On Innovation and Social Media

I've written a few times on innovation - but now I'm feeling particularly inspired.

Backtracking a bit - what is innovation? It's the step by step process to something new. Very rarely is it an unguided jump into the dark. Rather, I believe that innovation occurs, or happens, when a better solution doesn't exist.

Think about the iPhone - nobody needed one. But it took several existing features (a phone, music player, hard drive, web browser, etc.) and combined it into a new and exciting product.

Innovation on social media is kind of the same, but a little different.

Today (April 2, 2015) social media is used by almost everybody. Maybe it's not Facebook, maybe it's Kik, or Instagram, or Path, or whatever. The point being that everyone is using it. However, it seems that few people have made the linkage between social media and commercial value propositions. Think about it like this - someone will like, follow, tweet at, etc., a given page or figure because they approve of .... something. They now become a captive audience. Although clickthrough rates are tiny - at a certain point, it doesn't matter. Where I'm driving is that social media represents a unique opportunity to bring together personal interests, community building, and profit.

Think about it like this - what if you run a jam making business. You've got your business Facebook page with 46,750 likes and several dozen ongoing conversations. Impressive right? That kind of social volume should definitely translate into sales - right? Eh maybe. The challenge is that the buying experience is separate from the community experience. Sites, like Etsy or Pinterest, are moving in that direction, but none of them are there yet.

Now imagine this - what if (FYI it already exists) you see a "shop here" button at the top of the page? You notice that you're suddenly out of blackberry jam or something. You see a post about jam - you get hungry - you see the button - you buy. It's a similar situation to Amazon - except that I believe it could be a much stronger value proposition. Facebook isn't free - but it is uniquely positioned as a relatively cheap commerce platform.

Currently - data suggests that people won't buy anything more than t-shirts or mugs on FB. Fine - but why is that? Is it because they're afraid of buying more boutique items? I doubt it - after all, they're prepared to buy those systems anyway. Maybe it's more that the experience hasn't been fully thought out.

The emotions behind buying are significantly more nuanced than "me want - me buy." There's an entire story that goes into that experience. So maybe the issue is less that people DON'T want to buy and more that they haven't been convinced. After all - if the capability to talk with a real person and buy a product is instantly available - why wouldn't you take that leap? It's a scary proposition - but think about it this way.

In the 1400s - people forced Galileo to recant his theories.

In the 1860s - people laughed at Darwin. Now it's mostly the opposite.

In the 1990s - people thought the internet was a pipe dream, a wackado thing.

My point being that somebody has to experiment, to take the leap. I believe that the place for that leap (or at least the least scary place for that leap) is on social media platforms like Facebook.