21st Century Organization

2007 Year in Review: Google Zeitgeist

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2007/

Google's gift to those intrigued by the power of connecting intelligence and learning through participation.

~ Jenny

Social Media Club Gathering 20071211: A Gorilla on YouTube

Howard Greenstein labelled the event "What worked and what didn't in Social Media in 2007?" and convened an impressive collection of entrepreneurs and people who work at helping traditional organizations adapt to the impact of social media upon them. 

The most interesting discussion thread for me came via Jack Myers, (CEO Myers Publishing, author of the Media Business Report and "Virtual Worlds: Rewiring Your Emotional Future" published in May).

With TV industry experience starting at CBS, Jack proposed a potential outcome of the current writers strike is fundamentally changing the traditional television broadcasting industry. Given the impact of digital technology on transforming the recording industry, an entirely reasonable prediction.

Also discussed was the bottomline for organizations. As participative technologies empower individuals to become publishers and broadcasters via the Web, how do traditional media companies engage and develop new revenue models to play and sustain in this environment? No doubt the arrival of Chris Anderson's new book "Free" late 2008 will promote that dialogue.

It was interesting looking around the room and seeing who was present and not. My limited survey found technology entrepreneurs, consultants striving to help companies find their way in a low-cost consumer-created content world, and publishing industry companies although not the industry leaders.  I hadn't realized that Business Wire, the event host, is a Berkshire Hathaway company.  I'm betting there was no company in the room with more than 1,000 employees. While new low cost participative media technologies are nipping at the heels of larger organizations, their ability to adapt and leverage the possibilities is so much harder.

Not to say of course that some companies, with support from outside agencies are not figuring it out. Today's Financial Times (print p17) carries a story headlined "Gorilla drums up sales for Cadbury" with a photo of their YouTube favorite video captioned: "Sweet music". The story indicates the company reported the Gorilla advertising company "had helped it recover market share in its UK confectionery business." Tellyads voted the ad number 1 in 2007 based on their 185,000 requests since September 2007.

The Youtube video is here with 1,449,759 views, 3216 ratings, 2,442 comments, 4 honors 5 links and favorited 7,824 times. Sites are linkng to the Youtube ad and there are a string of remixes.

Of course the FT Cadbury Schweppe's story goes onto mention other forces at work challenging the company to change including an oil funds backed activist investor and rising commodity prices.

No doubt leveraging and adapting to new low cost participative media technologies is just one dimension to making an organization 21st Century sustainable.  Much more challenging is changing organizational structures and business models that demands serious heavy lifting and will.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Yale Symposium on Reputation Economies 20071208

      Yale Law School Reputation Economies Symposium organizers are congratulated on a stellar event that assembled leading thought leaders on an array of legal aspects from privacy to trademark and copyright laws, and more. The speaker and panels links give a taste of the day.  The position papers (available through the panels link) make interesting reading.

       While each session provided interesting nuggets the following stood out for me:

1. Professor Beth Noveck, Director, Institute for Information Law and Policy NYLS addressing the issue of who owns an online reputation? 

        Context was the case of eBay removing a member's profile and reputation rankings built over 8 years. The member was selling an Avatar that Sony claimed violated their copyright/trademark violation.

         Professor Noveck's position paper argues reputations are not individually owned:

"This requires, first, that we recognize that in on-line settings reputation is not the creation– and hence not the exclusive property – of the individual who is being rated nor of the publisher who supplies the tools for reputation-creation. Rather, it is the community in a social network that creates reputation.* My eBay score is the collective product of the members who contributed to that reputation.

The group should have a voice in how that reputation is treated and the legal treatment of reputation should recognize the community, not the individual and not the technological intermediary, as the rightful “owner” of reputation."

2  Alessandro Acquisti, Assistant Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon, School of Public Policy and Management

       This presentation addressed "Searching for Privacy and Looking for Fame: Thoughts on (Bad) Reputations, Online Social Networks, and Behavioral Economics". It added interesting dimensions to the Facebook Groups in Business Study peers and I are conducting.

3. John Clippinger, Senior Fellow Berkman Center for Internet & Society at The Harvard Law School       

    Clippinger directs the Higgins Project, "a program on open security and digital identity that gives people control over their personal information". He is the author of A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity, Perseus, Public Affairs, 2007.

His position paper argues:

"What is important about the example of reputation systems in biology for human based reputations – off line and online – is that they are constantly evolving and that the locus of control is with the individual, at the edge of the network.  Although there are aggregation or “mashups” of individual entities resulting in social networks that take on their own identities and reputations, the viability of these aggregated networks is dependent upon the persistence and stability of the individual entities." ~  John Clippinger

A couple of take-aways

i.  The array of issues and early days in evolution of reputation economies.

     It is clearly early days in understanding how reputation economies work and the legal aspects.  On this though I have to respectfully question Facebook advisor and retired Federal Trade Commission member Mozelle Thompson's observation about Facebook confronting legal issues at the edge.

      I suspect my PRODIGY alumni colleagues who were lawyers deeply involved in translating existing laws into day-to-day practice two decades ago, and influencing early legislation regarding online services, may argue significant foundations have been laid.

ii.  I will never count technology company behemoths IBM and Microsoft out.

Both were present revealing their constant attention to the 'edge" and research commitments

      IBM was represented on the last panel of the day by Bob Sutor, Vice President Open Source and Standards, Chairman of the IBM internal Corporate Standards Advisory Committee and the Open Source Steering Committee.
His speaker description indicates he is:

".. the executive responsible for driving and executing the cross-company business and technical strategy for open standards and open source as they relate to software, hardware, services, vertical industries, and emerging markets. In particular, helps move IBM from its traditional technical and intellectual property approach to one where business exploitation of standards and open source for greater customer value is paramount*, especially in vertical industries and emerging markets."

    Microsoft was the event sponsor and represented by Microsoft computer science PhD. and Senior Researcher Darko Kirovski  whose speaker bio reveals his interests and accomplishments as:

" Web services including reputation networks, reliable computing, system security, multimedia processing, and embedded system design*. He has received the 1999 Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship, the 2000 ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference Graduate Scholarship, the 2001 ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation, and best paper awards at the ACM Multimedia 2002 and the IEEE MMSP 2006. He has authored more than 100 journal and conference papers and filed more than 40 patents."

While Saturday's rich conversations focused on the legal dimensions of reputation economies, for me it is the interaction between technology driving change, human behavior, and the legal system striving to adapt that is really interesting.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

  * My highlighting   

CNBC: Chime-ing In- The New Silk Road

       Recently blogging colleague Victoria Axelrod and I had the opportunity to contribute to the Transorganizational Collaboration chapter of the Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook lead by Jeana Wirtenberg, Fairleigh Dickinson University. (The book publishes end 2008)

My contribution begins:

"Like collaboration and stakeholder engagement from the previous section, understanding that value is created through human networks and interactions is also not new. The ancient Silk Road, in enabling the flow of not just goods, but ideas and culture too, from China through Asia to the Mediterranean Sea, revealed how."

Hence UC Irvine professor, Peter Navarro speaking on CNBC today about "CHIME-ing In" and the "New Silk Road" caught my attention.

("CHIME" abbreviates CHINA and MIDDLE EAST.)

The video is available at CNBC.com but here are some highlights to encourage your listening and thinking about adapting your organization in this always changing business environment:

"Basic realignment of the world economy"

"87,000 miles new roads being built on the new Silk Road"

"1/4th world's circumference"

     My book chapter contribution includes a quote from  Chris Meyer, Chief Executive Monitor Networks, InnoCentive Advisory Board Member and well known author of books including Blur, Future Wealth, or It's Alive (all co-authored with Stan Davis), of which Blur, The Speed of Change in a Connected Economy is best known.

"Successful organizations build expertise, which becomes an asset--until it's a liability. As the rate of innovation accelerates, established capabilities obsolesce more quickly, and the need for skills new to the organization becomes continual. It increases corporate agility to minimize the investment in permanent human capital and access a broad universe of people to make up the difference--it also keeps the in-house staff fresh and on their toes."

~ Chris Meyer

Helpful advice on a day when we are reminded that connectedness and speed of change cannot be ignored.

~ Jenny Ambrozek