I was sorry not to be able to be at the London Communicators March meetup – Sex and Turkeys.

There’s been a nice follow up in the form of a white paper by SquarePeg on the cultural aspects of mergers and acquisitions.

Download the paper – Cultural Aspects of M&A

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Reading Jay Baer’s recent post about truth and candour, I think he has got a great point.

The RSS-reading public loves a screw-up – an opportunity to poke fun at hubris and pride brought low.  Domino’s is the most recent example of a long list of internet marketing screw-ups.

He says

I never thought I’d see a day when corporations were the most trustworthy and forthright among us, but it draws nigh.

Wow.

The honest corporation is coming… can’t wait.  And yet, a small part of my brain seems to doubt this.  Many people would love to see honesty triumph over evil manipulators but human nature being what it is makes me think that ‘trying it on’ will continue.  It’ll just take a new form.

But taking the moral high ground and thinking positively – I’d like to set a challenge for you.

What is the worst rumour or gossip about your organisation?

I can’t answer this for you.  If you are party to the senior corporate people, policies, strategies and mess-ups that have happened in the past year in your company – you can answer this.

• What is the one thing that has the potential to most embarrass your organisation if it were leaked to the public?
• Which bit of bad news would cause you the most sleepless nights / stress headaches?
• How would you choose to publicly humiliate your employer?
• What could an employee reveal that would make your share price tumble or clients to resign?

The short, easy answer to all of the situations is to not let it happen in the first place.

Quick fixes

Go read about Crisis PR and get some free or professionally paid for advice on how to handle a situation if true but bad news does hit the headlines.

Check employment contracts for privacy and secrecy statement clauses and enforce them if needed.

But in the medium term, surely it’s better to run a clean ship?

What might you choose to do differently if any of the scenarios above came to public light?

Becoming a trustworthy corporation

Firstly, do you want to be a trustworthy corporation?  What are the benefits?

If yes, go and make a list of things to do differently.  Share it internally and make your own subsequent management decisions about what changes to make.

‘Nuff said.

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I am in the thick of working with a client on their case studies and so when two messages arrived within minutes about visual communications it was clear that investigation was needed.
The first was a tweet about “the best slide deck in the world”. A classic @Armano message about a client of his.

Turns out it’s a link to RWW article [btw if you don't subscribe to their RSS, do consider it] about Slideshare’s annual competition to promote their services and show off great examples of its usage. A classic PR tactic, and a good one.

The winner is Healthcare Napkins All by some visual communication specialist, Dan Roam (Back of the Napkin) and Dr Anthony Jones the founder of Next Life Sciences

And it brought to mind the work of Cognac, the second email I received. Tom Ball founded this company and was introduced to me by a mutually helpful friend. He has produced a big picture for one of my former clients (about climate change as it happens).
But I now see that there are a range of Big Pictures – namely express, lite, original and plus.

What a great development of the core service. And the explanatory graphic is, naturally, a great summary. I love the use of colour to show the additional services and deliverables.

And so, if you are thinking of kick-starting your business development – maybe get us in to facilitate the senior team writing the full plan – and use Cognac’s Big Picture as a great tool to communicate it to the whole team, every office. Print it for watercooler areas, email it round the world, hey even send it to key clients.

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I wanted to start this post with a flow diagram t hat resonated with me so much that I immediately sent it to my Mother.  I’ve been doing ‘tech support’ for my family for years, and for Geoff and, and, and.  I expect you’ve been doing it too.

But although funny, truthful and nicely wry, the diagram got me thinking about what web 2.0 really means in real life.  How does it change some of the things we consider to be ‘normal’ now and what will a different future really be like?

There are lots of ways that I forsee
1.    Self-help – go and find it out for yourself
2.    Basic computer skills like editing documents, highlighting, linking
3.    Collaboration skills becoming more important
4.    Blending your private and business life

The cartoon illustrates the self-help trend.  I am marginally better than you at finding stuff online and so you call me to assist your search for a solution.  What’s important about this is not that I try to teach you how to do it yourself, but that I don’t mind that you call me. 

This is a link into the third point.  We will need to un-learn self-direction and move more into collaboration with virtual teams who come together and split apart without formalised enablement. 

The ThinkingPharma team is like this.  They find each other and new skills when their business demands it.

Point two is a possible huge divider between the digitally enabled and those who are cut off from this new world.  This really matters – but isn’t something for today’s post.

The private:public blend is something I personally will have a lot of issue with.  I dislike having to socialise with work and taking my private life into the office is not what I choose to do.  And yet I notice that Facebook has some helpful groups for my work and LinkedIn (which I thought to be business-only) now has a great group for my hobby.

We will all have to un-learn a lot of the habits business has taught us.

Then I read David Armano’s latest slide set about ‘social business by design’. His organisation, Dachis Corp ,  have been working on a management consulting template for enterprise.  They cleverly figured that the only people who will pay top dollar for social media advice are big companies and the only way to get them to do this is using change management or business model improvement.  Both huge consulting gigs.

Way to go, David!

Last week I undertook my first social media training event in which I spent an afternoon with a group of bright people and endeavoured to teach them how to use social media for business development. 

They were all business development professionals so it was a task to explain new ways of working to do the same old job.  Rather like “what web 2.0 will mean for business” as I said earlier.

I learnt a lot from that session.  

And now I feel better informed and ready to work with another company who is interested in teaching themselves, using computer skills and collaboration to work differently in future.

Is that you?

Prio

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Image via Wikipedia

I have been contacted by Emmanuel Moll – an old rowing contact, who is involved with the French movement to get customers to club togehter to buy out the management of the Nabaztag wifi rabbit toy service company.

I was wondering if you could help me with something. I recently started an initiative for the first ever crowd-funded community buy-out of a company (www.SaveNabaztag.com ).

It's a bit of a crazy initative since we are trying to raise 2M€ in 3 weeks.

However this seems to have gathered a lot of interest (160,000 hits from facebook, twitter and online press) and has an underlying political-economic message: the right for entrepreneurs to call onto public funding (i.e. more than 100 people).

(c.f. Techcrunch article: Trampoline jumps the VC ship for crowdfunding and closes a round in a fortnight)

So here's the SaveNabaztag website where you can make a pledge  (€87,000 pledged to date)

Follow Emmanuel on Twitter

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The principles of working remotely are commonplace and many of us have opportunity to take days away from our office desks and work at home or from another location. Nothing much new there.
But what if you could completely redesign your job so that half of your activities were taking place using internet tools?

What do I mean by “internet tools”? well anything from a meeting scheduler like Doodle to a shared database like SugarCRM or Salesforce and collaborative project management like BaseCamp .
I regularly use these tools so that I can now work almost anywhere with little loss of functionality compared with my own desk. The only things I carry around with me are papers [goodness, how last century!]

It feels good. I leave all the backing up and security tools to these online service providers. No need to buy new software each year because when it is released it’s usually already installed on the website and my fee to them includes all these updates, online support and training.

A new mode of working

This phenomenon is called SaaS or “software as a service”. But it’s come to mean far more than just software. It is a new mode of working that releases organisations from having huge in-office servers for hosting networks, software installs and updates and costly security firewalls. Many small and medium sized enterprises now don’t have their own servers. Is this progress? Does it save money and staffing?

Well it seems that Pharma is slowly catching up with the crowd with the first drug rep meeting scheduler tool – all run off the internet. RXVantage has been running a trial in Rhode Island and Massachusetts for the past two years. And it seems to work well.
Drugs reps and medical device salesfolk can schedule meetings online with doctors. It’s led to an increase in efficiency for time-starved doctors and the reps are able to make an appointment without first having to visit the doctor’s practice, sit in the waiting room for 2 hours in order to make the appointment (tell me that wasn’t a waste of time!).

Although I’ve positioned it as a scheduling service the company describes itself as

“The most efficient way for medical providers and pharmaceutical companies to exchange knowledge and ideas that improve patient care.”

How does that sound to you? It’s an ideas exchange…. we give you information in exchange for your time Mr Doctor. Obviously NOT selling.

It has a huge sign-up rate for doctors of over 90% of those invited joining enabling the reps free access to the majority of medics in two states. The doctors can reschedule and rearrange appointments easily online (quick to do between patients rather than having to pick up the phone) and the software advises all parties of the change. It fills a gap in the doctors’ surgery software armoury – they have no proprietary software to handle drug reps visits. It also enables doctors to show when they are available for rep visits… insight that must be worth gold dust to pharma companies.

Why is it an attractive proposition?

The openness of the exchange of value between a drug rep and a doctor is the underpinning principle for this service and is one of the main reasons both parties find it attractive.
There are times in our working lives when we are ready to be “sold” to and different times when we want information or education.

A salesman has to guess when these times are based on little or no information from his targets (even if he has a loyal customer base and data from years of interactions, it’s still guessing much of the time). By taking the cold-calling aspect away from these interactions, RXVantage has created a fabulous exchange of value between these two groups. I tell you when I want information, education, drug samples or just a general catchup and you turn up to my bidding.

One of the key insights that CRM has failed to deliver to many industries is the timing for a particular information exchange. This software service passes power to the doctor community to dictate when, where and how the drug companies can interact with them.

Now that’s a real example of B2B vendor relationship management (VRM) in practice. And the future is slowly developing before our eyes.

Exciting, isn’t it?

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Some of our American friends are getting very bgnt out of shape by Publicis' concealment of the extent of job losses they created across the global empire.

BNET's Jim Edwards posted a shocking article today that announced Publicis CEO Maurice Levy outright lied about the status of layoffs across the French holding company. 

Maurice Levy did come clean with a new version of the truth. and he insists that recovery is just round the corner saying "We are leading new business on a worldwide basis," Levy said. "We have not yet benefited from the impact of new business and we will see that happening from now."

I don't know what he means by 'we are leading new business' – maybe we are doing biz dev?

And so I had a bit of fun tracking round the web and found where they have been keeping track of the layoffs – albeit mainly in US firms.

BNET's holding company layoff stats as of July 30:   

* WPP – up to 7,200    * Omnicom – 3,500    * Interpublic – 3,000    * Publicis – 1,800    * The Nielsen Co. – 1,600    * Aegis – 780

Anyone got stats for UK firms?

I found these articles on Campaign about redundancies.

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  The Clutrain Manifesto was a significant moment in future-gazing for a world that is now very clearly with us.

The authors have re-published the book with some additional chapters by themselves and another luminary, JP .  Which will be great and some added thought-provoking chapters to digest.

What was so great about Cluetrain?  It first foresaw and articulated the concept of the market as a conversation. That is thesis number one.

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

That corporations are made up of people who (shock horror) may disagree.

How do you speak in a human voice? First, you get a life. And corporations just can't do that. Corporations are like Pinocchio. Or Frankenstein. Their noses grow longer at the oddest moments, or they start breaking things for no good reason. They want to be human, but gosh, they're not.  Christopher Locke

and thesis 15 stands out for me today – have we arrived at the point of 'a few more years'?

In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

For me what happens next is the really interesting part.  Here's what I think….

1. the rise of the power of the consumer to inform, bargain, leverage and enthuse
2. corporate honesty is tested and changes many organisations
3. Reversal of the advertising-led world of marketing and sales to networked conversations
4. The end of corporate databases and centralised record-keeping.  Only record-verification needs to be centralised
5. B2B engagement and prospect research is easier and cheaper and the opportunities to find good new business partners and clients quickly and cheaply grow massively
6. Shifting budgets from OTL to direct and social media
7. The up-skilling of call centres from help-desks to teams of helpful folk who can get things done, sell more product and work withing the network to facilitate the coompany goals

thanks to David Cushman for the link.

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I am off to Cass Business School in the City on Friday night for a 'big ideas' thinking session.   [@Dougald you must come along...]

Using the we20 forma t, the group will be trying to 

talk about the issues and come up with some potential answers. Founders of the we20 project will be on hand to introduce the event and generally help out.

Teams can be made up of friends and/or be representative of a specific company or brand. All ideas can then be put forward to the we20 website, which has a direct link with decision makers at the G20 summit in London.

So, enough of that moaning into the early hours at your Soho members' club about how our world leaders don’t have a clue. Now’s your chance to actually tell them! As an added bonus, the name of your company or product may well be seen by millions of people.

This theme has been buzzing around for a while – I met up with Steven Waddington recently and he's just put a great blog post about 'thinking positive' in the recession . Actually I really like the title "Bollocks to Denial and Despair!"

And so would you all help me think up some great ideas that will help people in the creative industries through these difficult times?

My list starts with

1. New business models – take products to market on a risk and reward basis (like bike sharing, The Anomaly business model and Lauren Luke ) 
2. Low cost marketing ideas – Tim Reid has a list
3. Social media tools that can support your existing marketing strategy and tactics
4. Creating opportunities for new business to happen – there will be loads of new ones developing as time goes on
5. I still think there's a role for CRM – the tools are cheap and freely available and all it takes is some strong thinking about your differentiation by need to really stand out
6. And Opensource for Agencies…. a topic close to my heart… DM me if you want to know more about how to re-use and publish your failed pitch ideas and see the benefits flowing back to your agency.
7. Umair Haque's Manifesto for Smart Growth – I particularly like point 2 "Connections not transactions" which echo the motivation behind Amplfied 09 the network of networks.
8. The Sirolli Institute has a economic development methodology that I've long admired since my days with the Aga Khan Rural Support Project in Gilgit – their bottom-up development method (enterprise facilitation) involves working with people who want to start a business and mentoring them through the process on a totally confidential basis. Rochdale Council in the UK i s using it right now and I think it's a great way for an economy to kick-start itself.

Now over to yo'all [gotta stop that Texas thang goin' on in my mind!]

[later... keep thinking up new ones - just added 6 and 7.... and later again number 8.]

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I will be speaking at Amplified 08 a "Network of Networks" event to bring together the creative thinking around several business networking events.

This is a ground-breaking event for business in the UK.  I have had the pleasure of being at a couple of 'seminal moments' when great things started (Social Media Cafe planning event in the Methodist Central Hall; Peppers and Rogers' methodology development; Pembridge investment strategy planning).  Frequently I haven't realised at the time how important they were to become.

This is one of those moments. 

Amplified08 will be one of the thought-leaders for this decade about new ways of doing business and harnessing the strength of our networks.

And I am very honoured to have been asked to chair a session and being described as a 'network guide'. Plus I've volunteered for a group about using social media for business development 'cos that's what I do.

Have a browse around the Wiki and read the newsletter and topic suggestions to find out more.

Conference Mantra:

What Works? What Doesn't? What Next?

• Create a network of networks which can amplify the power and reach of both our personal networks and the various UK social media, technology production and mobile media networking meetups that we regularly attend
• Come together to share our ideas and projects, to discover new ways of working together, and to break through the generation of silos among social media communities
• Coordinate the common themes from our various member networks to advance the causes that are important to the social media and technology scene in the UK
• Capture the collective intelligence from this first event to build our knowledge base and provide a more focused starting point for the next event in February
• Plan ahead for collaborative projects at the next event and beyond
• Work towards creating a major Network of Networks event targetted for 2010, working with NESTA that will run in conjunction with their own Innovation Edge conference.   We’re building towards 4,000 attendees that year, and a conference that will have the flavour of a "TED for Europe" [TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.]

Style:

Barcamp style organization
Unconference approachEverybody contributes
Everybody tweets
Live video streaming of each roomLive blogging, photo and video sharing
Encourage remote participation from anywhere in the World

 

 I love the ambition of creating a "TED" for Europe.  

And please, get involved yourself.

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