How to Unlock the Potential of Social Media

When disruption occurs it literally overturns everything. Suddenly the tried-and-tested way of doing something no longer works. But here's the catch. A truly disruptive technology never announces itself as such. It usually creeps up upon us by degrees, stealthily and steadily integrating itself into everyday activities, until the moment we suddenly see the marketing equivalent of the sky falling.

Traditional responses backfire, traditional marketing methods produce no results, traditional back-up plans do not work, every move which comes out of the 'What we did before' playbook seems designed to make the problem worse rather than better.

That's disruption and that is social media. For a quick list of casualties look at: Blackberry, PayPal, Virgin America, Netflix, TrendNet, McDonald's to name but just a few. Despite the fact that all of these incidents have received a lot of publicity and many of these cases have been endlessly analysed social media disasters keep piling up, mainly because changing their mentality quickly and the way they operate on a dime is not how companies have learnt business traditionally works.

The demands made by social media however require just such speed and adaptability. In the 2012 World Economic Forum in Davos heads of state, troubled by the social media powered Occupy movement across the globe called it "%u2026the age of damage" and wondered whether Capitalism is an ideology which still fits in the 21st century.

Social media as a trend has never stopped. It has been with us throughout history, quick to capitalize on technologies and bring about radical change. As a truly disruptive technology it never relies on one particular type of technology. Its spread and its effects are always the result of a combination of technological developments powered by people, and it is that which makes it truly unstoppable and, at the same time, so hard to predict and so difficult to understand.