Easton Ellsworth,
over at BusinessBlogWire,
pointed out this great article published in Business Week Online June 5^th:
Web
2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning.

While the entire
article is worth reading, consider this – “businesses in one sense are social
networks formed to make or sell something”. 

Web 2.0 expands that
network to include people that don’t work for you – transparency has just taken on a
whole new meaning! 

If you have a
remarkable product, worth talking about (or, unfortunately, the opposite),
people will. You want to influence that
conversation. Don’t even THINK
about controlling it – you can’t.

As the article
points out, “…the upside can be a brand to which people feel a stronger
emotional tie. Says Forrester Research analyst Chris Charron: "In the end, the brand is owned not just
by the people who create it, but by the people who use it."”

Let’s read that
last sentence again –  

“The brand is
owned not just by the people who create it, but by the people who use it.”

So what do you
need to do? 

Experiment: “Create
a MySpace page. Open a Flickr account and upload a few photos. Write a
Wikipedia entry. Create a mashup at Ning.com. The essence of Web 2.0 is experimentation, so they should try
things out.” (Emphasis added.)

Be humble: “Executives, long used to ruling from the
top of the corporate hierarchy, will have to learn a new skill: humility.”

"Companies
that are extremely hierarchical have trouble adapting," says Tim O’Reilly,
CEO of tech book publisher O’Reilly Media, which runs the annual Web 2.0
Conference "They’ll be outperformed by companies that don’t work that
way."  

How does your
company work?

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