Corporate awareness of all things - anything
Jeremy Owyang writes about corporate awareness of social media:
Senior Management at many Fortune 1000 companies still lack awareness, strong belief in Social Media or resources a large percent of budget.
Social Media is more than adding trackbacks and comments to a press release, it’s about accepting that bottom up knowledge from the masses can be greater than top down control.
I myself am wanting Social Media to be accepted in many forms across the enterprise and up and down the ladder, but to this date, Social Media is not dead.
….and he’s totally right. But it goes beyond just social media. These corporate types don’t really don’t grok anything at all. That’s why they need to hire consultants to tell them what to think.
Many folks are calling Steve Rubel’s ‘Social Media is No Mo’ as a classic smokescreen to revert attention from the recent Microsoft Vista laptop fiasco. Though there is some truth to that, you also have to realize who pays Steve’s bills - and its corporate Amerika. The same folks who both Jeremies (Owyang and Pepper) hussle as well.
In fact there’s a whole bunch of guys and gals out there who make their living hussling these corproate enterprise folks. They have their own conferences, newsletters, analysts, and believe me - lots of rent, food and cars has been bought and paid for - with corporate ‘consulting’ services.
So don’t start blaming Steve Rubel for doing his job. That’s what flacks do. They spin, they blow smoke and they hussle. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that - as long as its done honestly and transparently. Corporate Amerika pays to get advise and to get hussled. Its a time honored tradition.
It’s these same folks who got hussled into believing that Y2K was real. It wasn’t. It was all a scam. What self respecting programmer wouldn’t account for the year 2000? The Y2k scam tricked Corporate Amerika into believing that the sky was falling - so that they all bought entirely new sets of software and hardware - to the tune of many $B’s in windfall revenues for the Tech industry.
They also got hussled into believing that they needed Sun machines and huge data centers to host their measly corporate web sites and Intranets - paying companies $10M’s to build these sites. That hussle gave birth to companies like CKS/MarchFirst, Organic, Vivid and the like. Accenture and EDS did their bit - too.
When Y2K was finally exposed as the ’sky is falling’ hussle that it was (Q1 ‘00) guess who sold all their stock - high? Well it was the corproate advisors, analysts and web shop proprietors - who saw the bubble popping - ahead of the pack. That’s called insider vision.
So it should not surprise anyone that Corproate Amerika is cautious when it comes to jumping on the ‘media bandwagon’. Of course they’re slow to action.
That’s their job - to be slow and cautious. But once these flood gates come crashing down - watch out world. Every brand, municipality, hardware and software company, ISP, telco and just about everybody else - will have their own social network and blogging platform.
That’s why we developed PeopleAggregator. For them.
FINAL NOTE: I appreciate My. Calacanis’ clarity in making sure they everyone understands that we HE paid people to post, he didn’t tell them what to blog about. That’s exacly what we did - back with the FIRST of these promotions - called ‘Pay Bloggers to Blog’ for Marqui (back in 2004). Jason - in fact was the loudest complainer back then, but it sounds like he’s come around now. It would be nice for Jason to acknowledge who invented this clean, transparent, honest approach to putting money into blogger’s pockets. 
December 30th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Marc,
As much as I respect you, I have to tell you that you are wrong about Y2K. It was not (only) a scam. There might very well have been people taking advantage of the situation, but there were real problems.
The place I worked for had several date-sorting routines and deriviates dating back to the seventies and eighties, using only two digits for the year. We managed to find and fix most of them in time, yet we still had to use the first weeks of 2000 fixing a couple more. If we hadn’t taken the time to fix it (the year before), we would have spent loads of time fixing errors down stream as well…
Was it the right decision back in those days to only use two digits for the year? I don’t know…
December 30th, 2006 at 8:09 pm
Marc, just because one hustles - using your term - for work, does not preclude the ability to be open and transparent. Yes, I work for corporations and companies based here and oversees, but am I hustling for them or am I working with them to get them to understand the conversation
You work on clients as a consultant. Does this make you a hustler as well?
Or, looking at it another way, with the last line in the post (above the note) aren’t you hustling for PeopleAggregator? Yes, it is your company … but you are still hustling. You hire marketing firms to get the word out - is that considered a bad decision, according to this post?
December 31st, 2006 at 8:45 am
hustle?
You bit ya. Why can’t we say that when we are on payroll? Because we are on payroll. We used to talk until they started firing us and then we became silent. I know because I was one of the talking employee and then the talking consultant.
Money makes a strange bedfellow. Talk, good talk, is expensive. If not, try this experiment. When someone has something good to say ask if they are willing to make a recording. Right there, right now.
Watch them get silent.
Once it becomes known that you “talk”, you’d be surprised at all the silent people who will be listening to you. And you will be surprised about how long you hold your job.
Maybe my being black adds something to this, but, believe me, I have seen white people follow
the same doom. Corporate America don’t want to be given anything unless they pay.
If you try, it is perceived as “trying” to get more than you deserve.
Gil
December 31st, 2006 at 10:24 am
100% incorrect my friend.
You may not have told people if they had to write a positive or negative review, but you did force them to write about Marqui. We on the other hand told folks to pick their own topics and tone. So, you are comparing what you did–which was between a bribe and an advertisement–with what we did which was ethical blogging/journalism.
Note: That was a very lame attempt to spin my position… I expect much more from you.
December 31st, 2006 at 11:15 am
[…] Jason Calacanis took exception to my statements that what he’s doing is the same as what we did with Marqui: […]
January 1st, 2007 at 3:22 am
[…] Morten Frederiksen testifies that there was at least ONE of faulty shitty code that would have broke at Y2K. I have never met this kind of code - but I’m sure it exists. […]