Jan 24, 2011 | Collaboration, Communication, Social Media
Linux started with a promise, one that formed the basis of what has become a major player in the server operating system market, with a current share somewhere around 45%.
Linus Torvalds back in 1991 posted the following message on a discussion board inhabited by systems engineers “I am doing a free operating system (just a hobby) and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise to implement them”
Torvalds, knowingly or otherwise, tapped a vein that has proven on many occasions (Wikipedia.org & Meetup.com being just two), that a community has the chance to form when several conditions are met:
- The community is driven by a need, or interest, rather than profit for the initiator
- Participation is welcome, and encouraged, but a transparent “peer review” process dictates if the contribution will be used
- Recognition is offered to all participants.
The promise is that these conditions will be met, and when they are not, the community fails, as did the first iteration of Wikipedia. Does yours measure up?
Jan 18, 2011 | Customers, Demand chains, Marketing, Social Media
The retailer Patagonia has as a part of its corporate values a reverence for the environment, it is a core part of their corporate values, and highly relevant to their target market. They wear their hearts on their electronic sleeves by opening up their demand chain on all products to observation and criticism.
An integral part of their web presence is the Patagonia Footprint Chronicles site that provides some details the provenance of all their products with the opportunity for consumers to provide feedback.
This simple, transparent, exercise must be a source of huge value for the Patagonia brand, that targets high quality, and environmental sensitivity in everything they do. This sort of brand transparency is likely to become far more common as consumers increasingly demand facts rather than slogans from marketers, and marketers recognise the competitive value of demand chain transparency, enabled by the web 2.0.
Jan 17, 2011 | Branding, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
There are lots of people flogging various digitally sophisticated SEO techniques, and they appear to be making a living. However, it seems to me that after all this time most key words worth having, have been taken, registered, and everyone is following similar SEO strategies, so your generic term will not get you to the prized No.1 spot in Google, probably not into the top 10 pages.
Try putting in “Electrician Sydney” as I did recently needing someone to do some work in my house, and there were 4880 entries, taking Google’s suggestion and adding “inner west” where I live, there were 297,000 entries. Not much use, unless you happen to be the .00001% who lucks the No.1 spot, but many keep trying, and paying.
By contrast, if you invent a word , something unique, you have a better chance of coming up on the first page. The downside is that you need to make your target market aware of the word by other means, a challenge .
When you put “Strategyaudit” into Google, this blog comes up No.1, and has done so pretty much for the whole time it has been written, although Google still checks if it is a spelling mistake. My task is therefore to make the specific audience who may be interested in what I write to be aware of the name, then it is easy to find, as all they do is put the word “strategyaudit” into Google, and there its is.
No complicated SEO strategy, simply a strategy to “own” a space of my own making, and being different, the challenge to be relevant to an audience that returns to the blog remains, no SEO can do that for me.
Jan 16, 2011 | Change, Marketing, Social Media
Social media to many “50 something’s” who run most of our large businesses, is just code for wasting time that should be spent productively, but the reality is that social media is rapidly evolving into a potent business tool in several pretty fundamental ways.
- As we can see what is needed, and where far more quickly, the old resource allocation processes have become totally redundant. Allocating resources based on a plan now 12 months old is, as my kids would say “so 20th century”, it needs to be done in response to things happening NOW, and requiring response. This has huge implications on the way organisations democratise decision making at the front lines of market contact.
- As social media becomes more dense, it opens opportunities for collaboration not possible before. This is particularly potent in its ability to immediately mobilise numbers around a cause, location, or combination of both.
- Geographic barriers are no longer relevant as an organising principal. Most multinational businesses face this fundamental change in the dynamics of their organisational structures, but so to do social organisations such as the church.
- The power of social media as a marketing tool is only just starting to be recognised. We have long understood that personal recommendation is the best endorsement you can have, and the web can now offer an electronic version of the recommendation qualified by numbers and independence. Amazons system of recommendations shows the way.
And now, Hollywood has made a film about the beginnings of Facebook, and the motivation and foibles of its founder, surely, that is a sign that social media is now of age.
Jan 11, 2011 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
If I were managing a business in financial services, I would be asking myself if I had missed the second wave of the “net-boat” that is rapidly becoming a force in financial services.
Banks and other financial institutions have reduced their costs enormously by leveraging the capabilities of the net to receive and process payments electronically in developed countries, but even there, PayPal has carved a growing share of transactions, but more importantly, opened relationships with millions of customers who use the web for shopping. Just as the retailers missed the potential of consumers to use the web to seek the best prices, banks have allowed PayPal to build a customer base to pay for them.
In the developing world, millions are not serviced by the financial infrastructure of the developed world. predictably, alternatives are emerging, powered again by the web, and businesses that have no existing financial services infrastructure to protect, are able to move quickly to provide a cost effective and easy to use service to customers and potential customers not serviced by banks.
It is unlikely in my view that banks will become the recording companies of the early 2000’s and ignore the competitive threat until it is almost too late, but their influence, particularly in the developing world will be substantially diminished from what it could have been.
Jan 9, 2011 | Innovation, Leadership, Social Media
Ideo is an ideas factory, its stock in trade is ideas and the resulting products, that others commercialise. As such, it has been a lab or case study in how to innovate as they have grown. As a small business, they all knew each other, collaboration happened as a part of the DNA of the place, but growth and geographic spread made it increasingly difficult, so they set out to use themselves as the lab for themselves, evolving what they have called the “Tube” in which they mash up all the collaboration tools enabled by web 2.0 into a form that works for them.
Then, god bless them, they put it out there in the spirit of transparency and the collaborative energy that can be created, for us all to learn from.
