The web disintermediates. Retail is mediation.

Image courtesy The Drum

Retail is mediation.
Where-ever there is mediation there will be disruption. This is not just the lesson of an economic downturn - it is the structural reality of the networked world - of an Open Economy.
I write as I hear about Blockbuster hitting the great DVD eject button, just a day after HMV called in the receivers. Comet came crashing down just before Christmas, Jessops last week.
The analysts tell similar stories about HMV and Blockbuster - what they both trade in was more easily and cheaply available online.
The same is true of Comet and Jessops. Just because you can't download a washing machine (give it time as 3D printing ramps up) doesn't mean the web doesn't offer an easier trading environment.
So. The High Street is full of fail.
Except it isn't. Apple has the highest value retail floorspace in the world.
Reasons: 1 Products people really want.
We will happily swop good product for ease of trading. Think of Marks & Spencers in its heyday. It was incredibly difficult to trade with. Out of stock in the food stores by a Saturday lunch time and refusing to take credit cards. The products made this acceptable.
Reasons 2 An understanding that the experience is as important as the product.
Apple's stores re-invented the shopping experience. Or perhaps they just learned from a quality car show room. They elevated the products, put them in their best light and let you test drive them (ask a car dealer how much more likely someone is to buy if you can get their butt on the drivers' seat).

If you have products worth celebrating and provide the setting for experiencing those products then you have  an opportunity. You have earned the right to be the mediator.

If you don't then expect users to find ways around you, to go more and more directly.
If you are in the middle, unless you are adding value, they want you out of the way.

They are on a journey in pursuit of connection with the makers - something the blandness of the supermarket experience makes attempts to layer on (pictures of farmers on packaging spring to mind) but would much rather massage out. The web disintermediates - and retail is mediation.

Welcome to the Open Business mission

I was delighted to discover that Luis Suarez (@elsua on twitter) long time social blogger, famed for his attempts to banish email and for his KM work with IBM, has committed 100% to the Open Business cause.
His blogpost yesterday comes at the end of a series on social business/enterprise and concludes that it's time to move on, to lose the 'social' and to celebrate the Open.

Luis Suarez: Inspiring Open Business

I remember when back in the day, nearly 10 years ago, when I first started blogging, both internally and externally (Nearly 8 years ago for the latter), one of the themes I decided to go for as its own category was Social Computing, then Social Networking. From there onwards Enterprise 2.0, followed by the Social Enterprise and, lately, Social Business. That was all part of what I felt was the evolution of social networking in a corporate environment. Well, as of today, and while I move on shifting my focus into that where to next … I have created a couple of new categories. One of them is just a renaming activity from a previous one. The other is an entirely new category that I will be using to post articles on that particular topic from here onwards. It will also mean how, after 6 years, I’m starting to sense it’s time to move on from those fully loaded monikers of Social Enterprise or Social Business, since, you know, they eventually mean something completely different altogether and it’s probably a good thing to move on anyway.

That’s why Social Enterprise / Social Business from here onwards, for yours truly, are going to beOpen Business, following further up the superb piece of work that David Cushman did in setting up the stage of what Open Business is all about during the course of last few months. You may want to go ahead and start reading “The 10 Principles of Open Business“, or “Introducing Open Business“, or perhaps check out the Open Business Council to find out more about it and you will see how for a good number of years this blog has been permeating through plenty of the vision David shared across with that new concept of how businesses should operate. I know it’s not new, for sure, I mean, openness has been there all along, but if you read further into the principles that David shared across about this topic you would see how we still need to do plenty of work about it. And that’s essentially what I am planning on doing from here onwards.

I'm flattered that my work on Open Business (with Jamie Burke) has inspired you Luis. Inspiring Open is core to how I work.

If anyone would like to catch up on the 10 Principles of Open Business (a book on which is coming soon), start here.

But please also go and take a look at Luis' blogpost, and those leading up to it - join in shaping what Open Business can become.

I wonder if he can inspire IBM to make the leap from social to open business, too...

The dash from convergence and how the web can save us if we choose

I wonder if the proliferation of devices we are experiencing give us a hint about what will happen to the web?

A few years back – when the first smart phones were making inroads, when the first all-you-can-eat mobile data deals were laid before a hungry audience, then it seemed to make perfect sense that convergence would arrive via the device.

Hell, I have a phone that can take picture, tell the time, calculate, run my diary... open documents, access my email, access the internet, play games and music, play video, show broadcast tv etc etc. Why wouldn’t we think one device could do it all?

And here I am packing a few items for some days away on business and finding it essential that I load up with a laptop, ipad, kindle fire AND iphone (4S)...

Little sign of convergence here. And I’ve never given up on wearing a watch either.

But platforms? Despite the vast variety of opportunity, there are only ever a handful of giants. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, for example

All start off with relatively focused aims. But over time they bloat – copying the ideas of others, assuming that the battle is on for the one social home we will become and remain loyal to.

But the more they bloat, the more we see the value in the specific, the more we spill out into those with greater focus on specific needs – the Pinterests, Instagrams, 4Squares of this world – and the thousands more behind them in the long tail.

I wonder if, given just a little more bloating from the big boys, we may rediscover the self-forming-group value of the web – that we need less direction and guidelines from those who would be our internet, and more purpose from ourselves to make our connectedness count.

The dash from convergence in devices may be yet another indicator that we are more comfortable with complexity than the reductionists would have us believe, that we value niche over lowest common denominator in a very powerful way.

And that’s a good thing – because it’s a much better match with the infinite variety of adhoc self-forming groups the web is built to enable.

The web is our salvation from the bland, from the mass, from the uniform. If we want it to be.

The five posts you liked most in 2012

I've been slack on the blogging front for a couple of months - for which I apologise.
I'd like to take the opportunity of wishing you all the Season's best for you and yours.
Here, in a lowest common denominator way, are the five most viewed posts I've published this year.
As the office parties kick in - take another look.

1. Google;s Skyscraper -
In which we consider the give-away signs of a business reaching its peak.
2. Create Value as If the World Exists -
In which we ask if any business can sustain if it isn't a fit with the best interests of the world it exists in
3. The 10 Principles of Open Business -
A summary of what we learned at 90:10 Group - and which is now the basis of a business book from a major publisher due in 2013.
4. The Distraction Web Fades as the Distruption Web Rises -
A discussion on our shift from entertaining ourselves with the web to making change with it
5. Facebook's journey to monopoly or bust -
The fear that Facebook is now such a big beast it can buy anything that challenges it

2 years and 7 months that persuaded the PM to join Twitter

The picture I took at Starbucks. And tweeted

Two years and seven months after I collared Prime Minister David Cameron on the subject of his position on Twitter ("Too Many Tweets Make a Twat, to quote from his Absolute Radio interview before the last election) he has finally taken the plunge and started his own account.

His opening tweet - for those who have lost the connection in the mists of time - is a reference to that very "Twat" faux pas.

"I'm starting Conference with this new Twitter feed about my role as Conservative Leader. I promise there won't be "too many tweets..."

When I bumped into Cameron in a London Starbucks he took the view that politicians should think before they speak - which makes Twitter risky.

Politicians, he said, needed to think about what they said, before they said it.

He worried that those who tweeted all the time were sharing a stream of consciousness.

I said politicians ought not think too hard before they speak, they should tweet their stream of consciousness. I'd prefer the direct honesty.

For the rest of the original post, (and some interesting issues about the realities of privacy in today's connected world), go here.

By co-incidence I was retelling the story of my chance encounter with the PM at one of the panel sessions of London Social Media Week a couple of week's back. Which has led to some confusion:

While it is perfectly possible that I set a small flame burning in Cameron's mind back in 2010 (the power of John Prescott's ability to disintermediate the media may have had growing resonance post the whole Murdoch melt-down) I cannot claim to be behind this latest sorte into social media. If I had been he'd be following more folk back than a handful of echo-chamber Tory MPs. And he wouldn't have an underscore in his Twitter handle (it's @david_cameron). I mean, have folk there never used an iPhone???

Also I'd have been making his move on to Twitter part of a much larger shift from centre to edge.

Inspired by my new connection, I wrote an Open Letter (with the emphasis on Open) to Mr Cameron after our meeting (and after he'd come to power). Given the 2 year 7 month delay between our Starbucks enounter and his Twitter account, it would be wonderful to think that he'll be acting on the contents of the Open Letter by Christmas... Here's hoping!

Related articles

• David Cameron joins Twitter
• "I promise there won't be too many tweets": Prime Minister David Cameron joins Twitter
• PM @David_Cameron joins Twitter
• @David_Cameron joins Twitter ahead of Tory conference
• David Cameron joins Twitter, might now be a twat
• David Cameron's Twitter flunkies
• British PM Cameron joins Twitter despite reservations
• Cameron's Corkers: Exposing the PM's miscellany of untruths and u-turns