Posted by Karl Long

It is surprising to me how many big companies do not understand how the web and social media is going to empower and change EVERY ASPECT of their business, their industry and their competitors business. The reason is simple, the operating system for business has changed, in other words the way human beings are motivated to connect and create value has changed. My belief is that every business has to realize that it is a co-creative eco-system that includes it’s employees, partners, competitors and customers and the way they are motivated to create and realize value is the only measure of success. This TED video get’s to the heart of the problem and that the current reward system is actually hurting businesses and industries ability to innovate and dare I say evolve. It’s important to mention how industries need to change as they are one of the greatest impediments to change for a corporation as they are where the culture of value creation is created. Most corporations that want to survive have to re-imagine themselves as industry change agents instead of cogs in a ever more decrepid clock.

“A task that requires mechanical skill, bonuses worked as expected, the higher the reward the higher the performance”

“A task that requires rudimentary cognitive skill a larger incentive led to poorer performance”
D. Ariely, U. Gneezy, G. Lowenstein, & N. Mazar, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper no. 05-11, July 2005; NY Times, 10 Nov. 08

via EstateofFlux

There are some consultancies emerging which are helping companies with this task of re-imagining their value creation system, these include The Dachis Corporation, The Altimeter group and Victor & Spoils. Interestingly all these companies come from different backgrounds, Dachis coming from the digital/interactive agency world, Altimeter coming from the world of analysts, and Victor & Spoils coming from an advertising background so it will be fascinating to see how they approach this transformation of business.

My personal philosophy is that organizations need to provide a framework for their customer base (and entire ecosystem) to participate in the co-creation of meaningful value. The new paradigm is co-creation, co-operation on bigger ideas than just the motivation to consume. As Kathy Sierra says organizations have to find the bigger idea that their product lives in and work on that bigger idea.

Of course I should mention that Traackr.com is a tool that helps organizations connect with the most influential people in particular industries, which in my mind is the first step for an organization that wants to be an industry change agent. Give me a call or email me if you would like a demo 415.713 6763

UPDATE: I have not read it yet but it looks like The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism will be an interesting read in relation to rethinking business.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under B2B, Business, Management, Networking, Tips. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Karl Long believes the experience is the marketing and social media is how customers share experience and has been blogging about it for several years. Karl's primary blog Experiencecurve lives at the intersection of marketing, social media, social software and remarkable customer experience. Karl holds an MBA in Design Management from the University of Westminster and is currently the Web/Social Media Integration Manger for the video game group at Nokia. Karl also writes about t-shirts at tcritic.com