Peter's Blog

Looking back to the week there are a couple of alliance and social media appearances that stand out and made me ponder. This week in Barcelona the Mobile World Congress took place and traditionally it was a place where announcements are being made for the mobile sector. Also traditionally Apple was not there, they have their own marketing machine and events, like the recent announcement of the iPad. What we did see however at the Mobile World Congress was the announcement of 24 large mobile phone companies announcing an alliance named the Wholesale Applications Community to create an open applications platform. The press is positioning this platform as an act to fight the hegemony of the Apple iPhone and it's app store.

This made me wonder, would you rather create alliances from a positive attitude to grow your own strength and be innovative or build it's foundation on a defensive act to fight against a competitor's success? I know what has my preference! It will be interesting however to follow the development of the Wholesale Applications Community (which will soon be abbreviated to something like WAC) and see how 24 parties keep their act together without having one of the three market leaders (Apple, Nokia and Microsoft) on board.

Later this week Philips Healthcare announced a partnership with the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam. Purpose of the partnership is joint research for early diagnosis and treatment of cancer and neurological and cardiovascular diseases. This is a different kind of partnership, one clearly build upon combining each others positive strengths; the medical knowledge and care of the VU and the medical scanners of Philips Healthcare. This partnership is created with the wellbeing of the patient in mind.

On the social media front two appearances once again showed how important it is to be serious about social media. Every company needs to make social media part of their strategy. When a company chooses not to be active on social media they at least need to consider following carefully what's being said about them. Southwest airlines asked a passenger to leave a plane before it took off as they deemed him too overweight to fly. I am sure airliners will have their reasons to ask passengers to leave a plane whatever that reason might be. In this case however it was about Kevin Smith, a pretty vocal guy with nearly 1.7 million Twitter followers. You can guess what happened. Kevin started to tweet about what happened to him and started to write about it on his blog, which was picked up massively. Actions like this can harm your brand seriously and show the importance for companies to be on top of social media, follow it, monitor it, and act on it. When you act on it make sure your internal systems are setup to support whatever is being noticed and acted upon. Brett Simmons wrote about how ATT handled it when his complaints were tweeted to the world and in the end he returned to be a happy customer.

When it comes to creating alliances or applying social media soon it will no longer be a matter IF you will use these tools for your organization but HOW you will use them. Both elements need to be part of your company's strategy and always be embedded from a positive mindset. Focus on improving the patient's life rather than going into the defensive mode and turn a complaining customer into a champion rather than having them kill your brand image.

So here is one for you to ponder over during the weekend: How can the experience of your customer, patient, passenger, stakeholder, guest, etc improve when you are applying alliances and social media to their benefit?

Enjoy your weekend!