Video: How Open Business is shaping the 21st Century Org

If you couldn't make it in person, and were tied up while it was broadcast, yesterday's panel 'Open Business - 21st Century Organisations' is now archived and ready to watch at your leisure.
I do a short intro and then fire the questions at a stellar line-up:

Mark Earls (Author of  Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature, I'll Have What She's Having, and Welcome to the Creative Age – Bananas, Business and the Death of Marketing). Mark is also winner of an Emerald Insights Award and a significant contributor to the chapter on Purpose in The 10 Principles of Open Business,
Andrew Hill: Associate Editor and Management Editor of the Financial Times.
Dave Coplin (Author of business bestseller “Business Reimagined: Why work isn’t working and what you can do about it” also joins us. He is Chief Envisioning Officer at Microsoft & The Envisioners).
Chris Hirst, CEO of Grey (London) Since his appointment as CEO in Jan 2010 Grey London has been the fastest growing large agency in London driven through significant new business success, strong organic growth and acquisition. Grey (London)'s success is built on Open Culture.
Dorothy Mead (Commerce innovator. Head of Marketing at Blur Group)



I've also been urging people to take a look at the result of latest research commissioned by The Social Partners (where I work). The video below has founder Ivan Palmer taking us through them.
Highly recommended particularly if you're ready to start making your social marketing something ROI can really be comfortable with.

Purpose: Stop talking, start acting - do good.

If you are trying to understand Purpose (as best articulated by Mark Earls) and the role of Social Objects in that (very much at the heart of my insistance on 'Make Interesting Things For People To Do Together' as core to social media [all?] strategy) you can't miss this from Hugh.

"Purpose-Ideas are articulated via Social Objects, not Messages."

Hugh reminds us that the Why of a business (its purpose) can't simply be expressed in messages. It has to be expressed in actions.

As he puts it beautifully:

"Social Gestures beget Social Objects".

Quite.

It's something I talk about a lot as we organise around the Purpose (our why) that drives Brando-Digital (the story so far in five slides, below). What stuff do we do that is more than skin deep? How will we live our purpose?

Brando Digital: What we do

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: media digital)

Perhaps there's a call to action in all this for those who believe in the power of the network and the dominance of communities (and I know I ain't the only one...).

Maybe, if you aren't already, consider taking your love of the social offline?

Do something for your community in the real world. Pledge away (by posting a comment) below. If five people post a pledge, I'll join in and share what I'll be doing and have been doing.

I'd rather do it that way because then I'll know the community of loosely connected nodes that make up this blog DO care. And it makes me sound a bit less like ' I-do-a-lotta-work-for-charidee', mate.'

One thing I know all of us who join in will share is a sense of community.

And it is a sense that is more than skin deep.

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Connecting the dots. Creating change

Take this (via Mark Earls)

"What can we do, what do we need to do, to improve our differentiation?”

And add this. (via Neil Perkin)

"Everyone sat inside... organisations has the leverage to transform the model of the business they are in. When they try, the temptation is for the business to wrap such ideas in short-term ROI, judge it by existing rules, implement it through an existing structure, make it fit an existing process. You don't manage innovation. You need to get the organisation, with all that process, all that hierarchy, all those assumptions, out of the way

Sprinkle in some of this. (Via Chris Carfi)

"There is a transformational thought, a "transforming idea," and a point at which the group "gets it" and starts to gel in the new world."

And... do not relax.

Listening to Tribes: The need to lead

Book cover via Amazon

"Work is too time consuming to be dull"

I discovered (via Todd Sampson on twitter) a free download of Seth Godin's new book Tribes (pre-order it for £8.57 here).

You'll find the free audible download here (hint; say you're from the US even if you aren't when you register).

It's also available on itunes for 99p!

Seth talks about Tribes needing leaders, and all of us needing to belong. There is much of Mark Earls' Herd in this and much of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and even echoes of my own thinking about Communities of Purpose and the adhoc nature of group forming and who gets to be famous/a leader within each, as Seth would describe them, tribe.

But Seth's usp is his call to action. Tribes is a clarion call to the heretics - those of us who see the need for change. He demands that you take the initiative and make it happen.
He calls the heretics, our leaders and says that the technological tools available to us today make it easier than ever to effect change, to become a leader, if YOU take the initiative.
It's an energising message. Don't just pontificate; activate. Blogs, email and social networks give you the tools to not only to organise but to lead.

He demands YOU start your own movement. And he fears that people like you and I (we are the heretics, right?) are in short supply but therefore of the highest value.
Seth's message is writ through with the sense that this change to a purpose and passion driven mode of production is good (and, for the record, he ain't wrong there). Hence the repeated message that we need YOU.

It's ok to follow. But if you want to and need to lead then you can and you should, because it's never been easier, he says.

Seth has often talked about how everyone is a marketer now (much like my own claims that we are all publishers and advertisers now).
Tribes take this a step further. Not only are we now all marketers (publishers/advertisers) but everyone is a leader now.
Tribes offer something to believe in (again, echoes of Mark Earls' purpose idea). We heretics have visions that function as emotive drivers of action - action intended to change the status quo.

How does that fit in the factory-style process pipe of traditional business? Not so well, I'm guessing...

The second big theme of Tribes is that the individual has more power than ever. Good people with ideas that matter are now able to step forward with the power to turn things upside down. And he keeps on insisting that they should.

You are not a 'sheepwalker'.

So what are you the heretic about? Where are you ready to lead?

And why aren't you doing it already?

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Best Practice in Social Media? Best practice being human

The estimable Neil Perkin just tagged me as part of a 'Best Practice in Social Media' meme.
Trouble is Neil has said much of what I would have.

Actually, that's not a problem - it's a great thing that so many of us are converging around similar conclusions: Seth Godin, David Armano, Mark Earls, Jackie Danicki, Alan Moore, Euan Semple and seminally Doc Searls and the rest of the Cluetrain gang, to name but a few...

So yes I'll agree with Neil, once again, that human interactions are critical. (Image by dotbenjamin via flickr)

They are exemplified in notions such as P2PR, Lean-Too Marketing, The Intention Economy (which Doc was referring to more than two years ago, so I'm a late comer on that!) and summed up as best as I know how in this slidedeck:

Adapting Brands To The Networked World

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: internet network)

If you want a case study; try this. The slidedeck above also refers to some great examples of the use of social media.

Quick guide? Well I wrote this for 'how to blog'. Seems much of it is appropriate to all social media.


Time to tag: I nominate: Neville, Christopher, David, Mark and Jonathan
Dan was already tagged by Neil! This meme was started by Mitch.

Seth Godin joins the call for human interaction

Fantastic. Seth Godin says what David Armano, Mark Earls, Jackie Danicki and myself have been banging on about for not a little while.

(Seth Godin, the first law of mass media)

One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. The pronoun morphs from "you" to "me" to "us" to "the corporation" ...

The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions.

The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win. Image by Steam Talks via flickr

It's that last line that should be getting your action hands twitching.

• Here's what you should do.
• Here's how you can think about it.

I was not looking for Linda, Linda found me...

Delicious serendipity, the cocaine of discovery.

I was taking tea with Herd author Mark Earls in Camden on Friday (yes, we are in England, folks) when Mark spotted someone he knows. He called out and they had a brief conversation.
Turns out it was Pat Kane, lead singer of 80s pop sensation (I think that's the right phrase pop pickers!) Hue and Cry.
The delicious discovery? Pat is rather more than an ex-pop star. He, I discovered thanks to Mark, is a brilliant thinker and the author of the Play Ethic.

A quote from the blurb:

"The Play Ethic shows how play is fundamental to both society and to the individual, and how the work ethic that has dominated the last three centuries is ill-equipped to deal with the modern world."

Not a million miles from Stowe's high valuation of playfulness that he's been describing recently here at Reboot and here at WidgetWebExpo.

My takeaway so far (and I'm off to order The Play Ethic, by the way) is that people enjoy changing things, taking the mickey out of things, passing things around, playing with ideas, tools etc with a sense of joy. Being 'business serious' can be quite enough to kill ideas.

The gladiatorial my-idea-is-bigger-than-your-idea stuff that goes on in too many meetings is a fight to the death. The surviving idea doesn't come through better - it comes through with bits chopped off and toughened up so much that its now harder than ever to get it to trust a friendly hand when it reaches out (to collaborate, build on, share, co-create).

If the ideas were played with rather than fought over we'd find ways of making the game better, together. And this of course applies to the better digital tool sets groups are using to form with.

I like this very much. At least, I like the direction this chance encounter has prodded me in.

I was not looking for Linda, Linda found me? It's a Hue and Cry lyric. And a great description of how the Play Ethic discovered me...