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"Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation?" Guy de Maupassant

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Jon Husband of Wirearchy and Lee Bryant of Headshift, have recently put in a lot of thought on Enterprise 2.0 ...

"Will we see more written about what will probably come to be called Management 2.0 ? No doubt. Will there be massive struggles with this new set of conditions and ongoing resistance to coming to terms with these dynamics ? No doubt. Will resisting and ignoring and denying work? Maybe for the short term, but these new conditions are not going away ... and I posit that the issues engendered by linked interconnected bottom-up activities will necessitate significant amount of unlearning and re-learning, notably in the enterprise setting." Jon Husband

And Lee, building on Euan and Dion Hinchcliffe's recent posts on Enterprise 2.0 writes:

On the technical level, the integration challenges are non-trivial:

  • identity / Single Sign On (SSO);

  • internal application integration;

  • legislative obligations for data retention, privacy and audit; and,

  • availability.

But the integration of people, practise and (dare I say) process is even harder, with challenges such as:

  • devolving responsibility and promoting a DIY culture;

  • encouraging people to grow their own internal and external networks;

  • stimulating conversation and debate by overcoming fear of exposure; and,

  • for many people, simply overcoming the idea that any form of online communication beyond email is "not part of their job."
Related to these, is this neat post by Hugh Macleod on Corporate Blogging calling for "humanification" and "smarter conversations". And Britt Blaser, always sharp, talks about the People Law trumping the Power Law - I see this relevant to the conversation as well, as enterprise needs to realize the value in People Power.

I'd like to add another dimension to this conversation, which was triggered by presentations and comments I heard at the IAMAI Digital Marketing Summit last week in Mumbai. All pointing to the fact that there is immense potential for web 2.0 or social media (call it by whatever name you wish) in Marketing. In particular, I liked what Ajit Balakrishnan of Rediff had to say - here's the gist ... I may have missed a few words:

"Bloggers are our new gatekeepers of information. Journalists are hesitant to write up stories, unless bloggers are already talking about it. We get real news from the bloggers -- everything else is a press release. Smart marketers need them"

Rajiv Dhingra, who it was a pleasure to meet, summarizes the summit:

"The conclusion was similar to all the previous discussions and in fact this is to be noted - Marketers are now asking other media and medium what is the ROI!

...and thus concluded the IAMAI Digital Media Conference 2007.

I wish there were more marketers and especially FMCG product brand managers who had attended this conference because itís the offline world which needs to know that it is time to start switching online."

It's encouraging to hear marketers talk of blogs and social networking and building communities online, however, like Rajiv, I heard many unspoken doubts on Return On Investment (ROI) from such engagements. Its a question I raised at the summit. Is the industry doing anything to develop metrics to measure impact? Are they talking to bloggers about it? Simple answer - NO.

I know ROI is an obsession with marketers, and we would fail in our jobs as consultants in this area, if we did not address them. We've done the first part of our jobs by getting the words 'blog' and 'online communities' into the lexicon of marketers. They have some sense of what these can do. We can talk of benefits of corporate blogging, evangelism, influence on brand perceptions, using these tools to empower your customers to become your marketers. We can hold their hands on how to set these up for their companies. There's been some good thinking by Charlene Li at Forrester in October 2006 on ROI of blogging.

But do we have a model in place yet? Are we giving them more tangible, quantifiable metrics, the equivalent of or alternatives to GRPs and cost-per-clicks? Are we doing enough, in the area of showing them ways to manage risks involved ? How are we helping them 'market' social media internally to their VPs and CEOs who often tend to be older, more rigid, more in fear of giving up control.

Leaps of faith aren't always easy to achieve from organizations without any estimation of how it can affect bottomline. Bottom-up or top-down, as much as we want 'them' to speak our language, 'we' need to speak their's too. I was chatting with Veer and Rajiv at the summit, and I do believe it is time to get bloggers and advertisers/marketers together into a discussion on how this can come about. This isn't just an India issue, I know many of my blog buddies in other parts of the world are grappling with these concerns too.

Any takers? Suggestions?


Update: [link via Dave Winer - Nicholas Carr talks about two studies that provide some data on adoption of six prominent Web 2.0 tools - blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging. "Although Forrester didn't break out adoption rates by tool, it did say that CIOs saw relatively high business value in RSS, wikis, and tagging and relatively low value in social networking and blogging." Read more at Nicholas Carr's blog.]


12:55:08 PM    comment []  trackback []

Ate Poorthuis is a student at the University of Amsterdam, and is writing a thesis on the creative class in Mumbai. He wrote to me yesterday, in an email asking for help on a survey for Mumbaikars (I still prefer the term Bombayites :)). It piqued my interest for two reasons .. why his interest in and selection of Mumbai ... and I remembered listening to Richard Florida talk about the The Rise of the Creative Class, at Pop!Tech way back in 2004. He has subsequently written The Flight of the Creative Class. Here's an IT Conversations podcast of his talk at Pop!Tech.

"My name is Ate Poorthuis. I am currently writing my bachelor thesis at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I am writing this thesis on the creative class in Mumbai. In the last few years there has been a lot of academic writing on creative cities and the creative class. The definition of creative class in this context is very broad: it ranges from architects, artists, teachers and writers to managers, programmers, researchers and journalists.

It struck me that all research in this field is based on people and cities in North-America and Europe. That is why I decided to write my thesis on Mumbai. I cannot believe that Mumbai, with its artists, Bollywood, nightlife, university and IT-industry, is not included in any research on the creative class. With this thesis I want to shine some new light on the subject and I hope to provide another perspective for the academic field.

Since you belong to the creative class I want to invite you to participate in a web survey. The survey takes only 10 to 15 minutes to complete and can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection. The survey is completely anonymous. Your e-mail address is not stored within this survey and cannot be linked to your responses in any way. You can begin with the survey by just clicking on the link below. I will be very thankful for your time and effort.

The survey can be found on: www.creativemumbai.com/survey/index.php?sid=2

If you have any further questions or are just interested in my research, just send me an e-mail or have a look at www.creativemumbai.com. Also, feel free to blog about this research on your weblog and please do not hesitate to forward this e-mail to anyone that might be interested."

Mumbaikars .. or Bombayites .. whichever term rings better with you, do spread the word and take the survey .. it made me reflect on why I love this city with all of its 20 million people and why I believe there is no place like this anywhere on earth, no matter what some people say by calling it the least courteous city !


10:42:29 AM    comment []  trackback []