thinks

I need to read Mike Moran more regularly. He’s more than brilliant; he’s useful. To me, we should all aspire to usefulness. As Garrison Keilor once said , “There are far too many decorative people in the world.”

In any case, Mike points out the risks to business from blogging and why “blogging policies” fail to miss the point (credit where due: the original concept comes from David Meerman Scott’s “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”).

I’m going to take Scott’s “if you allow your employees to send e-mail” meme one step further: The same holds true if you let your employees talk to customers, friends and neighbors, too.

Now, many companies have long restricted employees from speaking with the media, for the obvious reason that the media traditionally has had much broader reach than the person next door. But, is that still true? And which one has more credibility with your customer in the current, fragmented media landscape? Which one has the potential to do more damage in the long run? I’d argue they’re roughly equivalent. A disgruntled customer, speaking to their friends and acquaintances, and, increasingly, their blog audience or favorite review site about how you conduct business may have equal impact as a page B17 story in the New York Times. A really pissed off customer/employee/whomever likely has much, much more.

Smart companies - big and small - should enact policies making clear what employees may or may not share. With anyone. The same holds true for harassment and discrimination policies. Blogs are just another conversation. Treating them differently is like locking a window while the front door remains wide open.

I don’t mean in the figurative, “down with it” sense. I mean for real. When will the Web (1.0, 2.0, mobile, what-have-you) achieve dial tone-like availability levels? VOIP, in particular, demands it. But so do your customers.

I don’t typically read Bob Lefsetz - though I should. You should, too. While he’s writing about changing business models in the music industry specifically, his comments translate well to anyone doing business. During Web 1.0, we called it disintermediation. Today it’s called reality.

Ah, big media. Always willing to fight for the benefit of consumers. This has nothing to do - as the NAB suggests - with “degrad[ing] TV service for consumers” and everything to do with degrading revenues for broadcasters. After all, mobile TV delivered via whitespace cuts out potential ad revenue for the broadcasters. But I see no benefit to consumers from the NAB plan.

Most of us aren’t in the platform business. Or are we? Fred’s post asks a really important question for your business model: how do others leverage your product to their business benefit?

As William Gibson likes to say, “The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed.” If you count the emergent local web - and include where things are going with the social space - as part of “personalization,” these predictions from Richard MacManus are pretty comprehensive. Which ones do you think are most important for your business?