My first issue is with the word now. From my perspective, the customer has always been in control – the fate of companies providing products and services in a capitalist economy is ultimately determined by what customers choose to buy. In turn, the analysis shifts towards social media somehow giving customers slightly more control than they had before – a small, but important, distinction.

The typical argument is that as customers have connected with each other through platforms like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, the opinions they share amongst themselves have increased in importance, while the typical “broadcast marketing” approaches have decreased in effectiveness. While I do believe there is some truth to this, there is another way to look at what’s happening.

For starters, if customers only wanted to hear each other’s opinions, they could do so without engaging companies at all – either in somewhat self-organizing fashion through Facebook and Twitter, or “neutral” services like Yelp. But many, many customers are also opting to directly connect with companies – liking, following, lurking in communities, etc. – through these very same platforms. In doing so, many are effectively asking companies to engage with them.

Second, being “in control” takes time and effort. I would argue that many customers may want to “take control” in relation to certain product and service decisions, for many others they are happy to be passive recipients of messages (and offers) from their preferred brands. For example, the #2 reason given for becoming a Facebook fan (based on a survey earlier this year) was to receive coupons. And while I don’t have time to go into it here, one of the consistent findings from my research is that customers like being “broadcast” to on social media more than many people think.

On a related point, I believe that many customers are being overwhelmed by all the brand-related conversations taking place. For example, many brands on Twitter now commonly send 30+ messages a day, responding to specific people. Many consider this to be engaging. But if you follow (say) 30 such brands, that’s over 900 messages a day – most of which will be of absolutely no interest to you. Perhaps the method will persist for many more years, but perhaps not.

Finally (at least for today), as “word of mouth” marketing has moved online, and more and more data is generated, it’s becoming ever easier for brands to monitor exactly what people are saying, thinking and feeling about various things. I personally believe that all this information points towards a world where many brands can be far more “in control” than they’ve ever been before.

Tying it all together, I’ve taken to asking what someone like Don Draper – the lead character on Mad Men – would think about the rise of social media if he was ported into 2010. Would he look at all the new tools and behaviors and say “wow, I can’t control anything here!” Or would he say “wow, I can influence, monitor and control things more than ever before!”

My sense is that it would be the latter – and many companies would be well served by taking a similar line of thinking. After all, to be in control implies having power; it is commonly said that knowledge is power; and all this information is giving companies more knowledge than ever before.

The underlying idea here is simple. The vast majority of us cannot create good / entertaining content, no matter what we may believe. Just because millions upon millions of people create blog posts, videos, and tweets on a daily basis doesn’t mean they’re interesting to many people, or even being viewed. And while the rise of social media has led to an abundance of new content, every abundance creates a new scarcity.

In this case, what I think is becoming ever-more scarce is easy to identify – time. I think we’re crossing a major tipping point where people engage with many of these social media tools, get quickly overwhelmed by it all (knowingly or not), and fall back onto select few sites and people who provide the best content people are looking for in the proper context – and it has how these sites and people leverage social media that will be critically important to determining it’s future.

What got me thinking about this again today is Mark Cuban’s most recent post- Who Cares What People Write? To quote the first paragraph:

In this day and age of blogs, aggregation sites, personal recommendation sites, link publishing, twitter and more, its not unusual to get a news alert email, or to wake up and google a person, place or thing and find hundreds of references originated in just the past 24 hours. Does it matter ? Could something be published hundreds, if not thousands of times on the net and be read by no one ? Fewer than 100 people ?  Fewer than 100 people that you care about ? The answer is yes.

What Mark goes onto talk about hits at the point I’m talking about, using terminology most commonly associated with belly buttons in a way that only he can quite pull off. He classifies three types of people on the web: “professional outties”, “amateur outties”, and “innies”. The professional outties are the major sites that are trying to (and have a reasonable chance of succeeding at to some degree) make money off publishing content read by a large group of people they build a relationship with. Amateur outties are the people popping up all over social media trying to be discovered – wherever there is a platform, they will search it out and try to speak on it. The “innies” are the passive consumers of content (whom are assumed to be the VAST majority, which I agree with), that read, watch, and listen to content online.

Mark argues that this “innie” group generally ignore the “amateur outties”, only paying attention to the professionals – but the “amateur outties” are the ones creating the most volume on social media, which is what most companies and people talking about the social media space are paying attention to. Hence, the disconnect.

While I agree with a lot of his argument that this amateur group is receiving a disproportionate amount of attention, there is some additional nuance that needs to be considered. For example, sites like Digg and Reddit represent the “aggregated wisdom” of what he might consider “amateur outties” – and while their individual voices may not be heard, their collective choices are, on very popular sites. Such sites are distinctly changing media consumption patterns for many people, pulling them away from the “professional outties”. I know from my own experience monitoring traffic on a variety of sites that many of the readers that are “sourced” from such sites don’t stay very long, and are difficult to build a relationship with – which makes sense. They have decided to let the “wisdom of the crowds” (augmented by reputation, etc.) select the best content for them, and if another site publishes something of interest they expect the crowd will find it for them. This is an important change.

The second is that relative ease at which an amateur can become a “professional”. While it is much harder than many people think to start a new site an build an audience, it is clearly much easier than it was a decade ago. Why this is important is that people can fall into a trap that says “all” amateur outties aren’t important, because whenever one does become important they are just reclassified as a professional. And of course, there are plenty of cases where enough amateur outties jumped on an issue that it did become an important driver of the viral distribution of information.

So I’m sort of arguing out both sides of my mouth right now, because I guess I’m trying to make two points. On one hand, I agree with the notion that we pay a little too much attention to the sheer volume of content being created, and not enough to what people are actually paying attention to – which often comes from “professional” sources. On the other, this argument can go to far as well, and it’s important to pay attention to what the amateurs are creating as well – particularly when they’re working as a group OR might be quickly turning into professionals themselves.

It forces some attention grabbing too (follow me @doverd4s).

Anyway, here are some interesting things I’ve tweeted about:

Mass collaboration picked up some old school corner-cutting in Disney films.

If you haven’t seen Auto Tune, check out this video (scroll down).

Good article about old media and a sense of entitlement.

And…I promise to be around more.

SOBCon stands for Successful and Outstanding Bloggers, so it seems fitting that any promotions for the event take advantage of Web 2.0 opportunities. By targetting the core audience of this event, bloggers, and providing a tangible reward for their participation, I am confident that this type of promotion will be a highly cost effective way of advertising for their event. This is especially true when you consider that the prize is a discounted ticket rather than a monetary reward, and therefore the actual cost of the promotion is likely to be negligible in the face of some good publicity. You might also consider what type of blogger might be interested in this reward and my thought is that respondents who self-select are more likely to be well-connected virtually, and hence the audience for their ‘discount-per-blog’ promotion will likely also be larger and = bigger impact.

Here’s the description provided by the founder of SOBCon:

“Blog your thoughts, share it, link it back to this post, and broadcast it on Twitter (hash #blogitearnit).  We’ll also link to you on the SOBCon blog for others to see and learn. And as a thank you for sharing your story, we’ll send you a special code to take $200 off the $795 FULL conference rate - that’s over a 25% savings!

…

We also know that getting to conferences isn’t always easy, especially this year.

So we are announcing today the opportunity for you to significantly reduce your registration cost for the event.

It’s called the “Blog It, Earn It” discount. We’d like to hear from you about what “The ROI of Relationships” means to you. Tell us why relationships matter. How they affect what you do every day and how you do it. Maybe how you see them changing the face of tomorrow’s businesses. We want to know how relationships and personal connections shape your world.

Blog your thoughts, share it, link it back to this post, and broadcast it on Twitter (hash #blogitearnit).  We’ll also link to you on the SOBCon blog for others to see and learn. And as a thank you for sharing your story, we’ll send you a special code to take $200 off the $795 FULL conference rate - that’s over a 25% savings!

Please act quickly because there are only a limited number of these discounted registrations available. All blog entries must be posted no later than March 7, and the discounts must be redeemed by March 14.”

–

What I like about this promotion, beyond it’s impact, is that it’s transparent in the exchange taking place – in fact it’s almost hard to ignore the quid-pro-quo nature of the activity given its name. I suspect that to many people, this information might make the difference between an unethical viral marketing campaign, and one with the public on its side. Thoughts?

My question for you: if you could have an alternate prize that’s more meaningful to you than the one offered, and which is within the range of reason, what would it be? Money? Items? Reputational rewards?

Mark’s other rules of engagement are as follows:

1. It can be an existing business or a start up.
2. It can not be a business that generates any revenue from advertising. Why ? Because I want this to be a business where you sell something and get paid for it. Thats the only way to get and stay profitable in such a short period of time.
3. It MUST BE CASH FLOW BREAK EVEN within 60 days 
4. It must be profitable within 90 days.
5. Funding will be on a monthly basis. If you dont make your numbers, the funding stops
6. You must demonstrate as part of your plan that you sell your product or service for more than what it costs you to produce, fully encumbered
7. Everyone must work. The organization is completely flat. There are no employees reporting to managers. There is the founder/owners and everyone else
8.  You must post your business plan here, or you can post it on slideshare.com , scribd.com or google docs, all completely public for anyone to see and/or download
9. I make no promises that if your business is profitable, that I will invest more money. Once you get the initial funding you are on your own
10. I will make no promises that I will be available to offer help. If I want to , I will. If not, I wont.
11. If you do get money, it goes into a bank that I specify, and I have the ability to watch the funds flow and the opportunity to require that I cosign any outflows.
12. In your business plan , make sure to specify how much equity I will receive or how I will get a return on my money.
13. No mult-level marketing programs (added 2/10/09 1pm)

So far, he’s received more than 1,500 comments including quite a few promises of impending business plans.

To suitably illustrate the popularity of blogging in Iran, according to Alexa.com, 4 of the top 10 sites in Iran are blogging services. The third most popular site in Iran behind Google at number 1 and Yahoo! at number 2 is BLOGFA – a free Persian blog service provider.
Surprisingly, not all the blogs are focused around politics. Topics include human rights, poetry, religion and pop culture. See visualization of the Iranian blogosphere produced by John Kelly and Bruce Etling for their paper, “Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere.”

Many Iranian youth are using blogging and other technologies to get around the tight restrictions they face in everyday life and are using it as an outlet to express themselves and be heard. With RapidShare.com at number 9 on Iran’s top sites list, Iranian bands are using the internet to share pop and rock music ‘underground’.
Although the Iranian government has taken some steps to control the blogosphere, including blocking content and tracking authors, the internet has created a self-organizing web of communications, making it easy to participate in and hard for government to control.
To get past the restrictions and government blocks, many Iranians are forced to change their domain names regularly or download technologies such as anti-filtering software. Even some journalists who work in the mainstream media use the internet to publish articles they cannot get past their newspaper, program editors, or the official censors.

The Government recognizes the threat blogging poses to undermine their position and authority. According to this BBC article, there have even been reports of bloggers getting arrested. Parliament is also considering a law that could impose the death penalty on bloggers found guilty of using the web to spread corruption, prostitution or apostasy (religious disaffiliation).
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has his own blog, although not very active. (His last English post was December 1, 2007; the last French post was November 30, 2007; and from what I can tell his last posts in Farsi and Arabic were also in 2007.) According to Statbrain.com his site receives approximately 4,786 visits per day.

Here at the Wikinomics blog, we can give you some help when it comes to succeeding with some of the more popular resolutions, at least from a geek point of view:

1. I’m going to get more organized.

This one’s easy. Visit lifehacker. It’s loaded with tons of apps and tips including this one which protects you from nasty applications adding themselves to your start-up tray. Hey, Weatherbug…go away, I have a window in my office. Here’s one that helps you organize your gift wrapping. Lots of stuff here for Gmail, iPhones, Blackberries, etc.

2. I’m going to read more books.

Here are the Amazon.com editor’s picks for best books of 2008 as well as the top ten from the New York Times Book Review.

3. I’m going to learn a new language.

Ok, this one is mocked at Stuff White People Like, but it’s a perennial favourite. You might think “The Rosetta Stone packages look cool…they’re in all my magazines and at the airport, but golly, it’s expensive. Is there a better way?” Damn straight…search the podcast language instruction on iTunes. There are a bunch of free lessons available. If you go to the French Ecole, tell them Bonjour for me.

4. I’m going to get in shape.

Hey, Tubby…before you join a gym, remember that the regulars don’t like newcomers walking on the treadmills enjoying a high-calorie smoothie. Complete the program at hundredpushups.com first. If it’s all good, join the gym in March.

5. I’m so sick of my music. I need to upgrade.

Maybe. But, then again, there may be more hidden gems there than you thought. Activate Genius in iTunes. Pick a song in your library that you like, then hit the Genius icon. It will make you a new playlist. If Mr. Roboto is on said playlist, start over.

6. I’m going to cook more at home.

Tell you what. I love epicurious. Go by the fork ratings, and check out the suggestions in the comments section. I go on about that here.

7. I’m probably not going to do any of that stuff. Instead, I’ll flake out on the couch and eat Cheetos.

OK, well, then watch some new movies. Have you seen all the top films ranked by the users of the Internet Movie Database? Here’s one at #4 that I haven’t seen, although it stars Clint Eastwood who was in Million Dollar Baby with Morgan Freeman who was in Outbreak with Donald Sutherland who was in Animal House with Kevin Bacon.

But, if all else fails and you need to get rid of the Cheetos, here are some tips on flossing.

Our exclusive Twitternomics Quant Study has revealed that a remarkable 72% of Twitter users believe it’s a great place to find marketing advice. In response to this result one of the most active users, whom in order to maintain anonymity we will call the “uber-twit”, noted that “This really proves the power of micro blogging and associated social media. Hey – if I follow you, will you follow me? I’ll link to you on my blog if you do. I’d tell you more, but I start to hyperventilate beyond 140 characters. Want to buy some marketing?” before passing out. Other findings include that 81% of Twitter users are marketers themselves, and 9% of Twitter users suffer from serious self-confidence issues.

That’s why I was so happy to come across this story about Ukoonto when I read the Globe & Mail over lunch. The article is about a young entrepreneur (and soon to be former sound engineer) named Hans Eich, who builds eco-friendly wooden building block toys from his St. Catherine’s based workshop. While I can’t say that I’ve tested the products myself yet, they look great – and from a wikinomics perspective what’s most interesting is how Hans has developed and promoted his company.

As the article notes, outside of an occasional trade show, Hans relies solely on Web 2.0 tools to spread the word about his products. When he started up, he had practically no money, and no big business plan – just an idea to create a toy company. He launched it under the domain of “my toy needs a name”, created a framework online, and asked people for ideas and feedback. From there, to quote Hans:

It was all about interacting with people and trying to set up meaningful relationships. The business evolved out of that.

If you go through the article, you can read about all the interesting lessons he’s learned – from use of things like YouTube and Twitter, to why it’s so much harder to create “fans” on Facebook than create groups, to backlash he received when he tried to push his products to hard in communities he joined, rather than really engaging with the people. To quote Hans again:

You have to listen first before they start listening to you. Traditional media is about telling, but Web 2.0 is all about conversations. It’s very much about letting go of control and engaging with people.

I’ll let you learn the rest from the Globe article, but I found it just an extraordinarly refreshing read – particularly when the three articles on the previous page were “EU to get call for stimulus package”, “Easy credit, public spending fuelled boom”, and “Lost auto jobs pegged at 15,000.” Amidst all the doom and gloom, it’s important to remember that there is an extraordinary opportunity out there for entrepeneurs that can create a good product they are passionate about, and learn to leverage social media and the web 2.0 in a compelling way. As Hans noted, given that most of the tools he’s leveraging are free, his out-of-pocket costs have basically been limited to website design costs. Think about how different it would have been if Hans tried to launch his company twenty years ago…

After reaching for a Motrin myself, I decided to check out what he was talking about. The article he was referring to was this one- The Worst Thing About Blogs. In the post, Ryan lumped my recent story about Starbucks’ wikinomics-enabled marketing success story with other posts from the likes of Guy Kawaski, Hugh Macleod, Steve Rubel, and Michael Arrington, with the lead-in sentence of (The Worst Thing About Blogs) is that they never let reality get in the way of a good post. Ryan then concluded his post with the following:

If we can deduce anything from the blogs above, it also makes you 1) Sound like an idiot 2) Act like an asshole 3) Always get it wrong

So it’s fair to say he wasn’t a fan of the post. As I read through the comments (some in support of his POV, others defending the posts including my own), Ryan again highlighted my post as particularly egregious, and for good measure pointed out again that it sucked. The reason he gave is that we don’t live in a vacuum – I can’t / shouldn’t be writing about only the Starbucks marketing story when there is another huge thing going on (Starbucks’ recent report of a 97% drop in profits).

So at that point, I had to decide what to do. In turn, I thought I’d share my thought process, and what came of it, since it might be helpful for other people and companies dealing with similar situations. You can see my first comment on his post (last I checked it was 4th from the bottom).

1. Decide whether to engage or not. The blogosphere, and particularly the comment sections, is notorious for maliciousness. As a general rule, if a writer starts dropping insults like “idiot” and the aforementioned a-bomb, I tend to prefer to just stay away. But this seemed like a special case. Ryan seemed like a fairly intelligent person, who’s job appears to be in relation to PR and social media, so I was intrigued by not only the message he chose to send, but how he chose to send it. And whether I liked it or not, based on the volume of comments it seemed like a fair number of people were reading it – so there could be direct benefit from engaging in the conversation.

2. Timeliness versus “Coolheadedness”. As another general rule, I tend to prefer to “sleep on” such issues, in order to avoid a hasty response that I might later regret. However, in this situation I was also dealing with a timeliness issue – popular blog posts can fade away quite quickly, and as I mentioned it was already Friday afternoon. I knew I had neither the time nor inclination to look at this on the weekend, and a Monday response might be a little too late, so I opted for an immediate response. Always dangerous.

3. Cede the point versus defend myself. All of us make mistakes. When faced with a criticism, it is of course important to decide whether you think the complaint is valid and cede the point, or instead defend your POV – noting that sometimes you can do a little of both and find some common ground. In this case, I felt Ryan was quite off base, and decided to actively defend my POV.

4. Choose the tone of the response. When someone is directly saying you sound like an idiot and act like an asshole, it is quite easy to fall into the trap of responding in a similar manner (hence, my “sleep on it” rule of thumb). I wanted to ensure my tone was different – a little more thoughtful and respectful. However, I did start my response with “As the idiotic a-hole who wrote the blog post on wikinomics, I thought I should respond to your criticisms”, so I didn’t fully succeed on this front. But if you read the rest of my comment, I think you’ll find it fair, reasonable, and respectful.

5. Respond directly to the criticism. In this case, I re-articulated what I understood his exact complaint to be, and responded directly to that. This helps to keep the response directly on-topic, instead of meandering into a variety of other tangential subjects, and helps make sure there is a common understanding of the “topic” both people can refer to. In other words, if I misunderstood, my misunderstanding would be clear and he could respond in kind.

6. Demonstrate knowledge in the area (if applicable). In this case it was fairly easy – in a former life I worked for one of Starbucks’ prime competitors in Canada (Second Cup), know a lot about their strategy and business model, and can talk at length about them on demand. I felt that briefly demonstrating I had this knowledge helped set-up my argument for why I chose not to share it in this particular situation.

7. Ask the critic to back himself up. In this case, it was again easy. Ryan was making a direct complaint about what others wrote in their blogs, on his blog. In turn, I asked a simple question – “if you scan through you last 20 blog posts, do you believe they stand up to the bar you have set for others here? Does each one represent high-level thinking, and provide full perspective on all the issues at play?” You can tell from the question what I think the answer is, but the bigger point is that a well phrased question, on-topic, can be valuable to the response. If Ryan can’t defend his POV by using his own posts, he’s clearly got another issue to deal with here.

8. Get a peer review. This one is self-explanatory, and is particularly valuable if you pass on the “sleep on it” option. However, in this case I didn’t go through a peer review process.

I think that covers most of it. So how did it work out? Well, it’s hard to say. After I posted my response the comments section on his post was basically dead, but I can’t necessarily claim responsibility for that – the post was now several days old, and we were heading into the weekend. But it is perhaps notable that of the two comments that followed, one was from a person admitting they didn’t understand most of the blogs he referenced, and the other (perhaps picking up on my question) indicated Ryan’s post should be added to the list of posts Ryan was complaining about.

Ryan himself didn’t respond to my comment on his blog. He did, however, send me an email. This message was notable on several fronts. Perhaps most importantly, there was an absence of inflammatory terms, which either indicates a subtle shift in his thinking, or that it’s more difficult to say such things to someone directly than when referring to someone you’ve never met on a blog. He also re-affirmed being a fan of the book itself.

Ryan also generally stuck to his POV, and re-articulated it in a slightly different / better way. Notable inclusions were that my post was kind of like enthusiastically writing about Nero playing the lyre while fires raged in Rome, and that my not acknowledging the strategic decay of the company within my Starbucks story was almost negligent.

In my mind, this puts us in a much better space. I’m fine with relatively cordial disagreements and differing POVs, and even noted in my response to Ryan that based on what I can piece together about his story Don might be interested in talking to him (think Wikinomics meets Grown Up Digital). However, my POV has not changed, and to sum up this now exceedingly long post I will share three points I made as to why I felt it was not important to put the other strategic issues in perspective in my piece. If you disagree, feel free to share below – but please keep the swearing to a minimum .

The first is an issue we have to deal with regularly in our research. Often times the best examples on the “bleeding edge” of innovation are being done by companies (start-ups and old alike) that have fundamental and fatal flaws in other respects. Some of our best research comes when the rest of the world is focusing on how Rome is burning, but we manage to find a “Nero playing the lyre” that not only other companies can learn from, but they might otherwise not hear about (because everyone is focused on the fire). The challenge for the reader is then to triangulate that information with everything else they know about the situation to draw their own conclusions.

Second, it’s important to remember the context in which a particular piece is being presented. We have heard complaints from readers if/when we stray off-topic on our site – the brand “wikinomics” indicates what type of information they expect. When we write about particular companies, it is perspective on the “wikinomics” part of their strategy and initiatives that people want to hear about. If they want to read about the other aspects of (for example) Starbucks, there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of stories covering 97% drop in profits and associated issues in Google News. If I search for Starbucks Lexicon, there are three hits, and none of them are on topic. It is by telling that wikinomics-related story few others are talking about that we create value for readers and keep them coming back.

Finally, space constraints are an important consideration. The piece I wrote was a little over 300 words. When you write short pieces, as I’m sure you well know the blogosphere demands, it is generally crucial to maintain a laser focus on a fairly narrow topic – every word giving context or providing background is a word that’s not being used to describe the issue at hand. Not everything is supposed to, or can, present the “big picture”… or it would be like boiling the ocean every time you want to make a pot of spaghetti.

I’m blessed with having a wonderful 7-month old daughter at home, and her equally wonderful mother taking care of her. The latter has some very strong opinions on parenting, and in particular when companies try to send messages that dissuade mothers from doing certain things that, say, thousands of years of history and an extraordinary number of experts indicate are good things to do. In turn, I don’t really have to imagine how she might have reacted to the growing Motrin Mom controversy. (Editor’s note: Said mom has since read this post and viewed the video, and the words “pissed off” were prominently featured in her response).

For those that might have missed it, the video ad (which can be seen on YouTube) presents the following text (bold added by me): Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion. I mean, in theory it’s a great idea. There’s a (whole bunch of different types of carriers), and who knows what else they will come up with. Supposedly, it’s a real bonding experience. They say that babies carried close to the body cry less that others, BUT what about me?  Do mom’s that wear their babies cry more than those who don’t?  I sure do. These things put a ton of strain on your back, your neck, and your shoulders. Did I mention your back? I mean I’ll put up with the pain because it’s a good kind of pain. It’s for my kid. Plus, it totally makes me look like an official mom. So if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.

Motrin, of course, is pain medication. The message above is not-so subtly trying to indicate that carrying babies is a “fashionable”, badge-of-honor type sacrifice to make – perhaps like drinking a Starbucks Vente latte, but with, er, sacrifice. As referenced, I know at least one person that’s VERY well educated on this subject that would probably object to this message (two if you include me) – let’s just say we’d drop things like “supposedly” out of the sentences above. Based on the brewing reaction described in articles like this one, we are hardly alone. After a big PR disaster, the commercial has since been pulled from broadcasts, apologies have been issued, etc. Rather cutely, on the Motrin site the ad has been replaced with the message “we have heard you.”

If you read my posts over the last few months, the intersection with my work here is obvious – I’m keenly interested in how the world of social media is affecting advertising, and the role of particularly important “N-Fluencers” in driving community action. I also wrote about an AdAge story earlier today, and I was happy to find AdAge also has the best account of how a few influential bloggers and twitters suddenly galvanized to bring this ad down – amazing details of how the message and uproar spread, and interestingly quite a long time after the initial ad was launched. And the following quote from story speaks directly to the media question I was asking earlier:

“You don’t have to have thousands of followers to start something like this. Many people with small networks have just as much influence as a few people with large networks.”

I suppose I should also note that I first stumbled upon this story reading something called a “newspaper” over lunch – I’m telling you this thing was coming at me from all angles!

So I agree with all the articles and commentators who are noting that this is a great example of the power of social media, and how it’s becoming increasingly impossible for companies to ignore. Though I do find one other thing to be interesting here. In truth, we’ve been through a ton of different baby carriers at our house, that we both use all the time. In truth, a lot of them (but not all) actually do cause my back to hurt a bit, and I think the realities of strapping a 21 pound and growing person to my stomach and carting her around for hours will lead to a little more pain now and again. In turn, why on earth would a company promoting pain medicine want to run a sequence trying to position baby carrying as a “fashionable” thing you should “supposedly” do (i.e. stop doing it)?

Me thinks the mistakes on this campaign run quite deep, and a fair bit of damage has been done. But how much I wonder? And does a company that presents a poorly thought out ad, but retracts it and apologizes after a storm of responses (i.e. shows they are actually listening), end up better or worse off than before?

What makes it so effective? Here are some keys:

1. Fresh content. Neil posts a new “awesome thing” every weekday.

2. Good content. The site is funny and well-written. I’ve never seen a typo. Cool, interesting graphics are always included.

3. Original theme. He talks about regular things that happen to be cool, like playing old school video games, playing on old, dangerous playground equipment, and ordering off the menu at fast food restaurants.

4. Effective use of cross links. He generates traffic and appeals to readers by adding links to other sites with a similar sense of humour like Stuff White People Like, Passive Aggressive Notes, and Girls Eating Sandwiches. Go ahead, click on the last one. It is a collection of regular looking girls eating regular looking sandwiches. And you have no right to complain. Also, he links to Wikinomics, so that’s cool.

5. Effective use of digg. When Neil posted this plaintive plea to digg, his site really took off. Since then, whenever he has a post that he thinks is really good, he asks a dozen or so friends to digg it, which puts the post on the front page.

AWESOME!

One of the papers I found most interesting lately was Revealing the Long Tail of Office Conversations, by Michael J. Brzozowski & Sarita Yardi. What the authors were interested in exploring tied was how social media tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) could breakdown geographic distances, work group boundaries, and organizational hierarchy in the organization. More importantly, they wanted to look at what motivated individuals to “invest their own time in creating content for public consumption.”

In order to do so, HP decided to conduct a study of themselves – the design and use of Watercooler, their social media platform. Included in their study was a survey of 144 users, 12 months of log files from the internal blog server, and interviews with approximately 96 blog users. The paper is broken up into sections on the design of Watercooler, results of the experiments, perceived benefits for users. The paper is also quite short- only about four pages – so it is well worth the read.

What I really liked were the readership and commenting network “social graphs”. I know they’re kind of hard to see on the screen, but in the first each node is an individual user color coded by business group, and each arrow represents someone having read someone else’s blog at least 3 times. It is notable that a couple of authors clearly emerge as “hubs” in the network, and also that 55% of links went outside of one’s own business group. It is also clear that the two green dots in the upper left corner are having an affair of some sort (just kidding).

The second figure focuses on comments instead of views – and the results are even more striking. One individual (J) emerges as the center of the giant component, due to a bit of a virtuous circle – she comments a lot on other people’s posts, and they in turn comment on hers. It’s also notable that there are several “disconnected clusters” where people are chatting away. And those two green dots on the side are still clearly having an affair (just kidding again).

I’m fairly confident that print is not yet dead, but what caught my attention was an article in Wired sounding the death knell for the blogosphere. Paul Boutin feels that the medium isn’t the pithy purveyor of pointed polemic, but an impotent (and often “catty”) soapbox for comment trolls and professional spammers. He decries that the medium is now disconnected with what made it popular and that ubiquitous social media sites make it so easy to post pictures and video, that the written word is now a distant second. Boutin believes that those communiqués are better suited for Facebook and Twitter rather than a blog.

But what I took issue with is the argument against sites like Engadget and The Huffington Post, which Boutin says smack more like online magazines, with teams of writers turning out such volume that the little guy gets swept away in the deluge. His point that now it’s become more difficult to find those little nuggets amidst the sea of PageRank-biased semi-professional bloggers. But isn’t that the point of blogs in general? They’ve equipped the masses to spread the word, and now they’ve exercised their “online constitutional right” to assemble and organize in ways they see fit. Yes, the good old days of the “lone wolf” blogosphere may be past (sic transit gloria), but the Internet is still very much a meritocracy. Sites like Digg and human-driven aggregators like Alltop still let the cream rise to the top. Yes, Google’s PageRank favours the Goliaths of the Internet, but it’s shocking how quickly we start acting as if there were no alternatives and that Internet users have lost all of their “animal spirits“ to seek out quality content at the margins.

Yes, Twitter and Facebook feel better suited for our new brand of SMS vitriol, but blog “nuggets” don’t stay hidden long. And I think that is reason enough not to dissuade the next wave of bloggers from having fun with long-form writing. Perhaps I’m advocating patience, something in short supply these days. Very “Field of Dreams”: if you blog quality, the readers will come—in time. In my case, I’ve got some waiting to do.

*Quote:

“Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.” – John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936 (Back to post)

It’s called FiveThirtyEight.com – the Five Thiry Eight stands for the number of electors in the Electoral College.

I’m a big believer in numbers and the use of statistical analyses and simulations to achieve the most objective view possible – and the writers of FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver and Sean Quinn do just that.

This blog is a perfect illustration of the benefits of Web 2.0. Now, citizens have access to data and for those who are intersted and capable in doing so, they can use the data to develop and objective assessment. They know exactly where the information is coming from, how it’s being used and the best part – they can share it with the world.

In the spirit of transparency and to prove that their blog provides a well-informed, trust-worthy view the authors offer full disclosure; providing their names, explaining their day jobs, even going as far as stating who they support. However, the key is that they also disclose, as clearly as possible, their methodology for the results on their page.

Here is the process overview on their FAQ page:

Process Overview

The basic process for computing our Presidential projections consists of six steps:

1. Polling Average: Aggregate polling data, and weight it according to our reliability scores.

2. Trend Adjustment: Adjust the polling data for current trends.

3. Regression: Analyze demographic data in each state by means of regression analysis.

4. Snapshot: Combine the polling data with the regression analysis to produce an electoral snapshot. This is our estimate of what would happen if the election were held today.

5. Projection: Translate the snapshot into a projection of what will happen in November, by allocating out undecided voters and applying a discount to current polling leads based on historical trends.

6. Simulation: Simulate our results 10,000 times based on the results of the projection to account for the uncertainty in our estimates. The end result is a robust probabilistic assessment of what will happen in each state as well as in the nation as a whole.

I encourage you all to go take a look and determine for yourselves how accurate these predictions are. I know this is a blog I’ll be visiting daily.

Appearing on digg can certainly help a blog. This post drove enough traffic to the Wikinomics site to crash our servers, but there is a fair amount of criticism of how the site works. From Wikipedia:

It has been reported that the top 100 Digg users posted 56% of Digg’s frontpage content, and that a niche group of just twenty individuals had submitted 25% of the frontpage conten, A few sites have raised the problem of groupthink and the possibility that the site is being “manipulated”, so to speak.

Our friend Neil addressed ths question head-on last week on his outstanding blog 1000awesomethings. After trying the old fashioned way (begging friends and regular readers to digg on his behalf) without success, he tried a direct route, writing An Open Letter to Digg from Unpopular Websites around the World. An excerpt:

Damn, girl.

You sure do play hard to get.

Why you gotta be so hot? Why you gotta be so attractive, with your smooth and sexy layout, massive in-our-face traffic patterns, and cute and casual down-to-Earth style? From the moment you first asked us “Are you human?” we were hooked. You’re just so funny and cool.

Digg, we want you bad.

Then, some sucking up, and…

Maybe one day, we think to ourselves. Maybe one day you’ll glance our way. Maybe not the big dance on Friday at 9am, but one little popular submission on a Sunday morning at 5am. Heck, we’d take the jogging-before-church date. We’d love the jogging-before-church date.

So that’s it, Digg. You’re hot and you know it, and we admire the fact that you always let us know where we stand. No matter what anyone says, you’ve always treated us with respect and honesty. And that’s what makes it so hard.

So we’ll just keep on dreaming. You just keep on being you.

Sincerely,

- Unpopular Websites Around The World

Was it pathetic? (yes). In the comment section, there was speculation that Neil was obese (he’s not) and a geek (well, he doesn’t bite the heads off animals in a circus act). But it worked! The post and the next one (he posts every weekday) both made the front page of digg and the total visitors went from 250,000ish before diggwhoring to 350,000ish.

Awesome.

It will be intriguing to see if the leadership of the private companies over public continues to persist, and/or whether the Inc. 500 adoption is a leading indicator of what the public companies are going to do. Wikinomics readers might also be interested in following the “In contrast” link above, which is a wiki page that was created by Chris Anderson and Ross Mayfield to enable a cooperative, volunteer effort to review the blogging activity of Fortune 500 companies. My favorite link here is the “spectrum of corporate social media“, which hopes to flush out a taxonomy of ways to engage in social media (with specific examples). I think it still has a long way to go, but here’s how it currently stands:

• Sue and fire Employee Bloggers (e.g. Delta Air Lines Inc)
• RSS Feeds of existing content (e.g. Intel Corporation)
• Internal Wikis and Weblogs (e.g. DrKW)
• Executive Bloggers off-Site (e.g. guest blogging)
• Host Consumer Blogs (e.g. most media companies, Google)
• Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for Employee Blogging (e.g. Apple Computer, Inc)
• Group Blogs on-Site (e.g. Yahoo! Search Blog)
• Executive Bloggers on-Site (e.g. SAP Executive Blogs)
• Public Wikis (e.g. Intuit)
• Encourage Employee Blogs (e.g. Scoble)
• Host and Employee Blogs (e.g. Sun Microsystems Inc, Microsoft Corporation)
• Carpetbombing (e.g. commenting anonymously in blogs)

Note: I don’t think “sue and fire employee bloggers” is a good category to be in .

And journalism wasn’t meant to be a conversation, anyway. It was maybe a monologue, at its most democratic a carefully constructed dialogue. If readers didn’t like or agree with the monologues in paper A, they bought paper B. What was most important about their opinions was that they thought enough to spend the coin.

I agree with the start of this to a point – while I believe there is certainly a role for “conversations” in journalism, what I’m most interested in from great journalists tends to be their monologue. In short, depending on the topic area, I want great insights, great entertainment, or both. But what I wanted to focus on here was the paper A versus paper B idea – and how the blogosphere is been blamed for a few things it might not be responsible for.

Ignoring blogs all together, one of the great things about the web has been individuals don’t have to pick between only a handful of newspapers for perspectives on a given topic (i.e. A vs. B), but rather select from among thousands. My sense is what a lot of journalists are experiencing is that they grew comfortable working for paper A and competing against B, but now find themselves competing with B through ZXTRQ. They then blame the blogs, whether they are the real problem or not.

Christine’s article is written from the Olympics, which is a particularly poignant case in point. While she focuses on Dimanno trying to report on Phelps 8th gold medal with less than 5 minutes to craft her story, that’s mainly a time zone issue (needing to meet the print deadlines). But let’s look at what she was up against, now that a few days have passed.

When I typed “Phelps eighth gold” into Google News, I had 9,155 hits – and almost all of them seemed to be associated with “traditional” newspapers. I scrolled through the first 30 pages of links or so, and I found literally hundreds of different journalists that had written a story about it. It was really, really hard to tell one story from another – and MAYBE one or two stood out. This isn’t the blogosphere’s fault, it’s the Internet’s “fault” – journalists now have to compete with many more of their counterparts, and truth be told many of them don’t seem to have a differentiated point of view.

This is the democratization wrought by the Web, and if it has actually helped open up closed societies such as China’s, in the West its chief effect, at least upon journalism, is to diminish whatever craft, and there is some, is left in the business… It is not true that anyone can write. It is not true that anyone can write on deadline. It is not true that anyone can do an interview….

This is a very good articulation of the most common journalist complaint that I come across – that because anyone can blog now, the craft of journalism has been diminished by the belief “anyone” can write. However, I think it misses the key point that the vast, vast majority of us “common folks” would greatly prefer to read a well-written, thoughtful piece than some random gibberish on a random blog. I would also argue that the vast, vast majority of us don’t have time to be searching through the millions of blogs out there, and are comfortable returning to a particular site (or paper) regularly if the content is compelling enough.

But how have many journalists reacted? As referenced in the article in the story of Matt Sekeres, they are “… committing (their) most idle thoughts and mundane observations if not to paper, then to its modern equivalent, a blog.” I see this all the time – give a journalist a page with “blog” at the top, and the quality of content diminishes rapidly.

I don’t get it, and I’ve never gotten it – the “blog” is simply a new form of publishing tool, but for some reason many thoughtful and insightful writers have decided that instead of approaching it the same way they would an article for print media (i.e. create something compelling), they replicate the worst of the blogosphere, mashing together a collection of random thoughts, then occasionally stopping to complain about it.

I could go on, but I realize I’m now making one of the “cardinal sins” of blogging – writing a post that’s too long. However, I want to end by mentioning one of my favorites sites to get people thinking more positively about the blogosphere, Sports Guy’s World. I wrote about his site awhile back (see here), but one of the more interesting things to do on his site is read the articles that are only on the website, and those that are published in the ESPN Magazine. From my experience the former are almost always better than the latter – notably because they are unbounded by word constraints associated with print media, and I believe the editors give him a little more leeway.

It should be noted that The Sports Guy actually represents what many journalists hate – he doesn’t so much report stories as offer his rather entertaining opinion – but I’d be interested to see what would happen if a few more journalists actually tried to use the web, or dare I say blogosphere, to create better content than they do when bounded by things like print constraints and fixed deadlines. I would imagine many would flame out, given my sense is that many of them just aren’t good enough – but the best of the best might just find a very loyal audience.

Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup!  This time around, we’re going to do a two week roundup, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout that period.  There’s some great material so take a look!

In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE.  Friendly reminder: the Wikinomics Roundup has a nice new home on the left side of the page, under Regular Features.

Word of mouth is considered one of the most powerful forms of advertising, so it makes sense that someone would attempt to package and re-sell it.  P&G’s duo of Tremors (for teens), Vocalpoint (for moms), as well as BzzAgent, have been successful in targetting Influencers by putting product samples in their hands, enhancing their user experience, and letting the user talk about the product. I see websites like SocialSpark as being the evolution, or at least the heir, to word-of-mouth marketing: where there are clear financial incentives for bloggers to participate, and advertisers have a direct channel to ‘buy’ authentic sounding opinions that support the product, and which specifically target the desired audience.

Learn more about this evolving advertiser-blogger marketplace @
The netGuide

Last week I spoke with Andrew Mottaz and Blake Johnson, the founders of Portland-based Site9, about their new software as a service offering: ProtoShare. ProtoShare allows web developers to collaboratively create interactive website prototypes, ensuring that everyone is on the same page during the development process. But more importantly, ProtoShare opens the process up to other stakeholder, such as the marketing team, allowing them to follow the project’s progress over time, and provide timely and effective feedback to developers. By improving communication and collaboration within the project team, and between them and their clients, ProtoShare has the potential to revolutionize the process of web design.

Get the inside scoop on this new SaaS offering @
Collaborative Web Design: An Interview with the Creators of ProtoShare

C) Recruiting and retention: Our research shows that the public sector is far from the top-choice of most university graduates. We surveyed over 10,000 youths in 12 countries and outside of Continental Europe, the public sector was dead last when respondants were asked to rank their employer of choice. A large part of the government 2.0 transformation is thus focused on reinventing the public sector workplace so that it does attract the best and brightest, and that when they arrive they have the tools, technologies and organizational cultures to make the impact they desire to. That ability to make an impact is key to Government 2.0. It’s about creating participative cultures that flatten organizational hierarchies and keep talent plugged in and motivated. Some of our partners are looking at replacing upwards of half of their entire workforces over the next 8-10 years. Unless they’re looking for investment bankers that won’t be easy to do. One of the key metrics for Gov 2.0 will be the ability to attract 1a candidates and more importantly the improvement, if any, of retention rates amongst those star employees.

Read the equally insightful parts A and B of the post @
Measuring Gov 2.0

• Connecting and leveraging internal resources – For large organizations dealing with limited internal resources (or in some cases poorly allocated resources after cutbacks) the ability to connect to and leverage internal knowledge and expertise will be extremely valuable.
• Measure twice and cut once – In organizations many times information is horded and work is duplicated. If organizations can utilize collaborative tools to increase organizations transparency and promote collaboration they should be able to operate in a much more efficient manner.
• Marketing in a 2.0 way – I think it will be tempting for many organizations to revert back to their tried and true marketing channels in tough economic times. Investing money where they have established metrics is safe from a job security standpoint, but doesn’t make sense given the direction we see marketing and the customer relationship moving
• Attracting and retaining talent – Look five, or even three years out in your organization and think about how that workforce will change. As the Baby Boomers retire organization will need to be able to attract and retain Net Generation employees. Creating a dynamic and collaborative working environment is one way to accomplish that.

Take a look at the more in-depth rationale @
Could Web 2.0 tools be the saving grace for organizations during a recession?

Before he left work for the day, Donald logged on to the central government’s voter platform and reviewed a list of “upcoming votes and issues that may concern you.” One of the big issues of the day was a bill to ban designer genes. It had actually been drafted by the janitor in Donald’s office. Donald gave his votes by proxy to the New World Party. But the party had not made a decision on this bill. Donald voted against the ban, as the voting system had predicted based on his past voting history. This system of tracking voting behavior had previously suggested Donald transfer his proxy vote from the popular Conservative party to the niche New World party, which he had found was much more in line with his views. Donald donated his monthly allowance for political financing to the party so that it could grow, and garner more influence.

Share your vision of 10 years from now @
2018 – A Vision of the Future

On August 14, 2008…Jeff DeChambeau looks into an exciting new technology frontier:

Here is how I see this playing out: Photosynth is able to infer 3d structures from photographs and (should soon be able to) skin these structures dynamically from the very same photographs. If there was a large enough set photos, Photosynth could infer the shapes, sizes and positions of objects all over the world. Then, with Virtual earth, geotagging data, and the relations between photos, these 3d structures could be mapped into their Virtual Earth platform. Essentially, it should be possible to make a virtual copy of the earth, passively, by processing photos that already exist.

See this extraordinary technology in action @
Remember PhotoSynth? Well, it’s old hat now.

On August 15, 2008…Brittany Creamer introduces cutting edge technology – now affordable:

Shapeways, a new internet-based 3-D printing service, offers rapid prototyping at an affordable price. Send in your digital design file and Shapeways will ship your polymer prototype in less than ten days and won’t charge you an arm and a leg. According to Shapeways, most orders cost between $50 and $150. Shapeway’s proprietary software ensures the design can be built and tweaks small errors in the design before production. Amazingly, Shapeway’s advanced printers can build objects with moveable parts and the clincher is that the price isn’t determined by complexity, but rather by the amount of polymer required.

How can this change the invention and prosumption process? Find out @
Attention Prosumers: 3D Printing Now Affordable

Check back next week for more original Wikinomics insight.  Until next week…

You need to be a premium member to get access to the demographic cross-tabs, but I would assume that age is the primary dividing line here: I can’t imagine too many Net Geners who grew up “bathed in bits” would support the balance initiative, but I could just as easily understand how people who don’t use the Internet (or don’t use it too often), which is a much older demographic, could be drawn into supporting it.

Such people would come from a broadcast media mindset, where certain individuals could consolidate control of dominant media assets, and thus control the political messaging that the vast majority of people are exposed to (think: the one newspaper town). The internet, of course, is an entirely different animal – one where it’s a lot harder (an understatement to say the least) to get a stranglehold on the political messages being sent out. More to the point, could you imagine how much less interesting so many websites (and particularly blogs, assuming they would be included) would be if they were forced to balance their opinions… when the whole point of the site/blog is to offer their unique opinion on a given subject?

So yes – the very notion of balance on individual sites is the worst idea I’ve heard this week, even though I still think there’s a business opportunity for someone to create a site that’s far better than what we have to day in making that balance easily accessible to those that are interested. But to take a positive spin on the survey findings, 71% of people said it’s already possible for “just about any political view to be heard in the media.” It’s easy to forget how little time has passed since the majority of people would not have agreed with that…

In the previous post I walked through the examples provided in the book, which took a “day in the life” approach by focusing on a fictional executive named Linda. The basis for understanding the argument starts with platform theater – where one “scripts in advance every line and every gesture, practicing each over and over again until she can confidently give a performance so accomplished that it comes off as fresh and spontaneous.”

Platform theater represents the way many companies operate, from the most basic call center designs right through to the experience created for customers. It’s a comfortable way for many companies to operate, and relatively low-risk as well thanks to the controlled environment. But as anyone who’s taken Investing 101, it is through taking calculated risks that rewards are achieved.

So now let’s take a look at the definitions of more “evolved” forms of theater:

matching theater – where “disparate facts and events (are pieced) together (into) a unified whole, much like a film editor or director.”

street theater – where “small, atomic units of activity are called on demand to construct a performance.”

improv theater – where “surprising” problems must be handled immediately, and where Linda had to draw on “the reservoir of managerial techniques she has stored up from past experience.” The chapter notes that “Improv requires systematic and deliberate methods of originating creative ideas, fresh expressions, and new ways of addressing old problems.”

I would argue that various social media applications be be used to help move from “platform theater” to each of the other options. The most involved, of course, is “improv theater” – and here is where I think we could really dig into the opportunities that social media tools can create for companies. How much better could those “systematic and deliberate” methods be if wikis, blogs, social networks, reputation profiles, ranking systems, and the like where fully capitalized on? I also like the idea of taking improv theater to the next logical step – pulling customers on stage to participate in the experience directly (see: prosumerism).

So what do wikinomics readers think – would this be a useful framework to develop in relation to social media and customer experiences, and if so how might you go about expanding on it?

As part of my effort to help you find meaning(ful applications) in your e-life, i’m hoping to start a regular column called The netGuide. In these blog posts I will briefly talk about some of my website findings from across the web and how they help solve old problems in new and creative ways.  The caveat is that although they may be new to me, they may not be to you – but hopefully this is the exception rather than the rule.

Website: SocialSpark
Category: Advertising and Blogging
Web Traffic: From nothing in the fall of 2007 to ranked 5,344 globally according to Alexa.

Why Care: SocialSpark is a website that facilitates the efficient exchange of pay-per-blog advertising. One of the distinguishing features of the website is its ad marketplace, where advertisers outline the word of mouth message they want produced, medium (text or video), and the price they are willing to pay for it (e.g. $9 to say XYZ).

Bloggers review these opportunities and self-select the topics that they want to write about on their personal blog.  Once a listing has been selected, the blogger submits their blog post and website name to SocialSpark, which allows advertisers to review the message, the website (i.e. its nature and web traffic), and the audience demographics for approval.  This provides the advertiser with final control over the message and the audience that it is being distributed to, while also employing a powerful mass-micro broadcast.

Word of mouth is considered one of the most powerful forms of advertising, so it makes sense that someone would attempt to package and re-sell it.  P&G’s duo of Tremors (for teens), Vocalpoint (for moms), as well as BzzAgent, have been successful in targetting Influencers by putting product samples in their hands, enhancing their user experience, and letting the user talk about the product. I see websites like SocialSpark as being the evolution, or at least the heir, to word-of-mouth marketing: where there are clear financial incentives for bloggers to participate, and advertisers have a direct channel to ‘buy’ authentic sounding opinions that support the product, and which specifically target the desired audience.

My questions for you:

• Does this have ethical ramifications?
• Will this impact the way people react to blogger based product opinions?
• Given that the Net Gen values integrity and is willing to scrutinize, could this backfire for advertisers??

Let me know what you think, and if you have a good website for a NetGuide post, please comment!

It’s understandable that lawyers would be leery of these services. Because these technologies are new, they are often not well understood and have negative perceptions attached. When professionals hear the term social networking they automatically think of Facebook and university students posting pictures from wild parties. But if you look a little deeper, the enterprise benefits to these types of technology are obvious. Not only are they more efficient in many ways (see Anthony William’s previous post of Wiki collaboration leads to happiness) they also help reduce costs.

Lawyers need to take the time to understand these technologies and look for constructive ways to incorporate these tools into organizations as opposed to automatically shutting out the idea.

There are now new services for lawyers such as Legal OnRamp that act as a space for lawyers to discuss issues and are a great way for lawyers and law firms to get their name out and show their expertise… As CEO of Legal OnRamp Paul Lippe says “Law is naturally a very social activity… long before Facebook lawyers developed Martindale-Hubbell and Chambers to connect.” (Full disclosure: nGenera Insight is currently working in collaboration with Legal OnRamp on a Law 2.0 white paper)

In the past few weeks I’ve been invited to several legal sessions with different law firms and in-house counsel discussing the potential of Web 2.0 technologies. Many of the concerns addressed are similar: IP, privacy, copyright, trade secrets etc. For the most part, many of these issues are easily addressed. Many organizations already have policies in place to address many of these issues such as simple terms of service, disclaimers and employee blogging, social computing guidelines. The BBC’s Guidelines are a great example.

These technologies aren’t a magic bullet. It takes time and a carefully thought out plan for these tools to be effective. But there’s a reason behind the buzz and why these technologies are starting to pop up in organizations. Similar to what happened with e-mail (when it was first introduced lawyers presented a plethora of issues with that technology) lawyers are now some of the most prolific users of e-mail. And as Paul Lippe puts it – there is a great opportunity for lawyers to go from worst to first when it comes to using social tools.

Visit the blog when you have some time to kill (not that that the typical Wikinomics blog reader ever slacks off his or her work to visit us). He is a great writer and has a huge following (tons of comments on each post).

Anastasia Goodstein and I interviewed “the Waiter” for a white paper we wrote a few years ago. Here is an excerpt:

“The Waiter” is the author an award winning blog about the tribulations of a server at a New York bistro. At its peak it was receiving more than 3 million unique visitors per month; most of the posts receive hundreds of comments from his loyal readers.

While he is self-admittedly an often disgruntled employee, his readers recognize him as a dark hero and appreciate that he is dedicated to the craft of being a server. While he is a firm believer in free speech, he knows that corporate bloggers are bound to be discovered by their real-life colleagues, and need to be prepared for the consequences. He feels that companies should not invade the personal lives of job candidates via digital sleuthing: “if you did something stupid in high school or college which is really the socially sanctioned time to be stupid and it’s on your Web site or in your Facebook and then five years later when you’re a very different person and you’re trying to get a job, it shouldn’t be held against you.”

Further, he believes that companies should actively monitor the blogosphere to appreciate what their employees really think: “I think what happens is that executives get into a headspace where they feel they’re above criticism and the criticism they do hear is couched and very politically correct and work-safe language and I think sometimes that denudes it of its impact and they don’t get it and sometimes that overheard thing in the men’s room or that thing you weren’t supposed to hear is the most valuable you’ve heard when you hear ‘oh my God, everyone thinks I’m a yutz.’”

Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review! Over the next few minutes I will try and capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.

In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE.

On July 15, 2008… Denis Hancock discussed the value of blog comments:

“The value of comments is a function of topic area and scale.”

Be sure to read on (and comment!) @
Comments: Valuable contributions of ramblings of the inebriated homeless

On July 17, 2008… Brendan Peat sets the stage for a discussion on security:

“In the last 20 some odd years corporate security has made some headway. Companies are now at the point where they are reasonably efficient at keeping ‘hackers’ out and letting employees in. The problem is that to get to this point the enterprise has had to put up walls in the name of safety and security, but at the cost of functionality and logic.”

Read about how empowering and trusting employees fits into the equation @
How Web 2.0, Facebook, and the Net Generation will change corporate security

“[The University of Wisconsin is] using the wiki to help us with all the work it takes to get from concept to real product. We use the wiki for spreadsheets on market development, documents with examples of other airless tires, images of competing products, project progress reports, FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) sheets, and QFD (Quality Function Deployment) documents,” said Frank [Rath]. “All the different variations are stored on the wiki. If we didn’t have the wiki, we’d be emailing those files back and forth all the time.”

Read more about the use of the Wiki in the project development @
War of the Wikis: University of Wisconsin uses wiki collaboration to help troops in Iraq escape attack

“The release [of graphics and data for more than 84,000 3D city buildings] is meant to allow citizens, whether development experts or simply concerned city dwellers, a greater role in conversations and plans about the city’s future. Want to propose a new development? These 3D images should go a long way in allowing all parties a better, and simpler, platform upon which to build.”

See the pictures and the logic behind releasing this information @
3D Cities and Government 2.0

• Wiki scripts
• Feedback mechanisms
• Unified account information and metrics
• Rewards and compensation structures
• Smart call routing that analyzes reps’ actual skills and matches problems with solutions
• Customers helping customers
• Supplement call center activities with other Web 2.0 initiatives

Read this NOW if you run a call center.  Read this now if you’re a regular Joe. Discuss @
Wikinomics in call centers

Keep checking back each week, as Wikinomics bloggers keeps their eyes on the web, and their fingers on the keyboard.  And as always…if something stood out and interested you, please comment!

You may also have noticed that the format for the WR has changed from last week.  This is because i’m experimenting with formatting to try and find the optimum length : insight ratio, and would love to hear your thoughts.