Markets are Conversations with Lars Groeger at City Business Swap

Markets are Conversations

The impact of Social Media on your business

Guest Speaker: Lars Groeger

When Time Magazine presented its Person of the Year 2006, it was YOU. People like you and me who generate content by uploading videos on YouTube, creating a Wikipedia entry or posting holiday pictures on flickr. Consumers who used to be sitting passively in the audience were now centre stage: actively producing content and initiating conversations about products and brands for everyone to hear and to be forever archived by search engines. The web is enabling conversations that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

By now, every CEO knows what social media is and that it is tool to have a conversation; they also know how powerful it can be in reaching a large audience in a short period of time at almost no cost. Yet, getting the young and hip people in the marketing department to ‘do something on Facebook’ does not necessarily mean that your company is truly engaging in a dialogue.

Dr Lars Groeger will look into the meaning of ‘conversations’ and present global best practices how marketing managers can engage with customers and transform interactions into transactions.

Lars Groeger, PhD, is Lecturer in Management at Macquarie Graduate School of Management where he teaches MBA students and Executives in Sydney and Hong Kong. Lars has also taught various marketing subjects at the University of Cologne, Germany and the University of Technology, Sydney. He has been educated at leading international management schools in the US, France and Germany. Prior to joining academia, Lars gained extensive management consulting experience in the private and public sectors.

His research aims to help managers gain an increased understanding of the various forms of social interaction between customers and the firm’s power to stimulate these interactions in a systematic and value-creating way. He has a long interest in social networks and how the structure of these networks influences individual and collective behaviour. Lars is a regular speaker at academic and practitioner oriented conferences in Australia, China and Europe.