Was MBAs, Soulja Boy and Obama

I spoke with MBA students at a prominent New England business school last week. Impressive was their understanding and interest in Internet technologies to achieve both business and social objectives. They seemed to care a little less about employers offering titles and briefing binders and a lot more about how to find employers who want to use Web 2.0 to change the relationships between the enterprise and it customers.

Closer to home, I observed the ever-increasing popularity and capability of on-line video. My youngest son, age 11, prepared for his first middle school dance by watching an instructional YouTube video by Soulja Boy Tell Em! (kind of like American Bandstand on demand). Same approach for preparing for a Show ‘n Tell at school: he learned a couple of magic tricks off of YouTube and then turned on his Mac computer’s camera to record himself practicing these tricks.

The ANA, Association of National Advertisers, met last week. Largest attendance of CMOs in the 97 year history of the conference. Their concerns are how to keep up with consumers as we continue to decentralize our sources of personally relevant information (the notion that marketing has evolved from ‘dozens of markets & millions of participants’ to ‘millions of markets with dozens of participants’). What inhibits CMOs from taking better advantage of Web 2.0:

- less than 24% consider their organizations to be digitally savvy (needed talent hard to find)

- 51% cite lack of organization support as a barrier to the use of new media

- 80% say that consumer insights (customer communities) are more important today than they were 5 years ago.

Related Booz Allen Report available: www.boozallen.com/media/file/HD_Marketing_2010.pdf

So much is happening in this amazing world of Web 2.0 that I do not have space to discuss Virgin Airlines’s foray into the peer-to-peer financial arena (majority stake in Circle Lending) or talk about the potential of the just announced partnership of Skype (owned by eBay) and MySpace (sister company of Dow Jones).

As we think about 2008, we might agree that the conversation about Web 2.0 evolved in 2007 from ‘What is it?’ to ‘How do I get started?’ I am confident that there is talent eager to help us; inexpensive and simple examples to guide us; and compelling business reasons to act sooner rather than later.

c.perrien

Been around for about about 15 months in an eight part series. Clever and my tip to get the week started.  On a serious note, the pace of video adoption is picking up.  Good news for storage vendors, I suppose, and better news for those seeking lower-cost, good enough ways of getting their messages to their audiences.  My eleven year old launched his video instant messaging system over the weekend (iMac) and is enamored this capability to see himself on ‘tv.’  ‘Appearing larger than you are’ is one benefit of YouTube-like capabilities.  To me, adoption at this stage is more a matter of thinkingdifferently than it is about technical capabilities.  At any rate, you’ll get a couple of good laughs out of it. cperrien