Threading Some Trends Together
This post by Shel Israel and this post by Steve Rubel bear reading and examining. There’s something afoot, and it deals with several pieces of economic pie shifting at the same time. In fact, it’s a little strange that Richard Florida’s latest book, Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, is so timely. For a little more trend connection, throw in a little bit of Seth Godin from May (this has stuck with me since then).
If you are an employer, think on this:
Connectivity is Everywhere
It costs you more money to house a work staff than it does to manage them remotely. Cost per cubicle, per in-house service, per enterprise service license. Your network bandwidth costs, your power and cooling costs, the things you have to do to keep people comfortable in an office space, are all worth reconsidering.
Afraid of how they’ll work?
Shift measurements from “being there” to “what you’ve done.” Look for deliverables that are based on pieces of information, goals met, business moved forward.
I’m at a Barnes&Noble on wifi. For $39.99 a month, I could be on Verizon EVDO and writing this by the lake where I took my daughter swimming. I can work ANYWHERE there’s a signal. So can a lot of us. In fact, I do my job much better at a remove (plus, it saves 4 hours of driving, two each way, at $66 a tank of gas twice or more a week).
The Loosely Joined Employee
The age of half-owned brands is upon us. Years ago, it was only Robert Scoble. We watched in awe as he put a whole new face on Microsoft. He then shifted over to PodTech, and it didn’t feel so strange. Is it strange at FastCompany? Kind of. Look at their latest print issue and see how many times they mention one employee, and not the boss.
Charlene Li leaving Forrester is actual news to a lot of us in this space. Why? Because probably five years ago, everyone would clamor to get IN to Forrester. (And by the way, I think it’s a great company, with good people, and all that. That’s not my point.)
But is Jeremiah Owyang about Forrester, or is he a half-owned brand that Forrester can claim for the time being?
As employers, it’s a strange situation. I cause a bit of this grief for my friends and employers at CrossTech Media for sure. Because I’m “me” quite up front, but still functioning as their partner, employee, and representative, and because I’m non-traditional and difficult and a Mac user, an stuff like that. And yet, will I become more of the norm? Will there be more businesses trying to loosely couple with personal brands while building corporate brand equity? I think so. And this doesn’t reflect on employer-employee relations. It just seems to be a shift for some classes of knowledge worker.
How Where Matters
Seth Godin’s post about conferences and workplaces strikes home doubly for me. I’m partly in the conference business. It’s my duty to convince thousands of people that I’ve got great speakers, engaging exhibitors, and passionate attendees for them to meet.
Shel Israel’s post says that more businesses will use social media tools for economical reasons, for one:
Businesses will increasingly use social media to get closer with customers. This, of course, is already happening and happening at a pretty fast rate. But I think the trend is about to accelerate. Because it is getting too expensive and inconvenient to meet face-to-face in the real world, there will be more efforts to bring the conversation to the next best place, in the form of virtual communities.
Steve Rubel says:
Digital Nomads are growing in numbers and they will create ripples. This trend will accelerate use of Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace. Over time, this may slow the efficacy of email marketing and accelerate the reliance on social media engagement.
However, it goes deeper than that. If you don’t allow your employees to become nomadic, they may do so and even compete against you in the process.
Where Will This Go?
In the very near term, I think a few things happen. I think that employers are definitely in a spot where they might have to consider how their employees work. On one side, the management challenges are huge. It’s not easy to shift around leadership and management styles. On the other hand, there are cost savings to be had, a shift in flexibility that might provide some hidden rewards. (Flex hours did this for a lot of companies. Suddenly, they had what amounted to shift workers without having to pay a premium).
I also think that the idea of employees-as-brands-as-employees will stir more bees in the shorter term, but might start to make more sense as we get more comfortable with that lifestyle. Businesses are primarily organized in 1950s-era style right now. If we can adapt measurements and management style, I believe the downstream benefits are going to outweigh the interim headaches. Will all employees at all businesses feel these changes? No. And several employees will still have to be hands on and nearby. (By the way, lots of people can’t manage themselves very well, and can’t work remotely because they’re easily distracted.)
Fuel costs are rising. Bandwidth is everywhere. Jobs are shifting into knowledge delivery and networked communities more than face-to-face affairs.
It sure makes for a complex picture, but I don’t know that we’re going to stop it.
What do you say? Could you work remotely? Do you? What has the price of fuel done for you? What motivates you to attend a face to face event these days? Will you be changing your conference going trends for the rest of the year and 2009?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
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Threading the Social Needle
One thing I try to do often is connect with people across all my various social networks. If you’re following me on Twitter, I invite you to add me at LinkedIn. Likewise, if you’re a reader and contributor to this blog’s community, I invite you to join me at those other two places. If you’re reading the blog, but not yet getting the newsletter, which is totally different, I invite you to get that. If we’re not Facebook friends, add me there. It’s all part of a concerted effort. The goal? Threading the social needle.
Networks Loose and Taut
Imagine you’re looking for a job. Where do you start? What do you need to know? I’ll give you a hint: the first letter is “p” and the last few letters are “eople.” I have spent time and effort building a robust social network across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, this blog, and beyond, because it’s my goal to be helpful in as many ways possible. It’s how you were able to help me send a woman to college in under 2 hours. It’s how I help friends find work, get projects, or just connect with like-minded souls.
That doesn’t happen on the fly. Jeremiah covers this very well. Networks are the lifeblood of this new human computer we’re building. You want the network connections to be there ahead of when you need them. And here’s where we get a little more human still.
Be Human About It
Connect with people from the mindset of wanting to be helpful to THEM. Learn what you can do to be useful FAR before you ask them for anything. And do this because you care, not because it’s a strategy, not for some long flung business project. Do it because being a good human matters to you. If you do this, and I mean it, no faking, it will become a very powerful thing. People remember your efforts to be helpful. They remember all the ways in which you do good things for them. And it never has to matter a lick, except sometimes it does.
How this SHOULD Work
In the future, this will be a lot more dynamic. When I show up at a social network, it will ping my profile server, will ask me which personae of mine to expose, and then see which connections I have from other networks that have similar credentials, and offer connections without me thinking much about it. I’ll be able to write metadata above every one of these contacts, very visual stuff, that will allow me on the fly to draw little lines between one person and another few people, showing VISUALLY the networks of people that I’ve met, and how they might relate.
With this information, I’ll be able to pluck threads quickly, and know that someone who has a PHP need is connected through me to someone who’s a PHP expert. I’ll be able to see my network by proximity, by home base, by corporation, without much fuss. I will be able to apply endless filters so that I can squint into the tapestry and find the exact right two people to work with me on a project.
But until then, while it doesn’t work that way, I’m building my own variations on the theme and threading the needle by hand.
If you’d like to connect with me on various social networks, here’s a short list:
- LinkedIn - my email linkedin at chrisbrogan dot com.
- Flickr (photo sharing)
- My newsletter (different than the blog)
Pretty much every where else, I’m also “chrisbrogan.” Feel free to connect.
What do you think? Where should this all reside? What’s the best place to put all this kind of information, and how else might we want to use it in flexible ways?
Photo credit, Twenty Questions
The Importance of Risk
I was speaking with a really interesting CEO this morning after speaking at the North Shore Technology Council panel on social networks and their impact on business. This man turned companies around for a living. Complex work, if you think about it. One thing he said really struck me, and has resonated all morning.
There was a company he was once evaluating, and he mentioned that they had taken almost ZERO risk. My immediate thought was that he probably saw this as a good thing. Instead, he said, “If you don’t take risks, you can’t grow.” Wow! He knew MY answer, instead of what I thought he would say.
Risk is Important
Hours after that conversation, I spoke to a young professional who wanted to do something meaningful with his time and effort. I asked him whether he had a “lab” where he could test out potential ideas. At first, it sounded really foreign, but when I told him that most of what I’ve done in life came from trial and error, he started to see where I was going.
If you don’t try new things, you don’t discover new things. If you don’t fail, you don’t know what comes out of the failure. If you don’t risk your career, you won’t invent the job of the future.
Where are YOU Taking Risks?
The future is risky. Deciding to use social media to promote your business, augment your internal collaboration, or other uses is risky. It’s untested, or not very tested. It’s different than how people did things before. Convincing people that ads don’t work well when the folks selling ads have numbers is risky.
Where are your risks, business or personal? What are you doing to move over that crazy divide? How are you readying yourself for the inevitable fall on the face that comes with not being 100% certain? What’s your take?
Photo credit, Smiles are Free
Jumping Over a Mountain
I believe this with all my heart: the way these new tools make the web work for us will (is!) dramatically impact the how/why/when of business communications and collaboration of all kinds. In ways, this impact is not too far afield from what Thomas Friedman talked about in THE WORLD IS FLAT. In this book, we learned how to move things that added value to our organization closer to the core of what we do, and how to disaggregate those things that aren’t as important and push those out to the fringe. It’s never safe to predict the future, but I want you to think about this, and see if it resonates. Disagree with me in the comments. We’ll talk about it.
I believe we’re going to shift back to thinking customer service and community management are the core and not the fringe. I believe we’re going to move our communications practices back in-house for lots of what is currently pushed out to agencies and organizations. I believe that integrity, reputation, skills, and personality are going to trump some of our previous measures of professional ability. I believe the web and our devices will continue to move into tighter friendships, and that we will continue to train our devices to interpret more of the world around us on our behalf.
I believe working remotely will become the rule, not the exception, and that we’ll replace some portion of office-meeting time with video now that it’s free-to-cheap. I believe that our business practices, processes, and output will modularize the way widgets have changed web design.
And not unlike Guy Kawasaki’s example of the ice blocks, to ice houses, to refrigerators analogy, I believe that the difference between how you perceive your role in all this and what will really make the difference is far apart.
It might be time to start thinking about jumping over a mountain. Because linear thinking won’t bring about what comes next. It will take a jet pack’s difference in your thinking.
What’s your prediction? How far off am I? What are you doing to get ready to jump over that mountain?
Photo credit, Jurvetson
