Turning Words into Sword

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The Wall Street Journal wrote today about a new U.S. Congress effort to create an opposition to Iran's current rulers. Their secret weapon? Words. Rather than add more economic sanctions or increase the political pressure coming out of press offices, the Congress is working on a bill to give Iranians unfettered access to the Internet and all of its communications tools such as Facebook and Twitter. These are the very means by which many Iranians were beginning to protest recent election problems prompting their governement to cut off access. By recognizing the revolutionary benefits of simple communication, Congress has discovered the real power of these tools that we take for granted in the West.

It's an example we can use in our companies when doubt is cast on the importance of social media and effective communication with and by customers and employees. Internal community platforms harness this power to the benefit of the company to overthrow competitors. External communities also reap the benefits for their participants and the companies that enable it. Companies that shy away from the strength of these communications risk a competitor doing it first and stealing the benefits. We've always heard that the pen is mightier than the sword. It's still true.

The Now in Knowledge

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What's the future of  information? Unlimited, I believe. All of the emerging technologies and new social patterns around them are all formed around information. Sending, receiving, multiplying, syndicating and federating information. In fact, they consume more and more information as the new technologies become more efficient and more widely adopted.  As the world becomes more complex marketplaces need more information to make sense of it all.

There are different kinds of information, of course. Jeremiah Owyang and I took a first pass at parsing the different kinds at lunch today. Simple enough to do, but the distinctions may be helpful in making sure that we marketers conciously address the different kinds and rush to fill the gaps that are identified.

Conversations
This is the ultimate user generated content. Twitter, Facebook, even email are primary examples of this unstructured, spontaneous and direct information. Most important to marketers, it's highly believable and largely unavailable to them. Though most advertiser-funded services do give marketers access to sidebars next to the user's own writing, no one except the user is in the content itself.

Content
This one's defined a little more broadly than perhaps it should be. Think of standard brochure-ware websites.  This is the stuff that we marketers have been building since 1995. It's vendor-generated and most customers view it as a necessary affliction if not an outright evil. We still produce terabytes of it.

Knowledge
Here's where it gets interesting. If there's been a revolution in user generated content, why not an equal revolution in vendor generated content. Imagine that your CTO or a sales executive or your online community manager is fully engaged in conversations with interested visitors and prospects. The informal and ephemeral nature of these conversations makes it difficult to present deep background or complex concepts. Even if one of your team has the chops to do that, it's a waste of time to repeat that information in the multiple conversations. Better for your company representative to establish mutual interest and then provide a pointer to the prepared knowledge that resides somewhere on the web.

Sure it sounds like more brochures and white papers, but it has to be more than that. It has to be what brochures and white papers should have been. What's required here is a qualitative improvement in relevance, writing and availability.

Possibilities
What's the thoughtful reference work that matches pace with the revolution in user generated content? Is it simply a well considered and consumable white paper? Does it rely on new or uninvented technology? What can marketers do now to be relevant and useful to the conversations that our customers rely on more and more?

Let's think about that. With a category called "knowledge", we can define it better and use it to improve the information that we're all creating. What do you think?

Big Companies Are People Too

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Big business. Corporate executive. Profit. Capitalist. Pro-business.

I cringe when these words are used as self-evident insults. Perhaps a residue from the counter culture thinking in the 1960s, this belief that “business is badness” doesn’t hold up to critical thinking. Or even any thinking at all.

Let’s look at some fundamentals:

1. Each business – large or small – is a collective effort to turn time and skill into value that a customer will pay for. No value? No customers and no business.

2. The people who work for a business earn wages for building their lives and wellbeing. No income? No employees and no business. Each business benefits its customers and its employees or it goes out of business. Which business benefits the most customers and the most employees? Well, I guess that would be a business with the most customers and employees. Some might call that “big business,” no?

3. To stay in business a company needs income to be greater than expenses. No profit? No business. That’s right, profit is necessary to benefit customers and employees. Note that a “big business” benefits more customers and employees than a small business.

So let’s examine what these facts might imply to those who want to kick big business with a knee jerk. Home Depot’s plans to build a new store might not be derided as big business ruining a neighborhood. It might be seen as a valuable service (see Fundamental #1, above) that will benefit the people who live there with broad selection and low prices. If the people of the neighborhood really don’t want Home Depot then they’ll vote with their dollars and the store won’t be there long. Remember, if there are no customers, then Home Depot will close the store. (Don’t get me started about the obverse of this when some then cry, “Big business is closing a store and ruining the neighborhood.”)

Perhaps the poster boy for bad business is still Enron from 2001. Surely that’s an example of a bad, bad business, right? Well, yes, but most importantly it was a major business tragedy. Just like any business, Enron was not a monolithic entity. It was a company of 22,000 people, only a small percentage of whom had the ethics of a toad. But the vast majority lost their income and their means to build their lives and wellbeing. (Fundamental #2) What’s more, at Arthur Andersen, Enron’s accounting and consulting firm, there was only a handful of incompetent people among the 7,000 who lost their jobs right away in the backlash.

Does Big Business do bad things? Sure, some of them do. So do small businesses. So do individuals. Through big leverage and big resources big businesses can have a big bad effect just as they have a large good effect. But let’s advance the conversation about “big bad business” to focus on which businesses are screwing up and which businesses are doing well. Let’s treat them individually. Heck, let’s treat them as if they were people.