In the midst of all the hype about Web 2.0, this is a very good book for business people. It puts Web 2.0 in the context of traditional marketing and communication media —explaining the parallels between traditional research, marketing, sales, support and development and their counterparts on the web. The authors also suggest taking a staged approach to implementing this new media that matches the readiness of the people in your organization as well as your customers—setting clear objectives and strategies, all before jumping into a specific technology.

This is a great source for anyone looking to plan a Web 2.0 strategy for their own business.  2008

But the basic idea in Meatball Sundae is very compelling. He opens with the story of Henry Ford, who won in the last era because he optimized his business to mass production. Likewise, Godin feels that the real winners in the new, internet-enabled world will be those businesses that optimize around the new media.

The idea he is communicating with Meatball Sundae is that if you are selling a typical product (say, a meatball) and try to leverage the Web 2.0 world without changing your approach and attitude toward marketing (the virtual equivalent of adding whipped cream and a cherry on top), you’ll end up with an ineffective and unappealing image.

He identifies fourteen trends that are part of the shift to Web 2.0. You don’t need to follow all of them, but you do need to open your business to at least some in order to truly leverage the potential of the new paradigm. Some of the trends include (I am paraphrasing): the power of the consumer, the power of direct communication, the creation of micro-markets, the power of ideas, and the importance of authenticity.

This is worth reading to get you thinking about whether you are just adding a little internet to your marketing or whether you have an opportunity for fundamental and profitable change.

To learn more about this book, visit Seth Godin’s Web Site.

Then I took the book on an airplane and gave it another try. New examples and ideas in later chapters begin to show how the technology of Web 2.0 can and will fuel wholesale changes not just in software and communication but in production as well. We all know about Wikipedia, Amazon’s open API’s, mashups with Google and other web-based technology plays. But the three stories in “The Global Plant Floor” chapter take this idea to the manufacturing world. One story is about Boeing’s 787—a plane that was designed together with a thousand engineers at more than one hundred suppliers, all collaborating in real-time. This full collaboration led to Boeing’s final specification document for the 787 taking up 20 pages versus the 2500 for the predecessor plane, the 777. With the 777, Boeing told its suppliers what had to be done in “excruciating detail.” With the 787, Boeing let its suppliers figure it out for themselves. This would not have been possible without collaborative technologies connecting suppliers around the world.

Similar stories are told for BMW’s production processes and the success of the totally distributed Chinese motorcycle industry. Other fascinating examples are the “internal decision markets” that HP, Eli Lilly, Siemens and Microsoft use to let stakeholders run a virtual futures market on ideas. HP finds that this market is more effective at forecasting annual workstation sales than their internal corporate forecasts.

Since we are talking about personal branding in this newsletter, it’s worth mentioning that in the “open source” worlds described in the many examples in this book, you are an individual, not an employee—your brand must be genuine in order to earn a seat at the collaborative table.

Even with all these examples, it is not necessarily obvious where and how to take advantage of the opportunities presented by collaborative technologies. Ultimately, this book is better at showing us the problem and the opportunity than it is with showing us how to succeed in this new world. But we all know that recognizing a problem is the first step to solving it. I recommend this book because it will help you see the world and your business in a new way.

One of the most interesting things about this conference was the subtle, but fundamental shift in the focus from technology for technology’s sake to the consumer (both for B2B and B2C businesses).  In the past, events like this would spend much more time on technology…and even more technology—and, if someone remembered, they would admonish you to remember the market.  Today, there is a real understanding that the customer is your partner. You have to listen to them closely and, in many cases, let them make decisions about how you are going to do business.

This leads to the other, and much more fundamental, shift that was touched on—the realization that companies will have less control in a Web 2.0 world.  We see it now as consumers blog about products, as online communities develop a life of their own (see our book review below) and as customers become full-time innovation partners.  This loss of control has huge implications.  Although it was mentioned a number of times at this conference, it is a fact that most people have not really thought through as of yet.  So, why not? We’ll try to tackle this topic in next month’s newsletter.  Stay tuned.