terrbear.org

I work at a company that helps other companies employ Web2.0 concepts (wikis, presence, IM, and other avenues of collaboration) to enrich their business, both internally and externally. I’m incredibly lucky, because I get to read some of the smartest people’s blogs on the subject (they work here). One of the problems that it seems everyone is trying to solve (including our company, and I’ll try to avoid parenthesis for the rest of this post) is how to explain the value of collaboration to customers.

Few people will say that collaboration is bad. But is it worth paying for? In terrifying economic times and with a new VC-funded company every 5 seconds asking you for money, how do you know what’s worth it and what isn’t? What will make you or your company more available, faster to react to change, smarter, better, faster, cooler?

I won’t pretend to know the answer to that. Well, not entirely. But I have seen some Web2.0 stuff change the way I do business, and the way I rely on other people.

In the last 24 hours I’ve scheduled a meeting, discussing Yammer, over Twitter; ordered pizza from Papa John’s online; been notified by our *most excellent* photographer that our new pictures our up; complained to Mr. Gatti’s about having a shitty phone operator; learned several new words; read about the Hill Sphere and microwave radiation’s effect on humans; and put out a pull request for Stammer, an open source Yammer Ruby client managed on GitHub (which was merged in).

Guess how many people I had to see face to face to do any of this? How many I had to talk on the phone? How many I had to interrupt? How many I had to let interrupt me? 0.

Part of the beauty of the new internets is that people can work without waiting on others. I can put out a pull request, read about some obscure physics concept, get new work items from my boss, and order pizza, all on my own schedule. This opens up possibilities for totally new behaviors, and business and people are taking advantage of them in different ways.

Our photographer (who’s a friend, and does a sound job of making us look attractive) pinged Sara and me over Twitter last night. She didn’t need our phone numbers, our emails, or anything; she just pinged us and said “pics are up, check them out here.” It made the transaction seem personal, immediate, and really cool. Think about back in the day (I’m barely old enough to remember) when you’d go to a professional photographer, and then wait a week or two to go into their shop and see prints, and then order pictures. That’s all obsolete now.

Small businesses have a propensity and need to create friendships, and Web2.0 is helping them out a lot. By making businesses more available, easier, you can expose yourself to clients in ways not possible before, and consequently almost guarantee loyalty. Saving money is an added benefit - no more prints, in this case.

Enterprises, on the other hand, are often aimed at the bottom line. This doesn’t say anything bad about big businesses. They run the world. They make the best coffee. They sell the cheapest footballs. They make the best TVs. But they don’t get to be huge by focusing just on customer experience. They have to focus on the bottom line. So, when introduced to a shiny new toy, Web2.0/collaboration/whatever, the immediate question is “how can this save us money?”

This works great for, say, pizza companies. I ordered a pizza online with Papa John’s, didn’t have to speak to a kid trying to hear me over a ton of noise in the background, and couldn’t have been offended by anything. Contrast that with my conversation right before I went online to PJ’s, where I tried to order Mr. Gatti’s over the phone, and was so pissed off at the douche on the other end of the line that I not only vowed to never order anything from them again, but wrote a letter to the owner … over the internets.

But there’s something lost. Though they solved the problem of the not-so-bright phone operator, they reduced the personalization. There’s no one to make a cool offer, a good suggestion, or offer insights into what they like. Everything’s filtered through market speak, and as a result, is bland.

Big businesses aren’t stupid, and they realize that the more of their business they put online, the more precarious their investment in customer relationships. As a result, many recoil, and others (like Amazon), try to bring customers closer to each other to fill the void.

What’s funny, though, is that even in big business Web2.0 is starting to entangle itself in teams. I communicate with my boss and coworkers through Twitter, IM, and rarely email. We post to our hub to share wikis and other ideas. Collaboration’s coming, like it or not.

I think it’s this inevitability that will bring everybody onto the internets in the next few years. Anybody who’s somebody is going to be twittering, IMing, voting, tagging, rating, etc. The reason it’s confusing to businesses is that there’s not many clear strategies for how to adopt it successfully.

It’s like this: you’re going to get a car when you turn 16. Do you want to position yourself to have a BMW or a 1985 F150? Would the BMW be better if you got it when you were 15 instead?

BMW. Yes.