Category Archives: Business

The future is orange

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A Demos report (funded by Orange) published today 29 October argues that social networking sites could help companies beat the recession (report pdf).

I liked this extract from the report: “Consultancy firm McKinsey has studied the importance of social or employee networks for businesses. They found in their research that ‘the formal structures of companies… don’t explain how most of their real day-to-day work gets done’.

“They go on to argue that to capture that value, these network relationships need to be formalised in ways that do not interrupt the looseness from which their value emerges.” (Bryan, Matson and Weiss, ‘Harnessing the power of informal employee networks’)

Reminds me of a post I wrote back in July on ‘How to survive a recession social network style’ quoting the example of BMW’s comms strategy from the early 1990s recession.

Social Media vs Knowledge Management, debated

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Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War

And my comment on the blog post:

Thanks, great blog post and insightful comments. I can see what is meant by a war between KM & SM better from this discussion, as often the reality is disguised.

I’ve learned the hard way, for example in campaigning media, that the key cultural difference is between doing things *with* people — and doing things *for* them.

For example when you have suppliers talking web 2.0, but practising what are fundamentally top down solutions. I’ve experienced it first hand.

A company I worked for did the market research but didn’t test out their innovative online solution sufficency on users. I brought in web 2.0 ideas but didn’t get the support and left. Straight after they decided to launch a web 2.0 community. It never happened.

I’m now helping set up a new award winning online community. The cultural shift involved is part of the process, and the testing of the product with customers (the initial market research has been done) is also part of that learning curve.

It’s easy to under-estimate the cultural challenge SM involves within the enterprise, to get  customers to come first. Thanks again for the helpful blog piece.