Rhymes with Cars

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The Most Powerful Colors in the World [infographic]

via static.colourlovers.com.s3.amazonaws.com

This is a sweet infograph of what companies use what colors. I'm surprised at how few are green. Clearly Blue (cold) and red (hot are dominant).

More on the study here http://www.colourlovers.com/business/blog/2010/09/15/the-most-powerful-colors...>

Tagged Internet colors marketing web2.0

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Yes It Can

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how social media will make the world a better place . The past Tuesday, I think that this point was proven to the world as a junior senator from Illinois was elected the President of the United States. Much has been written about the way that, over the past 2 years the Obama campaign, has leveraged everything from YouTube to Facebook to MySpace to Flickr to Twitter in order to convey a consistent message and increasingly gather support for his bid for President. By the end of September, while the McCain camapaign seemed to be making a presence in these new fangled interweb thingies, the Obama campagin was moving full throttle, like Katamari Damacy , gathering up more and more supporters, $5 at a time, with a message of hope and change. In the end, Obama had out raised McCain by over 2 times. But more importantly than the money raised was the way that Obama reached out so frequently and was so transparent and so consistent with his message. When I look at the stats of their respective social media sites, it is clear that Obama was far ahead in having a medium that allowed him to communicate asynchronously with his supporters.

Unlike politics over the past 12,000 years, another unique component of the Obama campaign was the level of transparency and the interest in reaching out to get the opinion of his constituents never before seen. Obama and staff sent out regular missives, sometimes to the point of being spammy, to all willing to receive them. These messages were fairly consistent - this is where I will be, this is what we are working on, this is why, please make a donation. After 8 years of secrecy, this is just another one of things that Obama recognized that people wanted, a level of transparency in their government. Sounds simple doesn't it? The past 4 days, since Obama's election have been no less interesting in terms of the usage of social media. The day immediately following the election, the Obama administration (that sounds great) launched Change.gov , a site maintaining that level of transparency. The site keeps all of the public up to speed with what is going on with the administration and has even asked the public for ideas and job applicants. Of course, all of this information has been available on some hard to navigate site. What Change.gov does is make it easy to find and easy to communicate. This past week also saw a lot of Al Gore . He supposedly signed up for Twitter . He was on DiggDialog and make the closing talk at the Web 2.0 Summit . All amazing stuff. As I mentioned in my previous post, I believe that people want to do what is best for the community and do what is best for the environment. The election of Barack Obama shows that social media can really work to make a tremendous change. We now have the soon to be President of the US that fully embraces social media as well as the person most outspoken for climate change both building armies of people willing to listen, spread and modify their lives based on their message. It is a great time to be alive and to be part of this happening.

Tagged Barack Obama Social Networking Sports facebook flickr john mccain katamari damacy social media twitter web 2.0 youtube

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Come See Me in Chicago Next Week

I'll be speaking next week in Chicago at the Lyons Consulting Group's event 'The Changing Face of Enterprise Collaboration'. If you're in town, come check it out and say hi.

Tagged Marketing & Management Sales collaboration enterprise 2.0 lyons consulting speaking engagement web 2.0

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Collaboration vs. Cooperation

Peter Tosh once famously lamented, in his song Equal Rights, everybody wants to go to heaven, but none of them want to die.

I hear from people all day long that are interested in sharing, but very few of them want to put in the effort to encourage their employees to collaborate. What it turns out, that they often really want, is cooperation with a fancy skin. Sharing & collaboration are not the same thing as cooperation. Cooperation is something that you have to do in order for society (your company, your group, your organization) to function. You have to answer your phone, you have to reply to emails, you have to work moderately cohesively with your team in order to be productive in a knowledge environment. Let’s face it, in most cases, if you don’t reply to email or return phone calls, your business isn’t going to succeed and you aren’t going to be around very long. Sharing, on the other hand, is something that people want to do. Very few people on the planet are forced to blog, forced to edit wiki pages or forced to share photos, yet everyday, millions of people share all of this. More importantly, people share ideas at work. Whether they are sharing ideas over coffee or sharing past learned data on future products, most people love to see their peers succeed, especially if they can succeed with them. So why do so many corporate mandated collaboration systems fail? There are a lot of reasons, but, what I’ve experienced is that the mandates are much too broad. Companies want their employees to collaborate because they read about the benefits of sharing & collaboration in Wikinomics or some trade paper and want that. Like little (or big) boys outside the Ferrari dealership. They don’t know what goes into obtaining and maintaining a system. They believe that if they build it, they will come. Unfortunately, most corporate mandated collaboration systems become just another way to cooperate. If your hobby is collecting widgets, you probably would graciously build a community around other widget collectors. You might even write a blog on widgets, share pictures of your widgets and help other people find widgets that they are looking for. You’d do it for free because you love widgets so much and you want others to love widgets too. But the second that someone forces you to share everything that you like about widgets, you are going to stop doing it. It no longer becomes sharing and it becomes cooperation. The same happens at work. Companies believe in the idea of sharing and collaboration, but rather than provide tools to help facilitate this and let things run their natural course, they develop complex systems that force cooperation. If you are interested in collaboration and sharing for your business (and who isn’t), define a measurable goal, keep the focus of collaboration niche – make small groups successful and the sum of the parts will be greater than the whole and identify technologies that will foster collaboration and sharing, not tools that force cooperation. Trust me, your users will thank you.

Tagged Social Networking collaboration enterprise 2.0 peter tosh shared drives web 2.0 wikis

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Masters 2.0

Augusta National, known for it's relative stodgieness is doing some really amazing things this year. First, they are letting kids under 16 in the gates for free. I believe that this is one of the best things that the golf world can do in order to get young players interested in the game. Second, the Masters has gone Web 2.0. Kind of. First, they now have 'Blogs'. Watch out world. This isn't all that interesting as every event seems to have a blogger or two on staff, but it is new to Augusta. The writers are doing a good job with it though and trying to illicit conversation from the readers, which is cool to see. They are also leveraging social bookmarking including del.icio.us, digg & facebook. They aren't setting the world on fire by being cutting edge (Tiger Twitters), but they are doing some things I wouldn't have imagined in a long time. Secondly, and in my opinion cooler, they are tapping the wisdom of crowds to answer the question 'how to get people, especially kids, playing, watching and talking about golf'. Visitors to the Masters site get a nice story about how Bob Jones and Cliff Roberts would have wanted as many people to be involved in the game of golf as possible and then have the chance to offer ideas. While I think that Augusta National is a long way from being open in a Web 2.0 sense (photos aren't shareable for example), this is a great step in reaching out to the fans. Who knows, maybe next year, the entire telecast will be broadcast online.

Tagged Internet Mobile & Technology augusta national masters web2.0

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Selling Web 2.0

Another good article from Selling Power. The long and short is if you are selling Web 2.0 style technology, there are some good things to look out for.

Before they get deeply involved in Web 2.0 technology, many companies will busily assess the social culture and processes in the current workplace, before using social software, and redirecting IT to give priority to openness, usability, people-centricity, and flexibility. Therefore, if you’re involved in selling software that falls under the Web 2.0 bailiwick, your specific challenge will be to identify companies ready to make this transition and help them through the culture knotholes.

But there is good news.

For software vendors that successfully manage this feat, the rewards are likely to be substantial. Gartner estimates that the enterprise social software revenue market will reach $226.9 million in 2007 and will increase to more than $707.7 million by 2011, reaching a 41.1 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2006 to 2011. Gartner further predicts that by 2012, the primary role of business networks will be to support social interactions rather than routine business transactions.

Tagged Marketing & Management enterprise2.0 sales sales2.0 selling power web2.0

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