuous innovation must be driven from top down, but the challenge is keeping champions' enthusiasm up
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Hallmark wants to create an emotionally-connected world and they see consumers defining emotional connections
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Blaine Childress [Sealed Air] talking about how IP personnel inside AND outside the organization have fears - lose my job versus lose my idea
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Tom Esselman [Hallmark]- Crisp definition of needs to commercialize open innovations makes open innovation more likely to be faster
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Graham Mott talking about how stating challenge too broadly will make it hard to sort through the submissions and evaluate them
And at the end of the day there was a great FEI blog post capturing the key learnings from the NineSigma panel session. Now, I know that live blogging and Tweeting is not unique to FEI and that plenty of other events do this. However, the quality of reporting and integration between the different media helped me see the light; that when executed properly, social media can involve you in a physical event in a way that traditional media cannot. I am a believer (well...I am getting there).
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