This post on 38 Minutes by Ray McSweeney gave me the following diagram (nabbed without permission but with attribution).
He writes: “As a base – I’ve taken the Hayes and Wheelwright model of operational effectiveness, and tried to put a digital media spin on it. Anyone who has any ideas or contributions to make, would be most welcome.”
Stage 1:
In this organisation, there is no strategy for collaboration technologies (invisibility) or the current implementation is reactive and limits the strategic options of the business.
Stage 2:
Basic web presence – involving “broadcast” webpages, and maybe some e-commerce. There is no active involvement in Web 2.0 technologies.
Stage 3:
The organisation has started building communities around its products and services, potentially enabling these communities through blogs/twitter etc.
Stage 4:
The organisation uses its interaction with its userbase to shape and drive forward its strategy.
Now, realising this is very “strategic”, I think it’s valuable to examine where you are. Likely you, as a small business, will be great in some areas and poor in others. The challenge is to bring everything up to the same level and then progress from there.
Make some attempt to measure your interactions and contributions and the results therein. I was speculating on something similar to this yesterday on Twitter – the Ireland tech/creative industry is great at meetups but I have no way of measuring the effectiveness of these meetups. How many of them result in actual deal flow and how many of them are just cliques of people who know and like other people? I have to say my experience has been heavily slanted towards the latter despite being in the company of one of the best networkers I’ve ever met. I just don’t see the deal flow. Understanding that a lot of this would be commercial in confidence anyway – it would just be nice to have some way of visualising the successes and the misses.
Head on over to 38Minutes and comment directly on Ray’s post.
A lot of companies, and some in NI I still do work for, are based on the old Corporate model. They are run by experienced Mangers from Big companies.
Many of them are actually now running small or start-up companies, but their interaction with the market place is trade shows and face-to-face meetings. Their websites are static news pages. They just don’t even ‘see’ things like twitter, blogs, forums, etc. (even a CMS is alien)
These things, innovative technologies that could enhance products and projects, are just not ‘got’ by the ‘old-school’. I think, more worryingly, if you tried to approach these people with new ideas, they would be treated suspiciously and implemented with a ‘least damage’ attitude – rendering them fairly pointless.
Yes, most of them hate bloggers, tweeters and anything that doesn’t come through the expensive PR company they pay a retainer to.