What is the single most important driver of success for a company to turn the commercial promise of social media into solid dollars? Quy Huy and Andrew Shipilov, both professors Strategic Management at INSEAD, conducted a cross sectoral study and found it all comes down to leadership, specifically leaders who can build communities both inside and outside their companies. The main findings of the study are published on the Harvard Business Review blog.
According to Quy Huy and Andrew Shipilov ”… firms that lack leaders with social media skills are often tempted to outsource community management to outsiders, such as web development firms or advertising agencies. Unfortunately, this increases the risk of failure. The problem is that when community development is outsourced, the organization doesn’t learn and people inside communicate like they always did, even though the use of social media might have speeded up internal communication and flattened the hierarchies. As a result, the company is often very different from the face it portrays online, which almost always gets discovered…. A better solution is to bring in new leaders who do understand social media…..”
Since social media play an increasingly important role in trade promotion, trade promotion organisations should also seriously consider how they deal with this. Is there systematic attention on social media leadership in trade promotion and business support bodies?
Read more on: Harvard Business Review’s blog
The Trade Promotion Organization (TPO) Network World Conference and Awards took place from October 14-15, 2010 in Mexico city. The TPO Network Awards recognize excellence in trade promotion services and celebrate TPOs that demonstrate outstanding performance.
The Dutch beer brewer Bavaria caught the international headlines during the Football World Cup 2010, hosted in South Africa, with a brilliant example of guerilla marketing.
During the past decade, the ‘Malaysia: Truly Asia’ campaign has won more than 25 awards worldwide and has resulted in more than a tripling of annual visitors to Malaysia to almost 24 million in 2009. The integrated media campaign showcases a destination rich in history, culture, and an abundant variety of experiences. The campaign included a series of TV commercials broadcasted worldwide, print with special media in international news and business publications, and online contests.
Colombia is a country that for years had to deal with a negative image due to narcotics and guerilla activities. An image that did not encourage foreign direct investment or international trade. But in an effort to swing the negative image around, Proexport, the country’s trade promotion body, launched one of the best country branding campaigns of the last few years: “Colombia is Passion”.
Over the last few years, the iD consultancy team has provided widespread support to trade promotion organizations in developing countries and emerging economies. In many cases, the support was geared to optimize trade information services, including trade information portals as main dissemination channel. In this respect we consider that UK Trade and Invest, Austrade and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise showcase truly good practices. To name a few: The portals these organizations operate are characterized by:
Public Private Partnership in Colombia
According to Luis Andrade and Andres Cadena (in McKinsey Quarterly) the impressive performance of Colombia is partly contributed by the “Productive Transformation Program”, a Public Private Partnership program that was launched in 2007.
A cornerstone of the program is closer collaboration between the government and the business community. Rather than choose winners, as some developing countries have, Colombia invited all sectors to participate in the program. Given the government’s limited resources, it organized a contest to decide which ones to work with first. The government based its selection on not only the potential of a sector but also the willingness of its leaders to commit money and people to the effort
It also set preconditions: subsidies or protection would not be granted. Any improvement in competitiveness would have to occur under market conditions. In exchange, the government agreed to work with private businesses to educate and train the workforce in pertinent skills, to improve the regulatory environment, to help promote industries in foreign markets, and to develop the required infrastructure.
There seems to be an important new working dynamic based on a shared and clear agenda between the public and the private sectors. To illustrate, here is an example of some steps already taken in the business-process-outsourcing sector:
To date, the program has encouraging results, and although it’s too early to claim success, it may well be that Colombia is underway to establish a good practice in this area of Public Private Partnerships.