How to use social media and web 2.0 to spot revolutions now and back in the 16th century?

This very well written, intelligent article that recently appeared on The Economist on the role of social media in allowing revolutionary changes in the 16th century (!) and today, is definitely worth reading.

There is however one important point not mentioned in that article that affects the “revolution” that your own stakeholders are starting to voice and that you, your company, your organization should listen to and embrace as quickly as possible to truly serve their needs and be successful:
Luther put up his manifesto on the walls of the Church in Wuttenberg and it was the ONLY message on that wall.
How visible would his message be on one of “our Facebook walls” today?

This opens the fascinating question about what and how would have Luther’s ideas have “gone viral” in today’s hyper messaging society? And how can an organization read key trends voiced by an increasingly demanding customer base?

All the signs are that increasingly “we the people” are put in a position to command over small and large companies by affecting its reputation, our – like – will affect the opinion of a thousand of friends that read our opinions on Facebook. That is a big influence and the collective influence of all our friends times their thousands of friends each will increasingly decide which companies will survive and which will disappear as fast as Nokia moved from the N.1 to the however-low-they-are-now spot in just two quarters or how the big powerful and unassailable Lehman Brothers disappeared totally in the space of one month.

The speed of change makes it imperative for us to listen more intently to how things are changing and they too are changing at an impressive pace. But the speed of change, the revolution happening in people’s desires is not random, it is actually pushed by the increasing awareness of just how influential I the client, I the supplier, I the employee actually are.
The shareholder remains king but the interest of the shareholder is to see our companies flourish over time and by not listening to the voices of our other stakeholders would never achieve this objective.

So back to the key question of how can we spot the revolutionary message of Luther (or of our clients) on the far too many “walls”?

Opening dialogues on as many “walls”, as many web 2.0 channels as possible is the answer. And it should not be seen as a costly increase in resources and costs but rather as an investment to truly understand and be able to serve people interacting with your company be it on the “wall” of Foursquare, of LinkedIn, of Twitter etc etc.
Each sincere, open, transparent dialogue is actually an extremely cheap way to do your research and development and market testing.

Opening sincere dialogues with the sincere wish to serve the needs and even better predicting the needs and the experiences that people wish to have with your product or service is the best way to ensure success and even survival.

Enviar comentario / 04 ene 2012 por Daniel Truran - opportunity_web20
stakeholder engagement /

MITx driving growing shift towards open sharing and universal opportunities

One wonders why so many companies and organisations are being so slow in adopting the full implications of the web 2.0 . The majority of production, decision making, training methodology is stil entrenched in the web 1.0 one-way passive system instead of embracing the multi-stakeholder sharing and co-creation opportunities of web 2.0 platforms.

The prestigious Massachusettes Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) is about to show the possibilities of shifting towards sharing collaborative systems adding another layer, increasingly present in today’s technology: making it free.

You can read here an article that gives the news of this new MITx online course that will allow anyone (without any need to enter admission exams or pay a cent) to attend its online interactive courses, usually reserved to a very small “elite” of academically talented and financially comfortable individuals.

I see three important implications of this apparently brave move, part of a growing trend:

1. a prestigious college that re-thinks its purpose
now giving the opportunity to the entire (English speaking) world to learn and develop itself, ultimately serving what I think should be the ultimate purpose of an academic institution: offering universal education that will in turn increase the possibilities of the advancement of civilisation thanks to a major new wave of empowered individuals; the new “students” who will develop their knowledge and skills through these new MITx courses.

2. addressing the current, increasing, gap between rich and poor
people who can afford education, horizon-expanding travel, the potential to connect and increase their network of influence kept increasing their wealth, the rest of the world got poorer. These MITx web 2.0 open source solutions are now giving the opportunity to people regardless of their wealth (as long as they can afford / have access to an internet connection) to gain those same opportunities.

3. the decrease in people’s need for “certificates” and increase for only-what-I-need knowledge and services
This MITx course will be totally free with a likely small fee if you wish to receive an “official MITx certificate” at the end of the course. My sense is that individuals, specially younger generations, are much less concerned in getting the official document that testifies they have attended a prestigious college and increasingly interested in the actual skills and new knowledge that they can gain by attending prestigious best-in-class courses.
I also get a sense that more and more “students” will be seeking for specific courses, most relevant to their passion or area of interest. There will be less interest to attend a year-long course that will include some irrelevant classes and a wish to only pick what they need and want.

The beauty of web 2.0 platforms and the connected social media is that it is now easier than ever to find or have your friends point you to where you can find what will be an increasing amount of free, excellent, relevant content.

I see this as one the the great revolutions of our time that will allow for the fulfillment and development of the unlimited latent capacities of human beings. A positive revolution that will allow the positive advancement of civilisation.

Congratulations to M.I.T. and to the other pioneers able to ride this new collaborative, open sharing wave: will you be the next user or creator?

Enviar comentario / 31 dic 2011 por Daniel Truran - opportunity_web20
co-creation, stakeholder engagement /

Crowdsourcing driving engagement and CSR

A recent study by Weber Shandwick’s Social Impact (you can see here its summary)  reinforced the opportunity of web 2.0 communication to engage and drive home the responsible culture of a company through crowdsourcing. With two initial striking findings of this survey of over 200 CSR-related executives in Fortune companies: already 44% of companies interviews had used some form of crowdsourcing and that 95% of companies felt that the use of crowdsourcing had been beneficial.

In case you are wondering, what is crowdsourcing in the first place?
I went to one of the best examples of crowdsourcing – wikipedia – to offer you a definition “Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call”

Web 2.0 platforms have opened a new era in crowdsourcing and specially in our passion to have responsible, values-based  approaches drive success. For example you can ask “your crowd” to provide feedback about a new sustainable product you are launching or more generic ideas on how to make your company more sustainable.

The key to crowdsourcing is of course to make the conversation relevant and worthwhile to your audience. The higher the “purpose” of the topic and the more likely you are to get good ideas, high levels of engagement. So if you ask your “crowd” to give you their opinion on how you can increase your sales by 10%, guess what, the level of engagement will be pretty low. But if your question is how can we best “refresh the world” through a CSR campaign, like Pepsi-Cola did with its web 2.0 refresheverything platform you will see how over 3,3 million people (!) joined in the campaign.
What Pepsi decided to do was – instead of investing millions of dollars in a campaign to convince people how responsible their practices may be – they invested the same amount in funding initiatives that would “refresh the world”, improve the world in one way or the other. Most importantly they allowed the “crowd” to both post their own projects and then let people decide which projects would refresh the world better and  should be funded.

Why does a web 2.0 platform become the ideal place where crowdsourcing can take place?

- It makes it very easy to handle interactions with large groups of people

- If the conversation is worthwhile and purposeful it is also easy to reach a much wider group of people than your company’s direct contacts could reach.

- Leveraging the “word of mouth” driver that is so particularly powerful on web 2.0 social platforms, it is very likely that the “friends” of people engaged in your idea exchange platform will become aware and either join in the conversation or promote it to an ever widening audience.

- With the right incentives people will feel very satisfied at having contributed as opposed to being forced into a survey or poll.

But let’s now go back to the Social Impact survey that we mentioned at the beginning of the post to and highlight some of the main benefits that these Fortune managers found and that are most commonly found when using crowdsourcing:

36% said that it surfaces new perspectives and diverse opinions
26% mentioned it as a way to build engagement and relationships with key audiences
22% said it invites clients and customers from nontraditional sources to contribute to ideas and opinions
16% highlighted how it brings new energy into the process of generating ideas

It therefore becomes an interesting opportunity offered by web 2.0 technology to open the dialogue, inviting people to participate in Responsible Business Solutions building, thus engaging them more closely to your brand and purpose.

Three final suggestions that allow the full potential of crowdsourcing to blossom:

1. Listen to what people are saying, be open, use this to align your offering to the public good, to what the public wants.
2. Give feedback on how you used people’s ideas, engage as much as possible reacting positively to individual’s inputs.
3. Create a constant flow, don’t start and stop engagement around a single project. Continue the conversations so that new thinking can always come to you, even after a CSR campaign has been launched to continuously hear of the evolving needs of your public.

Enviar comentario / 04 mar 2011 por Daniel Truran - opportunity_web20
crowdsourcing, csr /

What do the TIME Magazine Person of the Year and Trust have in common?

You may have heard how TIME magazine voted as the most influential person of the year for 2010 Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Time justified their decision as follows:

For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives

And indeed Facebook is one of the new ways of exchanging information that web 2.0 technology has brought about in just the last few years.
Be it your Facebook Page, your LinkedIn Group, your Wiki platform, your customer interaction platform or your Twitter platform, each of these and thousands of other web 2.0 solutions allows you and your company to not only inform your stakeholders but most importantly to hear them, to learn from them, to have them find solutions for you and to have them promote you and your products and services on your behalf.

The key underlying condition behind the successful use of the opportunities that  web 2.0 offers you is trust, or the origin of this status which is trustworthiness. By being and acting in a trustworthy manner you will gain the trust, the engagement and increase the brand, reputation and success of your organisation.

So think about it for a second: are your intentions as you step into the web 2.0 era truly trustworthy? Are you sincerely and transparently wishing to engage with your stakeholders or are you simply replicating the old 1.0 model (let me tell you and convince you of how great my product / service is and highlight how much you really need it?) using the 2.0 platforms?

Success in web 2.0 is about dialogue, it is not a monologue. It is about open and transparent interactions that aim to provide real benefit to the people involved. It is about allowing and encouraging conversations to take place amongst a community that forms around your organisation’s web 2.0 platforms. It is a lot about losing control of the conversations and allowing the community to guide you.

This takes us back to the title of this blog post connecting the TIME personality of the year with Trust, where can the link be?
The following data shows very clearly how trust in business and its leaders is at an all time low, not only are business leaders seen as some of the less trustworthy but it is the scale of our disillusionment with business which is amazing: only 25% of people believe that business leaders tell the truth.

IPSOS – MORI Poll Trust In Professionals
The question was: who do you trust to tell you the truth?
( http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=15 )

This would not be a problem is companies did not need to be trusted in order to sell you their products and services, in order to have a strong relationship with all their stakeholders more important than ever in this ever changing world or as Umair Haque at Harvard Business Reviews described it:

“a radically interdependent, increasingly transparent, tightly hyperconnected, brutally hypercompetitive, and viciously volatile world”

So what an opportunity! A fantastic competitive advantage for those companies who do manage to break the mold by being truly  trustworthy.

Ok so then to make my trust levels increase and to create the right values based brand that people enjoy working with and buying from, I will now set up a Facebook account and tell the world what a great company I really am, right?
Wrong !

The new web 2.0 technology involves interaction, if it wants to be successful, this interaction involves a lot of listening. Hearing what people like and dislike about you, reacting transparently and openly to the ideas and issues that are voiced online.

These new social networks and web 2.0 platforms are allowing for transparent trustworthiness to arise but they are also very quickly exposing the fakes, the superficial marketing spin of some organizations who believe more in the sales potential of a Corporate Social Responsibility campaign than in the values and consequent behaviors that lie behind a successful CSR approach.

Over the next few months we will offer on this blog a number of cases and ideas on how web 2.0 is being used and can be used to transform companies, both internally and externally bringing, about more meaningful and trustworthy companies that people will enjoy working in, interacting with and buying from.

Enviar comentario / 06 ene 2011 por Daniel Truran - opportunity_web20
trust /