Interactive Marketing Blog

Couple of days back, I went through a post from Forrester blog where “Social Product Management” as a terminology was being talked about. Though the post talks about the term with much caution but surely if you ask me, it definitely makes lot of sense. More because, most part of my work depends on continuous interaction with different social media properties on web. What that means is I continuously use internet destinations to understand the evolving community dynamics and where the ball is settling to come up with more intelligent solutions to everyday situations we face. (Read more in my “About Me” page to know about my work).

So what exactly is “Social Product Management“?

To put it in a framework, we can say SPM describes how social media is changing the way product managers and product marketers work in pretty much every aspect of the job where social media are relevant; moreover they supplement existing PM tasks, deliverables, or resources.

But I was wondering more about the evolution of such terminologies in Indian job market.

Now for sure we use internet to a large extent everyday for our daily work activities. I’m sure that primarily confines to Googling to find some information. But apart from Google, there are vast amount of information lay hidden in evolving social-graphs of twitter, facebook or other social media properties which provide a vast array of opportunities for today’s evolving product managers.

Also because simple googling only provides an intermediate solution to our “intent” which many a times doesn’t get fulfilled because of huge amount of data sets being fed to web which makes it all the more difficult to locate & present. There I believe the social graphs can really come in handy if used effectively since social media properties not only solves the problem of “intent” but also takes care of the “social proof” which we mostly need.

But there’s one problem to it. Many Indian offices don’t allow internet access to most of the social media properties. I have even seen the same state in companies where you most expect. But now that’s another story I guess.

But truly I believe that the concept of “Social Product Management” is something which won’t bounce off like many other neologisms. At least that’s what I hope. But I’m sure for that to happen (at least in Indian market), a mindset change has to happen from top level management where they see the importance of “Social” in Product Management and how it makes a textbook PM more efficient & skillful.

So what do you think?