I have been ignoring the blog the past few weeks largely to focus on a couple of efforts I am working on for SCIP. In the interim I hope that the active sharing of news items I find on Google Reader and Twitter that run along the sidebar of this blog. I am a religious user of both platforms and they really do serve a niche to give me a means to share items of interest between blog posts or when I don’t have enough time, inclination or insight to justify a full blog entry.
One of the projects that I’ve been working on is an article on Web 2.0 and CI that I needed to get out the door and kept me up until 2 AM Thursday night. The article is probably going to be in the March/April issue of Competitive Intelligence magazine. Some of the main points that I try to convey in this article are the basics of Web 2.0 and the consequences of network effects, transparency and open platforms on established business models.
I also try to make the point in this article that Web 2.0 platforms increase the need and importance of active, real-time reputation monitoring. This is a difficult tight-rope to walk, because one of the dynamics I am trying to convey related to corporate policies related to employee use of Web 2.0 platforms (both inside and outside the enterprise) is that heavy-handed strategies won’t work. My challenge is creating an appropriate sense of urgency around active reputation monitoring and management with the knee-jerk reflex to “lock it down” that one observes in command-and-control oriented corporate structures.
The downside to the command and control approach is that it comes with a hard-to-measure cost in employee efficiency, satisfaction and retention. Ham-handed anti-web 2.0 policies are signals to the market (and employment is still a market even if it’s more of a buyer’s market these days) of the value in which the corporation holds individual employees. The best and the brightest want to go where they are going to be recognized as individuals, allowed to innovate, allowed to pursue individual initiative and rewarded for their efforts. Heavy-fisted policies about participation and social networks tell these stellar employees that this will not happen here. It also sends a message to market watchers that a corporate structure lacks the ability to take advantage of bottom-up innovation. When the recovery does happen I would like to think investors will see these qualities as indicators of staying power and the ability of a firm to generate growth and higher returns on investments.
