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12 Mar 09

Mr. Eich launched his business online with a domain called "My toys need a name,"
He devotes a minimum of 50 hours weekly to his toy business, including about 10 hours on his blog.
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- "I grew up online and have been involved with social media for a long time," says Mr. Eich, who spent part of his childhood in Africa, often playing with simple wooden toys. "When I began, I had practically zero money and no tools to do a big business plan, but I knew I wanted to do this toy company. So I created a framework online and asked for people's ideas and feedback. It was all about interacting with people and trying to set up meaningful relationships. The business evolved out of that."
- "Everyone in the blogosphere is trying to figure out how they can monetize social networking," Mr. Eich says. "But Web 2.0 is not a quick fix or a golden nugget. I actually thought it was in the beginning, but it's a long-term process. The return is in the future. Every kid growing up right now is involved in Web 2.0, so [businesspeople] who aren't involved within five years will be non-existent."
- Even if a business isn't active in social media, it can't hide from Web 2.0. "Your brand and personal reputation are now up for others to discuss on the Web,"
- 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.

Wikinomics» Blog Archive » A New Age in Customer Service

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casestudy collaboration web2.0 web culture

Comcast responding to a complaint by C.C. Chapman about his service. While watching his HDTV, the reception starting becoming very poor so Chapman quickly started expressing his anger on Twitter and “within 24 hours, a technician was at Chapman’s house in Milford to fix the problem.”
“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,”

Wikinomics» Blog Archive » Wikinomics Report Card: General Motors

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collaboration open globalization economics casestudy

Being Open: Traditionally, GM has been a very closed organization. Even internally, its different brands acted with a silo mentality. In the Alfred Sloan era, GM used espionage tactics to quell union uprisings and in the mid 20^th century, GM was blamed for killing American public transportation in the Great American Streetcar Scandal. In the 1990’s GM was accused of killing the electric car so that it could sell its high margin SUVs and trucks.
GM has started by being very public and transparent about its production plans for the Chevy Volt. Also, GM is one of the few car companies to have higher executives and “Car Czar” Bob Lutz blog on a regular basis.
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- GM invited consumers to a newly built Web site that offered video clips and simple editing tools they could use to create ads for the Chevy Tahoe SUV. The site gained online fame after environmentalists hijacked the site’s tools to build and post ads on the site condemning the Tahoe as an eco-unfriendly gas-guzzler. GM didn’t take ads down, which caused even more online buzz. Some pundits said GM was being foolhardy, but the numbers proved otherwise. The Web site quickly attracted more than 620,000 visitors, two-thirds of whom went on to visit Chevy.com.
- Most importantly, sales of the Tahoe soared.
- This hugely successful campaign generated a lot of buzz for GM at a very minimal cost. With GM’s negative operating margins, cutting down advertising expenses through peering could greatly reduce costs and improve the bottom line.