MIS Research Center - Social Media Panel Discussion
Friday: 3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. in Room 2-206
Friday: Reception 5:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. 2-250 Foyer
Friday, 2/17 Carlson School of Management

Social Media Facebook

Opening - Ravi Bapna
Moderator - Anindya Ghose

Panelists

Farris Timimi, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, and a Consultant in Cardiovascular Diseases and Internal Medicine at the Mayo Clinic. He serves as Medical Director for the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. He also serves as the Director of the Cardiology Education Clinic; as Cardiology Physician Education Coordinator for the Internal Medicine Residency and as the Program Director for the Advanced Heart Failure and Transplant Fellowship Program.  In addition, Dr. Timimi is the physician lead for the Division of Cardiovascular Disease One Voice initiative, as well as the institutional lead for patient-family advisory councils.
Dr. Timimi received his bachelor's and medical degrees from East Tennessee State University. He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri; his fellowship in Cardiovascular Medicine and Interventional Cardiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School; and a separate fellowship in Interventional Vascular Radiology, Vascular Medicine, and Vascular Ultrasound at Mayo Clinic.

Lou Abramowski
Lou is 8thBridge's co-founder and Director of Product, driving innovation at 8thBridge using skills learned in a previous life as a web developer for a client partner of Ogilvy Interactive-Lacek. His innovations include creating the first like-gated Facebook Tab, the first Facebook Store, and the first News Feed store. 8thBridge's merchants work with Lou to discover and create cutting-edge, social shopping experiences that result in happy consumers and high conversion rates by becoming early adopters of Facebook Platform enhancements such as the Custom Open Graph and the Slow Poke.

James Plesser
Senior Marketing Mgr, Best Buy
I’m a native Kansas Citian but call Minneapolis home. The Twin Cities rock on many levels…except for the length of the winter. Work-wise, my gig is leading social marketing strategy at the corporate HQ for Best Buy. I went to school at the University of Kansas (B.S. in Journalism) and the University of Minnesota (MBA with a marketing emphasis).  I dig live music. I wish I was better than a novice guitar player. I love Kansas Jayhawk basketball. And I am a Royals fan in hibernation. Lastly, you can find me you can find chatting or ranting with friends and colleagues over on Twitter (@jamieplesser) or on my blog (kcslim.posterous.com).

Abstract

The Internet and the World Wide Web are revolutionizing the way people, businesses and governments interact with each other. From Twitter to Facebook to Google, the shared infrastructure of IT-enabled platforms are playing a transformational role in today’s digital age. The Internet is now encroaching core business activities such as new product design, advertising, marketing and sales, creation of word-of-mouth and customer service. It is fostering newer kinds of community-based business models. It is having significant economic consequences on industries and markets transformed by its shared technology infrastructure in ways that we have not seen before. There is a lot of economic value accruing from the content generated in spaces mediated by social media and there are tangible means for monetization of such content through newer forms of online advertising. Thriving in such an environment requires the understanding and leveraging of the major mega-trends of today, Big-Data and the Social-Graph for external and internal business innovation. Over the past decade, digital search and social computing technologies, such as search engines, blogs, wikis, and social networking systems, have moved from being objects of technical curiosity to being tools used in mainstream business practices.  Online social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are increasingly consuming a significant and growing portion of our time and attention. The use of mobile devices for generating and consuming online content is now becoming more and more pervasive. A WSJ article reports that online advertising is now a $30.1 billion industry comprising of 17.3% share of the total US advertising spend for 2011. Search and display advertising are in a constant race to outdo each other and we see increasing portions of firms’ ad budgets being allocated to online advertising.  A 2010 Nielsen study estimated that the amount of time the average user spent on Facebook was about seven hours per month, and more importantly, was growing at the rate of 10% per month.  Social media, is credited with playing a role in inspiring and facilitating political revolutions in the Middle East (the Arab Spring), while also attracting the attention of marketers who have a perennial interest in better understanding the viral and word-of-mouth driven spread of products and services and is being viewed as playing a significant role in the diffusion of ideas through its influence on our consumption of media.
Across a variety of industries, firms are increasingly considering how they can use and profit from these technologies. Companies are rethinking their advertising strategies around search engines, and looking at social media tools for internal and external business process innovation.  However, their distinctive nature gives rise to many issues that are different from those encountered when developing and managing traditional information technologies. In this interactive workshop, we will examine best-practices related to the business use of social media and digital marketing technologies. Through a combination of readings, discussion, and case analyses we will examine (i) the characteristics of key digital search and social computing technologies such as search engines, blogs, wikis, online social networks, and open innovation platforms (ii) the different in-bound and out-bound marketing approaches firms can use to deploy, manage, and benefit from these technologies.

Who should attend the panel discussion?

• Interactive marketers looking to increase the influence of their products
• Customer service heads
• IT specialists looking to create value for business units
• HR leads looking to create better employee engagement
• Product designers looking to leverage the crowd
• Social media specialists
• Digital media analysts
  

Ravi Bapna is a professor in the Information and Decision Sciences Department at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. He also serves as the Executive Director of the Center for Information Technology and the Networked Economy(CITNE) at the Indian School of Business. He teaches graduate students and executives on how to align business and IT for competitive advantage. His research interests are in the areas of online auctions, e-market design, Grid computing, and the economics of information systems. His research has been extensilvely published in a wide array of journals such as Management Science , Informs Journal on Computing , Decision Sciences , CACM , Naval Research Logistics , DSS , EJOR , and ITM . He was awarded the prestigious Ackerman Scholar Award for outstanding research at the University of Connecticut. His views have featured in the Financial Times , Wall Street Journal , India Knowledge @ Wharton , The Economic Times and Business Today.

Anindya Ghose is an Associate Professor (with tenure) of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences and Robert L. & Dale Atkins Rosen Faculty Fellow at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business and a Visiting Associate Professor at the Wharton School of Business . He is also a Daniel P. Paduano Fellow of Business Ethics at NYU Stern. He is the co-Director of the Center for Digital Economy Research at NYU Stern. His research analyzes the economic consequences of the Internet on industries and markets transformed by its shared technology infrastructure. He is an expert in quantifying the economic value from user-generated content in spaces mediated by social media; modeling and estimating the monetization of content through search engine advertising; modeling consumer behavior in mobile Internet based social networks; examining the drivers of crowdfunding, and measuring the welfare impact of the Internet and electronic markets. He has worked on product reviews, reputation and rating systems, sponsored search advertising, mobile commerce, mobile social networks, crowdfunding, and online markets. He has also worked on the economics of IT-based price discrimination and the economics of information security. He frequently works with and consults for leading firms in the information technology, retail, financial services, telecommunications, and travel industries on projects related to internet marketing, social media analytics, mobile marketing and digital advertising analytics. He also plays an senior advisory role to several start-ups in the Internet space.