DestiCorp 2.0

Another Word for TWIT

When I Grew Up another word for thick or dumb was TWIT.

Now I am told I am smart for TWEETING. Is this possible or am I mistaken?

Let me tell you a story to illustrate my point.

Some seven  years ago my good friend and colleague, Leon Benjamin, and I (both skint refugees of the dot com crash) got very interested in the way open source would transform companies, their relationships with one another, and their relationships with customers.  In various coffee shops and bars around London, snatched between train departure and arrivals, Leon explained XML to me, the implications of “web services” based on open APIs , and the powers of syndication and Software as a Service etc. We actually anticipated the day in travel when “everyone could be an intermediary” and when the customer would finally assume control. 

Of course, we weren’t smart enough to know how that would happen exactly nor technologically savvy or rich enough to create the solutions, but we did see the direction things were going as outlined here (Dancing with the Customer); or in our paper Why Web Services Will Turn the Travel Industry on Its Head  here); and here. Leon even wrote a book on it called Winning By Sharing and I contributed the Epilogue, available here

“CRM” was all the range at the time – companies actually believed that precious relationships with customers could be “managed” with the same sterile efficiency as they managed the assembly line. Millions were being spent on enterprise systems that enabled large inaccessible corporates to pretend to care about individual customers by personalizing their otherwise impersonal and often irrelevant direct mail. It didn’t work then and little changed since. The marketplace remained a battleground (lthanks Julie!) in which companies fought for market share and treated their customers as targets to be fought over.  

I was reminded of this when asked to speak last week to a UNICOM event titled: Engaging the Customer with Social Media: Getting It right. (My observations here and Twitter chatter: #ECSM)

While CRM has been replaced by a literal kaleidoscope of Social Media tools  (Thanks Brian Sollis!), the enthusiasm for all things labeled 2.0 has delayed real investigation into the suitability of most corporate structures and cultures to handle this tectonic shift in the underlying power of production and consumption. 

At UNICOM last week, I got a chance to test the relevance of some old ideas to a contemporary audience.  My  proposition is a simple one. The rise of social media is a symptom not the cause of a revolution. That revolution relates not to the theoretical market capitalization of Facebook but to our collective mindset turning upside down.  The unprecedented pace of social media’s diffusion reflects a convergence of technology and perception – we no longer see the planet as a mechanical object but as a living organization or community whose every member is connected at a sub atomic level. The universe is not a machine but a network operating more like a hive of activity as we swarm around whatever we find attractive. Our TWEETS are no more than the signals exchanged between bats, the wiggle of a bee’s behind or the smell of an ant’s pheromones. If you get this, you'll understand what Social Media is really all about....

So who cares whether we Facebook or MySpace;  Google or Bing; Tweet or Friendfeed, Powerpoint or Prezi? This not the pressing issue. No, our attention and our creativity need to be applied to imagining how we can continue to live fulfilling, happy lives without destroying our planet,  exploiting the poor, gaining weight, becoming asthmatic / diabetic, or chronically unemployed?

Surely the thousands of brains currently dreaming up innocuous apps for the iPhone or irrelevant tools that begin with the letters “TW” could be put to better use?

The act of TWEETING or TWITTERING proves that we’re all connected and inter-dependent. We live on one life raft and supplies of clean air, water, food and fuel are running out. If we were ants and the colony were threated, we'd all be working furiously together to repair the defences instead of sharpening up our pheromones. So please could some of those smart arses inventing all these “cool apps” stop sweating the small stuff and prove we’re not TWITS?

The master of the universe called 2.0, Tim O'Reilly,  thankfully wrote something similar a while back. His more profound piece called Work on Stuff That Matters is potentially more potent because of his status -but if we're going to spend our lives tweeting can we not sound like the canaries cheeping in the mine....

Engaging the Customer: Getting It Right

This time last week, I had the pleasure of representing the Head of Digital Strategy for Andy Law's marketing agency (The Law Firm Group) by speaking with a group of UK business people developing their knowledge of Social Media.

The event, titled, Engaging the Customer with Social Media : Getting it Right was organized by Unicom and ably facilitated by KM expert, David Gurteen. The Twitter chatter can be found at #ECSM.

The delegates were already very knowledgeable and attentive and the speaker roster was very impressive. I learned much,  gleaning many good lessons and tips from the leading edge of practice. 

Julie Walker from Purple Spinnaker, the first guest speaker, ably put Social media in historic context, provided a number of case studies and, really importantly, raised the key questions any business should ask before strating their "social media" journey.

Ian McNairn, Program Director, Web Technology & Integration,  from IBM showed how building community within a company fostered employee engagement - the importance of which was echoed recently by my colleague Leon Benjamin here;

Christope Langlois at Visible Banking seems to be doing a heroic job with the banking sector (I suspect most customers are thinking of engaging the banks in battle rather than conversation right now);

Lloyd Davies Director, Perfect Path Consulting is showing that you don't need fixed structures to create collaborative sources of intelligence and service.

Richard Sedley Director of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit (CEU provided some fascinating insights into the psychology of getting customers engaged online. His Customer Engagement Network, built on the amazing Ning platform,  is well worth joining.

Robin Grant from We Are Social described their groundbreaking work with Skype and how they used social media to respond quickly and positively to negative comments and news stories.

Robin Hamman formerly of the BBC and now with Headshift had, like all journalists, some great stories and anecdotes as well as practical advice from the BEEB.

Sam Marshall from Clearbox Consulting also drew our attention to some of the funnier ways people have used social media to tell a story - notably the case study of the small manufacturer of blending machines who used an inexpensive campaign on You Tube to show his Blender could blend anything - including an Apple iphone.Over 6 million people ave now viewed this.

I had to speak in the dead spot after lunch and, following Monty Python's lead,  decided it was time for something completely different. So instead of talking about the hows of social media, I attempted to show why it wasn't just a new marketing fad but symptom of a real revolution. The slides are below and as this will form the underlying theme of much of this site, I'll stop twittering on for now!

Thanks to the audience for listening, tweeting and blogging about the content. I had to miss the ensuing discussion in order to exercise my franchise and vote in the European Elections. So comments and further discussion will be most welcome!

Engaging the Customer with Social Media

View more OpenOffice presentations from Anna Pollock.

Calling on Tourism CEOs to Dig Deeper

It is a cliché to identify our world as one in which change is the only constant. Overuse of this concept has minimized its meaning and power and misuse has lead to confusion and miscalculation.

In our opinion there are three types of change as illustrated in the familiar image of the iceberg.

• Surface change which takes the form of trends in fashion, modes of speech, popular technology, management fads etc. They are easily visible - representing 1/8th of the iceberg - with new trends quickly attracting attention and possessing a relatively short life span. Their length of influence is determined to the extent that they are rooted in stronger change forces.

• Systemic change which reflect a deeper set of dynamics associated with the economy (eg., the rise of the middle class), demographics, changing consumer and personal values, big technological developments (e. g., the arrival of the phone or car), emergence of new political ideologies. They take longer to emerge and be recognized; last longer, and, if significant enough in strength and power, can be taken as reflecting the norm by any given population.
  
  The dominance of the automobile in American society and the pervasive belief that every American has the right to own and use a car whenever and wherever is a societal force totally integrated with the rise of the middle class, the beliefs and aspirations of the Founding Fathers, the growth in prosperity, the cheapness of raw materials, energy and credit. But it goes deeper than that. The western obsession with the automobile reflects a much deeper set of beliefs and unexamined assumptions and beliefs about how humans view the world, and their relation with it and each other. These are paradigms, mindsets or worldviews.

• Paradigm change occurs much less frequently and results not in the modification of something familiar but a fundamental transformation - in everything. The last big paradigm shift occurred over a 200-250 year time period starting with people like Copernicus and Galileo who began to trust their powers of observation and measurement over the prevailing orthodoxy of a powerful institution - the Holy Catholic Church.

Paradigms are sets of beliefs and assumptions about how the world works or mental maps that we use to make sense of our world. They are agreements that, as they are used over and over again, have become invisible - it's the way things are - simply because they are used to filter out information that might be contradictory.They affect what we choose to see and what sense we make of the world. See some examples here.

We are living in a period of paradigm change as great as that which transformed medieval society into the Age of Enlightenment and saw science rise to predominance over religion. The challenge is that this transformative switch is not taking 250 years to emerge but is occurring over a period less than a century. Everything and everyone will be affected by it - the travel and tourism sector being no exception. Yet most tourism leaders remain either oblivious or unwilling to contemplate the implications.

We can be forgiven for our reluctance to venture into this space of "deep change" for a number of reasons:

1. The time horizons of leaders in tourism are inevitably short. They sell a time and located based service that is highly perishable.
2. Their investors and or political masters are interested in short term results not long term strategic planning, as they expect whatever issues arise to be on "someone else's watch".
3. Furthermore, there's no precedent. In the past paradigmatic change occurred gradually and almost imperceptibly over several generations. Life at the time might have been both confusing and exciting, but it was still manageable simply because the scale and depth of the change was not clear. If you have never seen or heard about an elephant before, it's hard to get frightened about the prospect of one charging out of the forest in a rage. It's also common for very enlightened folks to move easily between two paradigms. Newton the founder of mechanical physics and responsible for the rise of scientific inquiry and rationalism was a committed Alchemist (he tried to turn dross into gold in his spare time). I suspect several quantum physicists may play the lottery.

At DestiCorp we are convinced that it is both possible and vital that tourism leaders, especially those heading up destinations, national and international associations and agencies, and heads of multi-nationals start investing their time and intellect in understanding that nature and implications of paradigmatic change on their sector and the future livelihoods of the communities they serve. Unless they do, they will be ill equipped to understand let alone deal with the gale force winds of change gathering on the horizon and make the decisions TODAY that will create options for decision-makers tomorrow.

Subsequent posts will provide examples from tourism life that show these deeper forces at work - they'll be tagged with the category "deep change."

WOW! That's pretty heavy for tourism marketers, we know. But if you are interested in what happens after "your watch" as a result of your leadership today; if you have any interest in leaving a positive legacy, then you could do no better than start to understand what all this means.....

This web site is just a start of an exciting journey that will develop over time and hopefully lead to some very fruitful discussions.... Please join us here as we develop more material.

Over the next few days and months, we'll be adding thoughts on

• Tourism Trends and Fashions (2009 - 2010)
• Systemic Change Drivers
• Tourism Growth Forces - the Following Winds
• Tourism Growth Threats - the Head Winds