We defended in Socialholic – our book on Social Media Marketing – that #socialholics are people with an outstanding ability to innovate. The use of social media provides them with three mass innovation weapons:
- Better and more efficient access to knowledge;
- Connections that allow them to find alternative ways to pursue their ideas/dreams;
- Courage; emotional support from relatives, colleagues and their professional networks.
I’ve recently found an article in the MIT Sloan MR, that underlines the point about the access to knowledge:
“These new social tools — applications such as social bookmarking/tagging, social networking (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), blogs and wikis — enable them to find and follow subject-matter experts and practitioners who have experimented with new ideas and technologies. In effect, scouts using social media perform “social navigation” — searching for and finding relevant people and content — which is positively correlated with personal innovativeness and success in idea generation. ”
Here is the link to the original article.