"In These Tough Economic Times" - Words that are starting to grind on my nerves

I don't know about you but it seems almost every advertisement has picked up on the tag line in the title of this article. Yes the economy has been hit by the collapse of a financial bubble built on worthless paper. Yes our governments in Canada and the United States have selectively decided to bail out some car manufacturers to save jobs while allowing jobs at dealers to disappear with little thought of a bail out for them. We have seen a contraction in trade, a drop in the value of homes, foreclosure crises for thousands of families, and many other business failures. All of this is a reflection of our capitalist system where risk is rewarded and failure is not.

So having described the "tough economic times" for the last time in this article, I would like to talk about new business models that can push us in a different direction. North America is going through a revolution. Manufacturing used to account for a large number of jobs on this continent. Not so much anymore. I remember a very wise boss of mine, Dave Ungerer, back in the late 1970s who told me that the information economy is North America's future. He was right, just a little prescient. At the time the Internet didn't exist. Computer networks were mainframe and midrange computer systems costing millions of dollars. The home computer was an Apple II, a Sinclair, or a TRS-80. If you had 64 kilobytes of RAM you were state of the art.

Today we look back at these technologies from a Mount Everest of technical advances, atop a worldwide, ubiquitous network we call the web, tying together billions of computers together with collective computing power that would have boggled the minds of those of us in the 1970s. Our way of doing business has been altered dramatically. We rely on email, probably the killer computing application of all time. We Google rather than go to the library. We more and more watch TV online. Wireline phone calls have been replaced by wireless cell technology. We chat. We twitter.

Has our collective business mindset altered with the onset of a worldwide communication network? Have we changed our business behaviours to match the collaborative power of all of this technology? The tools are in place for collective solutions, mining individuality, sharing expertise, and building the new economy. This is the silver lining of these times.

Collective Solutions

By collective don't think communism, collective farms and that ilk. Collective solutions are best represented today by natural collaboration in the form of wikis and other web tools. Collective solutions refers to collective wisdom. Google Search is a collective solution. Wolfram Alpha is the latest new knowledge answering tool to arrive on the web.

Collective wisdom can be captured in a social network designed with that purpose. Public social network sites like LinkedIn, Xing, BizNik and Partnerpedia are designed to foster networking and collaboration. Behind the firewall private social networks such as those created by Enable Consultants, a client of mine, are ideal collective knowledge gathering and sharing tools. For example, Recess, an academic social network encourages students to interact on homework assignments, teachers to meet in virtual lounges to blog, comment and discuss best practices, and mentors to share their knowledge and provide coaching to students.

Mining Individuality

What CEOs and Presidents of corporations don't know about the people they have hired to make their businesses successful is legion. People are more than their job titles. They bring hidden skills to work each day, skills that can be used to improve the business, foster camaraderie among employees, and extend the business into new areas that can lead to revenue growth. But if CEOs cannot mine the skills of their workers then their will be no gold to share.

Some companies are using public social networks to foster better understanding of their staff. Others are building private social networks with employee pages that let them share their interests outside of work including hobbies, photos, music they like and so on. I remember when I got out of school, the first company I worked for had annual meetings in Florida. In the first few years, there was always a talent show night where employees did skits, standup comedy, played instruments, jammed together and shared a bit of who they were beyond their workselves. After a few years the company stopped sponsoring these evenings. What a loss that was.

Deploying private social networks can do much more than those singular talent show nights that I experienced back then. Individual skills and interests can become valuable corporate assets.

Sharing Expertise

In the past few weeks I have been approached by an entrepreneur who has been a consultant for many years, just like me. His skills are complimentary. His skills combined with my skills creates a higher value proposition when I go calling on a prospective client. I am sure these types of meetings are happening everywhere these days. In marketing we always talk about the importance of networking. We network with former business associates over lunch. We go to association talks and meetings a few times a year. We join organizations and clubs.

The web, however, is the ultimate virtual network and sharing expertise is as simple as creating collaborative social networks where consultants can share their knowledge, both free and fee for service, and individuals and businesses seeking answers can find the experts they seek. Such collaborative social networks represent a new paradigm, a guerilla marketing challenge for traditional management consulting firms, and the coming wave.

I state this with absolute certainty because a lot of very bright people in the last few months have watched their gold-watch careers vanish as businesses have layed off them by the thousands. Many of these individuals are turning to self employment because they are finding job prospects to be slim. These individuals have thousands of years of collective expertise to share. The web medium is there for them to seize the opportunity and create a new expertise sharing model that generates revenue individually and collectively.

Knowledge Sharing: How Social Networking is Changing the Face of Business

Here's an interesting quote. Author Paul Gillin states in an article that appeared in the April 6, 2009 edition of eWeek,

"Formerly, people were forced to give up their knowledge, but with social networks, people willingly give up their knowledge. the great business opportunity is behind the firewall because simple tools can be used to replace more complicated collaboration tools."

Wow! The implications in these two sentences are enormous. It represents a paradigm shift for business people. Instead of an individual employee keeping information and knowledge close to the vest, for purposes of leaping over fellow employees in the race to the top, that employee is now rewarded for spreading the knowledge wealth.

What's causing the shift? Social networking has moved from being a public forum to a private business forum, a behind the firewall phenomenon that encourages new business behaviours among employees, between employees and customers, and between employees and suppliers. Behind the firewall social networking is seen as an effective way of improving overall performance. Gartner sees the growth of this market reaching over $1 billion by 2012. Forrester predicts $1.5 billion in the same time period compared to $384 million in 2008. I think they are underestimating the market growth because Microsoft and IBM, with their SharePoint and QuickR platforms are not only building internal social networks to link their employees, they are also selling these solutions to customers around the world. And when these two giants of the industry are involved it is a pretty good indicator of where the market is going.

They are not the only ones playing in this new space. Google has created Open Social, a set of programming standards that lets any developer create applications to run on a wide range of social networking platforms.

Sabre (the travel reservation system that came out of American Airlines) has developed Cubeless, a private business network that connects its telecommuting employees around the world. Pose a question on this site and a relevance engine makes a decision on who should see it within the social network. The right answer usually comes back within an hour. That's knowledge sharing at its best.

Enable Consultants, a small Ontario company, has created 3 flavors of private social networks, a school centred application, called Recess, a not-for-profit application called Communitirooms, and a private business network called Workingrooms. Recess has been deployed in primary and middle schools as a safe social networking site for young people to use as an extension of their "bricks & mortar" classrooms.

Some vendors like Worklight are creating applications that overlay public social networks such as Facebook. WorkBook is the application and it allows an employee to pull other Facebook members behind the firewall for collaboration. Authentication is handled by the existing business security setup.

Think about the impact on sales teams as knowledge sharing and problem solving become paradigms for measuring performance success. Will companies start providing bonuses and compensation to reflect this new behaviour? I remember when I was working for a large software developer some years ago that as part of a widely distributed sales team focused on a telecommunications client, I decided to publish a newsletter. That monthly newsletter shared knowledge internally within my company and also went out to thousands of employees of my client. The knowledge sharing led to sales group collaboration, joint strategies in penetrating the account, and finally to the biggest one time sale in the history of the company. That was before behind the firewall social networking.

Imagine what we can do today. Imagine what we will be able to do tomorrow. In 2009, the year of "Yes we can," expect social networks to be instruments of change in the way business operates.