The Relationship Economy……

As more and more brands launch their own set of “social initiatives” a critical failure is not involving people in the verification of whether their plans are really “social” or not.

Today people can see through the marketing spin and hype of messages quickly. The web is filled with opinions about everything, everybody, every brand and every move a company makes. Case in point. Comcast announced the acquisition of Plaxo and within hours there were hundreds of bloggers commenting on the move and their post went viral, one to one to millions. The initial blogger responses, in the aggregate, were negative about the Comcast move. Then more and more people expressed their opinions and it appeared as though the negative spin caught on like wild fire. The bloggers with the most readers and the most respect seem to “infect” the minds of many quickly and rather than enabling objective dialog entire communities, and the Comcast brand, became subject to the negative infection. See Read Write Web’s post as an example.

When will Companies Learn?

In modern management practices there is a term and process called Catchball which originated from a planning process known as Hoshin Kanari. Catchball is defined as:

“a communication process in which parties engage in a series of information exchanges about the means for achieving a particular objective. The purpose for the exchange is to build consensus around the best approach for achieving an objective. Catchball is based on the belief that the best approach will evolve from the back and forth exchange of information between the person who is responsible for achieving the objective and the persons who will be most influential in achieving it. The secondary benefit from using catchball is a higher degree of commitment to achieve the objective.”

Now think of the social web has nothing more than a huge medium that enables the “catchball” process with entire markets, customers, suppliers and employees. If Comcast, or any other brand, were to take advantage of the medium they would learn more from the opinion leaders and their markets in a few hours and would avoid being caught in the negative spin. Additionally people give their opinions freely and those with loud voices of influences have gained their position because of their perspectives, understandings and thought leadership relative to the dynamics of the social web or what we have labeled as Socialutions.

The benefits to applying a “catchball mentality” is that by engaging communities leaders and influencers in the process of strategizing “social initiatives”, you begin to develop a learning organization and your brand benefits from the ideas and opinions of the community of influencers. Organizational learning allows a company to adapt to market changes and trends and grow in the process. And, in some cases, help reduce the risk of negative spin. Without the ability to learn and to be social as an organization lends itself to being criticized by the very communities of people it intends to serve.

How Could It Be Done and Protect Confidential Information?

We’re not talking about telling the world your about to acquire something and asking for their opinion. Rather we’re simply talking about the exchange of ideas on how a brand can improve its position by applying Socialutions.

However let’s just consider the recent Comcast announcement about acquiring Plaxo. Comcast could have invited and paid five of the top influencers and opinion leaders within the social web into a “Socialutions Advisory Council” Without mentioning Plaxo Comcast could ask the proposed Advisory Council what their opinions were about Comcast buying or creating and using social applications. From this exchange Comcast would quickly learn of the pitfalls and opinions from the influencers before they made the acquisition. Additionally, the council could be under an NDA and shortly before acquiring Plaxo the council could be used as a “catchball” of feedback which would have helped Comcast craft the appropriate messages that would help level set its vision with the active participants within the social web.

Much more could be done using “catchball” strategies but by now you should have the picture of Socialutions possibilities.

What say you?

In an earlier post we discussed challenges and opportunities for Comcast and the social web titled “Can Comcast Reverse the Storm? Many of the opportunities we discussed is now a reality.

Staci D. Kramer, of paidContent.org writes: “Just got off the phone from a tandem interview with Plaxo CEO Ben Golub and Comcast Interactive Media’s Sam Schwartz. They weren’t willing to talk money but answered just about everything else and talked at length about the vision of marrying set-tops and social software. Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) plans to integrate Plaxo’s technology across its platforms?including, eventually, to WiMax. In the short-term, Schwartz says, it’s about “taking the existing network and making it more powerful. There aren’t too many other social networks that cross over to the TV set, certainly at that scale.”

Why now?: “The two companies have already been working together for a year, with Plaxo powering the address books used for Comcast’s 14 million high-speed data subscribers. Schwartz, president, Comcast Interactive Capital and EVP, CIM: “As we continued to look at making that partnership even deeper, we’ve been thinking about the things we could do to supercharge each other’s product and really believe there’s a unique opportunity in a marriage.” He puts the opportunities in two categories: the technology Plaxo has been building for seven years as it morphed from address book to sharing online activities through its social Pulse product and Comcast’s activities with interactive set-top boxes, building Comcast.net, expanding with the launch of Fancast.com, the acquisition of Fandango and more. “All those things when you tie them together, both sides can really provide a lot more endpoints for making that a valuable social service. Every social network does better the more endpoints it has and the information it has flowing through it.”

The Space is Moving A Lot Faster than Any of Use Can Imagine

This is a bold move that has promises to further accelerate both advancements to the web and others following to leverage the web for new opportunities. Sounds a lot like “The Emergence of The Relationship Economy”. Stay tuned for the next big move soon to happen within a click of your mouse.

What say you?

Whenever technology advances to the point of usefulness, it’s usually because someone found a great fit between two or more previously independent offerings. In techspeak, this has been referred to as a Mashup (adapted from the music industry).

Well, join me in welcoming the latest Mashup — between Internet delivery, Telecommunications, Television, Videos, and the social web (and much more, I suspect).

TechCrunch just confirmed the acquisition of Plaxo, a six year old company, by Comcast, a 45 year old company.

Comcast will announce their acquisition of social contact list Plaxo today. Financial terms are not being disclosed, but the rumored purchase price is in the $175 million range.

I’m thinking the next Mashup announcement will be that Open Social (Plaxo is in) will be incorporated into next-generation set-top boxes . . . and we’ll be surfing the social web (again — remember WebTV, it looks to be a Microsoft product now) with a remote (and that’s only the beginning).

Imagine yourself in the couch potato position with your remote and in the corner of your wide screen you get a transparent pop up message from one of your Plaxo contacts wishing you happy birthday. You respond with a thank you, and he notes that you recently posted your status indicating you were en route to a celebration dinner.

He confirms the open invite, and while you are on the way, you get a text message on your mobile that indicates the room you had reserved has been upgraded due to an additional twelve guests (pending your approval). You confirm, and hit the record video button on the dash of your car (probably a Ford, using Microsoft Sync and a Live Mesh application) and record a video greeting that your guests see as they arrive.

I honestly didn’t expect The Emergence of The Relationship Economy would be this imminent . . . (you can download the e-book for free here)

What do you think!

Many of today’s companies recognize the urgency of converting to a customer-centric, social web-based, operation. The excuses and faulty logic brought on by global prosperity have been replaced by an honest examination of internal operations and external market share. As the various departments search for collaborative ways to maintain profitability in uncertain economic times, we will see more and more arrive at the duh! moment of realization that the customer comes first.

We haven’t exactly reached the Utopia that Adriana Lukas describes:

Imagine having your customers share with you what they like, want and think of you. . . Interaction with them is modular, intuitive and user-driven freeing much of your resources spent on marketing and transaction cost.

. . . nor have we seen more than a few examples of big, giant companies who give more than lip service to the process Doc Searls detailed almost five years ago (and Eve Maler recently simplified for those who love simple graphics).

But there are some unpredicted catalysts on the horizon, and in the spirit of making right decisions, we see that adoption of a Socialutions paradigm is going mainstream.

Our proposal for Socialutions involves problem solving and finding innovative solutions through social exchanges. We are suggesting that organizations can capitalize on the relationships and relationship connections of the people connected to them in some way, whether these connections come from employees, vendors, customers, or wherever. But we maintain that the customer comes first. Not to the point of turning major strategic decisions over to crowdsourcing perhaps, but first nonetheless.

Tom Peters has a rather unique (not a shock if you know Tom Peters) perspective on where to put the customer. He says, “to put the marketplace customer first, I must put the person serving the customer “more first.”

Peters (admittedly selfishly) proclaims:

To give a high-impact, well-regarded, occasionally life-changing speech “to customers” I first & second & third have to focus all my restless energy on “satisfying” … myself. I must be … physically & emotionally & intellectually agitated & excited & desperate beyond measure … to communicate & connect & compel & grab by the collar & say my piece about a small number of things, often contentious and not “crowd-pleasers,” that, at the moment, are literally a matter of personal … life and death.

As Jay Deragon noted previously, the drive of tomorrow’s successful organizations will be a new method and philosophy proclaiming “We the Peoples are all aimed at Socialutions” that creates perpetual value. We the people are aimed in that direction, but do the companies who serve us (even if we are after their employees) get it yet?

Here are some Socialution suggestions for getting from where you are to where you need to be in a hurry:

1) Make the cluetrain manifesto (especially the 95 Theses) mandatory reading for all your employees

2) Have your company intranet feature a link to Cluetrain @ 10 (a revisiting and revising after ten years) and recent posts on the Clueship.

3) On your company-wide strategy wiki (get one if you don’t have one), start a “top ten clues” list and allow anonymous voting.

4) Allow time off (5% of the workday would be a good start) for your people (all of them, not just sales and HR) to Twitter, blog, Facebook and MySpace for the company.

5) Run from traditional (old school) marketing as a source of “what works.” If it really worked, you would not have taken the time to read this.

And finally, if you click on this link, you can contribute to our efforts to get Socialutions into Dictionary.com.

What do you think?

There is clearly a divide between businesses who understand the “shifts” happening and those that don’t. Whether a Fortune 500 or a small business owner the divides in understanding will separate the winners from the losers.

Consider These Conversations

Tim Leberecht writes: “In a panel on “Business Innovations that are Changing the World,” Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said: “Let’s not forget that the fundamental goal of any corporation is to change the world and not just to satisfy the interests of particular stakeholders.” Indeed, this was the overarching theme of an economic summit that was all about social: social innovation, social media, social networks, social web, and social capitalism. What once was a noble mission is now a mandate for CEOs: the future of business is social, both in terms of raison d’etre and modus operandi. Companies that open themselves up to promoting and fully leveraging the social dimension of human beings in order to create smarter and more effective solutions for social problems will be the winners of this new social economy.”

Brian Morrissey writes: For Tony Hsieh, CEO at Zappos, meeting up with a customer at a bar in midtown Manhattan was perfectly natural. Most execs with 1,600 employees and doing over $1 billion in annual sales would probably pass on having drinks with an individual customer, but Hsieh is not your typical CEO. In the past week alone he had given away shoes on Twitter, sent out an open invitation to a company barbecue and solved a service problem a customer left in a blog comment. If this seems exhausting, Hsieh sees it as part of a larger strategy to build Zappos into a brand on par with Virgin.

“We think our brand is going to be different because we want people to feel there’s a real person they’re connecting with, whether it’s when they call us or through Twitter or any way they come in contact with us,” he said.

“All we do is try to respond to what users are asking for,” he said. “That’s how we set our priorities. Users aren’t asking us to run ads, so it doesn’t come onto our radar.”

At the heart of these decisions is a simple fact of life with the Internet: Everyone is connected, and hiding behind glossy images won’t work when a Google search can turn up the good, bad and ugly of your company. In the analog world, it was different. Haque believes brands thrived on how difficult it was for people to get information. Logos, spokespersons and slogans combined to give consumers a way to make choices. But now, the Internet has turned that on its head. “The entire economic rationale for brands is gone,” Haque said in an interview. “Interaction is too easy now for brands to have power.”

Professor Henry Jenkins of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT articulates a world in which young people have a very different relationship with media consumption. This is the migration from consumption as an individual practice to consumption as a networked practice - which I might add is voluntary. Convergence Jenkins argues is also a culture phenomenon rather than a technological one Culture Jenkins argues is today Participatory.

Clay Shirky writes a very philosophical piece about culture/media and participation. His assessment is that social computing is a major shift in consumer behavior and market influences. He presented at Web 2.0 Summit in April and you can view his insightful presentation here

Jonathan Schwartz at Sun said “Our 1000 bloggers at Sun have done more for this company than a $1bn ad campaign could have ever done.”

And the Other Side Says

1. This is just a fad

2. We don’t want our employees participating in social media

3. We don’t want to give our customers too much power

4. You can’t make money using social media and social networks for business

5. That stuff is just for kids

Which side is closest to reality? An ancient Chinese proverb says: “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”

People like to be engaged, participate, discover and explore. The people have been limited but now they seem to be set free.

What say you?

With so many demands vying for our time and attention, sometimes even a simple, uninterrupted phone call seems to be a stretch of the imagination. Cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), instant messaging, pagers, faxes, emails and the list goes, on all contribute to information availability and overload.

In Western society, we have been trained to “want what we want, when we want it - five minutes ago.” Microwave ovens, cell phones, “instant” potatoes, lightning-speed internet searches, 24-7 news channels, all have conditioned us to get things done faster. We’re all chasing time as a value that drives us to either save or gain more of it.

Our attention is really the driver of the use of time. Time and attention are the factors to getting massive personal and professional leverage; by capturing the attention of someone, you are more likely to get their time. Learning how to leverage time is the means of getting more peoples attention while saving your own time.

The web is becoming the means which enables massive personal and professional leverage, you can reach the masses, or swarms rather than reaching a few. Those who can accomplish the greatest mass of personal and professional leverage will be those who gain the most use of time. Those who adopt, or more appropriately, transform their thinking, and learn how to use the web effectively and efficently, will perpetuate value faster than ever before. The dynamics we are all facing becomes the Paradox of Choice, or where should we spend our most valuable asset – time?

Is the Web a Time Transport Mechanism?

In transport economics, the value of time is the opportunity cost of the time that a traveller spends on their journey. In essence, this makes it the amount that a traveller would be willing to pay in order to save time, or the amount they would accept as compensation for lost time. Isn’t the web nothing more than a highway of transportation?

One of the main justifications for improvements to the web is the amount of time that people and businesses will save. Using a set of values of time, the economic benefits of any improvement can be quantified in order to compare them to the costs (thus forming the basis of cost-benefit analysis).

The value of time varies considerably from person to person and depends upon the purpose of web usage, but can generally be divided into two sets of valuations: working time and non-working time. This division is appropriate because the value of working time (i.e. time spent on the web in the course of work) is calculated differently from the value of non-working time (i.e. time spent on the web outside work).

Where are People Spending Their Time Today?

People are spending twice as much time online as they are watching TV, a new study of consumer behaviour by analyst firm IDC has found.

Silicon Republic writes: “The study found that the average amount of time spent online is 32.7 hours per week, compared with 16.4 hours spent watching TV.”

“The time spent using the internet will continue to increase at the expense of television and, to a lesser extent, print media,” said Karsten Weide, programme director, digital media and entertainment at IDC.

When Will The Web Give Back Time?

People have little patience with poor performance. While we are experiencing emerging web developments daily much of it is a distraction and robs us of time. However when we consider the converging activities in today’s marketplace and initiatives such as VRM it won’t be long before the web will become the utility of choice for enhanced personal and professional productivity gains. Then the attraction will magnify and draw masses faster than ever before and we will experience the dawning of The Relationship Economy fueled by Socialutions never before anticipated or experienced.

The time factors will become the market factors and those who understand “how to” will gain back time. Commerce will accelerate and new markets for businesses prepared will pull and attract consumers from old markets.

What say you?

Social networking technologies develop a momentum of their own which takes individuals beyond the point of counter productivity at which they become self-defeating.

While the phenomena of networking technologies appeals to some of our basic human needs it also appeals to human weaknesses and reveals our insatiable appetites for “new”.

The Hidden Game Appeal

Many adults are intrigued by the phenomena of social networking and will spend countless hours engaged in the game. It is a game when you consider what operators know and users do not. Operators understand the appeal of new technology when it is designed around “ basic human needs” for relationships, significance and wanting not to be left out of the “latest and greatest”. Knowing this operators launch new networks aimed at targeted consumer interest, new features to intrigue the masses, new functions that promise new efficiencies and network growth that promotes being able to reach more people.

The masses follow the appeal and the cycle of intrigue is designed to keep the masses engaged. Network operators are motivated to establish technological relationships with their customer with the aim of drawing in the masses so the networks economic value increases. The economic value of the network is aimed at satisfying the shareholder, not the users.

What is unique about technological advancements is that some people become enslaved by the technology while others figure out ways to be enabled. Those that create the technology do so with a purpose. Much of the marketing buzz about technology promotes its benefit but never do we see the scope of our cost for adopting the latest and greatest technological advances.Technology can become a detriment to our time, our relations and our economic standing if you aren’t investing mindfully with a view to a financially viable outcomes.

Technology can also become and enabler of opportunities to leverage the medium for our own individual or business gains. Our gains must be definable and useful to our individual or business purposes. Providing clear definitions and purpose will ignite a new wave of adoption from those on the sidelines wondering what is the purpose.

Our purpose should be grounded in relationships which produce different outcomes. Enrichment comes in many different forms but the basic tenant of enrichment across all forms starts with a relationship. The Relationship Economy is about leveraging technological advances that enable us to enrich our lives economically, relationally and in many other forms. Until we unite as users and collectively create one voice which defines and removes the constraints to our purposes then the “game” will not evolve to enable us to accomplish our purpose.

Revolutionary changes are required to facilitate “networking objectives” with a purpose. Reducing the learning curve will require education and removing the barriers to “trade” will require cooperation. Cooperation must be lead by the users and that is the purpose of Link to United Relations.

Operators aren’t likely to cooperate until the collective customer base creates enough force to facilitate change either from within or outside the current eco-system.

What say you?

The value of a relationship is not driven by how many networks your networking with them on rather it is simply the fact that they are part of your network. 65% of my network is also networked with me in other networks! What is the point?

Technology creates different expectations and maybe we think one platform is better at enhancing our relationships yet we don’t stop and think about defining the cost benefit of networking with the same people in different networks. Time, attention, distractions keeping up with approving “friends” through different networks, emails, notification and the list goes on…..are you feeling the pain?

One may argue that my relationships are enhanced because a different network enables me to share more media with my friends, more information sharing capability, expanded profiles of my friends capabilities, more groups of topical discussions etc etc. One may also ask how many different physical social clubs to you join with the same friends? How many golf clubs are you a member of in which you golf with the same people? How many different churches are you a member of in which you fellowship with the same people?

In our previous postings, “Show Me The Money“, “The Paradox of Choice“, “The Attention Factor“ and a host of others we’ve addressed factors that collectively are resulting from the proliferation of all this networking with different networks. The current state of the networking market can be categorized as “Chaotic” and the Chaos Theories have long been established and proven:

In mathematics and physics, chaos theory describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that under specific conditions exhibit dynamics that are sensitive to initial conditions. As a result of this sensitivity, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random, because of an exponential growth in the initial conditions. This happens even though these systems are deterministic in the sense that their future dynamics are well defined by the initial conditions, and there are no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.

So scientifically there is some order in all this chaos but if we wait for the network operators to create the order our expectations are in the wrong place. On the other hand if, and only if, we the people unite our relations into a force then we can bring about dynamics that shape the chaos into better meaning and value for us and our network. This will be the tipping point for the Relationship Economy and the tipping points starts with you, one to one to millions.

Join others and bring others to the united relations movement so we can create our own chaos. Get it?

What say you?

As brands and people flock to the web the rate of change grows exponentially on a daily basis. From the Big courting Mergers and Acquisitions to the little creating new applications, new communities and new ideas, the conversations are swelling like rivers.

This collective attraction is creating a passion for the future, the next BIG thing and new ways to connect, collaborate, converse about anything and everything. The key word here is passion which has been missing from the workforce and in May cases our individual lives.

Does Passion Matter?

Passion is an individual and collective emotion that drives people to accomplish and do great things. Passion defined as (emotion), feeling very strongly about a subject or person, usually referring to feelings of intense desire and attraction

Max Kalehoff, of Online Spin writes in his article titled Why Passion Matters “Think of the places in your business where the presence of passion really matters — making you stand out beyond the rest, or sink into mediocrity. It’s about approaching things with the utmost thought and care, versus doing anything less.”

“In my experience, there are a few places in business especially sensitive to passion:”

• ? Listening and understanding your customers and the market.
• ? Innovating based on your market insight and intuition.
• ? Building your product with quality and speed.
• ? Ensuring the highest aesthetic and usability.
• ? Refining your product over and over and over again, until it’s better and better and better.
• ? Paying attention to all the details and signals that comprise the experience.
• ? Inspiring your employees, customers, investors and other stakeholders.
• ? Engaging and collaborating with customers.
• ? Fixing things quickly when they go wrong — and then making them far better.
• ? Using your product yourself and recommending it to friends because you truly believe it’s the best.

Now imagine a business environment where all the people are ignited with passion at serving the needs of the customer, both internal and external. To accomplish this the organizations would have to adopt Socialutions as its management methods and start fresh with a new perspective about the business, their business.

What say you?