Managing Your Online Communications
One of our clients told us three years ago that they had not previously made a serious investment in their online presence because the revenues from it had been “only a few percent” of their total. That percent now stands at 4%. It represents a £1.3bn business and is growing 20% per annum.
We did a calculation for another client in 2008: by 2013, we told them, their online revenues – which had been 5% of their total five years prior – would exceed their traditional revenues. Yes – more online than offline.
The millions of people who use the internet each day represent powerful and fast-growing markets. While still insignificant for some companies, the next five years will see online activity make a significant contribution to revenues for many of the largest firms. The internet is also providing ways to slash costs too – from recruitment costs to brochure printing and media advertising.
But the online world poses threats. There is an element of it being uncontrollable and unproven. It requires a different approach – Firms need to react and respond in a way to which they are not geared. There is an immediacy and a risk of knee-jerk reactions. Information is harder to control, copyright harder to protect. And customers now complain out loud online and expect to be heard and recognized online.
We recommend that every firm thinking about its “online communications strategy” collects key online resources together in one place at the head office, and establish an “Online Control Centre” or “Social Media Hub”. From here, the company can get to grips with its online presence: monitoring, participating, tracking, adapting and building business.
We called this place the “TwitterRoom” in March 2010 and the name stuck, though it is about much more than Twitter. Twitter has become the language of social media. The Tweet is the currency of commentary online. Facebook and LinkedIn, the photo sites, YouTube and the video sites, most bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious, almost every blog, the new emerging location-based review and check-in mobile apps, all now communicate with each other using Tweets. When a blog post is made, a Tweet is automatically generated. When a video is uploaded – a Tweet. When a recommendation is shared – it’s using Tweets.
This document contains recent thinking and ideas from Open-First on how we can help you manage your online communications online culture and values and even the online business itself.
Engaging SXSW for Alcatel-Lucent
As a part of our continuing strategy for helping the Alcatel-Lucent Developer program engage with carriers, enterprises and developers, the Open-First team developed, implemented and managed a premium conference lounge at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin Texas (SXSWi).
Called the ElevenAPI Lounge, the theme was a tongue-in-cheek reference to 1984 music “mockumentary” This is Spinal Tap in which the character Nigel Tufnel explains that unlike standard amplifiers which range in volume from 1-10, his “go up to eleven.”
An engagement strategy that we first executed for Alcatel-Lucent at Mobile World Congress of asking people to contribute to an “idea wall” was further explored at SXSW, adding the notion of a timeline to indicate when contributors thought that their idea might come to fruition. The result was a strikingly beautiful signboard (which is said to now hang in a senior Alcatel-Lucent executive’s office…)
Featuring graphic facilitation sessions on the future of app development by the wonderful Kelvy Bird, daily prizes for the ALU idea wall and App Idol pitching contest, comfortable seating to recharge and relax and of course happy hour – it became a hub of developer activity and idea creation at SXSW.
This project amply demonstrates a core Open-First principle of market engagement, that organizations must create value and interest for the communities they seek to engage. While we primarily focus on how this happens in digital spaces, often that value and interest will happen in the physical world first and then create a bridge into ongoing online interactions over time.
In this video excerpt Open-First account manager Marissa Root is giving Alcatel-Lucent team member Ross Turk a tour of the room – we hope to see you there next year!
Mobile World Congress
As part of our work in helping Alcatel-Lucent launch their new program for mobile developers, we worked with the terrific folks at Miura Graphic Design to create a booth and experience in the “AppPlanet” hall of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
A team of people from Open-First, Miura, and RFK Architects worked together to create the booth concept, design, and actual build plans.
Alcatel-Lucent employed a local team to implement the vision which came together beautifully on the floor of the convention hall over the last few days:
Building the Open Enterprise
In talking about the Mozilla foundation and their competition with Microsoft to define the future of the web Zak Greant likes to say there is one simple axiom: externalities win.
This is an elegant way to boil down 20 years of hard won lessons from the software industry’s experience with the disruptive phenomenon called open source. To further quote Zak on how Mozilla has competed effectively against Microsoft:
The effect of this externality was to make it so that there were suddenly hundreds of organizations who cared deeply about about the technology stack, who spread the technology stack and who work to contribute small (and large) pieces to it.
Open source was the way in which Mozilla could embrace a community of individuals and organizations who shared a common interest in keeping the web from being dominated or controlled by Microsoft.
Building the open enterprise is about how we help companies take these lessons across all of their business processes — open communications, open data, open design, open innovation, open management, open research, and open support.
The most important thing for companies to learn is to be open. Open-First.
Opening Day for Open-First
The beginning of a new year brings a new start for a group of us from social media consultancy The Conversation Group. Over the past three years as our business has grown and changed we have learned an enormous amount about the revolution underway in our business environment. One important lesson – social is just one part of the transition we are currently seeing in markets today.
Our journey has taken us through a wide variety of large and small companies, B2B and B2C, and many different industries from consumer electronics to software and from telecommunications to construction equipment. By studying the changes underway across such a broad section of business we have been able to detect a deeper underlying theme — a new model for the way business is being organized in the twentieth century.
One of the deep thinkers on this subject is Harvard professor and Berkman center co-director Yochai Benkler whose 2006 book The Wealth of Networks
In his book, Benkler explores how over the past ten years the business of software development has been transformed by something called “open source.” And how the very basis of our market economy is being changed by a shift from competition to collaboration in the production of goods, in particular where a high percentage of the content of those goods comes from information.
The “knowledge economy” instantiated through digital communications, sophisticated collaboration platforms and fed by an increasingly rich set of data and analytical tools will transform every market, far beyond what we have seen so far in software development. We take the name of our new business from the lessons we have learned from open source — that businesses must re-examine every part of their companies and explore how a set of new practices must emerge which are open at their core. Open innovation, open research, open communications, open management, open support…
Our team of experienced business people is growing around the globe and currently work from Palo Alto, San Francisco, New York, London, Cologne and Helsinki. We are engaged directly with the senior management of some of the world’s greatest companies, helping them to understand how these new open business processes will transform the way they create new products, bring them to market, and support their customers in using them. Along the way we also help companies reinvent the way they engage employees, partners, and their customers to create value throughout their marketplaces.
Over the next few years we believe that the companies who will outperform their peers in every industry will be those that embrace these ideas and build the open enterprise.
