You’ve seen the preview, now see the actual live and in-person Intelligence Collaborative Call to Action from the inaugural event we held in Washington, DC on October 22. Special thanks to Eric Garland for working his digital video magic and making this video possible.
Categories: CI · strategy
Tagged: intelligence collaborative, web 2.0
I have been ignoring the blog the past few weeks largely to focus on a couple of efforts I am working on for SCIP. In the interim I hope that the active sharing of news items I find on Google Reader and Twitter that run along the sidebar of this blog. I am a religious user of both platforms and they really do serve a niche to give me a means to share items of interest between blog posts or when I don’t have enough time, inclination or insight to justify a full blog entry.
One of the projects that I’ve been working on is an article on Web 2.0 and CI that I needed to get out the door and kept me up until 2 AM Thursday night. The article is probably going to be in the March/April issue of Competitive Intelligence magazine. Some of the main points that I try to convey in this article are the basics of Web 2.0 and the consequences of network effects, transparency and open platforms on established business models.
I also try to make the point in this article that Web 2.0 platforms increase the need and importance of active, real-time reputation monitoring. This is a difficult tight-rope to walk, because one of the dynamics I am trying to convey related to corporate policies related to employee use of Web 2.0 platforms (both inside and outside the enterprise) is that heavy-handed strategies won’t work. My challenge is creating an appropriate sense of urgency around active reputation monitoring and management with the knee-jerk reflex to “lock it down” that one observes in command-and-control oriented corporate structures.
The downside to the command and control approach is that it comes with a hard-to-measure cost in employee efficiency, satisfaction and retention. Ham-handed anti-web 2.0 policies are signals to the market (and employment is still a market even if it’s more of a buyer’s market these days) of the value in which the corporation holds individual employees. The best and the brightest want to go where they are going to be recognized as individuals, allowed to innovate, allowed to pursue individual initiative and rewarded for their efforts. Heavy-fisted policies about participation and social networks tell these stellar employees that this will not happen here. It also sends a message to market watchers that a corporate structure lacks the ability to take advantage of bottom-up innovation. When the recovery does happen I would like to think investors will see these qualities as indicators of staying power and the ability of a firm to generate growth and higher returns on investments.
Categories: CI · strategy
Tagged: competitive intelligence, SCIP, strategy, web 2.0
Last January Eric Garland of Competitive Futures and I put on a joint event for the local chapters of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals and World Futures Society. We pulled together a set of lead panelists, including some of the guys from Intellipedia, the US government intelligence community’s innovative collaboration platform. We abandoned some of the standard structures of a presentation to take the event in an almost unconference direction. The discussions revolved around application of Web 2.0 tools to facilitate collaboration for the production of intelligence. We called the event “New Ways of Knowing.” The session was a great success with a very interactive exchange and registrations at above room capacity (whoops!).
On January 28, 2009 we will be holding “New Ways of Knowing 2.0″ and highlighting application of Web 2.0 and social media to primary research, secondary research, analysis and communications of competitive intelligence. Keep your eyes on the SCIP Greater Washington Chapter blog for updates on the event as they become available.
Categories: CI
Tagged: competitive intelligence, web 2.0
Jon Lowder of the Competitive Intelligence Marketplace blog had some excellent suggestions on alternative business models for giving away conference content. These are some excellent alternatives to my own suggestions from my previous post on giving away podcasts of conference content:
Sadly, Jon was not able to post his suggestions in a comment to my own blog. Previous run-ins with crazy volumes of SPAM led me to be perhaps a little overzealous in limiting readers’ ability to comment. I have made some changes to the blog srttings and hopefully have fixed this as an issue. Just know that any offers for herbal Viagra you see posted in the comments of this blog do not come with my endorsement.
Categories: CI
Tagged: podcast, SCIP09, social media, web 2.0
For one of the side projects I’m working on, I’m trying to sell the notion of giving away what could be considered “premium” content as a mechanism to raise interest and broaden an established brand among interested non-consumers. Specifically I am trying to make the case that giving away some audio recordings of presentations from an annual professional conference will stimulate interest in the following year’s conference.
In reality my concept is more nuanced than simply giving away content. The conference will be held next April, and I am advocating that we make audio recordings of the sessions that will be presented (pending presenter’s agreement, of course). Paying attendees will be given access to the recorded content for no cost following the conference. Those who did not register for the conference will be able to purchase the content as a price well under the cost of conference registration (I’m playing with price points between 1/10 and 1/5 of the cnference registration cost). Three to four months before the next year’s conference (set for April 2010) we would make some (probably not all) of the recorded content available for free.
Today a great example of using free content to broaden the appeal of a brand was brought to my attention: Tom Friedman is giving away audio recordings of the third edition of The World is Flat for free. The audio book is being made available with an audio preview of Friedman’s next book, and is likely part of a strategy to build anticipation and promote sales of the new book.
We’ve seen in the past years that diverse customer segments will pay varying prices for what is ostensibly the same product. Almost every one of us have paid for a bottle of water often enough when tap water is generally conveniently available for free. When the 9/11 Commission Report was published it became one of the best-selling tomes of 2004 despite the fact that the contents were freely available on-line. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have both demonstrated the benefits of giving away content or letting customers name their own price for music downloads.
With these and other examples in mind I’m not as concerned that freely-available content will cannibalize paying attendees. I’ve been watching presentations from the TED conference for several years, and would still be thrilled to attend the event in person if I got the chance. The real value of most conferences is in the face-to-face exchange of ideas, and you really do need to pony up the bucks to get the full benefit of a conference. Hearing the quality of the material from last year’s conference would, I am convinced, raise the interest of those who might not otherwise attend.
I’m very interested to hear what others think about this. Help me make the case to a skeptical audience. If you’re skeptical, lay it on me so I can refine or revise this concept. If you’re sufficiently convincing you might get me to change my mind. If you agree with the general concept of giving away content to spur interest among non-consumers then give me your take on this to help me make the case.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: podcast, SCIP09, social media, web 2.0
I have been very frustrated, nay, annoyed, about the intermittent performance of Twitter. The web 2.0 flavor of the month (several months ago) actually has a lot of potential. The technical infrastructure has been unable to scale to the demand placed upon it by the Twitter user community. I have alternatively heard the technical shortcomings attributed to an inability to deploy servers quickly enough, database issues and front-end software choices.
Twiter reminds me very much of Facebook. It’s a web site that, once you see the value potential of the site, you begin to see great potential. Once the hockey stick of rapid adoption hits the site, though, the infrastructure is completely unable to keep pace. Because web 2.0 platforms like social networks (Friendster) and micro-blogging sites (Twitter) rely on both the number of users and number of social transactions they can enable. As the number of these transactions is capped, users begin to look elsewhere. For Friendster adoption brought extremely slow performance and database errors. For Twitter some convenient methods for sending and receiving messages (particularly IM) become unavailable on a regular basis and for extended periods of time. The first-to-market innovators show others how to duplicate the promised user value and highlight some of the tecnical pitfalls to avoid. Friendster users went to MySpace and Facebook. If Twitter cannot get their act together where will the Twitter users go? Jaiku? FriendFeed?
Categories: Technology
Tagged: friendster, twitter, web 2.0
Some readers of this infrequently-updated blog may be aware that I am the chapter coordinator for the Greater Washington Chapter of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. For the month of January we are putting together a truly unique program, and I want to make sure as many people as possible are aware and have an opportunity to attend.
The program is entitled “New Ways of Knowing” and is focused on the application of new Internet platforms and tools to the practice of intelligence collection, creation and distribution in commercial and government environments. I’ll be functioning as the moderator, and our distinguish panel consists of:
Don Burke, Intellipedia Doyen, CIA
Sean Dennehy, Chief of Intellipedia, CIA
Eric Garland, President, Competitive Futures, Inc. and author of “Future, Inc.”
To give you an idea of the caliber of the program I am expecting, I want to share an excerpt from an interview Sean Dennehy recently gave to the Washington business forum ExecutiveBiz. It’s the most eloquent and concise definition of “Web 2.0″ that I have seen, and goes far beyond the notional buzzword bingo that most pundits throw at you when they talk about the concept:
ExecutiveBiz: Web 2.0 means different things to different people, how would you define the web 2.0 tools as it relates to the intelligence community?
Sean Dennehy: Tim O’Reilly coined the term, web 2.0–it’s basically using the internet or web as a platform in which applications improve the more people use them due to network effects. I often relate to our students a story about when I first joined Facebook (Facebook is a good example because it’s an obvious web 2.0 application). When I first started using Facebook it had very little value to me until other colleagues and friends started using it, then it became a much richer source of information for me. So how does this relate to the IC? Well it’s about user participation. The more people that start participating and using the tools, the more we can work collaboratively to build knowledge across the IC.
Prior to Intellipedia, blogs and TagConnect (the social bookmarking software in the IC), you had to go through a webmaster to get anything posted to the web. I remember sending out “blast” emails to everyone in the IC that you knew worked an issue, but emails fall into what we call a channel and can only be seen by those people on the distribution list, when there might be others outside that list that might have something to contribute. By using blogs, Intellipedia, and TagConnect, you can move the analytic “conversation” previously trapped in a channel out onto a platform where more people can see it and participate. That’s actually one of the recommendations from the Iraq WMD Commission—to make the IC’s analysis more transparent. I believe that these tools can help us become more transparent.
So join us for what’s definitely going to be a great interactive panel.
January 24, 2008
12 Noon – 4:00 PM
Embassy Suites
4300 Military Road
Washington, DC
Register here at the SCIP web site: http://members.scip.org/scriptcontent/BeWeb/events/eventdetail.cfm?
Categories: Technology
Tagged: competitive intelligence, government 2.0, SCIP, web 2.0
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