Business Practice

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Business Practice

I hate “quality” “products” (and so should you)

"Quality" is so abstract, ill-defined, and over-used, it doesn't mean anything. "Product" is about as descriptive as "widget." So I'm banning both from my office.

by Andrew Swenson
Quality Cleaners Drive-In sign

image credit: debaird™ on Flickr (see below for link)

There are plenty of cliché business words and phrases I hate (“optimize,” “low-hanging fruit,” “web 2.0,” “leverage,” and so on), but none as much as two words I’ve recently decided to ban from my vocabulary and my office: 1) “Quality” and 2) “Product”.

Why I hate “quality”

I owe my contempt for “quality” to Dr. Brian Till (author of The Truth About Creating Brands People Love). During a marketing and branding seminar I took with him, Till refused to accept “quality” as a satisfactory position description or brand equity.

His point: you can always be more specific.

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Business Practice

War, Meaning, and the Future of Social Business

by Andrew Swenson

image credit: The U.S. Army

Global capitalism in the last century has been a conquest. “It’s a dog eat dog world,” we say without much thought. Business is war. Sure the battlefields have changed, as Mark Shaefer explains, but it’s still the same fight—”trying to sell more to more people for more money more often.”

But just over a decade into the twenty-first century, are we losing the fight?

A decade with no wage growth, with return on assets of publicly traded American companies approaching zero in the next ten years, and with public sector workers railing in the face of service cuts and tax hikes. Something’s got to change.

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Business Practice

Business and WikiLeaks: There’s nothing to fear

by Andrew Swenson

I normally love the Economist, but every once and a while the mag gets it slightly wrong. So it was for a brief article regarding WikiLeaks in the December 11th edition that told us to “Be Afraid” as we face a world where our corporate secrets are increasingly unsafe.

It’s not that the reporting was bad, that was right on (albiet painfully obvious):

The State Department has learned what the music and film industries learned long ago: that digital files are easy to copy and distribute, says Bruce Schneier, a security expert. Companies are about to make that discovery, too. There will be more leaks, and they will be embarrassing.

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Business Practice

Process won’t solve ambiguous problems

by Andrew Swenson
wrecked Model-T by dok1

image credit: dok1

Ever since Henry Ford gave us the assembly line, the business community has been addicted to process. Now after more than 100 years of shooting it up, it’s hard for us to fathom controlling our businesses in any other way than through process.

Even some social business leaders have argued for the use of process to introduce social tools in to the enterprise. As Michael Idinopulos, VP of Socialtext writes:

Process, rather than culture, is increasingly seen as the key enabler of social software in the enterprise. Rather than wringing our hands and gnashing our teeth about how to change organizational culture, we’re looking at how to insert social tools into the existing business process.

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Business Practice

On leadership and social business

by Andrew Swenson

We’ve been talking about how community management is as much of an internal process as it is external for a while now, but I was glad to see some affirmation of our argument from Quy Huy and Andrew Shipilov on the Harvard Business Review blog yesterday:

Firms that lack leaders with social media skills are often tempted to outsource community management to outsiders, such as web development firms or advertising agencies. Unfortunately, this increases the risk of failure. The problem is that when community development is outsourced, the organization doesn’t learn and people inside communicate like they always did, even though the use of social media might have speeded up internal communication and flattened the hierarchies. As a result, the company is often very different from the face it portrays online, which almost always gets discovered.

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Business Practice

There are no blog how-tos for the hard stuff

by Andrew Swenson
 

image credit: mikebaird

You won’t find the secret to business success online.

So stop looking.

Because everyone is scrambling to produce better content more often, there’s great incentive (eyeballs and wallets) to create new and better guides for business.

I mean, Brian Solis told us how to create and cultivate a brand in social media in just seven steps.

Chris Brogan just shared a simple formula for blogging success that got him 50,000 subscribers.

Forbes thought it prudent to create a slideshow entitled “In Pictures: How To Fire Someone”

And the list goes on.

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Business Practice

The Voice of the Org in Social Business

by Andrew Swenson

As the roles of marketing and PR orient themselves away from the industrial practices of the last century to something more socially aware, I think it’s important that we question the role of “the voice of the organization.”

Should organizations speak with one voice that reflects a singular identity and purpose?

Or has the rising role of individual voices in the context of networks supplanted the need for “org” speak, replacing it with the speech of loosely connected individuals?

As a disclaimer, I’m writing this as a theoretical discussion, not a manifesto or even a how-to.

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Business Practice

Facebook found a way to Kill Google

by Andrew Swenson

image by jaycameron

Okay, so maybe Facebook won’t kill Google, but I’m predicting they will supplant them as the largest and most ubiquitous web app.

In case you’ve been sleeping, yesterday at the f8 developer conference, Facebook announced Open Graph, a new killer app.

What’s changed

If you aren’t up to speed, here are the three most important updates (and you can read the rest on Mashable):

  1. With the new “Facebook for Web Sites” social plugins (the like button is featured at the top of this post), you don’t need to log in to a web page to engage with its content. Try it out.
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Business Practice

Broadcast 2.0 v. Open Market

by Andrew Swenson

Beyond all of the iPad hype, beyond the lovers and the haters and the blenders, there’s a really serious question lurking, and Doc Searls nailed it in his brain dump response:

Do we want the Internet to be broadcasting 2.0 — run by a few content companies and their allied distributors? Or do we want it to be the wide open marketplace it was meant to be in the first place, and is good for everybody?

On closed systems

Searls, Cory Doctorow, Dave Winer, Mark Pilgrim, Alex Payne (cf. this post also), Tim Bray, and Peter Kirn, take the side of the open marketplace.

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Business Practice

Why the iPad won’t save Publishers (and what to do about it)

by Andrew Swenson

Photo Credit: Renato Mitra

With print sales falling faster than tween girls are falling for Justin Bieber, book publishers are getting a bit panicky. In not so modest desperation, they’re looking for a savior…

Enter the iPad.

Advertisers are lining up for periodicals, and according to the Wall Street Journal, breaking out their checkbooks for iPad deals. This has caused some minor elation, even among more traditional book distributors.

This, I think, is foolish.

Fact: the iPad won’t save publishers

This is a given. Publishers and news organizations need to get over themselves. Henry Blodget tells us why:

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