Web 2.0 Defining Open Leadership And The Latest Innovations

Posted on 17. May, 2010 by Natalie in Entrepreneurs, Featured, Social Media

In my previous post I gave an overview on the key takeaways from the Web 2.0 Conference I attended in San Francisco recently.

This follow up post focuses on my pick of the Keynote speakers who had the most fascinating information on innovations and technology that’s permeating the online world, but first up:

Open Leadership

My favourite speaker and workshop was held by Charlene Li, Founder of the Altimeter Group who talked about Defining Open Leadership. Altimeter Group is a strategy consulting firm that provides companies with a pragmatic approach to disruptive technologies.

What is open leadership?

It’s having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control, while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals.

How to give up control and be in command?

Open Leadership. It’s not about being completely open and transparent, it’s about finding the right level for your business.

For example Best Buy’s founders Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling went out to see make use of their people on the ground. Their staff go through a tremendous amount of training that makes them understand that they ARE Best Buy, they define it.

These two started creating a culture of sharing, where the individuals and frontline workers the ability to share best practices.

Barry the CMO of Best Buy was asked to start a blog. He initially thought this very scary and now he’s the face of Best Buy and always looking for ways to improve himself and Best Buy and to really reach the customers. He’s extremely open at the appropriate times and admit when he’s wrong.

Openness became a strategy, and Social Media became the tools to do this. They even used open market testing for their new logo and have used Twitter to answer 24,000 questions so far.

Focus on relationships not technologies.

Go beyond traditional customer data to the socialgraphic – who are they influenced by and who do they influence.

Charlene showed us the `Engagement Pyramid’: Focus on watching and sharing then commenting, producing and curating (at top of pyramid). You need to build the base first.

Look at all the options to engage openness on your site and sharing – white papers, free eBooks and commenting is important.

Curating is when someone feels so engaged in what you’re doing that they take your content and curate it – your best customers may do this because they feel it would benefit someone else.

Dell made $7 M on Twitter sales last year with offers like 15% off any Dell Outlet Studio. It’s trackable and you can have a conversation to support that sale.

Starbucks Big Idea concept allowed customers and employees to figure out ideas to make the Starbucks Experience better, got lots of vote and ideas.

#1 Align openness with strategic goals.

Examine your 2011 goals, pick one where open and social can have an impact

#2 Understanding the value

“We tend to overvalue the things we can measure and undervalue the things we cannot” – John Hayes, CMO of American Express.

The new lifetime value calculation

Value of purchases – Cost of acquisition + value of new customers from referrals + Value of insights + Value of support + Value of ideas = Customer Lifetime value

(%that refer, size of their networks, % of referred people who purchase, value of purchases, % that provide support, frequency and value of that support.)

#3 Understand how open you have to be

Information sharing  = explaining, updating, conversing, open mic, crowdsourcing, platforms
Decision making = centralized, democratic, self-managing, distributed

Determine how open you need to be to meet your goals. Today we’re around half way there to how open we need to be.

For example Apple have done well with their secretiveness to build hype for its products because they’re so great, aside from MobileMe launch 2 years ago which wasn’t and then it backfired.

#4 Find and Develop your open leaders

Change the mindset of people in your business from pessimists- worried skeptics, to optimists – transparent evangelist. The most powerful person in your org is going to be the Realist Optimist – they can collaborate to make real change happen as they can speak to each quadrant.

#5 Encourage sharing

This is a no brainer. Make it easy to spread your content.

#6 Embrace failure

We all make mistakes, we fear failure. Manage risk with Sandbox Covenants. Be prepared for it.

Keynote Speakers Top News:

The internet operating system

Tim O’Reilly told those of us innovating that we need to ensure our creation is one for the future, not just hot now. It’s crunch-time, we need to start thinking hard about how to keep the Web open.

How do we do this? Create more value than you capture. Facebook is doing a great job of this. Think about being part of a cooperating internet operating system.

The Real-time Web Eco-System

Hilary Mason, chief scientist at Bit.ly is the lady who figures out what to do with all the data they receive. How does it spread? How is it being exploited?

She provided an overview of the mechanisms of content sharing through the facets of social streams and the ways that content and behavior are evolving in this new environment. This has led to their launch of new service Fugu that analyses your personal graph, plus bit.ly tv.

Triage and capture: Rethinking Mobile Email

Jeff Pierce from IBM Research talked about their cool new innovation that separates out unread email from new and shows you where you should pay attention first, what’s most important on your mobile email.

You can apply types and actions to new email messages – next, deferred, reference. They then store and capture actions in a cloud storage so you can access it online, as well as a desktop application so you can access it instantly and deal with the emails that you have deferred etc.

IBM also look at providing those actions to the mobile device itself not just the desktop and they’re developing how that mobile experience fits in with the desktop and laptop experience.

HTML5 and the future of publishing

Jared Friedman, CTO and one Founder of Scribd showed that they’re starting over and moving everything over to HTML5. Scribd is the largest social publishing and reading site in the world and has 10s of millions of docs shared on it.

On Scribd, you can easily turn any file—such as PDF, Word and PowerPoint—into a web document. Documents generally have very complex formatting which is difficult to replicate in a web page and because browsers hade such limited fonts the process was to convert text to image which was not ideal.

Scribd supports 97% of browsers. They’ve had to convert millions of fonts to be read by these browsers.
Now they’ve developed searchable and copyable text that works across all devices. Magazines can now be easily transferred into powerpoint and scrolling views. It’s transforming the future of documents and sharing online.

More photos of key slides can be found on my Flickr account in the side bar or here.

And in case you missed this great interview I got whilst there with Shaherose of Women 2.0 on women entrepreneurs then watch it now:

• Web 2.0 Exposed – The Future Of Your Business Is Open
• Defining Your Business Personality
• Entrepreneur 2.0 How To Get The Latest Version

Tags: Charlene Li, Scribd on HTML5, The Altimeter Group Open Leadership, Tim O'Reilly O'Reilly Media, Web 2.0 Expo exposed