Crowdsolving and MH370

Tomnod – enabling the crowd search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 – Picture courtesy of Tomnod

It’s been 9 painful days since Malaysia Airlines flight 370 vanished from secondary radar on the early morning of Saturday the 8th of March en-route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. As sad as the story and mystery of the whereabouts is, a beautiful use of Technology, Digital and Social Media has come on the spotlight in the hunt of the plane. The idea is simply brilliant. Thousands of detailed, freshly captured satellite images are made available to the public, allowing the crowd to collaborate in the humongous task of combing thousands of square miles of ocean in the search for any trace of the missing plane. The imagery is provided by DigitalGlobe, who owns and operates the network of satellites that constantly capture the images, with Tomnod being their crowdsourcing arm.

The mechanics are simple, and brilliant. Just browse to Tomnod’s website and join the cause. Tomnod will assign you tiles of the map where the search area is being focused, allowing you to tag different types of objects as you find them. With a simple and incredibly intuitive user interface, you can be collaborating to the cause in a matter of seconds

Whilst in this particular case the plane is yet to be found, this has been successful in the past in finding a missing light plane in Idaho, helping response and humanitarian aid teams prioritize they activities in the aftermath of devastating super typhoon Haiyan or mapping the damage of a deadly tornado in Oklahoma.

Tomnod has helped resolve real problems in recent times – picture courtesy of Tomnod.

It just comes to demonstrate how Technology can help solve real world complex problems, by organizing and coordinating a massive collaboration effort across the globe. Beautiful idea, hope it is as successful this time as it was in the past. You can help, spread the word!.

Born Social vs Learnt Social

Citi rewards facebook app

Following the previous post on Scoot, and how they are a truly born social company, it is interesting to compare how their evolution is in Social Media as compared to more established companies that are learning how to become social and adopting it on their way.

It is becoming more and more clear that Social Media is not only going to be the way to gain a more close and personal relationship with your customers, but also a full service channel that will probably start moving business out of your current electronic platforms. Some industries will be earlier adopters than others, and some examples of this can be found on the airline industry, where Malaysia Airlines is already offering flight search, booking and check-in can be done in a facebook app.

Security and privacy concerns will slow down the adoption for certain industries, namely the Financial Services, but yet there is already space for certain features to be offered in Social Media. Citibank recently launched a new facebook app that allows their customers group their reward points they obtain for purchases and use them for charity or a group gift. Rewards seems to be quite the right transaction for Banks to start servicing customers over Social Media, as its level of risk is far lower than traditional financial transactions.

It will be interesting to see and compare the adoption curve for established companies, specially on highly risk aware industries like Banking as compared to companies born social like Scoot, who have adopted Social Media in a very natural manner for literally every single internal process they are facing in the journey of setting up the airline: Recruiting, selecting their slogan and offering promotions. It will not be surprising to see that Facebook -their Google+ page is yet to be seen- will become their main sales and servicing channel when they start operating.

Will this be the trend followed by other industries and therefore, will Social Media replace -at least partially- online banking? I make my bet!

Moving into the Social Network

Malaysia Airlines MHBuddy

Malaysia airlines has recently announced their MHBuddy application, which basically introduces all the flight search, booking and check-in features IN facebook. This is not a link to the Malaysia Airlines site, it is really a booking engine within facebook.

Where are your customers?

This idea, not specifically around flight booking but more on banking and financial services has been flying through my mind for the last months. There is one fundamental question I ask myself: How much time do our customers spend in our websites or online applications? The answer is simple, very little. We spend millions in improving our look and feel, making channel based pricing to make the Internet channel more attractive, but still it can not be even compared with the time our customers spend in facebook or other social networks.

People do not log into a social network, they are IN the social network all the time. Through their smartphone, tablet, netbook and desktop, through notifications, email or browsing. No matter where and when, you are connected, like it or not, part of your life happens there. And moreover, it does not happen in our corporate websites or online offerings, we are outside the life of our customers.

So it does not seem too wild to think that a possible way to go is to stop trying to pull our customers to our sites but, put our sites and online offering where our customers are.

The implications

I know this opens very serious security concerns, specially in some industries that deal with sensitive information and are prone to attacks, phishing and fraud in general, but if you think about it, this is probably one of the trends we will see in the next few years, with more and more moves into the social network, name it facebook or others, but ultimately, I bet it will happen, and ways to make this secure enough will be found to make the risk acceptable when compared to the benefits.

The most powerful CRM

Now think about the power behind this. Not only you are now part of your customers life, also your customer will be sharing with you lots of precious information that you would have never imagined, this is the most powerful CRM system you can imagine. Habits, friends, likes and dislikes, it is all there for you to be exploited and to adapt your offering to your customer, individually, and in the place where his/her life is taking place. Interesting?. I think so.

Adoption curve

We will probably see companies drifting some of their low risk customer interaction points to social networks, possibly things like customer complaints, surveys and service requests. Maybe even online stores will start selling their goods in facebook. Buying tickets for events is also a very possible application leveraging the existing event management facilities in facebook. I see a lot of constraints before we see high risk customer interactions in these places, but after we are able to understand the security implications and overcome the existing issues, what stops us from offering financial services to our customers in their preferred social network?. Do you want to apply for a credit card or loan, while you tag your last trip pictures?.