Category Archives: business

Social networking: the next generation

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Have you ever noticed how social networks don’t do a very good job of representing how our personal networks actually function? Sure, places like Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn have their utility, but their flatness is a problem.

Think about your Facebook, for instance. If it’s like mine, you have friends there who run the gamut from “real life best friend” to “people I know” to “guy I couldn’t pick out of a lineup if my life depended on it.” You may have relatives, friends from school, co-workers and “assorted others.” And they’re all absolutely equal.

Our LinkedIn networks can be even less attuned to how our lives works. Continue reading →

Upon reflection: was I too hard on The Blog Council?

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Last week I joined a legion of business bloggers in poleaxing the shizizzle out of a self-satisfied new project called The Blog Council. Josh Catone of Read/WriteWeb stomped them. Dave Taylor, who’s probably forgotten more about blogging than the entire council put together knows, took them to school. Robert Scoble – another guy who knows a thing or two about blogging – explains why he’s skeptical. Jordan McCollum goes door-to-door on some of the group’s players. Mike Moran prays that it’s all just a big mistake. And so on.

Then Jake McKee comes along and explains that all us “experts” don’t get it. In fact, our failure to get it proves that the Blog Council is right in doing things behind closed doors. Continue reading →

A great new how-not-to resource for business bloggers

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When a new innovation comes along, corporations typically follow a predictable arc. First there’s the “Ignore It” phase. Then, once it becomes clear that it’s actually important, they dive into the “Getting It All Wrong” phase. The first step in Getting It All Wrong is “pretend that the new thing works like all the old things.”

Eventually they get past these early “ballistic podiatry*” activities and begin to figure things out, although there’s often a step, which falls late in Getting It All Wrong, called “Hire a Consultant Who Was Successful at Other Things But Barely Knows More Than You Do About The New One.” Sometimes these outside hitters have read a book, but mainly they rely on the tendency of executives to overgeneralize about prior successes.

Which brings us to The Blog Council, Continue reading →

Electrolux Innovision Hub – interesting concept at work

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A quick-hitter here. I’ve done a little work on Electrolux’s behalf (this is actually me voicing this video) and I really like the philosophy behind their approach. I’m expecting more good work from them on the social media front in the future – so keep your eyes on them.

World War III under way; America hasn’t noticed?

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“Corporate America ought to be darned worried. If you are a major corporation with very sensitive technology, you have been targeted. Somebody is spying on you right now.” Todd Davis, FBI supervisor in Sacramento

There’s been a great deal of debate lately about spying – FISA and domestic spying issues, for example – and now the news that Blackwater is augmenting its army, navy and air force with its own CIA. While I’m routinely bemused by the conclusions we seem to reach (we’re about to approve a new Attorney General who doesn’t think waterboarding is torture, remember), I do welcome these kinds of discussions. The world of information and intelligence has been changing dramatically for years and our policy deliberations haven’t kept pace. It’s critical to think about what we know, how we know it, what we do with it, and the implications of not knowing it, because despite the fact that they’ve been awfully cavalier about the Constitution, our conservative friends are generally right in noting that there are bad guys in the world. In the end, the question really boils down to how can we best deal with the bogeys without becoming bad guys ourselves.

There’s one area that we aren’t talking about, though, and it’s a topic we ought to be very concerned with: corporate espionage. Continue reading →

S&R hits significant milestone: you, too, can be a social media star

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On April 16 some colleagues and I launched Scholars & Rogues, a team blog covering politics, media, art and literature, culture, sports – really, we wanted to cut a pretty broad swath through our readers’ lives, and whether you agreed or disagreed (heck, we don’t even agree with each other all the time), we wanted to encourage thinking and intelligent discussion. Continue reading →

Comcast cuts off customers who cross invisible bandwidth line

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I’m not going to dive into the telecom policy implications here, but if you thought Sprint was screwing up by firing customers who call support too often, you’re gonna love Comcast’s latest blast of genius.

Comcast has warned broadband Internet customers across the country to curb their downloading or wind up on the curb.The company has a bandwidth limitation that, if broken, can result in a 12-month suspension of service. Continue reading →

New report notices that Boomers are retiring; offers band-aid for sucking chest wound…

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Lately I’ve been talking a lot about the looming macro-succession crisis, and it’s felt like I’m the only one who sees the issue coming. This morning, though, a MediaPost item addressing a piece of the issue came across the desk, and while it’s only partially aware of the whole problem and the solution it points to is a half-measure at best, it’s at least nice to see a little validation on the subject.

Thursday July 12, 2007
Retiring Boomers Important in Hand-off to Younger Employees

A recent survey of 28,000 employers in 25 countries, by Manpower, revealed that only 21 percent have implemented retention strategies to keep their senior employees participating in the workforce. Continue reading →

How the macro-succession crisis is going to hit the entrepreneurial sector

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I’ve written recently about some generational issues facing companies – most notably the “macro-succession crisis” that I suspect very few corporations have even thought about in meaningful detail. In that post I examine how the coming Baby Boomer retirement explosion is going to engender all kinds of crisis, especially in larger legacy corporations that are so top-heavy with Boomer leaders that their Gen X successors are ill-prepared for the transition that must begin taking place in the next five years.

But if you’re a different kind of company – say an entrepreneurial outfit started and run by front-edge Xers (people now in their early to mid-40s) – you’re in good shape, right? You aren’t facing a retirement wave. You aren’t facing the need for a painful adjustment from Boomer-style leadership to the far different style of Xer execs. And this means there’s going to be no leadership vacuum at the top sucking everybody higher in the organization and creating trainwrecks at the Xer-to-Millennial lower management level, either. Life is good.

Except that you’re wrong – the macro-succession crisis is coming for you, too. Continue reading →

Doubleclick report missing the mobility picture?

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I was reviewing the Doubleclick Touchpoints IV report earlier today, and while I still need to dive a little deeper, there are a couple things I wanted to comment on.

1. The study’s top finding – “consumers acknowledge that online video shows great potential for advertising” – points to the exploding importance of social media. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but maybe it does. Sometimes I slip into assuming that everybody tracks “the next” like I do, but the truth is that the pace of advance these days is so rapid that it’s hard to keep up even if keeping up is your main job.

2. The study suggests one potentially dramatic finding that the authors either ignored or failed to recognize. I’m going to ask you to study a couple charts from the report and see if you notice something: Continue reading →