Blog

The more we explore “The Business of Social” through our Britt Technology Impact Series, the more I realize that the impact of these new technologies is truly something massive and not just a culture shock due to Facebook’s adoption rate. Ben Edwards, VP of Digital Strategy and Development at IBM stated at a recent interview here at Tuck something to the effect of this: Do you recall the 90’s and e-business? All the predictions that the web would change how we business? Well, it did. And social will do the same thing. Social will force businesses to re-engineer.

Re-engineer the business! Oh, the adrenal rush!

I am a self-professed e-addict. I fell into ecom and therefore, emarketing, straight out of college and it was truley love at first byte. I can recall building shipping-schedule rates in massive excel files and ftp-ing them to our backend like it was yesterday (remember “fetch” when he was a little dog of a few black pixels that actually ran!?) From yahoo store to microsoft commerce server, google adwords to SEO, to drupal and expression engine … it’s been such a fun fast fanciful ride. And today I am blessed to be here at Tuck, closely considering this technology, its effects on business and hearing experts in the subject share their insights with the MBA community.

I admit, I insatiably and daily seek education and input on these social technologies along with other digital trends. I have more than 50+ RSS feeds on my iGoogle page , I follow every expert or “influencer” (to use the current jargon) in this space, I read everything I can get my hands on, I listen and listen and listen again to the amazing executives we host here on the topic and I finally secured a touch of my own certification in this subject. (Shown left – and was pleased to see that a future BTIS company is connected with WOMMA – Ogilivy.) Yet I still wouldn’t consider myself an expert by a long shot.

I sometimes try to calm all these sparks of possibility with the sobering realization that “social” will mature into simply into another digital communication channel to be considered in the marketing mix, as a collaborative tool that outshines yesterday’s intranets and as an augmentation to customer service.

That still doesn’t change the fact that I have kept a podcast clip of Mr. Edward’s interview on my iPad, home MAC and work machine’s desktop, and I titled it “FUTURE.” To quote him, “Ultimately, it’s going to re-engineer the corporation.”

I listen to it daily….
Now I’m off to hear today’s expert talk to us about virtual collaboration. We are hosting John Lester, Director of Community Development at ReactionGrid. Catch him on Twitter >