Dave Shen

What are the best U.S. social media conferences in 2011? 4 answers on Quora

What are the best U.S. social media conferences in 2011?

The second-half of conferences tend to be more “developer-centric”. Companies put in a tremendous amount of money in ensuring developers are happy and are given the necessary tools and resources to be able to develop “apps” on the company’s platform — At Adobe Max last year, BlackBerry provided a BlackBerry Torch and a BlackBerry PlayBook (to be released by mid-year 2011) to encourage developers to build on their mobile platform. Whether not it worked, it definitely got a lot of attention within the community. p.s. the PlayBook front end GUI is built using Adobe AIR on-top of the QNX OS.

Over the years, I’ve attended a variety of conferences of different types: mobile-centric, UX-centric, developer-centric, and marketing-centric. I thought about putting out a list to share with folks who might be interested.  I will post a second list (Jun 2011 – Dec. 2011) in a separate post. Please feel free to comment.

The best preparation for managers to ‘a future war with the past’ is to develop a corporate culture where customers are considered in the decision-making process.    It seems obvious but it happens quite often.  Too much success for organizations can reduce the importance of the customer wants and needs while more attention is focused on the organization itself (company objectives and personal objectives)  – whether it’s acquiring more companies (builder-> imperialist), to developing research projects (pioneer –> escapist), to perfecting process (craftsman –> tinkerer), from decentralized to added bureaucracy (salesmen –> decoupling).  Jeff Bezos, in his message to Zappos employees (Amazon recently acquired Zappos for $900 million US) — was that if you focus on customers, mistakes are more forgiving.  Too often, companies lose sight of this — and as a result, they lose their customers.

Apple, lost in the PC war with Microsoft, focused their efforts in consumer electronics.  The lessons they learned from their experiences in the PC industry helped translate into their success in the iPod and iPhone products.   They were not first to market for both products — and the industries were highly competitive — but what they were able to offer was a simple and elegant user experience to digital music players and smartphones, leveraging their marketing, R&D, technology, and supply-chain prowess.   Microsoft, on the other hand, has unfortunately not figured this out yet (XBox is an exception) and because of their monopolistic practices in the PC industry, tried to apply a similar approach towards the media player (Zune) and smartphone product categories (Windows Mobile) but failed.  Microsoft’s arrogance towards product development and its failure to capture customers and Apple’s successes has resulted them to emulate similar practices… the challenge for Microsoft is that they were once agile and nimble but have become large and bureaucratic.    The product launch of Microsoft Windows Vista was a disaster — because they released a product which had too many bugs and it was slow and consumers looked for alternatives.

Keeping abreast of your competition, trends within the industry, understanding operations to reduce cost, getting to know your customer (feedback) are critical to challenge the status-quo, in order to create uneasiness and to combat complacency.  By doing so, companies have a greater chance in growing over the long-haul.

Trust, commitment, and effort on the part of the stakeholders of a firm are essential to the success of that firm as are the competititive advantges and strategic positions of the planning process. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) cannot be separated from firm strategy and they are very much interconnected.

In 2007, Apple had responded to criticism by environmental groups such as Greenpeace who questioned their environmental commitment by taking a position on climate change, improving product energy efficiency, and recycling performance and to eliminate toxic chemicals from their products including: mercury and arsenic from displays and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from internal components. Apple introduced a policy on climate change, product energy efficiency, and overall recycling performance. A “Greener Apple” is an important part of their corporate business strategy. Also having Al Gore, former US Vice-President and active environmentalist — serves as a Director on the Apple board.

Although many companies are being socially responsible, they have found some challenges when taking their products/services to the global stage.  Google’s internal corporate motto “Don’t Be Evil” was said to recognize that large corporations often maximize short-term profits with actions that destroy long-term brand image and competitive position. By instilling a culture of trust and image would outweigh short-term gain. When they were entering China in 2006, they caved into China’s hard-line censorship by allowing the government to self-censor their search engine. CEO Eric Schmidt explained that the term “don’t be evil” was then later replaced with an “evil scale” balancing evils for a greater good — rather than taking a stand on censorship, the Chinese market was too large to ignore and caved into China’s demands.