Brian Gillooly
BRIAN GILLOOLY is responsible for maximizing members' value in New Paradigm's research and consulting services. He conducts client briefings and facilitates working groups. Previously, Brian was editor-in-chief of Optimize and editor-in-chief of events for InformationWeek, where he was responsible for setting the editorial direction and strategy of Optimize's magazine and web site, as well as for developing and defining editorial content for live events for both publications. Working with the editorial team, Brian interacted with subject matter experts to bring business technology executives the unique perspective that enabled them to develop and execute innovative strategies within their organizations. He met regularly with top global CIOs and business technology executives.
 |
|
April 1st, 2008, 10:31am
|
A report from AIIM Market IQ released last week says that while businesses firmly believe that embracing Enterprise 2.0 concepts is critical, many companies still don’t quite understand what it encompasses. That’s what our researchers at New Paradigm might call “fertile ground.”
According to the report, which surveyed 441 business people, while 44% of respondents said Enteprise 2.0 is critical or important to business goals, and another 27% said it has an average impact, 74% said they were still unclear about what it is. The biggest factor in stymying growth and impacting mindshare is corporate culture.
Of course this is one report, but taken on face value, it reminds me of the early days of e-business, when everyone knew they needed to be involved, but some still couldn’t put a finger on what they were doing. Of course, the same can’t be said of the dozens of New Paradigm Enterprise 2.0 clients today, most of whom are at the cutting edge of Enteprise 2.0 adoption and implementation. They already understand that letting your people get caught up in nomenclature — the corporate culture issue — is a surefire way to stifle growth and let competitors take the lead.
|
|
February 18th, 2008, 11:32am
|
I get this question a fair amount of times, and it came up at New Paradigm’s Enterprise 2.0 all-member meeting in a couple of weeks ago. That is: “How can established companies (sometimes people use the word “legacy”…) compete with newer ones in an Enterprise 2.0 world?” A corollary to that question might also be, “How can established companies embrace the Net Generation.” If you were watching the Today Show this morning, you heard the author of the book “Mavericks at Work,” which was first published in 2006 and came out in paperback last month, mention IBM’s effort to answer those questions, and it started with one person who took a bold risk.
Some of you may already be familiar with IBM’s “Extreme Blue” internship program, which was started by a woman named Jane Harper at IBM who went out on her own — a maverick — and created the skunkworks within IBM that eventually grew to become a formal, companywide initiative. As “Mavericks at Work” author Polly LaBarre asked on the Today Show, why would any young, talented person work for IBM today when they can work for a Google or similar company? Worried about that very phenomenon, IBM expanded a few years ago on the nascent ideas of its maverick employee to create a program for eager, talented NGeners that’s now worldwide. In 12-week internships, NGeners work on real-world projects in one of 14 labs and have been responsible for more than 60 open-source products and more than 360 patent disclosures.
So to answer the question about how established companies compete with newer ones in an Enterprise 2.0 world, one of the answers is to take risks and start small. IBM proved it’s a formula that can work.
|
|
February 1st, 2008, 02:43pm
|
It’s described as an “experiment,” but as most test-market situations go, if enough customers bite, the rest of us could be forced to dine from the same buffet.
Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner broadband service is testing a plan in Beaumont, Texas, that would meter customers’ Internet usage and then charge them based on consumption. In other words, if you live in Beaumont and you swap or download large files on a regular basis — video or music files, for instance — you could end up paying a lot more for Internet service than you’ve been used to. According to an article in the current Newsweek, Time Warner is proposing service plans for 5 gigabytes, 10 GB, 20 GB, and 40 GB of usage, with increasing prices as the size of the plan balloons. If people exceed their plans, like a cell phone bill, the extra charges really start to pile up. That’ll stink for people who like or need to tranfer large files. And with people sharing photos, videos, and downloading movies and TV shows much more frequently these days, that could mean a heck of a bite in the wallet for even average users. Time Warner claims the plan will get people to think more about their Internet use and avoid overtaxing its broadband system.
What the plan does avoid — so far — is a violation of Net neutrality. Right now the plan measures only how many bits a person uses, not where those bits are coming from or are going to. So Time Warner isn’t using the program to steer customers to, say, a less expensive carrier of the data, which would violate Net neutrality. However, an increasing part of the cable company’s business is offering video on demand, and local Internet companies are trying to get into the same business. So, as the Newsweek article points out, Time Warner can push more people to its own cable-based video-on-demand and away from the Internet providers because users who are concerned with exceeding their metered Internet usage by downloading a movie will instead pay Time Warner’s cable operation to rent the movie. That would be a situation where one company is exercising undue influence over a person’s use of the Internet. Whether that happens in Beaumont — or anywhere else if this experiment expands — remains to be seen.
|
|
January 23rd, 2008, 08:21am
|
I’ve been meaning to post this for some time for our New Paradigm syndicated-research members. For those who believe that the big guys can still learn a thing or two from the smaller guys, I recommend checking out this article from Optimize magazine from a year ago (disclosure: I was editor-in-chief of Optimize at the time; it’s since been folded into InformationWeek magazine). It was written by Eastern Mountain Sports CIO Jeffrey Neville and was one of the best examples I’d seen of a company that understood the E2.0 environment and how to create a wiki workplace. It’s still relevant today. I’ll see if I can get Jeff to comment on this blog with an update on how things are going with EMS’s wiki workplace efforts.
|
|
January 23rd, 2008, 07:58am
|
The blogosphere needs Amanda Congdon back.
The bitingly witty and expressively comic former host of the once-popular vlog Rocketboom has been out of the public eye since her last video for ABC’s web site was posted in November, but her star turned long before that when a dispute with Rocketboom, the vlog site she hosted and co-produced for more than two years, led to her departure in June of 2006. Since then she’s kept up her own blog (though it’s looking quite stale), done some minor work in TV, a short-lived blog called AmandaAcrossAmerica, and hosted the aforementioned weekly video update on the ABC site.
I was convinced back in 2005 that Amanda would be the first true crossover hit between the blogosphere and the MSM, and indeed she certainly got tons of air time being interviewed on the morning shows, not to mention those bit parts on some TV shows and commercials. Her audience for Rocketboom swelled to more than 300,000 by some accounts. But by crossover hit, I mean someone who would continue to live and succeed in both media platforms, merging audiences and blurring the lines between the Web and TV and movies. I was sure she had the talent and qualities that played well in both worlds and would bridge the two audiences (in ways where there wasn’t already some overlap). I’m not a media critic, but as a casual observer, I felt she had terrific comic timing and charisma that would be appealing in the MSM (yes, being attractive doesn’t hurt for that medium), but also had the irreverant, spontaneous attitude that was necessary to succeed in the Web-based world. And she had no problem making fun of herself, which was key to getting inside some of the stories she did for her newsy Rocketboom segments. She played extremely well in front of a Webcam on a mock studio set, and at the same time just about fit but wasn’t quite ready for a big splash in the corporate environment one still finds in the MSM. A friend and I placed bets that she’d find her fit as the next SNL regular, one who would take her Web audience to SNL by creating crossover work in a vlog attached to the NBC hit. In some ways, SNL cast member Andy Samberg has assumed that mantle crossing over in the opposite direction by producing some spectacularly hilarious viral video hits (the best of which decorum prevents me from even linking to; this is a business blog, after all) and helping spawn his first movie deal last summer (the jury’s out on a successful movie career).
Amanda didn’t quite seem right for the ABC gig, even though it was an online medium. It felt like she’d been plucked from an environment that embraced her talents and been placed into one where she was forced to conform in ways that didn’t fit her style. She still had the opportunity to explore the offbeat, but much of the irreverence was gone. Not to be conspiratorial, but I wonder if it was because her work was edited or in some way or was expected to conform to an environment that may have been Web-based but still overseen by The Big Bad Media Giant? Whatever it was, the situation seemed to stifle her, and her contract expired in November. One blog says her agent claims there were no disputes, and that the contract just wasn’t renewed. To be fair to ABC, perhaps her audience just didn’t follow her, I don’t know. A long-rumored deal with HBO for what Amanda herself acknowledged she didn’t even “really know exactly what it’s going to be” never materialized.
Check this out for some quintessential Amanda, which she posted after her departure from Rocketboom. It combines pure comedy with some subtle messages about the Web environment and not-so-subtle messages about the fleeting nature of fame. How she convinced her mother to deadpan “what a loser!” about her own daughter in this “where are they now” parody about herself is a terrific example of why she was truly popular. With Amanda, anything went, and she used that talent to stretch the boundaries of a medium that was as pliant as Silly Putty. I’d be naïve if I didn’t attribute some of her popularity to ogling fanboys – she got her share of marriage proposals and other drivel on her blogs – but what made the real fans come back was her (and her co-producer and co-writer Mario Librandi’s) ability to tap into what was relevant (or even plain fun) on the still-developing video Web of, lo, those 48 or so months ago, and how she did it in a manner that took advantage of the medium. Whether or not this parody was posted as a preemptive strike against anticipated chatter about her being a flash-in-the-pan, it was nonetheless sensational.
I didn’t intend for this blog post to sound like an obit, and I’ve made an attempt to contact Amanda to see what her future plans are. I sure hope to have some news directly from her to see if there’s still room for her in the blogosphere, the MSM, or both. One hopes this representative (I’d rather not use the word “icon” here) of the early-ish video Web wasn’t soured or changed in some way by the rigidity of the MSM and that she can still bring her insight back to the medium where she found her voice.
|
|
January 22nd, 2008, 07:41am
|
Live and learn. After my recent post musing about who owns Facebook — the college students who were the original targets or the businesspeople who’ve started to swarm the site — I heard from some people who clued me in on the work of the Data Portability Workgroup, which would allow social-network visitors to migrate their personal data among — and connect to audiences in — many different sites. It maintains my faith in the concept that, if I sense a need for something, there’s a darn good chance someone’s already been working on it. I’ll never be mistaken for a brilliant entrepreneur…
John Battelle took Facebook to task in a recent blog posting for presumably fighting the efforts of the Data Portability Workgroup. Facebook responded saying it’s committed to giving users control of their data on Facebook, but stopped short of committing to a completely open approach to portability. In fact, Facebook announced on Jan. 8 that it’s joining the workgroup. Some seem not to believe in Facebook’s commitment.
But the data portability situation brings up another issue: customer loyalty and “stickiness,” that overused term referring to the ability of a site or platform — or for that matter, a brick-and-mortar retail outlet — to maintain customers once they acquire them. With the ability to transport your profiles and experiences from one site to another with relative ease, a whole new concern arises for social networks and Web sites. If MySpace was concerned about losing audience to Facebook because of image, imagine the landscape when people can pack their bags and move on to the flavor of the month (or day, or hour) with relative ease. Salespeople say that the cost of acquisition (or reacquistion) of a customer is higher than the cost of retention; the same logic likely holds for retaining audiences on social networking sites. It’ll be interesting to see what these companies do to attract and retain fickle audiences once data portability becomes a standard. It was sad to see reputable news organizations pander to the common denominator with stories about celebutantes and video of stupid pet tricks when they began to battle for audience (because of the asinine business model based on pageviews, but that’s a blog for another day). Will social networking sites stoop to a lowbrow approach in an effort to build and maintain audiences? If so, I’ll be looking for other venues.
Hmm, maybe that’s a need someone isn’t working on right now…
|
|
January 15th, 2008, 10:51am
|
We’ve all heard the buzz on both sides of the fence about Facebook. The NGeners that spawned the popularity of the site are complaining that the “old farts,” who only somewhat recently discovered the utility of Facebook, are ruining what’s good about it; and the Johnny-come-lately businesspeople think the site would be a lot better if it didn’t have so many juvenile applets cluttering it (tired of being turned into a zombie by work colleagues?). Who owns Facebook? Should the Baby Boomer (and Gen X) businesspeople find their own home (LinkedIn is increasing in popularity, but IMHO it falls well short of Facebook in blending business and social networking), or is it time for the folks in high school and college to move on to another site where they can say and post whatever they’d like without fear that a mom, dad, aunt, or uncle stumbles upon an embarrassing photo of a young family member? Or, is it possible they can all co-exist on the site and use it the way it brings most value to them?
Where Facebook goes and who they decide to cater to is up to Mark Zuckerberg and future investors, but it seems to me they’re swiftly reaching an impasse in what Facebook is and who it caters to. For the most part, it seems the businesspeople are willing to co-exist with the college students — I’m spending more time interacting with my nieces and nephews than I have in years! — but the discontent among the NGeners seems to be on the rise, and it didn’t take much apathy among MySpace users for that site to cede the popularity leadership to Facebook a year or so ago. MySpace is still very popular, but even some of its core demographic has shifted over to Facebook. How long before they sour on Facebook because it’s also becoming a popular business tool? Or, will something else come along — a more socially aware LinkedIn, or perhaps a completely different site — that will capture the attention of businesspeople? (Although after finally getting used to LinkedIn and Facebook, will businesspeople want to add, or move to, yet another site?) But assuming the two demographics decide to stay put, how will they co-exist? Will they — can they — should they — stay out of each others’ business? Can I confidently use Facebook for business purposes without fear that in the middle of an important group discussion, my niece doesn’t throw a sheep at me?
Would it make sense for Facebook to segment its site by purpose? Can there be a college/social section, a business section, a family reunion section, etc.? On one hand, that dilutes a lot of the value of Facebook as a wide-open social networking site. On the other, it returns the value of the site to the original “owners” and still placates constituents who have other needs. No matter what, it’s an issue Facebook needs to address soon.
|
|
December 20th, 2007, 10:25am
|
I’ve never understood this somewhat new Christmas “tradition” (at least in the U.S.) of heading to the movies on Christmas Day. Nothing says “good tidings” better than packing up the family in the SUV and heading to a dark theater to silently eat stale popcorn for the opening of “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.” Then again, considering how my family gets after a few hours of staring at the yule log, maybe I should consider making the movies a Christmas tradition for the Gilloolys.
But here’s an alternative for our European friends: Stay home this holiday season and catch a very interesting programme on the telly: Don Tapscott will be featured on CNBC speaking on the subject of Wikinomics. There are three chances to catch the show: just after figgy pudding on Christmas Eve at 21:00 CET; immediately following your fine goose dinner on Christmas Day at 19:00 CET; and on Dec. 29 at 20:30 CET as an alternative to the Harrod’s Earl Grey Tea Bowl parade.
The show is also expected to air on CNBC in the U.S. some time in the new year, and as soon as we have more info, we’ll update this post. My personal hope is that it doesn’t conflict with the Jan. 6 International Bowl in Toronto. I’d have to choose between watching my boss discussing N-Gen norms and rooting for my alma mater, Rutgers, to beat mighty Ball State. Considering how Rutgers played this year, it shouldn’t be a difficult choice.
del.icio.us
Digg it
Furl
reddit