Web 2.0 / 3.0 and the small or medium business or organization

In order to understand what Web 2.0 and 3.0 might mean for your approach to and use of the internet today, it always helps to see what in fact these terms mean. So, think of Web 1.0 as a library. You can use it as a source of information, but you can't contribute to or change the information in any way. Web 2.0 is more like a big group of friends and acquaintances: The library features of Web 1.0 have been augmented by your network of social relationships, so you now have many more ways to learn and find stuff. So what then will Web 3.0 likely be?

Some internet experts think Web 3.0 is going to be like having a personal assistant who knows practically everything about you and can access all the information on the Internet to answer any question; others compare Web 3.0 to a giant database. But what is likely to be true is that intelligent software behind the scenes will be giving you librarian-like access to what you and your friends know, how it's relevant to any new thought or issue that arises, and what information out there might be most relevant to you right now. Star Trek will have arrived, at least the all-knowing computer-assisted part of it; personally I can't wait for the "beam me up" technology!

So what does all this mean for your business or organization today? Two things:
One, to satisfy your future omni-librarian, there will never be a better time to get your information in order. Today a well-organized information architecture does everything from increasing your findability via Google to improving your clients and members search experiences at your website. Tomorrow you will be ready to reap the benefits of the new technologies that harvest and share your well-organized information.

Two, it's time to fully leverage today's Web 2.0 internet: today's successful business or organization does not only have a good local network of friends and colleagues, but is leveraging the internet to exponentially grow this network through social media communities such as Facebook and Twitter. We will help you understand how to be a solid citizen of the new internet, and to effectively network and market yourself in the rapidly expanding WWW!

Doing Good & Sustainable Business

I came into my Monday with Bruce Cockburn's song on my mind:

http://www.nme.com/awards/video/id/ZL4CdHd9ma4/search/lions

This troubador of the soul sings of a life lived without fear, but instead walking in joy and love. What does walking in joy and love have to do with the business world, if anything?

It is a truism that the markets are driven by fear or greed, and sadly this is often true of business dealings. But there is another way, something beyond the rapacious greed of mindless earning and consuming, mindless because somehow continuing to maximize bottom line profits, to maximize the successful lifestyle, that somehow these means are ends in themselves. Oh, there's some blather about not restraining market forces so they can make us all rich . . . but I'm talking about real world values now . . . not some mystical $ in the sky that will bless us all if only we pursue it freely with our whole beings!

But something else is going on now: we live in a shrinking, not expanding world - where consuming more means others have less, where consuming more is slowly, perhaps even quickly destroying the conditions for our ability to continue to enjoy life on this planet. Then there's the coming of age of the baby boomers, who once were idealistic and wanted to make this world a better place, and then got sucked in like most everyone else into the consumerist system, and now more and more of them with decades of work experience and wisdom want to create sustainable businesses, want to do good as part of doing good business. This is what we're doing at GLS dezign, and soon we will have our first announcements of this good business that does good.

But it was a lovely synchronicity to see the in the Harvard Business Review this morning an article on a book, "SuperCorp: Values as Guidance System" (link in subject line above) in which the author, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, writes of how IBM and others are moving into a sustainable approach to big business, perhaps finally closing the door on the General Motors style of capitalism (whatever is good for GM is good for America). More and more books are coming out now on the theme of doing good business, of doing good. (One of my favourites is David Berman's Do Good Design http://davidberman.com/social/index.php in which he enourages designers to integrate doing good into how they do good design and good business.)

Something important is happening in the world of business today. Businesses are being established explicitly to do good such as o3b networks who is already well into establishing high speed broadband services to the developing world through a network of affordable satellites.
(http://www.o3bnetworks.com/press_o3blaunch.html) People in their 50's are tired of being cogs in the consumerist system and want to consider something worthwhile with the most productive years of their life.

Join in! :) You don't have to be in your 50's, all you have to do is decide that making this world a better place is an important part of your business plan! :)

Building a Business that does good

Three things happened to day which are bringing into sharp relief something I've believed for sometime (it shapes how I am with people) but have yet to "realize" it corporately so to speak. In the business world, generally you work with whomever you can, so long as it is profitable first, and enjoyable second - and the first can eliminate the second (we need the business).

We at GLS dezign are different, and there are in fact more and more businesses like us. When you are in an unpredictable universe, where things could go bad at any time, when times are tough, there is a tendency to prioritize $'s above all else. However, what more and more people are realizing, what the enlightened approach to business is, is to truly be yourself, to do good, and to work with people like you. We are attracted to each other, we are brought together often by fortunate "chance," but the more our self-statements and our marketing statements reflect this solid, grounded presence, this being good at what we do, and committed to doing good, the more we will attract these kinds of clients and partners.

So the three things that got me thinking about this:

First I had an email from a potential client telling me I had failed in my first impression, because of getting the time and place wrong for our meeting. This is quite common in business culture, to judge people, sometimes quite dispassionately, on their first impressions. I'm a businessman, but I've never done this: rather I look beneath the surface in everyone. I have also found to my dismay that the people in best control of their first impressions often made terrible business partners, and very difficult clients, because of how ruthless and unethical they were. I am no longer interested in working with such people.

Second, was an email invitation to take a course on social marketing. If you're ready to be snowed by someone, desperate and looking for answers and perhaps have already been burnt by slick, empty marketing that cost you money without delivering anything, then, you might be ready to take the plunge with this lady. However, she horribly over-promises the way so many "success" vendors do, and so, despite the glitz of her promises I'm really not interested in learning from her.

Third, a small charity I know running an orphanage and school in Ghana, recently put out the message I've pasted below. It's about getting consumers to slightly change their habits in order to direct small %'s of the sponsor's revenues to the designated charity. While this has the possibility of being able to create a revenue stream for your charity, it involves either changing how you search (therefore your effectiveness) as well as shopping online at this place rather than that place. From a marketing point of view this could work well for a charity with a well-established brand and 1,000's or 1,000,000's of "friends" a small percentage of whom might be willing to through the trouble to register and shop at this particular location. But personally, I prefer the granular one person, one business at a time approach we are using, working with people who share our values, in order to grow both our business and foundation. I will however check out Goodsearch and Goodshop, as she is a very small charity like us, and perhaps this can work at our level as well.

To close, there was in the Ottawa Citizen this morning two stories of interest that provide an interesting context to this reflection:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/health/rude+worker+poisons+whole+office+study+finds/1910315/story.html
is a story about research into the effect of negative behaviour in the workplace. While the focus is on coworkers, obviously negative behaviour from clients or partners can have the same effect, the more people that are exposed to it.

But to finish off we have Steve Wosniak who had the following and more to say about his philosophy of being in business:

One of the pioneers of Silicon Valley and the creator of the world's first mass-market personal computer has some simple words of wisdom for today's struggling startups:

"Believe in your product." Adds Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc.: "Don't ask yourself, 'Will this be successful or will this make money?' Ask, 'Is this what I want to do?' "Ask yourself, 'Are you absolutely sure that this is what you want to do to make a big mark in the world?' "

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Wozniak+words+wisdom/1910821/story.html

On that note, for business people of similar strip, let's forge our way with confidence and yet wisdom as we find the people like us with whom we want to work, and, find our way to making that mark in the world we have in mind!! :)

your brother Dan

********************
What if FosteringHopeInternational earned a donation every time you searched the Internet? Or how about if a percentage of every purchase you made online went to support our cause? Well, now it can!

GoodSearch.com is a new Yahoo-powered search engine that donates half its advertising revenue, about a penny per search, to the charities its users designate. Use it just as you would any search engine, get quality search results from Yahoo, and watch the donations add up!

GoodShop.com is a new online shopping mall which donates up to 37 percent of each purchase to your favorite cause! Hundreds of great stores including Amazon, Target, Gap, Best Buy, ebay, Macy's and Barnes & Noble have teamed up with GoodShop and every time you place an order, you’ll be supporting your favorite cause.

Just go to www.goodsearch.com and be sure to enter FosteringHopeInternational as the charity you want to support. And, be sure to spread the word!

Collecting used not abused Athletic Shoes and all sizes of soccer cleats to establish selfsufficent sustainable farms for individual families in Ghana.

Elaine Brown, Director
FosteringHopeInternational.com
GoodSearch - Web search, coupons, discounts & deals for charity!
Source: www.goodsearch.com
GoodSearch - Search the web to support your charity. Also, find online coupons, coupon codes, deals, discounts and promo codes at GoodShop.

Ghana 3: It is heating up!!

this is the 3rd in a series of my republished accounts of my trips in Ghana from January- February of this year, as a warm-up for my Ethiopian trip this September . . . more on that later!

For a cold-adapted guy like me, something more ominous than storm clouds is on the horizon, in fact it is already here. Each day is hotter than the last, and although these gains in heat and humidity are small, the fact that I've got a month of the same to look forward to is looming over me now! I'm now implementing the opening of windows in the evening once it is cooler, and then the closing of them again in the day once it starts to warm up. Every little bit helps, but the trend is undeniable. Fortunately my new clothes will be ready tomorrow evening as I'm sure I will sweat my way through at least one outfit a day, and I only have 3 or 4 light cottony outfits. V will have close to a continuous stream of laundry from me as S's washing machine broke down quite a while ago and V is its replacement. I sure do get nicely ironed clothes back from her!

Speaking of V, she is now learning her numbers from me: practising writing them as well as their visual recognition. Her English is also improving rapidly. We are able to communicate well enough that I now know that she likes the boy in Eremon who keeps calling her, that he is working, and that she's known him for about five years. He's a nice boy, smaller than her, but that's what she likes. I teased her about wanting to be the boss in her family, as this is a very patriarchal culture where the men still traditionally call all the shots. She liked the tease.

With the boys, I am the respected, loved and feared Uncle who supports their learning: so far I have helped K memorize his times tables, showed P how to ace exams, and helped R develop his soccer skills), and of course, at the drop of a hat they are being tickled or thumped, sometimes for no reason at all. S is now onside for the rough-housing, understanding the benefits for the boys in the development of their masculinity. P and S will also be taking some instruction in meditation and breathwork from me, as P had put together a meditation practice for himself based on what he found on the internet, but had been dissuaded by S because of the biased psychological and christian perspectives she had been fed. Fortunately she has a PhD in psychology and religion staying with her with a lot of experience in meditation who's all to familiar with the tendency of religious christians and religiously-biased psychologists to pathologize and demonize stuff they don't understand.

S and I have been working together a lot on her ideas for an NGO and what I'm finding in internet research, as well as going deeper into the spiritual direction, counselling side of what I do. She's encouraging me to think about setting up a counselling practice in Ghana; I'm encouraging her to think about a solar energy business since there is a UN NGO called AREED that supports the development of entrepreneurs in the renewable energy field, and my friend T's Dad has developed a really nice solar energy package viewable at wwww.solarfire.com. F has been away working this week, but when he's around we tend to focus a lot on guy stuff like watching soccer games and discussing bible translation, religion, and the country and its issues. At meal times, I've been telling them all about Holland, China and India rather than sitting listening to P and K extol the merits of one of their video games. Most evenings, S and I go out for a long walk in the cooler evening air, and I've had a couple of Skype computer to computer phone calls with T and A from Holland and L from Ottawa.

S and I met yesterday with a parishioner from St. John's (my church - Elgin and Somerset St. in Ottawa) and received some much appreciated support for our key perceptions and ideas, as well as some helpful networking contacts and general advice. He's acting head of the CIDA branch of the Canadian Embassy in Ghana, and a former international development professional, so he's being very helpful to us in many ways. Tomorrow we will meet with S's cousin, who's a senior bureaucrat in Ghana's Agriculture department. "Bit by bit the river grows, till all at once it overflows" is a line from an old song that comes to mind.

So I continue on living a day at a time, enjoying the walk, the company (both earthly and heavenly) and the scenery, if not the climate.

heating up in Ghana, but not sweating it too too much