We talked about the recent resource actions at IBM and other companies, and how people were reaching out to their networks to find other opportunities. JF Arsenault (one of my role models) tweeted his availability and blogged about the situation. Others are reaching out to non-Web-2.0 networks, calling and e-mailing people. In tough times, we need all the help we can get.

David observed that being part of a resource action–being laid off, in less euphemistic terms–used to carry more of a stigma. But in an economic climate where even top performers are part of resource actions, it’s not about individuals. If it’s not shameful to be looking for an opportunity and you’re the kind of person for whom sharing things online, it makes sense to reach out to the widest networks you have. You may even have an advantage: you’ve cultivated a wide network, established your credibility both inside and outside the company, and can find out about opportunities you might not otherwise have come across.

One of the interesting consequences of this recession and reshuffling, then, is that the shake-out may give us more insights on what works in the marketplace. Does it make sense to hoard your knowledge so that you are valued more? Does it make sense to share your knowledge so that you gain more leverage on it, create and share more value, and grow your network?

From personal experiences such as regularly getting calls from headhunters because they’ve read my blog (which I always reply to with a variation of “I’m really happy at IBM because I’m doing all sorts of awesome stuff with awesome people, but thanks for connecting!”), I suspect that sharing knowledge opens up far more opportunities than it closes.

It’s difficult for people to switch paradigms. Through evangelism and coaching, I help people who are interested in sharing learn how to share more effectively. Through examples, I hope to inspire people to reexamine their assumptions about knowledge and power, and to try sharing what they know and what they’re learning. If people are afraid of losing their job, they’ll probably find it even more difficult to invest extra time in sharing what they know. Sharing seems slow. But if those who have invested the time to share their knowledge start seeing clear benefits during these uncertain times, then maybe more people will consider sharing.

We’ll see what it’s like when the dust settles. I think, however, that investing in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 – whether at the organizational or personal level – makes even more sense now than it did it easier times. If you’d like to learn more about getting started, leave a comment. I may not be able to spend as much time doing one-on-one coaching as I’d like, but maybe I can share some lessons learned that’ll help you and lots of other people. You can also pick not only my brain but also my teammates’ brains by engaging us for consulting or application development for your organization. I think we can get through these challenging times, and I think it’s a great opportunity to find out what works.

(Also, check out Joe McKendrick’s blog post on investing in Web 2.0)

Here’s what I love about Pass It Along, and I think you’ll love it too:

• You can find out who’s learning a topic and see what else they’re interested in. Sharing what I know becomes a lot more fun when I can see who’s learning, because it gives me feedback that what I’m sharing is useful. Lists of people are much better than anonymous hit counts because I can view their profiles to see what else they’re interested in.
• You can learn from other people’s contributions. People can add links, related presentations, discussion topics, and other updates. For example, the “How to Make the Most of Your Commute” topic I started within IBM drew lots of interesting suggestions.
• You can create a place for discussions. I give a lot of presentations, and Pass It Along topics are a terrific place to hold follow-up discussions and reach out to more people. I post my presentation material using the Presentation Wizard and include the URL of the Pass It Along topic on my slides. It’s a great way for learners to connect with each other, too.

I also really like how a newbie like me can create value for other people by sharing what I’m learning. =) Whee! I’m copying some of my public content over, and you can find my topics on Pass It Along.

IBM Pass It Along on Alphaworks is a public site open to everyone. Access controls will follow soon, so you can limit topic access to just your organization if needed. IBM Pass It Along is even better inside your organization, where you can link it up with your employee directory or do all sorts of other cool stuff.

Check it out – it might be a great fit for your organization!

IBM Pass It Along

• Advertise – make sure your participants understand how an unconference is different.  That this is about what the participants want.  The unconference is what the participants make it.  Some participants still didn’t quite understand it until after they attended.  Don’t use only blogs and wikis to advertize, you want to get message out to others too.

• Make sure the sign up board is big, and is in people’s faces, preferrably before the unconference begins (we had 1.5 days for them to sign up before the unconfernece part of blue horizon began).

• Don’t expect too many people to sign up ahead of time.  Actually some unconferences don’t allow any pre-sign-ups anymore.

• Realize that some participants may still try to “present” leaving no time for interaction or questions.  Tell them that no preparation is required.  If they really really want to prepare, then set a maximum on the amount of time they can “present” and the maximum number of slides.

• You might want to specify a theme

• Hardest part is getting participants to realize that there is a topic that they can lead.  All it requires is enough knowledge on a subject to ask the right questions, initiate the discussion, and facilitate it.

• Facilities – we only had one room (a big room) so we put projectors and screens in 3 of the 4 corners.  We put flip charts in all 4 corners.   What worked best was having the chairs in a semi-circle.

• Schedule – we had 4 time slots of 35 minutes, in 4 break-out areas (16 slots total).  Next time I would like to make it longer, or have more break-out areas.

• Schedule board – we used a big white board.  I drew in the schedule and an area for people to request topics.

• Let unconference session leaders have 1-minute to tell all the participants what their topic is about.  Almost like a verbal-abstract.  Keep them to 1 minute (with a buzzer or something) or this could take forever.

• Encourage session leaders and participants to blog about it afterwards all using the same tag

• Advertise some more

Also, check out some great ideas by David Crow on tapping participants brillance.  I especially like the idea of open white boards with questions posed to all the participants.

If you are wondering where you fall in this division, here are the boundaries:

• Traditionalists, born between 1900 and 1945;
• Baby Boomers, born 1946 to 1964;
• Gen-Xers, 1965-1980;
• Millennials, or NetGens, born after 1980

I liked the way the table above summarized the generational differences the first time I saw it, to the point I asked a colleague to re-use it in my current engagement. But when I proposed to add this table to the material I’m developing – part of a collaboration strategy for a very large government agency – I had an enlightening conversation with the folks I’m working with, both of them boomers and brilliant.

I don’t buy this. When I was 18, I was very much like the NetGen described in this table. The behaviours described here have a lot to do with personal traits and lifecycle. Today’s NetGens, once they get married, start a family and get a mortgage, may become more settled and act pretty much like a boomer. Besides, there are young folks today that are uncomfortable with change, thrive under hierarchical structures and prefer things to be run the "conventional" way.

Disclaimer: The above is my recollection of what 2 people said, which can be very different from what they actually said, so take it with a grain of salt.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’m inclined now to think that the table above is VERY ageist, and it’s not helping us to actually understand the differences between people.

Our brain likes generalizations. It helps us to create a simple model of how life works and simplifies our decision making. But generalizations are typically based on perceived averages. And there is no such a thing as the average person, the average Asian, or the average woman. You probably have seen one of the multiple incarnations of "if the world were a village of 100 people" (see here & here for more details). The hypothetical average human being would be Asian, adult, heterosexual, Christian, always hungry and with no TV at home. I would bet that the vast majority of the human population does not fit that full profile, even though those are the dominant attributes in each category. Those attributes are independent variables, they don’t come in bundles.

There’s a Brazilian song that says something along the lines of "looking from a close range, nobody is normal" ("de perto ninguém é normal", Vaca Profana, Caetano Veloso, if you need to know). That’s so much true! Just imagine the table above trying to do the same with gender, race, or sexual preferences. You would probably think that to be very inappropriate or stereotypical. One of the things that make humanity fascinating is exactly how complex and different we are. Nobody is "one in a million". There was never a person like you, and there will never be. We are all truly unique, each one of us a long tail of our own. So please don’t tell me that you are too old to blog or that you "get" technology just because you are supposed to be a NetGen. There’s nothing like living in exponential times: the only thing you are supposed to be is yourself.

When I left the group in their capable hands I wondered how the Web2.0 world would change while I was away.

Things that have not changed:

• it is still called Web2.0
• it is still the people who are driving the change bottom-up

Things that have changed:

• many of our customers now “get it”
• social networks are for everyone, not just the geeks (although if I get an invite for one more network……)
• more people seem to understand the breadth of Web2.0 (and not just one facet e.g. RIA)

First of all, even though early entrants do benefit from garnering mindshare as innovative and bold, there are several cases of late entrants who were able to level the competition by offering a superior service. Both Google over Yahoo search and Facebook over MySpace come to mind, but there are several other notable examples.

So let’s suppose you’ve been late to the 2.0 game but now wants to try it out. What can you do to get an edge over your competitors? In other words, how can you obtain, in MBA lingo, a Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA)? A SCA happens when a firm "has value-creating processes and positions that cannot be duplicated or imitated by other firms that lead to the production of above normal rents" (Wikipedia). If you read the whole article (which is not that well written, by the way), you’ll find that, to be sustainable, your advantage has to be distinctive and proprietary.

Knowing that, three of your resources come to mind:

1. Your people (employees, business partners and customers)
2. Your data
3. Your products and services

People is the most overlooked of the three. Most companies claim things along the lines of "our customer always comes first", "our people is our most valuable asset" and "you can trust the excellence of our business partners". Talk is that cheap. Very few act on it.

Your employees

The executives in your company, individually speaking, may be among the brightest business people in the world. They’ve been through it all, seen it all, have powerful incentives to make your company do really well. But nobody really knows your business as much as the collective intelligence of all your employees. The teller in that remote city in Wisconsin knows that you just lost a loyal customer because you started charging too much for a cheque book, or because your company was rumoured to be exposed to a serious security breach. Your fast-food cashier knows that charging 50 cents for having a small salad instead of fries in your combo made 3 clients cancel their orders this week. That information can be trivial and inconsequent. Those employees may not even think about those things that much. If we want to be fancy, we can call all that tacit knowledge, which is typically deemed as hard to access. So, why bother?

Well, Web 2.0 is changing that. Knowledge that was only registered in people’s minds or oral conversations are increasingly becoming digitalized in blog posts, tweets, comments, text messages, VoIP conversations, call centre recordings, YouTube videos, you name it. Now, if the only channel your employees have to express themselves is the corporate email and the conversation at the cafeteria, you’re missing all that. The chart below shows that email and other traditional communication tools fall short in both reach and breadth of content. Using blogs, wikis and enterprise social networking tools can really amplify and strengthen the networks you develop at work, and will capture a fair amount of tacit knowledge that would otherwise be lost. You’ll also be able to reach out to the "invisible majority", people that you should care about and never have a chance to listen to (represented in white in the diagram below).

Many companies are afraid of giving employees an internal corporate blogging platform because that could be used as a space to vent frustration and rant about all sorts of things. Don’t be afraid. Rest assured that both venting and ranting WILL happen. And that’s a good thing for you, as you do want to learn what the major causes of dissatisfaction may be. Well, unless mistreating your employees IS part of your business model. But over time you’ll see that people complaining is not going to be the major theme there. Some folks will tell stories, others will share their knowledge or come up with new ideas. As the community matures, that may be even an added incentive for your employees to stick with your company, as the sense of belonging tends to be strengthened during this process.

Guidelines

Make sure you establish reasonable guidelines for what is OK, and revisit the guidelines from time to time to ensure they stay current and relevant. Also, don’t enforce guidelines as if you were the police. Do it as if you were a parent. People will occasionally post content that will challenge some of the guidelines. Unless it’s blatantly inappropriate, you may be better off leaving it there for a while, for the community to make a judgement. Sometimes breaking a guideline says more about the guideline than about the violator, and guidelines are supposed to evolve with the maturity of the blogging community.

Business partners

Some companies are also creating communities with their business partners, field agents or prosumers. Even though these folks are not part of your payroll, they want you to succeed, and listening to what they have to say can give you a perspective you cannot get from inside. More companies should be doing this in the next few years, opening their collaboration environment to trusted partners.

Customers

Finally, the scariest space of them all: let your customers say, in a public forum, what they think about you, your products and services. You actually should beg for people to comment on those. The more people do it, the less skewed your sample will be. Again, don’t be scared to give up control here. You’ve lost that years ago. If you are a large company or have a best seller product or service, try this simple test. Google your company’s name, and look for related Wikipedia or blog entries. You probably don’t need to go beyond the second page of results to find people speaking about you already. If you are really large, chances are that you’ll even find a <your-company-name>Sucks.com website.

So the bad news is that  the genie is out of the bottle already, you can’t control what people say anymore. The good news is that your competitor’s genie is also out there, so it’s a fair playing field for those who understand the game. I highly recommend you visit Mike Moran’s website for more on that (full disclosure: like me, he also works for IBM).

Done in the right way, this is a very hard capability for others to copy, as your people are truly unique and their contributions cannot be easily replicated.

Stay tuned as I’ll be addressing the other two resources – data and products + services – in a future post.

The article is written from a viewpoint of how to use a blog to improveyourself, and the bonuses they list regarding blogging (e.g. trackprogress, get feedback, share knowledge) apply to anyone, either personally or professionally.

The home team won 2 x 0, first goal by Brazilian Juliano Beletti and second one by Shaun Wright-Phillips, after a fantastic play by J. Cole. I wonder how many people in Brazil know that Beletti’s first name is Juliano – in Brazil, most players are known by a single name.

Here are some more pics (check the full set in Flickr):

And what would a football game have to do with Web 2.0, you must be asking? Well, two days ago I learned in the CBC Search Engine podcast that MyFootballClub, a British website, is offering anybody the opportunity to own and manage a real football club for £35 a year. It’s not an online game, or a fantasy league. The team is Ebbsfleet United and they aspire to reach Football League soon. According to their website:

For the first time in football history, fans have the opportunity to buy and then take control of a professional football club – both on and off the pitch. Every MyFootballClub member will have an equal say in team selection, player transfers and the running of the club.

This site takes the Monday morning chat about football to a whole new level. If you don’t like a player or want to fire the coach, you can really do something about it. I wish I had that power with Brazil’s national team or the Toronto Raptors. My oldest brother is a huge football fan and he goes to every game of our hometown team (the little known Ituano FC, if you really need to know), but the only voice he’s got is when he curses at the linesman during the games. Believe me, he makes the most from it: he and his friends know bad words in Portuguese that I can only imagine what they mean .

I’m not sure if this concept of wisdom of crowds applied to professional sports will ever work, but they are up to a good start, having more than 25,000 owners already. And I agree with this fella in the BBC website:

While I wouldn’t rule out a meteoric charge up the leagues to the
Premier League, I believe MyFootballClub’s success will hopefully be
judged on whether we’ve improved the club for its supporters and its
community. If that means we only get them one division higher,
or get them only a thousand more supporters a week, then to me that’s a
success.

Now I’m asking myself: Is there really anything in the world that cannot be web-two-oh-fied? In the last few months, I have heard about NGO 2.0, cyber crime 2.0 and even environment 2.0. Just google “<put any word here> 2.0″ and you will be amazed about how people have been trying to use the wisdom of crowds and the web as platform.