Asian Energy Advisors

You can disagree with me if you want, but you can’t prove me wrong. We’ve had all kinds of advisory boards, expert panels, studies. The President and Cabinet are continually issuing directives. Funding agencies are continually handing out grants and huge loans.

So where is the real traction going to come from? As I said here over two years ago, it’s going to come from the:

“Boards of Directors, CEOs and CFOs of Philippine utilities and energy corporations.”

I can’t wait for one of the more progressive utilities here in the Philippines to effectively apply social media to transform their customer relationships and unleash their employees’ abilities to operate - an initiative that has to be enabled at the very top of the organization. It will push the whole sector forward, I’m quite convinced.

Shel Israel, who knows of which he speaks, advocates here quite soundly for social media at large corporations.

Regular social media followers understand that Microsoft, for example, does not, think with one mind, but with nearly 60,000 of them that GM does not speak with one voice or language, but with over 275,000 …

If you blog with transparency and candor about your corporate job and the guy down the hall is devising a character blog by a talking moose to extend brand, he or she may hurt the brand or simply waste company resources, but that effort will not hurt yours, and that is why, in the long run, the simple, interactive credible path will prove to be the wise course for most companies whose employees take pride in their products and services.

… Technology has made conversations scalable. You can talk with customers in seconds all over the world. The cost of it is quite low. If you give your audience something valuable. If you show you are listening, you will gain significantly in customer retention, loyalty and their carrying your virtues forward with tools that put word of mouth on steroids.

Quite simply, social media is more efficient than traditional marketing. It lets you build better products and services. It shortens the time-to-customer. It is less costly than advertising and more effective. It gets the people most passionate about your company to talk to others where they have more influence than celebrity endorsement. It is more credible by far than traditional PR. It gives your company greater prominence in search engines by orders of magnitude over traditional web sites.

And it’s even more than all of that. It will leverage the creativity and capability that is already existing within our utility employees by allowing them to tap into the wisdom of everybody else outside the utility (which is a much bigger group!) - creativity and capability and wisdom that we need to move prices lower and service up - here in our electric sector.

ps: The solutions are in the long tail - otherwise we would have easily already tapped into them.