While I’m admittedly a bit behind the times, was intrigued by this piece of news that Nielson and McKinsey were coming together to form a joint venture
to create a new company today called NM Incite, which builds upon the industry-leading social media and online brand metrics, consumer insights and real-time market intelligence of Nielsen BuzzMetrics to transform business operations including product development, marketing, communications and customer service.
While obviously a sign of “maturing” of social media for business, there should be concern social media becomes part of the intelligence, market segments, metrics and management discourses that suggest procedure, process and control – rather than dialogues with and between different stakeholders that interact with and through an organisation. However, this will be interesting to follow for signs that such a venture is able to nurture the best of the Enterprise 2.0/ social business whereby the boundaries of organisation become blurred or disintegrate. These can be the boundaries between customers, suppliers, partners, distributers, advertisers or the internal boundaries, especially between silos of knowing. Or will we see the use of the “social” rhetoric as a veneer to traditional patterns of managerialism – lipstick on the face of the gorilla?