Trends in the Living Networks

Mark Pesce will keynote on Using the Network for Business Success

2009-11-19T10:10:42Z

Among our awesome cast of speakers at SME Technology Summit, our opening keynote speakers Mark Pesce and Tim Pethick are two of the those whose insights I most look forward to hearing. Both have fantastic experience and insights into where technology is today and where it's going.

Mark's topic is below. Be sure to get along to see it!

Using the Network for Business Success

The past five years have seen an explosion in the ways we can connect with one another. Just five years ago email was a bit risqué – now people use Facebook and Twitter and Google Wave and don’t even give it a second thought. All of this ‘hyperconnectivity’ means we can be reached anywhere, everywhere, all the time. This has enormous implications for SMEs. More than just supercharging your rolodex, these network connections can become the channels to increased sales and productivity.

The network represents a new force, pressing down from the outside, as your hyperconnected customers (both satisfied and not-so-satisfied) use new channels to spread the word about your products. You need to be there, wherever those conversations are happening, whenever they happen. You really do need to have eyes and ears everywhere across the net. How can a small business afford to do this? New tools make it easier, but to make best use of these tools, you have to empower your employees to use them. Social media in the office is powerful – and a little bit dangerous. But with some simple ground rules, it can change your business.

Keynote: Network to win! ..for global professional services network Kreston

2009-11-19T07:04:31Z

On Tuesday I gave the opening keynote at the 38th annual global conference of international accounting network Kreston International.

Kreston are a very interesting organization. With revenues across the network of over $2 billion, they are the 13th largest accounting network in the world. The day of the conference they made the final step in becoming a network according to the IFAC (International Federation of Accountants) definition of a network. One of the critical issues in determining whether a group of firms is deemed a network is whether they have common quality controls. The appointment of a Global Quality and Professional Standards Director is a key step Kreston has taken.

I have long been fascinated by professional services networks. I wrote about them in my first book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, and in detail in Chapter 9 of Living Networks.

I am actively continuing to explore the nature of networks in professional services. How well they network very simply determines their success.

As such I was delighted to be invited to do the opening keynote on the conference's theme of Network to Win. It took the format of a participatory workshop run over two 45 minute sessions, getting the attendees to reflect on and discuss how they can best enhance the cross-firm networks that drive results.

Below are my slides for my presentation, provided primarily for event attendees. Note that they are intended to accompany my speech, not to be meaningful in themselves.

Network to Win! Keynote presentation at Kreston International Global Conference

View more presentations from rossdawson.

Six ways technology is transforming small business

2009-11-18T21:17:59Z

This article was written to frame The Insight Exchange's SME Technology Summit in Sydney on December 1 - while many of the references are to Australia the issues apply globally.

Small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) are taking a larger share of the business pie, and increasingly driving economic growth. This is one of the most important trends in business today, and one that will shape the next decade of business, work and society.

This powerful trend is driven largely by technology and connectivity, creating a world in which smaller, more nimble, better connected companies can outsmart their monolithic larger brethren, competing globally and tapping opportunities as they arise.

At the same time, using technology well in business is proving to be one of the most prominent drivers of success. Almost every aspect of business is becoming driven by technology. This is obviously the case with services businesses ranging from graphic design to even house moving. However this is relevant to every kind of organisation.

Gardening and worm farm retailers Wiggly Wigglers in UK, Caminito Argentinean Restaurant in the US, Brasserie Bread in Australia , Martell Home Builders in Canada and many thousands of others around the world are examples of companies selling highly tangible, everyday products that have built outstanding success through the use of online social media.

There are six key ways in which technology is changing the very nature of how smaller companies operate today.

1. Findability
Customers look for and find businesses in very different ways than just a few years ago. Search engines, recommendations from friends on social networks, and online services exchanges are now how most companies are found. Marketing has completely changed.

2. Customer communication
With over six million Australians on Facebook and usage of other social media soaring, communicating with customers is shifting from to email marketing and beyond. The companies in the vanguard are building the most powerful customer relationships.

3. Productivity
Email and mobile phones have made us far more productive but also are in danger of overwhelming us. New online tools, such as Australia’s global success story RemembertheMilk.com, are helping to make business owners and staff far more efficient.

4. Collaboration
With staff working flexible hours, often from home or in their cars, the ability to keep on the same page is critical. Technology allows easy coordination of far-flung teams working closely together.

5. Outsourcing
Anyone can tap talented workers from next door or anywhere on the planet. Outsourcing used to be the domain of banks and telcos, now any company can outsource personal assistants, graphic design, research, or a million other tasks around the world.

6. Online revenue
With Australians expected to spend over $20 billion online this year, virtually every company is shifting their attention to how they can sell products and services on the Internet. It is a level playing field, where small can readily trump mega-business.

All of these issues will be covered in depth at the SME Technology Summit (http://smetechsummit.com), held in Sydney on 1 December, which will provide the tools for small and mid-sized businesses to succeed in a rapidly changing world. Come along to learn how to use technology to grow your business fast, build profits and leapfrog your competition!

Sky Business Tech Report: Interview on social media, online outsourcing, and how small companies are using technology to leapfrog big business

2009-11-16T11:47:08Z

I was interviewed this morning on Sky Business Tech Report. Some of the things we discussed in the interview are:

* How social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others change how companies engage with customers, become more efficient, and being competitive.

* Among the many Australian organizations applying social media, for example Westpac has been implementing blogging and other tools internally to improve effectiveness, and discount airlines and telcos are using Twitter to engage with customers.

* Online outsourcing platforms such as elance.com, Odesk, and freelance.com are giving the power of outsourcing to small business, enabling them to compete effectively with large companies.

* To begin to use online outsourcing, think about what tasks you want done, get bids, find new suppliers, and see what works best for you.

* It is important to recognize that the world is rapidly changing and that learning new tools and approaches is fundamental to business success moving forward.

* Managers and business owners have many resources to learn how to do these things. SME Technology Summit, other events, this blog and many other online resources are available.

* To get the most talented people to work for you, reward suppliers in ways more than financial, by making it stimulating, engaging, and fun to work and offering to share rewards.

SmartCompany webinar next Monday to feature SME Tech Summit speakers

2009-11-12T21:38:52Z

SmartCompany magazine is running a webinar on Monday 16 November at 2pm: How Small and Mid-Sized Companies are Using Technology to Drive Business Success.

The webinar will provide a preview to some of the outstanding content at SME Technology Summit.

Amanda Gome, Publisher of SmartCompany, will moderate the discussion and share some of her insights in running a young and rapidly growing company, as well in covering the best of what's happening in small and mid-sized business in Australia.

Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, will discuss how companies can best take advantage of online outsourcing to build efficiencies, scale operations, and grow companies rapidly.

Suzi Dafnis, Community Director of Australian Businesswomen's Network, will draw on her extensive experience in building online communities using blogs, forums and other tools.

David James, CEO of Brasserie Bread, will share how he has rapidly grown a real-world business using Twitter and other social media tools.

See the full SME Technology Summit agenda for details of what they will be speaking about and where they fit into the array of valuable content available on the day.

And be sure to register for the webinar to get these speakers great insights! There will be three complimentary passes to the Summit drawn at the end of the webinar.

The rapidly building wave of online outsourcing and crowdsourcing

2009-11-12T03:29:04Z

The Age today has an interesting article titled Outsourcing on steroids that looks at the array of online technologies that are enabling the outsourcing of small tasks and the crowdsourcing of design, innovation, and other key business functions.

I've noticed that in just the last few weeks mainstream media coverage of online service exchanges and crowdsourcing tools is picking up. As the article in the The Age concludes, "it’s certain crowd sourcing is a key business trend for the future". The

The article quotes me in two different sections:

Although odesk and similar sites such as elance.com are known for being a meeting place where businesses can access very low cost services, crowd sourcing is not just about finding the cheapest service provider possible.

Futurist Ross Dawson says: “Online services exchanges are places where anyone anywhere can get people to perform services; it’s about the development of a global talent economy. Some services are commoditised – you might want someone to count the number of tennis balls in a photo for the lowest price possible. But they also allow you to find the best person for the job and price isn’t always the primary factor why you hire someone, sometimes it’s more about finding talented people. I use odesk and the last person I hired wasn’t in Egypt or Latvia he was in New York.”

This idea of how best to tap the most talented - rather than the cheapest - professionals in the global market is the subject of my next book. I'll be writing a lot more about this on my blog.

Later in the article:

To date, there has not been a significant uptake of crowd sourcing by large Australian organisations. But Ross Dawson says in the future this will change. “It offers large organisations extraordinary potential and opportunities to get tasks done efficiently.

A good example is under-resourced marketing departments that want to outsource tasks and engage people through online services exchanges.”

But what’s holding this back, says Dawson, are the required skills within large organisations to access the plethora of talent available through online services exchanges. “odesk is hard work. You really need to know how to pick the right supplier to be able to use it effectively,” he says.

Another barrier to large organisations using crowd sourcing is the grey area around the copyright related to creative services accessed through these sites.

If for example a large organisation sources a logo through a site like odesk or Australian creative crowd sourcing portal 99designs.com it’s very difficult to ensure the company owns outright the rights to the logo.
[NOTE: I didn't say that and I don't agree on this.]

“But the biggest issue with crowd sourcing,” says Dawson, “is the cost of co-ordinating a large number of suppliers globally. Big companies are more likely to go to a [local] design firm in Surry Hills, who will then crowd source the work and project manage the job. I think we’ll see more businesses on-selling crowd-sourced work.

There’s a real role for the Australian economy to project manage this sort of work. The work might be done in Indochina, but a domestic firm will handle the client interface role with the Australian organisation that has outsourced the work.

The benefit for the client is that they are dealing with a supplier that’s culturally similar, has knowledge of Australian business practices and has the skills to bring the whole project together.”

This has been a key theme I have been banging on about for many years now (for example in this article that appeared in The Bulletin in 2005 and discussing India's role in project managing outsourcing in China in 2002). In a global connected economy, one of the most valuable emerging roles is that of acting as a relationship and project co-ordinator, finding and bringing together the best resources to deliver work to clients.

That is already been done by many developed world service providers. This role will continue to grow. In fact, these ideas tie in very neatly with my blog post yesterday about co-creation among creative service providers - this is about bringing together talent in novel ways. Challenging, but the wave of the future.

Agency co-creation: very hard to make it work but that's where the most value lies

2009-11-11T06:41:16Z

There's a great article in the latest issue of B&T Today on how Westpac, one of Australia's big four banks, is approaching working with its advertising and creative agencies. Here are a few choice excerpts from the article, which is well worth a read in its entirety.

Jee Moon, director of brand and marketing at Westpac [said] that an agency roster based on co-creation, not simply collaboration, is key to establishing and maintaining a strong brand identity.

She added the “one stop shop”, integrated agency model in Australia had “never materialised” and that a rostered agency model based on co-creation in which agencies do not simply coexist but coproduce was key to developing and maintaining a strong brand positioning.

“At Westpac we have moved from a contractual agency model, which we had with the Red House when there was little to bind the agencies together apart from a piece of paper, to a system of collaboration where our partners work together as a community of experts, and are currently striving for a true, co-creation model,” Jee said of her agency partners The Campaign Palace, Yello and Lavender.

“We subscribe to a culture of respect and openness and believe that a great idea is agency agnostic while execution is agency specific. Co-creation does not mean just sitting side by side, but being in it together, sleeves rolled up and building ideas as one.”

However, she added: “This model is not easy, it’s a whole different game to the ordinary standards of agency collaboration and feels unnatural, like you’re stepping on each other’s toes and plodding into areas that are not your own. But when it works the results are remarkable.”

... Jacques Burger, CEO of The Campaign Palace, said the challenge with moving from a “contract of collaboration” to a “culture of co-creation” is motivating a change in agency behaviour and added there needs to be a shift in the traditional measures of success.

... “In the industry we work in, the person who comes up with the idea is seen as the hero and the person who implements it, second class,” he said.

“We need to flatten this structure out and get agencies to work on the same level, which is achieved by giving agencies access to all briefs and by creating a remuneration model that reflects contribution and collaboration as opposed to mere results.”

Moon added its agency remuneration is dependent on how well they work together, and not who comes up with the idea or creates the campaign.

This is a great example of the core ideas of my book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships on professional services co-creation, and in Chapter 9 of my book Living Networks on professional service networks. I also wrote an article in July 2000 on The Future of Advertising that discusses these issues.

It has been clear for many years that this co-creation model was where the advertising industry is heading, though it is taking a greater maturity from both agencies and corporate marketers to enable this to work. There are a multitude of challenges to making this work, some of which are touched on in the article, however this is where the most value can be created for large sophisticated clients. Certainly many senior advertising executives look with disdain on co-creation models (which imply that they don't have all the answers themselves), but they will be cutting themselves out of an increasing proportion of where value is created in the industry.

Free webinar on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 (and win a copy of the book!)

2009-11-09T11:28:17Z

My book Implementing Enterprise 2.0 has been selling at a very healthy and consistent pace since its launch earlier this year. The front page of the book's website features links to reviews of the book, including some very useful ones from ReadWriteWeb, CMSWire, and Inside Knowledge.

I thought it would be good to share some of the book's insights in a different format, so I have teamed up with Newsgator - who have been key proponents of the book - to do a free webinar on Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Practical Steps to Creating Business Value. The webinar will be held on November 18 at 2pm US ET.

We will draw six complimentary copies of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for webinar attendees.

Below is the webinar overview. Hope to connect with you then!

Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Practical Steps to Creating Business Value
Live Webinar - November 18, 2009 at 2 pm ET

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 technologies and approaches can be a key driver of competitiveness and profitability. However since Enterprise 2.0 sits at the nexus of technology and organizational culture, there can be no one-size-fits-all approach.

Key success factors include analyzing which Enterprise 2.0 approaches are most relevant to your organization, establishing an effective governance process and policies, creating a timeline for initiatives, and supporting user adoption through internal ‘champions’.

Ross Dawson, author of the acclaimed book Implementing Enterprise 2.0 and Chairman of Advanced Human Technologies, will provide detailed insights into the process of successfully implementing Enterprise 2.0, drawing on real-life case studies and featuring extensive content from his book. Christy Schoon, Director of Business Consulting with NewsGator, will supply examples and best practices to help encourage user adoption.

This webinar covers:

* How to apply the Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework to develop your own strategy and action plan
* Identifying key risks and benefits, and the process of establishing Enterprise 2.0 governance and policies
* Making it happen: building a business case, getting buy-in, setting up pilots, and user adoption
* Building a culture of collaboration and innovation and creating the enterprise of the future

Six complimentary copies of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 will be drawn for attendees of the webinar.

Further information and free chapters from Implementing Enterprise 2.0 are available at http://implementingenterprise2.com/.

Practical insights and advice on Everyday Enterprise 2.0

2009-11-04T10:17:03Z

Newsgator's Director of Enterprise 2.0 Consulting Christy Schoon has launched a new blog Everyday Enterprise 2.0 at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Christy says "I'm going to write in plain English about everyday Enterprise 2.0 from my own on-the-ground perspective working with living, breathing social computing champions at Fortune 500 companies."

One reason I love the blog is Christy's four standard recommendations to businesspeople on where to start with Enterprise 2.0 (particularly the first one :-) ):

1) read Ross Dawson's sensible, plainspoken book "Implementing Enterprise 2.0"

2) read the Nielsen Norman Group's report "Enterprise 2.0: Social Software on Intranets"; and

3) if your company has at least 10,000 employees, join the 2.0 Adoption Council

4. Get professional help.

However I also like the rich content tone. It's very refreshing to see a post titledPimp My Site that happens to be a detailed discussion about the practical issues involved in Enterprise 2.0 adoption but begins:

My second blog post and I’ve already used the word Pimp. My Mom would be so proud.

What robots.txt tells you about corporate culture - the case study of Nike and Adidas

2009-11-03T03:22:09Z

Even if you are not a technical person, you may have heard about the apparently arcane robots.txt file which sits on websites but is seen only by computers, not by human visitors. The file contains instructions for search engines on what they can and cannot index and make searchable.

Note that in the examples below # indicates a comment line that is not read by the computer; the other lines provide specific instructions to allow or disallow access to search engines.

Let's look at the robots.txt file on Nike.com - www.nike.com/robots.txt

# *.nike.com robots.txt -- just crawl it.
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Crawl-delay: 20

In contrast, look at the file for Adidas.com - www.adidas.com/robots.txt:

# go away
User-agent:*
Disallow:/scripts/cud/cud2.asp

In fact this means that the entire Adidas.com site except for one file can be crawled by search engines, but the comment does seems to suggest a difference in corporate culture from Nike :-).

(Hattip to @larsv!)

Social Media Strategy Framework in Korean - 소셜미디어 전략 프레임워크

2009-11-02T23:31:03Z

And one more! ...continuing our series of translations of Social Media Strategy Framework, today we are launching the Korean edition.

See the original post for the full overview of the Social Media Strategy Framework in English and compilation of the framework in 11 different languages.

Click on image to download pdf

Please share this with any Korean speakers who would be interested.

Also be sure to let me know if you can suggest any improvements to the translation.

The top 10 blogs for small to mid-sized businesses

2009-11-02T20:46:24Z

Blog search engine Technorati recently revised its blog ranking algorithms and created categories for the rankings.

The list of the top 10 blogs for small business provides an excellent resource for attendees of our SME Technology Summit in Sydney on 1 December, where there will be deep insights into all of the topics covered by these blogs.

Many of these blogs are for businesses of all sizes, but all of them provide valuable insights for small to mid-sized businesses. Check them out!

1. Online Marketing Blog
http://www.toprankblog.com

Covers digital marketing topics, focusing on social media, online PR and search engine marketing. A broad team of writers brings diverse perspectives to bear.

2. Affiliate X Files
http://www.affiliatexfiles.com

Specializes in affiliate marketing issues, with a wide range of in-depth articles.

3. Social Media Today
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC

Brings together selected blog posts from 60 leading thinkers on social media and Web 2.0.

4. Brian Solis - PR 2.0
http://www.briansolis.com

The first single person blog (with occasional guest posts) is by Brian Solis, leading thinker on the future of marketing and PR. Brian spoke at The Insight Exchange's Future of Influence Summit.

5. Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog

Jeremiah provides extensive research and insights on his blog, to complement his work over the years as a social media practitioner, analyst at Forrester Research, and now partner at Altimeter Group.

6. Altitude Branding
http://altitudebranding.com

Author Amber Naslund is Director of Community for leading social media monitoring platform Radian6, blogging here about elevating brands through social media.

7. BrandSavant
http://brandsavant.com

Tom Webster writes about how to gain insights into brands from the vast amount of data generated by social media.

8. Convince and Convert Blog
http://www.convinceandconvert.com

Jay Baer writes about social media, including tools, tips, interviews and analysis of the emerging landscape.

9. Duct Tape Marketing
http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog

Duct Tape Marketing focuses explicitly on small business marketing, not just technology but across all the activities that will build customers and business.

10. VA4Growth
http://va4growth.com/blog

A resource site for social media marketing, run by a company specializing in providing Virtual Assistants.

Speaking at Future Forum - creating the future of the enterprise

2009-11-02T10:38:29Z

I first met Mark McCrindle when we were both part of a small team of futures thinkers engaged by a major bank for its innovation program. His company McCrindle Research provides a variety of research services focused on generational change. They also organize the Future Forum, an annual event run in several Australia cities which pulls together insights on key trends across all domains into a compact one-day session.

I will be speaking at the Sydney event on November 6, talking about Enterprise 2.0 and how to create the future of the enterprise, including how organizations can leverage social media for competitive advantage. A video overview of the event is below, full information and agenda here, and you can register here.

Future Forum Australia 2009 from David Birley on Vimeo.

Five reasons why Turkey is one of the hottest Internet markets in the world

2009-10-31T10:46:50Z

Last week I gave the opening keynote at IPZ2009 Interactive Marketing Summit in Istanbul. Here are my slides for my keynote on the Future of Interactive Marketing.

It was a fantastic event, the fourth annual IPZ conference organized by Günseli Özen Ocakoğlu and Hakan Senbir of Marketing & Management Institute, which publishes a range of leading magazines including Marketing Türkiye.

In preparing for my keynote and during my visit I discovered many fascinating things I did not know about the Turkish online market. It is in fact one of the hottest and fastest-growing Internet markets in the world.

As it happens I have a very deep interest in language-defined online markets, such as Japanese, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Korean. Each of these markets – some within national borders and others spanning countries – has very different characteristics across all facets including which types of social media are used, which are dominant players, and the most successful business models. I have written about this before in the context of blogging languages and global media strategies, and will be doing further analysis of country markets soon.

Here are five facts that illustrate how exciting the Turkish online market is.

1. Turkey is the third largest country in the world on Facebook

Source: CheckFacebook

Coming from almost nothing two years ago, Turkey now has close to 14 million Facebook users, overtaking France and Canada earlier this year to be the third largest country on Facebook after the US and UK. Facebook does not dominate social networking in other high population countries such as Brazil, Russia and Japan, so Turkey with a population of 72 million and a very rapid uptake of online services ranks close to the top of the list.

2. Friendfeed is more popular in Turkey than anywhere else

Source: Alexa

In relative terms Friendfeed is more highly ranked in Turkey than any other country. While in Turkey most people think of Friendfeed primarily as a niche geek platform, with Facebook the true mass market social network, in fact a large proportion of conversations, many stemming from Twitter and Facebook and then posted back onto those sites by users, are happening on Friendfeed. This seems to indicate the particularly conversational nature of Turks, aligning themselves with the social media advocates of Silicon Valley.

3. Turkish Internet users have the highest level of engagement in Europe

Source: comScore

Recent statistics show that Turkish internet users have the highest level of engagement of any country in Europe, both in hours spent online and number of pages viewed. This is in spite of fairly low broadband penetration, which is usually correlated with less time spent online.

4. Turkey has a population of 72 million with an average age of 28

Source: NationMaster

Turkey has the youngest population of any country in Europe, with its youthful orientation in contrast to the rapidly aging countries of Western Europe. This means that we can expect uptake of new technology to be far faster than in other countries, as we are currently experiencing. Turkey has come relatively late in building a mass internet market, but its pace of growth is exceptional and will continue to be so.

5. Broadband penetration is low but rapidly rising

Gas masks in a busy internet cafe during the May Day riots in Istanbul, Turkey
Source: Will Cowan on Flickr (Creative Commons)

At the end of 2008 total Internet penetration was estimated at 22% of the population, with just 35% of these on broadband. As the proportion on broadband rapidly rises, the already high levels of engagement will increase. Mobile penetration is close to 100%. Mobile broadband and 3G is being launched currently, so much of the next phase of Internet growth in Turkey is likely to happen on mobile devices.

Counterpoint: YouTube and many other websites are banned and blocked in Turkey
At last count 1874 websites were banned by the Turkish legislature, notably including YouTube and Wordpress. However this doesn't stop people accessing those sites using proxy browsers. The Turkish prime minister himself was reported to say he gets around the YouTube ban, and it is in fact supposedly the ninth most popular site in the country. The reasons for the ban are complex and rooted in legal structures and the separation of powers. On the positive side, the Turkish market is thriving in spite of these blocks. However unless this changes it will impact among other things the willingness of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to invest in the market.

In summary, the Turkish Internet market is one of the fastest growing and most dynamic in the world. Its large and young population overlaid with strong economic growth and internet technology rollouts means this will if anything accelerate. There are outstanding opportunities for Internet entrepreneurs and for traditional media to migrate online.

The extremely strong uptake of social media, notably Facebook, reflects on the traditional community-based culture of the country, as well as the dislocation of urbanization. I was surprised by the relatively poor English skills outside the professional sector, a factor which will in fact increase concentration and opportunities in the Turkish language market.

I look forward to engaging more in this very exciting country and market.

As an aside, I met Cem Sertoglu, at the time the CEO of corporate social networking platform Select Minds, in New York in 2005 at an event on Blogging goes Mainstream that Cem, Robert Scoble, myself and others spoke at. Cem has since returned to Turkey and is now general partner of iLab Ventures, Turkey's leading internet VC firm. It was great to catch up with Cem while I was in Istanbul. Cem writes some great commentary on the Turkish Internet market on his blog Sortipreneur. [UPDATE:] Cem makes an interesting comment re language skills and Facebook uptake .

Business Today: Interview on how business can use social media

2009-10-28T23:16:23Z

Yesterday I was interviewed on the Business Today program on the Australia Network, ABC TV's international network which broadcasts across Asia.

The interview can also be viewed along with other material in Business Today's archives.

Key points covered in the interview include:

* Building business relationships increasingly happens online

* People have leapt at the opportunity to connect online - this is part of who we are

* Companies are networks working in a networked world - social networks are invaluable tools for them both internally and externally

* Companies in different industries will use social media tools in different ways depending on their priorities e.g. banks and telecoms for customer service, professional firms for internal networking etc.

* If you get onto Twitter or other social media, you need to commit and do it properly - this usually includes appointing social media specialists to engage well externally

* Examples of companies using these tools include Jetstar, Telstra, Comcast, Deloitte, Wachovia, Citibank, Zappos and many others