Citizen-Generated Media (CGM)

The Digital Grapevines of Business

Blogging is to words as Napster was to music, a transforming technology whose influence and implications will only grow more wide-ranging with time.

Imagine that you are a large corporation engaged in the manufacture and sales of widgets.  Your organizational chart is fairly predictable.  The vast majority of workers make the widgets or supervise those that work on the widget assembly line.  A smaller group of employees work in the field, selling the widgets, and an even smaller group of executives devise the strategies and monitor all the systems that must operate to ensure the efficient production and distribution of the product in a competitive marketplace.  This basic structure is the same whether you manufacture a material product or process something more ephemeral, like information.   In traditional business structures, the information flows primarily in one direction, from the powerful spots on the top of the hierarchy downward.  Enlightened managers may have placed an anonymous suggestion box on the workplace floor, but even that was a recognition that fine-tuning any production process was best accomplished by those that actually participated in it.  By anonymizing the process, the manager was able to cherry-pick the best ideas without disrupting the hierarchy.  The same thing applied to company newsletters and magazines.  They emanated from on high and served such useful purposes as informing the workforce of changes or adaptations, or elevating morale.

Along comes the blog.  Anyone can create one, practically for free.  The early adopters were frequently voices in the wilderness, people with a point of view but no means to broadcast it.  Just as Hollywood first saw television as a threat, and missed its greater significance as an allied technology that could enhance the marketing and distribution of feature films, so too did businesses perceive blogs as annoying usurpations of their “system”.  Employees were fired for serious offenses such as disclosing company secrets or undercutting company campaigns, but just as often got the axe for posting photos of themselves in company uniforms, or for gently criticizing a misguided management policy.
 
As blogs have become more commonplace, resistance to them gradually softened.  To some, they’ve become be a useful tool, not only an expression of muted hostility.  Giant firms like General Motors, IBM, Sun and Microsoft have embraced the blog, and required that senior management operate them for such critical functions as dispute resolution, product liability information, even labor/management negotiations.  Blogs can facilitate internal communications, or act as an avenue for customer feedback.   Their threaded, chronological nature creates a legal record and provides a well of history into which any interested reader can delve.
 
Traditional businesses are hierarchical and don’t usually encourage mid-level initiative.  The web is a lateral series of volitional associations, one almost impossible to monitor or control.  The architecture of the blog has enabled a dialogue, the most appropriate dialogue, to take place, outside the reins of hierarchy and in the spirit of egalitarian information transfer.  The company that refuses to recognize the utility of this because it violated protocol faces the fate of the horse-and-buggy and the typewriter.

Blogging is a digital medium, one more way to tell stories and assess their relevance.  It’s another channel, and for some, a disruptive one. Blogs allow conversations where none could occur before.  They are currently, and will continue to greatly change the way that business is conducted at virtually every level.

We Are All Addicts

Is the Internet a drug?  Does it possess addictive allures that rise to the level of a defined medical condition?  This question is being hotly debated as an ex-IBM employee, fired for discussing a sex act in a chat room from his office computer, argues that he’s sick, not criminally deranged, as reported by Business Week.com.

Coke and Doritos

We all know the cliché that computer geeks live on soda pop and junque food, with bloggers experiencing “fear of the blank page” (or writer’s block, as it used to be known) among the most likely to succumb to these temptations as kinds of displacement reactions.  Now bloggers can rate their favorite sodas, and even acquire a patch for their website that extends this unholy trio (drink, food, and cyber-buzz) to anyone who visits. 

Tracking Your Ancestors Diaspora

iUsing U.S. Census records, Ancestry.com has figured out a way that you can track you last name’s distribution in 1840, 1880, and 1920. This idea will probably become more robust as other databases are added.

The Hobgoblin of Inconsistency

Nobody uses Digital Rights Management (DRM) software more than Microsoft, whose Vista operating system is jammed with DRM applications, as is Zune and other spin-offs.  So, a few bloggers’ eyebrows were raised in skepticism when Bill Gates recently gave a speech in Seattle that seemed to endorse the very strategies that DRM was intended to prohibit. A more likely critic was National Public Radio, who ran an interview “Goodbye, VHS. Farewell, Fair Use” More significant than any of these rants is the big dollars Sony had to pony up after a recent court ruling in required the fine after finding that Sony had illegally embedded DRM software on many of their releases.