With all the talk and early signs of an economic downturn the pressure on businesses to prove ROI on their marketing activities is greater than at any other point in the last twenty years. This changing climate will dictate not only where budgets will go but which companies will win and which will lose…

It will be on sale in printed form from 11th March, but it is a free download from the Winners and Losers website while stocks last. If you can get to the event on 11th March, I recommend it (details on the site) as well as the book.

I was going to write a short piece for it, but things didn’t end up that way, so here was the gist of what it was going to be:

Ed’s top tips:

1. Use Open Source software or free products wherever possible (not neccesarily with organisational single sign-on for example, but how about openid?
2. Use Open Source models and ideas reported elsewhere
3. Learn your lessons wisely and share the findings from your work with others freely
4. Embed the learning and resources in your organisation

This is how I work wherever possible. Most of my findings and lessons learnt from last year with CILIP, Amnesty, Media Sandbox (case study out next week) and others are available for nothing.

Some call it idealistic, but that’s fine by me. I don’t believe that ‘Knowledge in a box’ has much value, and that business plans built on hoarding IP are really sustainable any more. If you stuff knowledge in a box and hide it, you get a Schrodinger effect (quantuum knowledge anyone?).

It is better to share it, learn from it, converse around it and build upon it. See more on this from Miguel’s excellent analysis, or Verna Allee’s brilliant book The Future of Knowledge, which presents a variety of examples of how to share your product knowledge with your consumers in order to drive its development forward.

This approach has new assessment frameworks, sure, but these can be handled with approaches like Outcome mapping, currently used in the Development domain, which are far more participative and pragmatic than any of the other assessment models I have seen, much more suited to the basic fact that business is complex, and highly suitable to online community stuff.

If you want some uplifting thoughts on this subject I recommend reading Charles Leadbeater’s new book “We think: The power of mass creativity” (Thanks David), and combining those thoughts with those from the book “Enough” (Thanks Toby). That’s what I’m going to hint at at a couple of conferences this week.

I recently read some bits from ‘We think’ out loud to some strangers on the train it was so good, and thought I would share one here (I think I’m going to have to add a quotes category to this blog):

Markets trade products; communities breed knowledge. Ideas do not live in the minds of individuals but through a constant circulation as gifts. In the century to come well being will come to depend less on what we own and consume and more on what we can share with others and create together, especially as consumption becomes increasingly constrained by environmental concerns that mean we have to live more within collectively binding limits

This points firmly towards the original Cluetrain directions about the incoming integration of markets and communities through conversation and sharing.

Good work all!

This bit is the first to chew on (for me anyway):

“… 70% consider building a sense of community around their brand essential or important, but…
… only 20% plan to engage with target customers in social networking sites that they do not own…”

Which puts the thinking around how to approach the three types of community (centralised, de-centralised, and distributed) into an interesting organisational context. And ‘Ownership’. And ‘Control’.

Which makes me think about what Eric Schmidt said in The Economist yearbook for 2007:

“… The past few years have taught us that business models based on controlling consumers or content don’t work. Betting against the net is foolish because you’re betting against human ingenuity and creativity…

The direction is clear…

Simplicity is triumphing over complexity.
Accessibility is beating exclusivity.
Power is increasingly in the hands of the user…”

All good stuff for brain exercise. Thanks to the survey owners for going out of their way to research and publish this invaluable information, which you can download from the cScape website:

Download the Customer Engagement Report (.pdf; needs registration)