Maximillian Kaizen's Bookmarks

I tweeted the question and got a dozen positive answers in less than a minute, which I was able to report back to my client.

It gets even better than that. You can put out questions on LinkedIn, which nearly always produces quality answers. And you can check the profile of those who reply in order to assess their qualifications before using their replies. Mahalo offers a similar feature that enables you to offer a monetary “tip” to the best answers, which could motivate the best resource to provide a detailed answer.

Inserting a poll into blog post can be a quick-and-dirty way to get information, while setting up an RSS-based listening post and conducting tag searches of blog search engines can reveal what others have already written about the subject.

Keep the conversation going on Twitter

Do our six recommendations agree with the successes and failures you’ve seen?
Is the economic downturn affecting your perception and use of Web 2.0 tools? What organizations get the most out of Web 2.0, and why? Use the #web2.0work hashtag to respond to this article and these questions on Twitter. We’ll be following them and responding via our McKinsey Quarterly account, @McKQuarterly.

Don't launch a product or service before you're ready

Have a strategy and a contingency plan in place first. "Web 2.0 is more instantaneous in terms of success or failure," says Jean-Jerome Baudry, founder of Cybernomics, a Toronto company that advises companies on green IT technology. "If it affects your brand - especially with a new company, a new app or a new service - and your first impression comes across as sloppy, you can put yourself out of business."

Don't Astroturf

(and no flogging, either)

This is not the fake green stuff. Astroturfing is public relations dressed up as independent opinion - that is, pseudo marketing reports or faux grassroots feedback about a product or service that has actually been generated by an individual, business or organization. It's easy to detect who's behind such bumph using tracking tools like Whois or Google Analytics. "If somebody figures you're doing that, they'll immediately dismiss you from the Web 2.0 forum and your traffic will die," Mr. Binns says.

“Comcast’s customer service was rated “poor” by 30% of respondents” and it had a strong hit after this video, which showed a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch.  It was viewed over 1.2 million times with over 700 comments. Also, a website named ComcastmustDie.com was created for users to tell their stories of their experience and grievances with Comcast.

It seems like Comcast finally got the message. With the emergence of Web 2.0 ordinary people can have their voice heard and create a terror of a public relations problem for companies. “Listening and acting upon what [customers] are hearing and being very proactive is different than waiting for a customer to pick up the phone and call us. We can nip it in the bud,”

Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way. We had telephones, we had the telegraph. We were familiar with technological mediation of those kinds of conversations. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported one-way outbound. I could put something on television or the radio, I could publish a newspaper. We had the printing press. So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they're patterns we knew from before.

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.

Right now clouds are chiefly created and run for the benefit of enterprise, rather than users. Or to be more exact, the initial customers of cloud computing are businesses. Firms serving up web services. Cloud computing is also known as grid computing and utility computing. There is a small industry of providers, suppliers and makers of applications emerging. Besides the well known clouds of Google, Amazon Web Services, there is also GridLayer, and Aptana Cloud, From the marketing page of Aptana Cloud comes this fairly utilitarian description of cloud computing from the enterprise POV:

 

Rather than worrying about where to host your web sites, how to configure your web server, and how to set up additional services, the Cloud enables you to push all of these concerns and worries to someone else, and more importantly, somewhere else. It's all handled for you on the internet, dynamically and completely managed. In short, all of your technology needs on the back-end are handled for you as a service, much like your electric or phone bill. 

Participatory Urbanism promotes new styles and methods for individual citizens to become proactive in their involvement with their city, neighborhood, and urban self reflexivity. Examples of Participatory Urbanism include but are not limited to: providing mobile device centered hardware toolkits for non-experts to become authors of new everyday urban objects, generating individual and collective needs based dialogue tools around the desired usage of urban green spaces, or empowering citizens to collect and share air quality data measured with sensor enabled mobile devices.

Our mobile devices are more than just personal communication tools . They are globally networked, speak the lingua franca of the city (SMS, Bluetooth, MMS), and are becoming the dominant urban processor.  We need to shatter our understanding of them as phones and celebrate them in their new role as measurement instruments. 

It follows that matchmaking is most effective in densely populated areas, where there are plenty of fish but an awfully big sea. If you live in Los Angeles, online dating is the killer app. If you live in a small town, you've likely already met all your potential mates at church or a bar.

In theory, technology should allow new-economy firms to prosper as easily in Nebraska as in Silicon Valley. But far from killing distance, it has made proximity matter more than ever.

"We are not our moms, who were just involved in the PTA," said Catherine Lorenze, a McLean mother who helped organize Fairgrade, the parent-led campaign to change the Fairfax grading scale by lowering the bar for an A from 94 to 90 percent.

"We worked for a number of years before we had kids," she said. "We know how to research and find information and connect the dots. To expect us to show up and just make photos or write checks does not sit well with this generation. If you are going to invite parents in the door . . . it should be more of a partnership."

Collaboration is simply a series of conversations to get to a goal. It
involves gathering people, asking questions, collecting answers and
ideas, surfacing information, getting feedback on interim
deliverables, and the like. It is the way most work gets done.

We’ve been collaborating for a long time, but we’ve been doing it the
hard way. Using today’s business tools – email with attached documents – collaboration has been slow, difficult and ineffective. Topics get fragmented across many places – individual emails, different versions of presentations, excel files and word documents – stored in different desktop applications,
shared drives and content management systems. Corporate employees spend up to 1/4 of their day looking for information, according to research firm IDC. The cost of this unproductive time can be as much as 25% of your staff costs. And according to a 2008 IBM study of 400 human resources executives, only 13% of people can find someone with a particular area of expertise in their own company. This means the bulk of work doesn’t leverage the specialized knowledge that exists right there in the company, because there is no good way to find it.