|
|
||
| Home | Products | Industries | Blog | News | Company | Login | ||
|
|
||
|
|
From Financial Times, April 23 2007 Master new technology or be ruled by the unruly mob Published: April 23 2007 16:51 | Last updated: April 23 2007 16:51 Who says that elephantine old media can’t learn a few new dance steps every now and again? See what we’ve done for you this week – a bright new look, with this column being pummelled, stretched and contorted into an entirely different shape. Hard-core Web 2.0 types may laugh and accuse us of merely “rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic”. But I say: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. (And, by the way, I’m sure the guy who rearranged the deck-chairs on the Titanic did a perfectly reasonable job. Show some respect.) Business leaders worry about the web. It wasn’t around when they were growing up, or when they were at business school. Most people in senior management positions built their careers in the pre-digital era. The internet economy is a great big “known unknown”, perhaps the scariest of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous epistemological categories. But businesses have woken up to the web’s potential. A survey of US brand marketers carried out last month by online analysts Jupiter Research found that almost half were planning to advertise on so-called “social media” networking sites – MySpace, Bebo, Facebook – this year. Managers are rushing to catch up with the phenomenal growth of blogs and social media, which has left a lot of companies feeling a bit vulnerable. “Brands are completely exposed in social media,” says Simon McDermott, co-founder and chief executive of Attentio, a Brussels-based internet monitoring company that tracks the blogosphere and social networking sites. “It’s inevitable that people are going to talk about you, for good or ill, and they may well have a propensity to write some pretty negative stuff.” It is this fear of what the unruly mob might be saying that led one crisis manager to talk about chief executives “practically hiding under their desks in terror about internet rumours”, in a recent interview with Business Week magazine. The anonymous nature of the web makes it a perfect medium for bullying (or “cyber bullying”). Users are free to post up any comments they like, and then run away. Teachers and other professionals are finding out all about the unpleasant potential of hate-filled chat rooms. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Swales and web guru Tim O’Reilly have now proposed a “blogger code of conduct” to encourage civility on the web. But it is unlikely that angry customers or malevolent protesters will moderate their comments to spare business’s tender feelings. Facing all these pressures, there is a danger that managers – and journalists – will lose all sense of proportion. In July last year Business 2.0 magazine put “You” first in their list of “50 people who matter”. This was followed up by Time magazine, who named “You” as person of the year, with this citation: “For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.” We really do risk disappearing up our own virtual fundament. Of course people – customers – matter. But have business leaders lost so much confidence in themselves, and in their own judgment, that they are prepared to kow-tow to the alleged wisdom of an at times rather hysterical crowd? In his forthcoming book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, California-based Andrew Keen rails at what he sees as the unthinking adoption, by people who should know better, of fashionable Web 2.0 nonsense. “It’s all those c-words,” he says, “citizenship, community, conversation, customers – you actually get less of them. Do the guys from Google [Sergey Brin and Larry Page] blog? What about Apple – the most untransparent, paranoid company you could meet. The really successful businesses just don’t buy into this stuff about ‘transparency’ and ‘authenticity’.” Don’t panic. There is no web-enabled mystery about how to make money in the “new” economy. For a truly invigorating (and wonderfully vituperative) little pep-talk on all this, check out Loren Feldman, a New York-based film-maker, on his website www.1938media.com. Here is his recipe for success: “Make interesting shit that people want to look at and then get people to buy it or advertisers to advertise on it. How’s that? This requires conference after conference after conference?!” New technology, and the new things it makes possible, can be scary. But managers need to master it, not cower down before it or, just as bad, be bamboozled by it. Remember the New Yorker cartoon that showed a group of young computer technicians looking on in awe as their team leader demonstrated the latest fancy piece of kit: “... Of course its most outstanding feature,” the boss told them, “is that it can create the illusion that work is being done.” Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007 --- Contact Information: |
|
