Open Innovation and the Power of Viral Marketing: Simple and Effective Lesson from General Mills
General Mills presented several of their open innovation initiatives at the recent CoDev conference. They are doing great work and I will post more about this later. In this post, I want to show an example of how open innovation can be done in a simple, yet effective way.
The open innovation team at General Mills uses small business cards to describe what they are seeking. The cards are distributed to their contacts. Since the issues are not relevant to everyone, they make sure to ask whether the recipients could forward the card to other relevant people in their network. This is a very simple idea with a strong viral potential. You can see an example of the cards below.
What could be next on this? I would definitely look into how to do this digitally and thus make the viral potential even stronger. Microsites with short postings could work. Twitter can help spread the word fast on this. Short videos on YouTube might work as well.
Can you add other ideas?
I have previously stressed the importance of communication and branding in this post: Why Communication is Key to Successful Open Innovation. I think this is a nice, little example on how to not only get in touch with external partners, but also communicate that you are committed to open innovation.
Viral Marketing. It’s so different for every business what will work. I have been thinking about what would work in my business…maybe business cards is it.
Re: your point on digital cards…I think that physical cards may be best. We are all inundated with digital. Emails get overlooked and deleted without second thought. But if you get an odd, customized package in the mail…you open it. You know that someone took the time and money to think of you and send you the package for a reason. It’s thoughtful. In return, people will take the time to be thoughtful about who might be able to help….