Still Eggplant

Like many people, I’ve noticed a trend of late. It has to do with Web 2.0, the Howard Dean campaign, permission marketing and all of these newfangled technologies and ways of doing business. What do they all have to do with each other, I wondered. Why now? Is there, in fact a commonality between them?

Instead of trying to pressure myself into figuring it out, though, I simply sat back and watched. I used social networking sites. I used Wikipedia. I looked at the success of the netroots and how they’ve begun to influence the media. I read Seth Godin’s work on permission marketing. I read more about the Long Tail. I was intrigued. And I learned a lot along the way.

Then, recently, it all came together as I was preparing a presentation for a job interview. The job entails recruiting volunteers into research studies. There’s an educational component, a public relations aspect, and a selling part to it. The more I thought about the requirements of the job, the more I looked at permission marketing as something that would satisfy all of those pieces of the job. I decided to do my presentation on that concept.

In order to explain why permission marketing made sense, I needed to let people know where I thought people are. From there, I wanted to show the response to our changing world, and why permission marketing, in the context of social marketing, might make sense. And that’s when it hit me. Following are my resultant thoughts on what I’m calling Participatory Business Development. I have many other thoughts on the subject. I’ll write more in the coming days.

Here’s what happening in our changing world — we’re being overrun. Our attention is demanded constantly. The average American sees over 1,000,000 advertisements a year. That’s 3,000 marketing messages a day. We’re bombarded with too much information. But that’s not all. Work drives us toward greater efficiency while simultaneously asking us to spend even greater time at the office. Big money controls politics. The world has gotten smaller through globalization. Media consolidation has opened up the plausibility that the news we hear is only the public relations version of events. There’s a lack of physical neighborhoods where people really work and play. We’re all experiencing the effects of corporatization. And technology is taking over our lives placing a barrier between us.

This all has resulted in a lack of trust, I think. Basically, we have a world that is simultaneously becoming smaller yet less personal. People don’t have the same connections they used to have. We’re not a world centered around the family or our neighborhoods anymore. My feeling is this has produced a certain amount of fear and a grasping for some sort of control.

Some aspects of the business world have responded with a set of technologies and ways of doing business. The most famous of these is web 2.0. It’s gotten a lot of press within a certain segment of society. But that’s not the only thing going on. I think web 2.0 is part of a fairly linear path that includes concepts and business practices like the wisdom of the crowds, blogging, the Howard Dean campaign, social networking, YouTube, the netroots, 37signals, APIs, the long tail, permission marketing, open source software development, tagging, Wikipedia, and viral marketing.

What all of these things, ideas, practices have in common are that they are all about Creating Conversation. Essentially, they all put people back into the process. They give people a say in their world again — at least a version of control. The essential characteristics of this people centered process are: dialogue, iterative processes, responsiveness to customer needs, an openness about the process, learning on the part of the business, the desire to collaborate, relationship building with the customer, and a commitment to data.
This is the new way of doing successful business. The businesses and nonprofits that incorporate these practices will survive in this changing world. The ones that don’t take on these practices will fail . . . or at least become mired in the gunk of bureaucracy.

Oddly enough, these practices have some close antecedents in the noprofit world, particularly the world of evaluation. Early in my career I learned about an evaluation methodology called Participatory Evaluation. Basically, you involve various stakeholders in the evaluative process. The stakeholders would include users of the service or product, the managers, the funders, governmental officials — anyone who had a stake in the outcome of the product or service.This group would help decide what needed to be evaluated, the process, the research questions. They also helped with gathering data and then analyzing it. My goal was to facilitate the involvement of the product or service experts in the evaluation. Not only did I, as the facilitator, benefit from their expert knowledge but the product or service managers, as part of the process, gained a greater insight into the process. They are able to change tactics on the fly in need be because they can see what impact their work is having.

There are some strong corollaries between participatory evaluation and these new business practices. They are both about learning. They are both saying that all of the expertise doesn’t reside in one place. They are both about changing things as you go along to make a better product. Until more recently, businesses have listened pretty hard to their funders — whether stockholders or venture capitalists. But there has not been as open a dialogue with their customers. But, as we can see, that’s changing. It’s not just about taking a poll and measuring what will make the most people happy. It’s about truly listening, about being fleet enough to change messages, outcomes, services, the whole product, on the fly based what you’re hearing. It’s about openness — taking the fear and the proprietary nature out of business. It’s about building trust.

And that’s why I’m calling these new business practices Participatory Business Development.

Technorati Tags: 37signals, advertising, api, long tail, marketing, netroots, open source, participatory evaluation, permission marketing, social networking, tagging, viral marketing, web 2.0, web2.0, wisdom of the crowds, youtube