New (or Narrowed) Focus

Posted on November 9, 2006 by Lee White

This blog has fallen on some hard times, primarily due to my new focus and growing activity of bring social media inside the firewall. As I have mentioned before I have started a dark blog. I have almost as many posts internally in less than 2 months as I have posted here in over a year. I have also managed to move my interest in social media from pure personal development into actual value added activity for the organization. A while back I posted about becoming a blog evangelist; I have for all intents and purposes managed to make that happen. To tell you the truth about it, I am pretty excited by what is happening. This is the first time in a long time that my personal passion and my actual work have been this well aligned.

Now I plan drive change from the inside!!!

changethesystem117.jpg

Just call me "George". (Thanks to Hugh for this.)

I think now I have a better perspective and a better focus on what I want this blog to be. I want to tighten my focus here and really get into the use of social media within a large organizational setting. Hopefully others in a similar position will be able to leverage some of what I am learning for their own use; and that I can find some new insight from new connections.

Here we go…

Filed under: Corporate Social Media | Leave a comment »

New Friends at Blog Business Summit

Posted on October 30, 2006 by Lee White

I have just returned from the "center of the blogosphere" (Blog BUsiness Summit, that is). So many great ideas, so many great people. It is going to take a while to get it all processed and make it all tangible. Anyway…

I met a bunch of people that I have to mention.

Those folks I have been reading for a while:

  • Jory Des Jardines– We talked about family, friends, gender issues, etc. I am looking forward to continuing the conversation.
  • Tara Hunt – She showed me her prized Hugh-original business card. We talked about connecting and building networks.
  • Robert Scoble – Just a short conversation, but I am going to work on getting my plumber friend to start blogging.
  • Tris Hussey – Great dinner conversation, I learned as much over dinner about the business of blogging as I did at the conference.

And those new friends that will now be added to my aggregrator:

  • Buzz Bruggeman – A true Dookie. Well no one is perfect.
  • Maryam Scoble – I never saw anyone have so much fun presenting at a conference
  • Dave Taylor – Looking forward to a long conversation about how we are going to convince big organizations that social media is a good thing.
  • Matt Mullenweg– I am going to see if I can get the folks here to install WP.

Looking forward to next year’s conference.

Filed under: Blog Business Summit | 2 Comments »

Going Dark

Posted on September 15, 2006 by Lee White

I have finally managed to get an internal blog set up. WooHoo. Not an easy thing to do around here. It will be a blog about blogging, trying to spread the Word. So my guess is that most of my energy will be focused internally for a while. I will pop back out here every once in a while to give updates..

Also I am attending Blog Business Summit 06 in Seattle at the end of October. Let me know if you are going to be there.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Is IP Good?

Posted on September 8, 2006 by Lee White

I think Kathy Sierra is great. Her last two posts are related to memes that I have been tinking about for some time, I just haven’t been thinking about them out loud on my blog. First, the relationship between good ideas and execution (leading to my theme for this post), and second recognizing the value single contributors bring to organizations. So with a little coaxing from Kathy…

In the years ahead when someone is finally able to do the Big Analysis, it will be determined that the principle of intellectual property (IP) has done more to retard innovation than to advance it. The incumbent thinking is that unless I can protect my ideas and be allowed to monitize them, I have no incentive to spend time coming up with new ideas. That is a load of C**p. People will always spend time coming up with new ideas because:

  • it’s fun
  • I need it for myself

I think open sourcing of ideas has the potential to generate far more innovation than the predominate walled-garden approach. Walled gardens seem to be effective in making a few people very rich and creating large plodding organizations.

Money should come from exectuion not ideas. By locking up the rights to IP, producers become lazy and complacent, creating their own little monopoly and don’t have to worry what users think. Think about how good customer service would be if everyone had the freedom to build their business on any idea available, and had to compete primarily on execution.

I think that, among other things, one outcome would be fewer large companies with nicknames like "the evil empire". Instead we would have cooperative networks of smaller organizations opperating on more of a community model. I just like fantasizing about it.

Just imagine if Linus Torvalds had gotten the contract from IBM instead of BG…

Filed under: Community | Leave a comment »

Using Windows Live Writer

Posted on August 15, 2006 by Lee White

Testing this for the first time. Seems to be enough good comments on other blogs (GigaOm, TechCrunch among others) to give it a try.

Filed under: TechCrunch | Leave a comment »

Wasting Time

Posted on August 10, 2006 by Lee White

I am really getting tired of hearing yet another research report being released about how much time employees waste each day at their jobs. (Here, here, here, etc.) Inevitably the culprit is "the Internet". I guess learning, building relationships and having conversations have no value!

Now that I think about it, it is the people that spend no time on-line that scare me.

Filed under: Organizations | Leave a comment »

Marketing 2.0, Now or Later?

Posted on August 9, 2006 by Lee White

I recieved a comment on my last post (WooHoo) from Lev at Co-Creators, wondering if the "weed & seed" analogy is primarily apt for an interium, transition period, while traditional marketers figure it out.

My first thought is that before even that transition can begin, tradional marketers will first have to "get it" that a change is necessary! Most everyone around here is charging ahead with the status quo marketing plans. There are a few pockets of awareness that things are changing, but even there, the thought is that we will do some sort of a small pilot to prove the concept, to validate ROI. My fear (hope) is that we are going to be caught by suprise by some event that races through the blogoshere and makes us look really bad. I would like to think that some foresight now could take us down a controlled transition, seed & weed approach. My experience tells me differently, that we will get hit by a big giant ball of BLOGs.

Back to the original point, I think the seed & weed approach would be a good transition approach, but there will need to be proactive forethought to put it in place.

Filed under: Marketing | Leave a comment »

Seed and Weed

Posted on August 8, 2006 by Lee White

I just watched Michael Arrington’s interview video with a bunch of Web 2.0 CEO’s. Very thought provoking, in bits and pieces… One quote that really struck me was from Jotspot CEO, Joe Kraus. He was talking about the future of publishing and publishers. His view is that the publisher’s role will be to "seed and weed". In other words, put initial ideas out there and see what happens to grow, while keeping an eye on things and making sure too many weeds (trolls, spam, etc.) don’t choke out the growth of the good content.

I wonder how this metaphor could be carried over to marketing.

The big concern of traditional organizations is loosing control of the message. Therefore most traditional marketing is about driving traffic back to the controlled content source, the corporate web site.

Viral marketing, the apparent preferred approach of Web 2.0 generation organizations, on the other hand is primarily concerned with the spread of "the word", by mouth, by net, whatever. The main concern seems to be maximizing the spread, regardless of how true to the originally intended message.

Maybe "Seed & Weed" is the common ground between these two approaches. This would foster spreading the word while maintaining intended focus, if not control. Not quite sure what this would look like, just an idea…

Filed under: Marketing, TechCrunch | 1 Comment »

Next Generation Marketing

Posted on May 31, 2006 by Lee White

It seems to me that the Social Networking space is heating up. MySpace seems to be all the rage. I am certain that some organizations are trying to figure out how to flip this phenomenon into a marketing advantage. The first mention of this I have seen is MarthaSpace. I have also seen companies trying to embed some social network functionality into their Web 1.0 site.

I think the next step is to build vertical network communities with a hugh amount of functionality (blogs, RSS, OPML, Pics, video, Tags, aggregrators, etc) but using  accessible metaphors (Journal vs. blog, Bulletin board vs. del.icio.us, for example). Give the community free access. Charge those that want to provide information to that community.

The community must have value in and of itself just based on the community members. As traffic to the community grows, the price content providers are willing to pay goes up. The key to making this work is to define a focused community that clearly has a common thread that content providers can clearly target.

The problem that advertisers have with something like MySpace is that there is no clear focus, almost any organization could advertise there, and the impact would not be much more effective than advertising on broadcast media.

I know what this should look like, but alas I have not have the tech skills to build it. Anyone interested in having a conversation?

More Thinking…

Maybe creating another Social Site isn’t the answer. Maybe the approach should be some sort of vertical meta-data site that finds and aggregrates blogs and other social content from all sources. An add-on could be simple "in-house" tools for those not currently active and don’t have the resources (time, knowledge, etc.) to go about setting up their own environment. These are people that don’t care about tech stuff, they just want to engage in the conversation.

Filed under: Community, Marketing, New Venture | Leave a comment »

too small

Posted on April 21, 2006 by Lee White

I was in a meeting with about 30 marketing professionals (brand managers, ad agencies, PR firms, etc.). At lunch I asked the question at my table: "what do you think of blogs and the other types of new media on the horizon?" One of the agency folks responded:

We are keeping our eye on it, but it is still too small to be concerned about.

I guess they haven’t looked at the rate of growth, the kind of data you would expect a good marketer to look at. Unfortunately my mind was not quick enough to make that point at lunch…

Of course they went back to the meeting to discuss marketing plans and what will be delivered in 18 months… I can’t help but think how different the landscape will look in 18 months.

Filed under: Marketing | Leave a comment »

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