Business Goes Virtual – Chapter 2: The New Face(book) of Organizations

The second post of my Business Goes Virtual blog series continues with “Chapter 2: The New Face(book) of Organizations” and how businesses are using social technology to interact with their customers, but also how users are also being empowered by it.

Groundswell

The power behind the groundswell concept is that suddenly everyday people have unparalleled power, especially people that gather together and create communities (see http://www.forrester.com/groundswell). But what has changed to empower these communities with such power? Surely groups of passionate people have long yearned for the opportunity to influence or perhaps even hijack issues. Of course, there have been many times in history when large groups congregated to spark change. However, the logistics with massing large groups can be very cumbersome, expensive, and difficult to communicate.

Enter Web 2.0— a World Wide Web based on collaboration rather than content— and suddenly all these obstacles evaporate, at least for virtual groups. In their book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, authors Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams describe how a low- cost collaborative infrastructure is empowering the many— they term these “the weapons of mass collaboration.” Tapscott and Williams warn that these weapons support a new level of collaboration that will turn the economy upside down and may well facilitate the destruction of organizations who fail to adjust.

(Pg 23)

The 2011 Egyptian revolution was facilitated by the use of social media websites Twitter and Facebook to co-ordinate and to organize the protests, thus increasing local and global awareness. Because of this “Twitter Revolution”, the now ousted Hosni Mubarak at the time believed that shutting off the internet would stifle the rebellion. (Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/28/whats-going-on-in-egypt_n_815734.html)

Events like these (including the protests in Libya), are a prime examples of how powerful Web 2.0 can be. Social media has given the power back to the public and stripped organizations and even political parties of theirs. How has social media empowered you as a person, consumer, etc.?

Buy a physical or electronic copy of Business Goes Virtual: http://www.businessexpertpress.com/books/business-goes-virtual-realizing-value-collaboration-social-and-virtual-strategies

The content includes:
PART I - THE CONVERGENCE

Chapter 1 - Virtual Business: Real or Imaginary?

Chapter 2 - The New Face(book) of Organizations

Chapter 3 - Real Leadership in the Virtual World

Chapter 4 - The Power of Sharing

Chapter 5 - Making Sense of Virtual Worlds

PART II THE STRATEGIES

Chapter 6 - Any Place, Any Time

Chapter 7 - The People Know Best

Chapter 8 - Everyone Has a Stake

Chapter 9 - Real in the Virtual World

PART III THE WAY AHEAD

Chapter 10 - What Every Leader Needs to Know

Review of Business Goes Virtual by Bill Ives

I recently received a review copy of Business Goes Virtual: Realizing the Value of Collaboration, Social and Virtual Strategies by John P. Girard, Cindy Gordon, and JoAnn L. Girard. I have known Cindy for some time and we have done work together on several occasions, including several writing efforts so I had high expectations for this work. The book argues that after some false starts, four critical enablers have converged to make virtual business opportunities a reality: social technology, visionary leadership, an increasing recognition of the value of a collaboration culture, plus virtual worlds. They define virtual business as follows: “A virtual business provides innovative solutions to new and traditional business challenges by exploiting social technology, leadership, and collaboration in both the real and virtual words.”

The book examines four virtual business strategies that are showing promise. The “any place, any time” strategy provides high quality service 24/7 through bypassing traditional geographic challenges. The “people know best” strategy looks at crowd-sourcing the wisdom of every-day people. The “everyone has a stake” strategy allows organizations to take advantage of their stakeholders’ views. Finally, the “real in the virtual world” strategy enables real businesses to sell their wares in the virtual world.

The book provides case examples and best practices. They look at both successes and failures in this new market and make some bets on the future. They conclude that virtual business is here to stay and firms need to develop a strategy to take advantage of this new market or risk their demise.

One strong example is the transformation from printed books to e-books. I am reading a virtual version of their book now. The authors report that on Christmas Day 2009, consumers purchased more Kindle books than physical books through Amazon, a virtual store itself. Now the iPad is booming with Apple selling more tablets than PCs both in terms of volume and revenue – and the iPad is much cheaper. It takes e-reading to new heights and provides connectivity to so many other possibilities. For example, it becomes that much easier to sharing insights from what you are reading or look up related information from other sources. Publishers who recognize this trend will be in position to ride the new wave and those that do not will be ridden over.

This new world will change many things including jobs. The authors note that many of the top jobs of 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are now faced with preparing our children for jobs that do yet exist and to solve problems that are yet unknown. This uncertainty has always been the case to some extent but it has become a much stronger factor. I saw from another source that in 1986 75% of the knowledge that a worker needed was stored in workers’ heads but by 2006, that number was estimated to be 9%. We need new ways of providing the remaining 81% and the virtual world opens up an opportunity for this also through social software.

It is nice that at least some of the challenges brought forward with the virtual world can also be addressed through it and the new technologies that have enabled it. The authors provide a useful chapter on these new technologies including social networks, blogs, microblogs, and wikis. I was interested to see that Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2010 Report on American bloggers found that 81% have been blogging more than 2 years and 11% say blogging is their primary income source. I am currently one of those in the latter group. Supporting their growth predictions is that fact that most of their usage stats for most tools have now been surpassed.

Of course it is more than technology and they cover the leadership necessary to go forward in the virtual world. They found a variety of leadership styles to work including both transformational and transactional. They provide a series of stories written by a diverse group of successful virtual business leaders.

The book covers much more including the power of sharing, the four strategies mentioned above, and where the future may take us. I recommend it to anyone who wants to make sense of today’s business world and the opportunities and risks it provides.

Source:http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2011/07/review-of-business-goes-virtual.html

Introducing Business Goes Virtual - Chapter 1: Virtual Business - Real or Imaginary?

This blog post is the first of a ten post series about my new book, Business Goes Virtual, written with John and JoAnn Girard. Each post will feature chapter excerpts and general commentary on the current topic.

In a nutshell, Business Goes Virtual combines academic theory and case studies of real-world success stories to provide leaders with leading practices and lessons learned to help their organizations innovate and grow more rapidly.

Virtual Business Defined (Sort of)


...Wikipedia defines the term as follows: “A virtual business employs electronic means to transact business as opposed to a traditional brick and mortar business that relies on face- to- face transactions with physical documents and physical currency or credit.”


Our use of the Wikipedia definition is very deliberate. We are very aware that some readers will cringe as they read the word “Wikipedia” and immediately challenge the validity of the definition. However, we believe that Wikipedia is an excellent source of material, especially given the subject of the book. Throughout Business Goes Virtual, we will use a variety of high- quality online references including blogs, wikis, social media, and corporate web presences as well as more traditional academic sources such as peer- reviewed journal articles, books, and conference proceedings. We will select the sources carefully; however, we will not differentiate based on whether the source is from electronic or paper media....


From our study of businesses in the domain, we define the term as follows: A virtual business provides innovative solutions to new and traditional business challenges by exploiting social technology, leadership, and collaboration in both the real and virtual worlds.


(Pg 9-10)

According to a New York Times interview with Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture-capitalist, tech businesses (where most of which are virtual businesses) are still being undervalued because of the 90’s tech bubble and its eventual burst in the early 2000’s. With the recent valuations of LinkedIn at $9 billion and Pandora at $3.4 billion (Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/01/as-zynga-files-for-1b-ipo-linkedin-and-pandora-stocks-pop/), do you still agree with him? Are you willing to invest in these kinds of companies armed with the knowledge that there could be another bubble burst? Comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Buy a physical or electronic copy of Business Goes Virtual: http://www.businessexpertpress.com/books/business-goes-virtual-realizing-value-collaboration-social-and-virtual-strategies

The content includes:
PART I - THE CONVERGENCE

Chapter 1 - Virtual Business: Real or Imaginary? *Read the first chapter online at the above link*

Chapter 2 - The New Face(book) of Organizations

Chapter 3 - Real Leadership in the Virtual World

Chapter 4 - The Power of Sharing

Chapter 5 - Making Sense of Virtual Worlds

PART II THE STRATEGIES

Chapter 6 - Any Place, Any Time

Chapter 7 - The People Know Best

Chapter 8 - Everyone Has a Stake

Chapter 9 - Real in the Virtual World

PART III THE WAY AHEAD

Chapter 10 - What Every Leader Needs to Know