A quick comment on the Small Business 2.0 event: I enjoyed it very much and hats off to Dan and the Conference People team for putting it together.  It was a very telling sign of the times that the audience was not a bunch of “2.0″ nerds, but small businesses either looking at how to branch out from established marketplaces and become really multi-channel, or wanting to get more from the Internet than their traditional web site has given them to date.  There is a clear convergence of interest from SMEs with very different online backgrounds looking into how the Web can become a more effective part of their marketing and sales strategy.  I sincerely hope there will be more Small Business 2.0 events because the need is evident.  

And on that note, I will no longer feel like a miserable sinner and am getting back into the blogging saddle again … yeehaa!

Whilst companies such as Eutelsat and SES Astra went about growing pedestrian but very profitable businesses distributing digital TV to the Direct-to-Home and cable markets, billions of dollars were pumped into projects of truly galactic dimensions to build new global communications infrastructures in the sky.  The two exemplars were Teledesic and Iridium.  Although, these two projects targeted different markets (Teledesic was all about high bandwidth applications, whereas Iridium was global voice communications), they had many similarities:

1. Backed by titans from the high tech sector: Microsoft put $30M into Teledesic, and Motorola was the lead investor in the $5bn investment in Iridium’s network

2. A large dose of philanthropy: both companies exhibited a strong belief that satellites could bridge the digital divide and bring IT and communications services to the Third World.  But forgot that whilst the need was there, nobody had the money to pay for the services brought by these billion dollar networks!

3. Some very costly experimentation in new technologies - LEOs and MEOs for the interested (whereas we at Eutelsat made do with the old faithful GEOs)

4. Complete failure - Teledesic wound up before getting a satellite off the ground in 2002 and Iridium went bankrupt in 1999 (although it came back to life in a different form in 2001)

Google’s adventure is remarkably similar.  $20M contributed so far into a project estimated to cost $750M to launch 16 LEO satellites into orbit to bring Internet services to the “other 3 billion” people in the Third World. umm …

As JFK said: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard“.  I wonder whether a similar sentiment has taken hold in the Googleplex.  Could this be hubris from a cash-rich tech behemoth at the apogee of its market dominance? They have after all remade the planet as Google Earth, so now let’s look to the stars … And will this well-intentioned project burn up on re-entry as the fundamentals of the business model unravel?  I really hope it succeeds, but fear that like its predecessors it’s destined to fail.

I’m very flattered.  Blogging despite being a social medium is an individual activity and to build up readership takes the long haul.  Blogging communities such as Fuelmyblog are great sources of support, ideas and inspiration and of course readers.

So thanks Fuelmyblog! And now let’s do some blogging.

What we all want to do with social media is dialogue and share. For large enterprises, the opportunity is to engage with their customers in a more transparent and effective way than ever before possible through ‘linear’ marketing campaigns. But it ain’t easy…

Here’s my take on the obstacles facing Big Corp:

1. Understanding - social media is typically approached as just another route to market and this leads to a campaign approach with businesses majoring on ‘viral’ marketing and tapping up the blogosphere as a PR channel. By thinking in campaign terms, ’social marketing’ is driven by the tempo of the marketing plan and is at the mercy of the quarterly campaign focus. However, conversations involving your business can start at any time and judging when and how to engage simply can’t be planned. Inconvenient I know, but nothing you can do about that!

2. Skills and confidence - marketing in Mega Corp is coming down to a reporting, budget and program management function with the doers being the rostered agencies. As a rule, traditional marketers, including those with an online background, have neither the skills, nor confidence to enter into a conversation with their customers using blogs, podcasts, and video or through forums, or social networking sites.

3. Process: One reason that marketers are uncomfortable getting stuck into the social graph as their day job is that they are not empowered to do so and may even be explicitly barred from doing it. In effect turning your marketing team into ’spokespeople’ for your business is not something companies do lightly. But changing or indeed writing for the first time policies that enable employees to take part in online conversations is essential if businesses are to benefit from social media as a customer engagement tool.

Also the team developing an engagement plan using social media needs the freedom to procure services they need from a variety of suppliers most of whom won’t be on the roster. I’m convinced that as social marketing becomes core to the ‘plan’, purchasing of marketing services needs to become more like software procurements (project based) and less driven by the dictates of who is on the roster.

An outcome of these obstacles is that forward-thinking marketing departments that do see the potential of social media often turn to their agencies to define the strategy and lead the campaign. This approach is simply doomed to fail. Effective social marketing demands as its foundation transparency and proximity to the customer and cannot be done by proxy. Social marketing even transcends the boundaries of the marketing department. The best people to engage with your customers are those closest to the topic of conversation with the customer and this could be someone from the product, customer service or sales team.

So my advice to any enterprise looking to put Web 2.0 into the marketing mix is don’t get worked up about digital influence or going viral, but simply look at what your customers are talking about, understand what matters to them, and let your people join the conversation.

The story of the growth of this label is fascinating, not least because it was started in the 1950’s by a brother and sister who were white, yet it made its name by discovering and promoting some of the most well-known African-American artists of all time, supported by thoroughly ethnically integrated backing bands.

Remarkable for its time and place.

Key to its success (and in sharp distinction to Motown) was its open-door policy of allowing anyone to come in off the street and play with the band. People came and went, participated, connections were made, talent emerged and became part of the Stax community.

I couldn’t help thinking that the open-door model is really what makes for a successful community-based web site. The record label was the platform. Stax removed the barriers to participation and created the place where individuals wanted to come together and be creative.  The label was also the social object around which the community could coalesce meaningfully. The label became successful once it had created a vibrant community (it’s ‘family’ as Stax and its artists described it) and a nexus for talent.  Cash followed community.

A really simple recipe for success that we could all do well to strive to emulate.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T

Agencies, hosting companies, and domain registrars will all be rubbing their hands together at the opportunity to breathe new life into their business models. But I can’t quite help feeling that the whole shebang seems just a little passé …

On the Web the first time round, we all rushed onto the beach flinging our towels down and claiming our individual space. After a while we caught on that actually everyone was having fun at the bar, so we left our umbrellas where they were and joined the party. That’s Web 2.0.

Social networking is largely domainless (who cares or knows what my Facebook URL is!). What matters are the interactions on the platform and between platforms through data porting. So my Tweet is syndicated to my Friendfeed and then displayed on my Facebook profile. The ‘address’ of this information is actually irrelevant. The important bit is the community with which I am sharing my content and time.

The social Web is changing the landscape of ecommerce too. Some recent research from Quidco found that 62% of shoppers consult online communities before making a purchase. And that only 27% of consumers go directly to the retailer. And the top three reasons …

1. communities offer me unbiased facts about products and services (32%);

2. I trust the views of communities more than merchants (27%);

3. communities help me find the best deal available (27%).

Given the above, is spending a fortune to ‘protect the brand’ with a custom domain (and then spending even more to drive traffic to it) a worthwhile activity? Or should businesses take part in the communities where customers are already talking about their brand, engage them and turn them into advocates? In other words, will a hotel chain get more customer value out of a .hotel TLD, or a series of positive reviews on Tripadvisor? I strongly suspect the latter.

This is really a big business dilemma as SMEs won’t typically have the marketing budgets to worry about securing a new TLD. That could turn out to be an advantage, as whilst the big brands buy better picks and shovels to take part in the new gold rush, small business can be down at the saloon mixing it up with their customers and doing real business.

From 9 - 11 June I spent my waking hours at the O’Reilly conference, Graphing Social Patterns East, in Washington DC. Lots of senior developer types from Facebook, Google and Myspace and the like presenting to a fairly geeky audience. As someone whose interest in social media is heavily skewed towards small businesses and commerce, I was a little disappointed that neither term was actually mentioned over the three days!

Content aside, what stood out from the opening minutes was the collective audience behaviour. As panellists talked, the audience went about its business: maintaining profiles on the social network of choice, tweeting like no tomorrow, and I kid you not, listening to iPods whilst updating Facebook. In short, we weren’t listening. For those with an interest in the conference proceedings, this was often enjoyed as a mediated experience. Following the GSP East Twitter Feed, or reading live blogging coverage from one of our fellow attendees took precedence over actually sitting back and digesting what the people just a few metres away were saying.

(With an absence of irony, the conference organisers did request on day 1 that mobiles were turned off less they disturb the sessions!)

What did I take away from this experience?

1. For those in the social networking biz, the tools of the trade seem to be at least as important as the content - in other words, the medium trumps the message. This is nothing new to Web 2.0 though: Nietzsche reflecting on how his writing style had changed since using a typewriter said “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Well that explains Twitter then …

2. The views of others take precedence over a personal and original standpoint - it’s easier and faster to consume another person’s perspective than think about something yourself for the first time (This point was drilled home to me by the UGC videos introducing each session, which were practically all derivative riffs on other people’s work).

So it appears to me that we may be suffering from a Web 2.0 induced attention deficit disorder. Quite a worry really.

I am currently agnostic on this one. There are lots of claims being made in the SaaS and hosting space that software running on multi-tenanted servers is inherently better for our collective futures on this rock than running multiple single-server installations. That seems reasonable. But what about the case of hosted software, such as Google Apps, that is largely meant to replace client-only software (e.g. Microsoft Office)? Is this greener? Maybe not. In this case we are actually adding a server into the mix, rather than taking one away. And the environmental costs of running massive server farms are huge. The Economist commented recently that ‘the largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume’, noting that Microsoft’s new facility in Chicago requires three electrical substations with a capacity of 198 megawatts! Offset that if you will …

So, am I damning the polar bears every time I use Google Docs, or not?

What’s happening to the directories business is a classic example of the impact of digital disruption. I’ll drill down into why I believe this is the case in another post. But for now it’s worth considering that Yell was seen as a recession-proof stock because the classifieds directories business was “more resilient to economic downturns than other forms of advertising” according to its 2003 flotation. Well, that was true in previous recessions, but not now. And the reason why this one is different is that the Internet happened in the intervening period!

With that in mind, I’d like to plant this rogue line of reasoning. According to Nielsen Netratings about 70% of online local search is done through search engines and Google is the launch pad for most searches for local business on the Web. Now the Mozilla Corporation made c.$67M USD in revenues in 2006 (the latest numbers I could find) with 85% of this revenue coming from Google. In comparison yell.com’s 07/08 revenues were c. £140M GBP (c.$277M USD). I question whether yell.com can sustain its current growth as Google is becoming ever more dominant in search and is now going after the SME advertising market. And we do know that Firefox usage is growing year on year, so it’s revenues from Google are likely to increase too.

Against this background, is it just conceivable that the Mozilla Corp. could, in the near future, end up making more money from online local search than Yell.com? Yikes!

For two days this week in Brighton, the BT Tradespace team, our development and marketing partners and customers shared, debated, informed and firmed up our plans for the next stage in our development. Exciting stuff and good fun too as Derek our Community Manager captured on the Tradespace blog.

The highlight had to be our field work where the whole team - everyone from developers, to experience architects, to marketers, to PR, to producers and programme managers - hit the streets and started talking to local businesses about the BT Tradespace proposition and how the tools of social media can help small businesses grow their business online.

In a telling sign of the times that SMEs are already on the case themselves, one of the companies we spoke to blogged about the experience of being ‘crashed’ by the BT Tradespace team. And yep, hands up I was the ’senior tech/sales guy’!

The whole experience was a practical reminder that markets are conversations and conversations power commerce. All right, where next …