Open Business wins some influential supporters

It's a good week already for reviews of The 10 Principles of Open Business- with two very positive write-ups appearing by influential business leaders by Tuesday.

The Chief Learning Officer at global PR business Ketchum wrote an article/review on The 10 Principles of Open Business for the Ketchum blog on April 8 (2014).

In his post The Purpose Driven Organization - Moving from Talk to Walk Robert Burnside concludes: "I highly recommend you check out the thinking in this book. It's ahead of the curve and a useful glimpse into the future."

Excerpt: 

Essentially, the book argues that businesses should move from thinking of others as customers, to thinking of them as partners in achieving a purpose that they all find meaningful in the world.
Of course, this involves a lot of changes in organization structures, most deeply in the mindsets of those involved. The book does a credible job of giving examples of how the 10 principles are being realized by various organizations, including big ones like Tesco in the UK.

B2B Marketing Magazine published a review of the 10 Principles of Open Business in its April 2014 issue.

Written by Harris Interactive's UK Head of Marketing Ian Smith, the review concludes: "The book will get you thinking about ways in which you can apply the open business ethos to benefit your business, direct stakeholders and society in general. Open business is our present and our future. You can't afford to ignore that, or this book - 'Open up, and win!'

Thank you both. If you've read the book and would liek to share a review, please let me know. I am particularly looking out for more folk to add to the Amazon reviews.

More examples of The 10 Principles in The Press.

The edifice of the trusted expert takes another hit

Hard on the heels of all that Blue Peter cat naming chaos, dodgy phone votes and competitions, comes news that Maxim (in the US) has published a review of a CD its reviewer hadn't actually listened to (via the BBC... careful now, people in glasshouses etc etc).

Media brands have long known that trust is among our most precious possessions. At least we say we do - and then keep doing things like the above. Yet there are still those who struggle to understand how inevitable the decline of mass media becomes in these circumstances.

In specialist, consumer media (my world - and that of Maxim) we like to believe that our experts have something more to offer than our communities. Often that comes down to access. That's what makes the Maxim thing so wrong - it faked the access. They pretended they had got to hear the new Black Crowes album before you did. And they hadn't. And as a result the opinion was fake. It was a lie. Even the position of authority Maxim could claim from getting this access was bogus - because the access was never there.

THIS UPDATE: (made me laugh outloud!). "Rapper Nas, whose hits include Hip Hop Is Dead and If I Ruled The World, told the New York Post that he was surprised that Maxim had reviewed his album - because he hadn't finished recording it yet. The magazine called his album "radio friendly" and gave it a rating of 2.5 stars out of five."

Guess what all this does to trust...

No wonder people are making use of the power of the network to create their own networks of trust and to set their own definitions of quality (step forward tripadvisor et al). Relevance over quality folks. Live (or die) by it.

There is still a (potentially lucrative) role for trusted reviewers to give you a tip in the right direction, to start a marketing ball rolling in a believable direction. Trust them and you start to believe the reviewer even without direct experience of the product yourself (it's a core part of Dave Balter's thinking, an idea which permeates his book Grapevine, and the activities of his word-of-mouth marketing company BzzAgent).

I'll be keen to hear what Dave thinks about the regularity with which 'expert' opinion is being revealed as untrustworthy when we meet for lunch in London next month, and the impact of trust being created by networks rather than from the centre.

How long can we expect UGC for free?

I've been doing a lot of thinking about ratings and reputation recently, about their importance in sustaining communities, particularly co-creating ones.

I come to conclusions such as:
Review systems which attach no value to reputation are doomed.
Reviews by people for whom the loss of reputation means nothing are likely to have less value to your average internet user. And reviews with less value = less incentive to contribute and less opportunities to inspire a purchase.

This makes it a critical element in any revenue-generating model. I've written more on this here (why reputation holds the key to revenue success). And more recently: Here

I believe it's all a question of what is at stake for the contributor of UGC. If there's little this may explain why it's a) not valued by contributors and therefore not growing like you expected it to, b) not inspiring a bucket-load of trust-related purchases to pay your bills.

So why do people so freely contribute to things like tripadvisor (10million+ reviews so far!). You can't even build a reputation for yourself on there (at least not one measured by community score).

It's likely people contribute because they have previously derived some value from a review before they booked their tip and, therefore, felt in some way obligated to return the favour. And there's clearly enough people who feel this obligation to overcome the freeloaders who just come, take their fill, and never contribute. Except of course the 'freeloaders' are contributing, by notching up page impressions and clicking on ads.

I still feel a model without a reputation system, and one which has a value attached, will eventually fail.

One reason is that there's another reason people are contributing reviews right now: Because they can.

It's not so very long ago that the only people who could publish were the owners of the means of publishing production. Now we're all publishers. And the novelty has yet to wear off. We get to see our work 'published', we get a little bit of fame, a little bit of influence.

Indeed it's only in recent times that models, such as TripAdvisor, have emerged which place user reviews at the heart of their proposition. Even more novel!

But as we become increasingly used to being able to publish our views and reviews perhaps this ability to out the bad and praise the good, and our valuation of our little-bit-of-fame, will need bolstering by getting something in return for our efforts.

It might be as simple as you-only-get-to-read-reviews-if-you-contribute-one. It might be a revenue share on items sold off the back of your review efforts.

Eventually we want a payback. And when you want something in return we need proof you deserve it... hence the need for reputation.

Ratings and reputation should vary depending on the context. For example a stag party might rate Malta a dull location. A couple seeking a romantic break would rate it higher. Your value of the review provided by the stag party will vary depending on how similar your needs are to theirs. Their reputation as raters of stag party venues may be high - of romantic locations, low.

Speaking of which, slightly at a tangent; Technorati's reputation system fails to understand how reputation should vary. It's a bit of a popularity contest rather than a selector of the best fit with what YOU need.

This blog's reputation is 55 today. Its value to people seeking blogs about horse racing ought to be close to 0. It's value to people interested in its themes might be much higher. All the rating tells you is that it's of a certain global value - but not what the value should be to YOU.

That value to you remains in the gift of the network of trust all blogs are capable of generating. If Technorati could segment ratings based on your specific interests, you might find the scores more useful.

Why reputation holds the key to revenue success

I caught up with an old friend yesterday morning; BBC presenter Dotun Adabeyo
Dotun and I studied philosophy together towards the end of the last Ice Age (in fact, I recall a fair amount of co-creation went into some of those late essays...).

Dotun launched his own TV channel in August this year: ColourTelly It's very much a broadcast model with a schedule and quality programming - and he does have his reasons for this less co-created, less VOD approach, which I'm not about to debate here.

The channel is billed as Britain's "first general interest black internet television station". Check it out and tell your friends!

While we discussed it, Dotun introduced me to some thinking around reputation which may have use in the construction and value of trust.

His father always told him to eat in hotel restaurants. His reasoning was the hotel has more to lose if they serve you a bad meal than a stand alone restaurant. They don't just risk losing your eating dollar, they also risk losing your accommodation, conference, drinks and associated hotel service dollars.

Applied to media, this is why Dotun will trust a review written by an 'expert' journalist and published in a magazine much more than he will the view of Joe Public (at least in the singular) posting on a forum. The publication has more at stake when it publishes its review. If it gets it wrong the risk is you'll never buy the magazine again.

If Joe Public gets it wrong what's the cost to him?

And I think this is the guts of the issue. Review systems which attach no value to reputation are doomed.

What we're looking for here is the equivalent of losing a customer. I've often praised ebay's ratings and reputation system. But one of the reasons it is so robust is that what is at stake in losing your reputation is exactly that - losing a/all customers. That has real and easily identified value.

Perhaps this is our pointer. Reviews by people for whom the loss of reputation means nothing are likely to have less value to your average internet user. And reviews with less value = less incentive to contribute and less opportunities to inspire a purchase.

This makes it a critical element in any revenue generating model. It's also critical in sustaining community.

So what is at stake for the contributor in any of your UGC systems? If there's little this may explain why it's a) not valued by contributors and therefore not growing like you expected it to, b) not inspiring a bucket-load of trust-related purchases to pay your bills.