Farmers breed the best Social Media Success-Stories

Spending two days with the annual New Media in Corporate Communications Conference in Amsterdam, I learnt a few new things:

• Financial Services companies are far behind on adopting and promoting new online media (well, that's not really new).
• Tech corporations are quite advanced in usage, but not so advanced in creating sense and meaning. They use stuff just because they can – that's not really productive.
• The most beautiful and productive usecases come from those businesses, that one might assume to be rather slow: The agricultural industry and the very basic manufacturers (producing wires, nails, rubber bands or other stuff we usually don't care about) really produce sense and productivtiy with online media.

Surprised? If you have a closer look, things become understandable:
The business is truly worldwide. Growing seeds in India requires the same knowledge as growing them in Australia – just different parts of it. The production processes are pretty similar. There are hardly any existing online media remains you have to remove before new things will get noticed. Customers (eg Farmers) are often not heavy media consumers, they don't live in cities, they are not easy to cover with newspapers and magazines, online is oten the online way to reach them. Mobile solutions add even more value – since they bring the desired knowledge truly out in the field, where customers need it...