Could Social Media Plug the BP Oil Leak? Can Social Media Clean It Up?

Following is a post from my SociaLies blog. This is the first one I have posted on both sites and may be the first of many.

Thus far, I have posted “unique” entries on the two blogs, but it seems to me this one enjoys a convergence of thought, which might be of interest to those only interested in entrepreneurship as well as to those primarily interested in social media forensics.

In this case, it seems to me that there is an opportunity for entrepreneurs and companies facing a crisis to use social media tools as part of their strategy to avert, resolve, or remediate disasters. In the case below, BP had contingency plans, but they have not worked. It seems they must now innovate. What better way to tap a much larger pool of gray matter, than posing the question, “how do we fix this problem?”

Here is the SociaLies post.
*******************************************************************

Could Social Media Plug the BP Oil Leak?

Can Social Media Clean It Up?

The title of this post notwithstanding, I’m not asking if:

1. dropping all the Facebook  ”friends,” LinkedIn “contacts,” and Twitter “followers” into the ocean directly above the horrific BP oil leak would plug it; nor
2. if there might be a possibility that turning a year’s worth of online digital chatter into pieces of paper containing those messages would bury the leak so much as to stop it.

Granted, there are statistics indicating:

• Facebook is said to currently have more than 400 million active users; 50% of whom, as active users, log on to Facebook in any given day; the average user has 130 friends; people spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook; there are over 160 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups and events); the average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events; the average user creates 70 pieces of content each month; and more than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

These statistics come from Facebook.

• LinkedIn may have over 65 million members in over 200 countries; have a new member join approximately every second, and and be able to boast that executives from all Fortune 500 companies are members.

These statistics come from LinkedIn

• Twitter is said to have 105,779,710 registered users; new users signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day; and 180 million unique visitors coming to the site every month.

These statistics come from the Huffington Post

Some might say these statistics are inflated. That would certainly be a surprise wouldn’t it? The Tweet Twins, yes, you read that right, put these statistics, as of December, 2009 at:

• LinkedIn users at 24 million unique U.S. visitors;
• Facebook users at 23 million unique U.S. visitors; and
• Twitter users 116 million unique U.S. visitors

Any way you slice it, these are some hefty numbers. What I’m wondering is, with all those folks using social media to connect, learn, and more, why does social media seem to have so little a role in solving the BP oil catastrophe?

I searched the BP Web site and failed to come up with an easy way to offer a suggestion to BP on how to fix the problem. I’ve heard on the news that everyone from actor Kevin Costner to some of our most brilliant scientists have tried to make suggestions, but have had a difficult time getting anyone at BP to listen to them. How could that be in a world with such robust social media platforms designed specifically to facilitate communication?

“”They’re clearly out of ideas, and there’s a whole world of people willing to do this free of charge,” said Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of InnoCentive Inc., which has created an online network of experts to solve problems.”

When I searched the BP Web site for information on the oil spill, I found very little, if anything, to allow one to post a suggestion. BP America has a Facebook pageand a presence on Twitter. The official Deepwater Horizon Response has a Web site. It states:

“A Unified Command has been established to manage response operations to the April 20, 2010 “Deepwater Horizon” incident. A Unified Command links the organizations responding to an incident and provides a forum for those organizations to make consensus decisions. This site is maintained by the Unified Command’s Joint Information Center (JIC), which provides the public with reliable, timely information about the response.”

Below that statement are the names of fifteen .gov sites one might initially think were intended to facilitate the process of transmitting one’s brilliant, problem solving ideas to the “proper authorities.” Not so fast. All you get here is links to the home page of these fifteen government agencies.

The Unified Command Web site contains a link to an Alternative Technology Response Form, posted online. It also has a suggestions page where it says:

“BP has established a process to receive and review submitted suggestions, on how to stop the flow of oil or contain the spill emanating from the Mississippi Canyon 252 well. Proposals are reviewed for their technical feasibility and proof of application.”

“More than 7,800 ideas have been proposed to date. Given this quantity of technical proposals suggested by industry professionals and the public, it may take some time to technically review each one.”

Maybe they don’t need our input, with all those suggestions. As a student of how social media can be used by businesses, I find it hard to believe that putting up an essentially static Web page with a limited information form is the best way to get meaningful input. It took a while to find out how to offer a suggestion and the Web site says they are apparently overloaded with suggestions. Traditional media channels are full of stories about people who have suggestions but can’t seem to get anyone to listen.

BP seems to tout its expertise. BP America’s Web site maintains that:

“BP strives to minimize the environmental impact of its activities by applying management systems and standards and using innovative technology in its operations.”

If BP is innovative, they have not yet proven it in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill response. As of this writing, they were still struggling to find an effective way to “plug the damn hole.”

Perhaps they have not seen the wisdom or potential application of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of  Crowds. Surowiecki says:

“If you put together a big enough group of people and ask them to ‘make decisions affecting matters of general interest,’ that group’s decisions will, over time, be ‘intellectually [superior] to the isolated individual,’ no matter how smart or well-informed he is.”

If BP is actually getting too many suggestions to handle well in a finite amount of time, what would they have to lose by giving the wisdom of the crowd a shot? One of my favorite examples of how a business can use the wisdom of the crowd to be successful comes from Threadless. As Max Chafkin says in his article about the company in Inc. magazine, The Customer is the Company:

“…[t]he lesson of Threadless … demonstrates what happens when you allow your company to become what your customers want it to be, when you make something as basic and quaint as ‘trust’ a core competency. Threadless succeeds by asking more than any modern retail company has ever asked of its customers — to design the products, to serve as the sales force, to become the employees. Nickell has pioneered a new kind of innovation. It doesn’t require huge research budgets or creative brilliance — just a willingness to keep looking outward.”

If you are not familiar with the Threadless business model, it would be fair to say it is one in which the customers create the product. Threadless makes T-shirts. They don’t think up the designs, however. They let the customers do that. Anyone who wants to can design a shirt. Once the designs are in, customers have an opportunity to engage in a “popularity contest” and pick their favorite design. Threadless then produces the winning T-shirts for a group of potentially interested customers who are already prequalified buyers.

Could BP do worse than they are now? What would they have to lose by opening up the potential solutions and letting the world vote on the best solutions? If the “best” solutions didn’t work, it would seem they and we would be no worse off. Maybe Kevin Costner has the solution. Maybe Joe Shmoe does. I don’t know. What we do know is that BP has apparently not come up with one yet.

Maybe it is time for the wisdom of the crowds to take a shot at resolving the continuing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Could social media be used to “plug the damn hole?” Could the use of social media be helpful in finding ways to more effectively remediate the damage the oil spill has and will cause?

I don’t know, but could BP do worse than asking?

If you are a company that wants to innovate, or just avoid disasters, shouldn’t you incorporate all available tools, including social media tools into your company tool box?

Lessons I Learned Today 6/30/09 – Getting to Know You; Science Lab 101

This is a digest and recap of highlights, quotes, and comments from articles and discussions posted on this date on the Applied Entrepreneurship, LinkedIn group site.

 

*A Practical Guide to CEO Succession Planning by Clarke Murphy

“Clarke Murphy and the CEO/Board Services Practice discuss the specific elements and timeline of a successful CEO succession plan, as well as the steps necessary to ensure a smooth transition.”

1. Begin intensive knowledge sharing.

2. Communicate with stakeholders.

3. Develop a written transition plan.

4. Share the transition plan.

5. Strengthen relationships with the board.

The article contains an example of a grid showing the personal average of each candidate based upon the following criteria:

• Vision and Strategy;
• Ensuring Tactical Success;
• Relationships and Communication;
• Motivation; Business;
• Fit to Situation

Competitive Benchmarking with four tiers:

tier 1 – Best candidate available in the market for this position

tier 2 – Would present as candidate without reservations

tier 3 – Would be presented as a candidate with reservations

tier 4 – Would definitely not be presented as a candidate for the position

“Managing the CEO succession process is a board’s ultimate responsibility. A regularly reviewed and closely followed succession plan is essential to successfully exercise that responsibility. The costs of shortchanging this process are easy to see when companies are caught off guard by events; the payoff is reflected in the company’s momentum as it moves from one leader to the next. In addition, ongoing succession planning helps the board to be better informed and aligns the development of the senior management team with the strategic needs of the company. Beyond its usefulness in risk mitigation, CEO succession planning contributes to the successful governance and management of the firm long before a successor is needed.”

 

*The ABCs of Buying a Business by Tim Berry

“Buying an existing business is an excellent option that is often overlooked by entrepreneurs, but it does have advantages. You will have an established name, existing customers and an immediate revenue stream. However, searching for a business to buy can be difficult, and finding the right one to buy is tougher yet.”

“To provide some ‘structure’ to this very complex decision, the following process-oriented steps may serve as a checklist to help you go through the process.”

“Based on what you know about yourself and why you are interested in this business, you must constantly assess if the concept and the business is right for you. Does it fit with your interests and your resources? Cash, credibility, skills and contacts: do yours match what this business will demand?”

“Access to the “real numbers” behind the business is crucial.”

“You will want to retain a Certified Public Accountant and an attorney who is knowledgeable in business acquisitions. A CPA will to help guide you through the financial analysis process, and you may benefit from legal counsel as agreements are drafted and signed. Their expertise and the emotional separation from the process can make the costs for their services your wisest investments in the entire process.”

“Ultimately, negotiations will lead to a business valuation to determine what the business is actually worth. There are several ways to estimate the value of a company, such as the value of the company’s assets, how much debt does it hold, and from what sources are the company’s current revenues and profits? All of these are going to have a different impact on the value of the business. Other factors to consider in the valuation process include:

• Level of risk
• Competition
• Growth
• Organizational stability
• Management team
• Overall desirability

“Based on a valuation that you find acceptable, the specific arrangements of the financial transaction may determine if this is a “go” or something to walk away from and feel good about.”

“Determine if you are going to be able to add value to the business or if your goal is simply to keep “the machine” running. Once you have purchased the business, what are your objectives? Are you planning on owning the business for the next twenty years, or growing it over the next five years and then looking for the opportunity to sell? This will impact the intangible assessment of what the business may be worth to you and help assess the potential challenges ahead. Beginning your business plan will help to clarify your objectives and the business potential ahead.”

The bottom line:

• Take your time.
• Be methodical about gathering all the information you can.
• Pay attention to the details.
• Get help when needed and leverage available resources.
• Continue to “test” to see if the business and its demands fit who you are and what you want your business to be.
• If the deal doesn’t feel right, keep looking

 

*Questions to Ask When Buying a Business by Stephen Windhaus

“There are so many questions to ask when considering the purchase of an existing business. Let me give you a few examples that relate to financial, marketing, ownership and operations:”

• Why is the seller selling?
• Have you asked to review the certified financial statements of income, cash flow and balance sheets for the last three years?
• Have you asked to see the company’s IRS returns for the last three years?
• Have you asked for a copy of all documents of all outstanding indebtedness?
• Has there been any significant turnover of employees?
• Is there a close relationship between company and customers?
• Do vendors display preferred, regular or irregular relations with the company?
• Are there any members to a management team for this company?
• What are the actual conditions of existing fixed assets like office equipment, machinery, vehicles and the like?

“This is a brief list designed to give you a starting point from which to begin the investigation of the venture in which you are about to invest.”

 

*Buying a Business? Know What You Are Getting! by Tim Berry

“When buying or investing in a business you need to evaluate that business carefully. One tool is the Investment Analysis.”

There are many valuation formulas:

• The Book Value formula calculates valuation as Assets less Liabilities, just the same as Net Worth.
• The Liquidation Value formula says the business is worth the liquidation value of its Assets, less Liabilities.
• The Replacement Value formula says the business is worth what it costs to replace it.
• The Times Sales formula is one where the business is worth the Sales Multiple shown as the Calculated Sales-based Valuation.
• The Times Earnings formula is another of the two most common.
• Market comparisons look at actual transactions of similar businesses of similar size.

“The valuation of a business depends not just on simple formulas and multiples, but also general market conditions, specific economics of the business, its location, its branding, its management team, its balance sheet, its customer base, the negotiating skills of the parties, and other factors.”

“For privately held companies, valuation of a business is theoretical until there is a transaction. When the transaction happens, the business is worth whatever the buyers pay for it. As a buyer and or seller of a business you don’t necessarily get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate; or what you settle for.”

 

*How Does Innovation Fit into a Business Plan? by Tim Berry

“Innovation changes a business plan pretty much as a reflection of how it changes a business. It adds risk, uncertainty, and interest too.”

“Risk has two sides to it: up and down. The upside risk in innovation is of course the benefits to a business when innovation leads to a more desirable offering: better product, suitable for a larger market, differentiated from competition, easier to build, and so forth. The downside risk the business that depends on innovation usually positions itself on innovation and loses big time when somebody else comes up with the next new bigger, faster, and better. “

“Interest comes with innovation too. Market makers are interested. Opinion leaders are interested. Competitors are interested. And investors are interested. To the investor, innovation means defensibility and market advantage.”

“Innovation is part of your company’s identity, we would hope one of its strengths, and certainly a key element in business offering. It directly affects the market, both in the higher degree of guessing required (educated guessing, we hope) and in how it affects target market and message. And it affects strategy focus, too, because it turns a company towards it like plants growing towards the sun.”

 

*To Franchise or Not to Franchise by Tim Berry

“When you are trying to decide whether to buy into a franchise there are several factors to consider. Make sure you are looking at a solid and effective franchise that offers real value. There are hundreds of good ones, but lots of bad ones too.

You are paying an up-front franchise fee and a percentage of sales to get two main benefits:

• A formula you can follow, a proven formula that guides you through the process, avoiding expensive mistakes.
• National marketing to enhance your business with a brand name, television advertising, etc.

“I would want to know about training costs, needs, quality and availability. I would also want to know from other owners how well the parent company meets franchisees’ needs regarding product and system-wide marketing. I’d want to know also whether their marketing actually works and how much supplemental marketing you need to do. Do they supply signage? Do you have any choice about signage, etc.?”

“I’d talk to at least 10 other franchisees before I spent my money on somebody’s franchise formula business. I’d also find an attorney with experience in this area, and go through with him or her some of the questions you should be asking. For example, is the franchisor going to protect your territory or sell another franchise across the street? How can you tell for sure? What guarantees does the franchisor make about national advertising, etc.?”

 

* Social Media Will Change Your Business by Stephen Baker and Heather Green

“There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Any dolt with a working computer and an Internet connection can become a blog publisher in the 10 minutes it takes to sign up.”

“The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.”

“Companies have to learn to track what blogs are talking about, pinpoint influential bloggers, and figure out how to buttonhole them, privately and publicly.”

“The dot-com era was powered by companies—complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and—that’s right—no bubble.”

“The role of the blog startups is to build tools for this grassroots uprising.”

“The Web we’ve come to know is mostly a collection of documents. A library. These documents don’t change much. Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world is thinking about, minute by minute. E-mail has carried on billions of conversations over the past decade. But those exchanges were private. Most blogs are open to the world. As the bloggers read each other, comment, and link from one page to the next, they create a global conversation.”

“In time, aggregators could turn the Web on its head. Why? They discourage surfing as users increasingly just wait for interesting items to drop onto their page or e-mailbox. Internet advertising, which traditionally counts on page views and clicks, could be thrown for a loop. Already Yahoo is packaging ads on the feeds. Google is testing the waters.”

“Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like—you guessed it—blogs. Clay Shirky, a Web expert at New York University, calls it ‘an absorption process where the thing doing the absorbing changes.’”

“Blogs can land sponsorship deals for as much as $25,000 per month, say consultants. O.K. money for an entrepreneur, but a rounding error in the ad industry. Blog power simply doesn’t translate yet into big bucks. For now, it’s running mostly on people’s passion to communicate—especially in developing markets.”

 

* Social Media SWOT Analysis by Peter Hollier

“It only makes sense to use SWOT analysis within the Social Media realm to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that business has or will encounter upon initiation of a Social Media program. Without a SWOT analysis it will be impossible to develop an effective Social Media Marketing Strategic Plan, develop company guidelines and effectively initiate the Social Media Program.”

“The following questions are a starting point to what should be asked about your company’s SWOT”

• Does your company have the creative people required to develop meaningful high quality content and communication on a regular basis?
• Does your business understand the keywords customers and prospects use to find your Social Media content?
• Does your business have strong change management skills?
• Does the company feel comfortable with empowering company employees to interact with customers using Social Media?
• Are you customers using Social Media for personal or business reasons?
• Have you identified and evaluated the efforts if any of your competitor’s Social Media presence?

“This by no means a comprehensive list of questions which need to be answered to complete a SWOT for your business’s Social Media program however, it is an indication of the types of questions you should be considering about your business’s capability to thrive in a Social Media environment.”

 

What I Think

I think all of the articles posted on this date center on change and change management of one sort or another. I also think the common thread is “getting to know you.”

Clarke Murphy’s article, A Practical Guide to CEO Succession Planning, deals with the specific elements and timeline of a successful CEO succession plan. Boiled down to the basics, this is simply a system in which criteria are developed to compare and contrast various factors to reach a decision on which of several options is the best fit for a particular situation. It is a way to “get to know” and understand several options and pick the best one.

The articles by Tim Berry and Stephen Windhaus on buying a business, when boiled down to the basics, are also stories of how one can create a series of criteria to use to compare various options. One option is to buy a business. One option is to not buy a business. You can take this up a notch, and compare various, somewhat dissimilar opportunities and bring them down to your own personal set of “final criteria.”

The screening used to compare various franchise opportunities presents one set of criteria. The screening to compare opportunities to buy several non-franchise opportunities presents other criteria to compare and contrast. Once the best candidate from each “column” is selected, the winners can be compared and contrasted using a narrower set of criteria, and that in turn can be compared to the advantages or disadvantages of taking no action. What a concept!

As they say, the devil is in the details. Knowing what formulas or criteria to use can be as much of an art as a science. Giving appropriate weight to the various criteria or factors is also critical to ending up with a selection, which will make you happy. These are things, fortunately, which can be accomplished by the proverbial “trained professional.” Selecting which “trained professional” to use and when to use them is, likewise, a process in which you can develop criteria relevant to your situation, such as education, experience, price, availability, etc.

Even the social media SWOT analysis article by Peter Hollier presents a similar analysis. Distilled down to the basic concept, this is a process of a company getting to know itself and how it will be able to manage a change when dealing with various options. In this case, it is a matter of developing relevant criteria to determine if it can achieve reasonable ROI from engaging in a social media campaign.

Isn’t this the same sort of thing our high school teachers tried to us in science lab? This is the scientific method applied to business opportunities. According to Science Buddy. Com, a popular Web site for kids learning the scientific method in school:

 The scientific method is a way to ask and answer scientific questions by making observations and doing experiments. The steps of the scientific method are to:

• Ask a Question
• Do Background Research
• Construct a Hypothesis
• Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
• Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
• Communicate Your Results

Notwithstanding the Art of the Deal, is business really this simple? Does it just come to putting things on a grid and selecting the option with the best numbers. Not really, but it seems like that could certainly help.

Look at a relatively simple personal transaction, such as buying a house. There are lots of factors to consider, but for some people who move frequently, the process is just not that hard. Through multiple experiences, they have learned to identify the important things they want in any house, such as price, condition, location (ex. proximity to where they work, or to good schools), number of bedrooms, etc. Others, involved in exactly the same process for the first time, are probably much more likely to see the decision as extremely complex, to make a significant mistake, and be unsatisfied with the results, because they didn’t factor in something important to them.

In residential real estate, “curb appeal” is very important. In business, not so much. Given the wealth of material available online and from “trained professionals,” why would a business owner rely on curb appeal in an significant situation? “Getting to know you” can be an art, but not all of us are artists. If you want to play the odds, my money is on the science. 

 

 

If you enjoyed my impression of these articles, why don’t you read them for yourself and see what you and I missed or hit? Join the Applied Entrepreneurship group on LinkedIn. Membership is free and I try to post about ten articles a day there. We have some great discussions going and if you are an entrepreneur, we hope you will join us.

Lessons I Learned Today 6/24/09 – We Are the Owners of Corporate America and Should Act Like It.

This is a digest and recap of highlights, quotes, and comments from articles and discussions posted on this date on the Applied Entrepreneurship, LinkedIn group site.

  

*Measuring the ROI of Social Media

“It is becoming increasingly important for businesses to interact with current and potential customers online, consumers are expecting your business to be online for them. So businesses are now faced with the necessity of participating in Social Networks with their consumers. If they don’t chances are the consumer will click on your competitors site who happens to participate the way they want them to.”

“The bottom line here is, operating a Social Media Campaign is a business expense. For many businesses this expense come mainly in the form of time, there is little need for additional software and many of the most popular Social Networks have no membership fees. The old business adage “Time is Money” most certainly is appropriate for Social Media.”

“Regardless of the metrics used to analyze the productivity of the Social Media Campaign prior to initiation, it is important to determine the business’s current status of both tangible and intangible measuring metrics. If this is not completed it is not possible to provide accurate data on the performance of the Social Media Campaign.”

“Much of the success of the campaign is based on customer experiences, such as:

• Customer satisfaction
• Improved communication
• Better service response
• Higher brand perception”

“Some of the more identifiable items to monitor to ascertain the effectiveness of your Social Media Campaign include increase in:

• New visitor numbers
• Returning visitors
• Newsletter subscribers
• Page Views
• Time on site
• Adsense ad revenue”

 

*Measuring ROI of Social Media – Another Perspective

There are three steps to figuring out the ROI of investing in social media:

• Step One: Circulation – take the hours it takes for you to work on that network and compare that to the cost of an ad with similar circulation.
• Step Two: Conversions – the objective is often more about awareness and driving traffic to a Point of Sale.
• Step Three: Assessment – see if they are sharing your message with others, talking about your message, or going over to your website.

“With these three steps you can compare your Social Media ROI with any other promotional investment you are making. Often what you will find is that conversions made through Social Networks are more targeted, responsive and longer lasting that those made from traditional advertising.”

 

*The “Intangible” Benefits of Social Media

“The elevator pitch about these “intangible” or long term benefits of social media is very simple. A good engagement on social media is part of the brand experience and supports brand building.”

“Brand building campaigns and brand management aim at delivering the adequate customer experience in a repeated way, so that customers consciously or unconsciously associate the brand values to the company and its products.”

Social media are well adapted to the following (these are only examples):

• Drive internal discussion between employees and/or with the management
• Support collaborative exchange within a project team or any group who is motivated at sharing knowledge and experience
• Create awareness, for example with a good content, preferably a video or webcast rather than text
• Enable and facilitate discussions with customers and potential customers on product feedback, product definition, product roadmap, or customer support
• Make a company and/or part of its staff recognized members of a community
• Drive thought leadership via facilitation of valuable discussions  – this one uses social media with a classic goal of marketing and communications BUT the execution must be very subtle in order to adapt to the rules and etiquette of social media: a peer to peer dialog

“There are quite a few paid services available to monitor and analyze conversations on the web. These services allow a qualitative and quantitative  analysis of how discussions on your company or your topics of interest spread over the internet. A recent article written by Dan Schwabei and published on Mashable  (http://mashable.com/2008/12/29/brand-reputation-monitoring-tools/ ) provides a very good concise description of 10 of them.”

“When designing a social media campaign, you should have a clear idea of your target group and of the expected short term and longer term impact (nothing really new).”

 

* Jack Connors: Managing Succession by Patricia O’Connell

“Succession planning is a huge issue for companies. Many don’t to it properly, if at all, resulting in disruptive management transitions that are bad for morale and business.”

Connors trusted his own judgment about deciding it was time to go in 2000. “At the risk of putting words in Yogi Berra’s mouth, when you sell your company, you don’t own it any more, and so, my hunger, my level of interest, began to recede ever so slightly,” Connors says. “So gradually, my lack of hunger began to show itself in the lack of growth of the company, and Hill Holiday had always been on a growth track, so it was important to bring in people who could reenergize that growth.”

Connors considers the succession, well, a success. “At the end of the day, this is very much a business. It’s a for-profit company whose objective is to return money to the shareholders of IPG,” he says. “But within that, we always felt an obligation to the people who work here. They’ve dedicated a piece of their lives to the success of this organization, this particular mission. And so it’s not just a matter of paying them, but it’s a matter of looking out for them.”

 

* ‘Starchitect’ Libeskind Reinvents the Mall by Reena Jana

“The world is suffering. But this is exactly the time to do exciting things. It’s not the time to hide our heads,” says Libeskind. “It’s when we have to use our imaginations to try new materials, new ideas. Not just add gold and chandeliers!”

Libeskind made his name by creating dramatic cultural institutions with angular, jagged silhouettes, such as Berlin’s Jewish Museum, not shopping centers. But he thinks his portfolio shouldn’t be split into two categories. “I don’t believe in this old-fashioned distinction between cultural and commercial projects, as if we live in split worlds,” he says. “Architecture is about everyday life, not just about going to a museum. I want to blur and erase the lines between culture and commerce. And it’s a fact that museums want to be successful economically, too.”

“Libeskind is used to creating big budget projects such as CityCenter with large-scale, intentionally crooked walls and ceilings. These are his design signatures, meant to evoke surprise in the people who visit his buildings. So his fans—and critics—might be truly surprised that the architect is looking to remake objects on a tinier scale. These are well-timed, and potentially well-priced, for a recession.”

“I believe people want a ‘wow’ experience in their lives, not just when they visit a museum,” Libeskind says, emphasizing that during such glum times, businesses really need to supply “wows” to draw customers. The businesses include, of course, his own.

 

*‘An Explosion’ in Women-Owned Companies? by Damian Joseph

“Seven years ago, Nicole Loftus was entrenched in a $19 billion-a-year industry she felt was following an outmoded model. As a distributor of branded products, she served as an intermediary between companies that wanted products imprinted with their logos and the manufacturers that made them. Remarkably, neither side ever interacted. Loftus struck out on her own—against the advice of her family and then-husband—and began building what is now a multimillion-dollar company, Zorch International. The Chicago company offered an innovation to the branded-products industry’s supply chain and changed how many corporations procure such products.”

“It can be especially challenging for women to establish companies seeking a broad reach, such as those that provide services for corporations—and securing financial backing can be nearly impossible. In 2008 only 6.8% of venture capital went to companies founded by women, according to Dow Jones VentureSource”

“Loftus started the company herself with the aid of angel investors, bank loans, and the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center. In 2008, Crain’s Chicago Business ranked Zorch the fastest-growing company in Chicago, and Inc. magazine ranked it the eighth-fastest-growing in America. Inc. also ranked Zorch the country’s No.1 company owned by a woman for its astounding 10,822% growth rate from 2005-2007.”

“The biggest challenge for women in starting successful companies, Millman says, is they need to become more aggressive and less risk-averse. This would include women more confidently marketing their expertise and forging ahead with potentially valuable business ideas despite market conditions. “The resources are actually more plentiful and it’s much cheaper to start a business now than a decade ago,” she says.”

 

*A New Agenda for Boards of Directors by Ira M. Millstein

“I’ve had the good luck to have lived through the Great Depression and every recession since, and I’m still here, which is the good news. However, the depression of the 1930s had a lasting impact on my attitude toward life and times. I don’t suppose any of us who lived through it ever fully recovered enough not to worry about money, jobs, and all the rest, no matter how we otherwise made out in life. “

“This particular crisis bears a resemblance—but only a resemblance—to the 1930s. Really, in my opinion it’s nothing like it and won’t be. Furthermore, I am confident that the lasting effect this time will be positive, not negative. Watching my grandchildren and their attitudes, I see them fully capable of resetting their goals in a very positive way. I think they will see the world as one in which real values are more important than the values we created in the 1980s and 1990s. So, I’m confident about the future.”

“The first thing we must do is restore trust in the system. This requires a new approach to proposed government regulation once the need for emergency responses subsides. Future regulation should be based on an analysis of its costs and benefits in terms of economic impact. In addition to regulatory reform, we need to take a hard look at how the private sector governs itself. To earn trust, both analysis and reform demand total transparency to convince the public at large that regulation and governance are designed to benefit the “real economy,” not Washington or the executive suite.”

“In assessing the economic impact of proposed regulations and private initiatives, we must make strategic choices for the economy as a whole, between innovative and lightly regulated financial markets and the stable and heavily regulated market of the post-depression period.”

 

*The Tools of Social Media

“Before beginning a project of any type it is a pre-requisite to know what tools are available, what tools are required, and a clear understanding of how to use the available tools.”

“Social Media offers numerous tools of varying types to businesses and consumers, knowing what is available, which Social Media tools you should be using to achieve your company objectives and how to use the tool for your business’s project can be confusing to even the saviest Social Marketer.”

“The primary business objectives of Social Media is to converse and engage with customers and potential customers to achieve a desired result which may be a sales or sales lead or improved customer satisfaction.”

The articles give a nice, detailed analysis of the primary tools types of Social Media Tools.

 

* A Scholar-Activist Challenges U.S. Patent Law by Michael Orey

“Critics of the U.S. patent system have high hopes that 2009 might be the year Congress acts to amend it. But their lobbying has failed for years, so John F. Duffy sees another path to change: litigation. “I’ve thought a lot about reform of the patent system through the courts,” says the George Washington University Law School professor. “It’s not like the courts can’t adjust in this area.”

“Two years ago, in a case known as KSR, he helped win the most important U.S. Supreme Court ruling on patent law in 40 years, making it harder to patent readily apparent inventions. And on June 1, the high court agreed to review another hugely important case with which Duffy has been involved, dealing with what kinds of business methods can be patented.”

“Duffy contends that to promote innovation in an evolving economy, advances in a broad range of areas ought to be eligible for patent protection. This includes business methods, which are controversial because they cover things such as financial instruments and management techniques, not physical-world inventions like a new chemical or a machine.”

 

What I Think

I think the articles posted on this date show a variety of reasons for entrepreneurs to be optimistic. The social media articles demonstrate that the innovative tools, which we collectively call social media, can be effective ways to connect with customers and keep them engaged. Just as important, the popularity of these tools has led other innovators to find ways to measure the return on investment, which companies can and do achieve when employing social media campaigns.

Other potentially optimistic trends for innovative entrepreneurs include changes in the patent laws, more deeply ingrained systematic corporate succession planning, and what Damian Joseph’s article, An Explosion’ in Women-Owned Companies, predicts as an upcoming increase in the number of women bucking the trend to become the founders of companies in science-based sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, software, and clean energy.

Finally, there are words of encouragement in the excerpt from Ira M. Millstein’s keynote address, as printed in the BusinessWeek article, A New Agenda for Boards of Directors. Millstein is senior associate dean for corporate governance at the Yale School of Management and a senior partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, one of the largest law firms in the world, with approximately 1,300 lawyers and gross annual revenue in excess of $1.7 billion (per Wikipedia).

Millstein, who says he had “the good luck to have lived through the Great Depression and every recession since,” feels, with regard to this economic crisis, “confident that the lasting effect this time will be positive.” He also thinks his grandchildren will be fully capable of resetting their goals in a very positive way, giving us hope for the next generation. Millstein understands that “innovation and risk-taking are a source of wealth and should not be stifled.”

He talks at length about the need to balance legislation so that the goals are clearly defined and there is a direct correlation with creation of jobs in the private sector. As he says, “we know economic growth depends on trust in the functioning of the capital market and in the people responsible for running financial institutions and our productive corporations. The private sector is uniquely positioned to restore trust in the capital markets. It is at the very place regulation ends that individuals are asked to make discretionary decisions about the use of capital in the interest of their beneficiaries. It’s here in the gray areas that self-regulation and prudent corporate-governance practices are absolutely necessary. It’s in the boardroom that independent oversight is necessary, especially in the area of risk management, to instill market confidence.”

Together “we,” the whole investment chain, are the owners of corporate America and we should act like it. 

 

If you enjoyed my impression of these articles, why don’t you read them for yourself and see what you and I missed or hit? Join the Applied Entrepreneurship group on LinkedIn. Membership is free and I try to post about ten articles a day there. We have some great discussions going and if you are an entrepreneur, we hope you will join us.