(Credit:
Maple and Leek)
Twitter’s “suggested users” list is a Who’s Who of Twitter celebrities, featuring the likes of Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Ashton Kutcher, John McCain, Martha Stewart, and others with millions of followers. The New York Times claimed that a spot on the list would guarantee 500,000 additional followers and reported that social media guru Jason Calacanis had offered $250,000 to be listed.
Last Friday, Twitter did something remarkable. It added a number of well-known social entrepreneurs and innovators to this list, among them Social Edge, Skoll Foundation, Kiva, Matt Flannery (Kiva co-founder), Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz (Acumen Fund founder), charity: water, GOOD Magazine, Kjerstin Erickson (FORGE founder), and Room to Read. Not knowing what was going on, Kiva’s Flannery thought there was a spam attack and complained about the 500 new users a minute he was getting. But not for long.
Twitter’s move is huge, not only because it propels social entrepreneurs to enter mainstream but also because the microblogging service--THE trading floor for attention on the Web--has decided to give away some of the attention it attracts to promote good causes. Consider it the New Socialism: a redistribution of attention, not of material wealth. What’s even more remarkable is the reaction of one of the benefitting organizations, Social Edge, which immediately sent out a message to all its new users pointing them to a list of 100 other social entrepreneurs and innovators on Twitter. Give more than you take: that’s the power of meaningful marketing and exactly the kind of giving that makes companies thrive in the ‘share economy.' Good creates more good.
There are other, even more immediate ways in which Twitter can be used for doing good. My colleague Jacob Zukerman proposed it the other day, and I found the concept instantly compelling: instant social action, enabled by Twitter. Tweet Mobs for collective action. The idea is simple: Convert all the attention on Twitter into real-world action--in real-time. With some twitter users attracting more than a million followers, their social influence is significant--why not use it for social good, especially when you can “eventize” it by creating artificially scarce moments of real-time public collaboration?
The link between tweet and deed is not new on Twitter and exists in various formats (Mashable has provided a great overview): Cause-related fundraising (Tweet fund drives) via Twitter has been made popular by Twestival, Tweetsgiving,12for12k, Tweetathon, and others. An alternate concept is Twollars, a Twitter-based currency with no hard money value that allows users to pledge money to charity using Twitter. Describing itself as “a currency of appreciation for Twitter,” it effectively connects micro-payments with micro-blogging. (Speaking of currencies, PollyTrade links Twitter accounts to E*Trade account and allows brokers to trade stock via Twitter.) And there are Tweet-Ups--offline events initiated and organized via Twitter--but in this case, too, the tweet and the deed are asynchronous. Carrotmob, a congenial social media platform for social activism, uses Twitter, but it still requires a moment of translation as well: good will and a commitment to a cause can be immediately “socialized,” however, the output--the action--still occurs via intermediary.
All these formats do not convert instantly into offline action in the way Flash Mobs do. What if followers not only follow but do (in the best “Here Comes Everybody” style)? What if Blog Action Day became Twitter Action Minute? These Twitter Mobs or Smart Tweets would capitalize on the unique combination of peer pressure, presence, location-based eventization, and of course, sheer reach. The train wreck Sarah Lacy-Mark Zuckerberg interview at SXSW 2008 was a negative example of live-mobbing on Twitter, a disaster unfolding in real-time, amplified through the synchronous meta-conversation on Twitter. The #CNNfail campaign in response to CNN’s deficient coverage of the Iranian election, was another one. The enormous power of these real-time conversations is frightening, but it is also promising. The more optimistic equation goes like this: Attention = social capital = social action. What if a group of Twitter followers all picked up one piece of garbage from the street? What if they all gave food to a homeless person? What if they exchanged money, products, hugged a stranger, etc.? And so on. It’d be a real-time, real-world transaction that would be as swift as the transactions taking place at breathtaking pace every second in the highly virtual realm of international finance. A smart attention-to-action cascade. A Good Mob.
Maybe a fantasy--but a good one.
(Credit:
Sustainable Life Media)
The Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) Conference, a landmark gathering of top business and government leaders creating market-based solutions for social impact, is taking place September 1-3, at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.
SOCAP brings together a unique mix of the world’s leading social innovators--traditional investors, impact investors, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, new media, NGO’s and non-profits, wealth managers, development agencies, venture capitalists, MBA students, and other groups interested in the growing opportunities of social capital--who are catalysts of change across the globe.
Last year’s conference gathered more than 650 leading global investors and entrepreneurs from 26 countries. This year’s conference from September 1-3 in San Francisco is sold out again and features speakers from the Skoll Foundation, Participant Productions, Food Inc, GRITtv, LINKtv, Invisible Children, Global Giving, the World Economic Forum, Virgance, Kiva, Change.org, Ushahidi, McKinsey, The Economist, and many others. The opening keynote will be given by Sonal Shah, director of the White House Office for Social Innovation.
“SOCAP09 is the premier event that puts the flow of capital to social good into a context,” says Founder Kevin Jones. “In these turbulent times, social innovators in the public and private sectors, from foundations to social venture funds to development agencies to grassroots Web 2.0 activists, are working together to build a new economic foundation for the world. With our expert speakers, high-impact sessions, and exciting networking events, SOCAP09 is an essential gathering for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of social capital.”
We will be there, too, and will report back. You can also follow the conference online via:
Twitter: @socap09,#socap09
Frog Design's promised series on “Meaning-Driven Business” is taking shape. After introducing the concept of “Chief Meaning Officer” in the “Power” issue of design mind, we are going to formally launch this new forum in our upcoming special TEDGlobal issue (to be released on Sept. 21, 2009) as well as on a special microsite to be launched in a couple of weeks.
For the first round of essays, we are delighted to have received contributions from three industry and thought leaders: Beth Comstock, chief marketing officer of GE and one of the world's most influential Fortune 50 marketing executives, will take the economic crisis as an opportunity to make the case for marketing-driven innovation. Werner Bauer, Nestle's chief technology officer and head of innovation, will describe his company’s concept of “Shared Value” and how it enables a more socially responsible business. And Dev Patnaik, founder and chief executive of innovation consultancy Jump Associates and author of the book Wired to Care, will illustrate how “high-empathy organizations” of all kinds prosper when they tap into a power each of us already has: the ability to reach outside of ourselves and connect with other people. Stay tuned!
The conversation is continuing in other outlets, too, and some pundits want “meaning” to not only be an abstract concept, but a movement. Economist Umair Haque is one of them. His "Generation M (as in “meaning”) Manifesto" stirred some controversial reactions (just read the comments on his blog)--from unconditional endorsement to accusations of arrogance and naiveté. It is one out of many manifestos that have recently been published on the new “new economy”--this, too, is a sign of the times. Manifestos indicate an increased need for ideological alternatives – and meaning. ... Read more
That a leading business school is dedicating an entire student-run conference to the topic of responsible business is remarkable (HEC Paris will do the same soon in May, also in collaboration with Net Impact) but not an isolated phenomenon. In the past few years, several top business schools, such as Yale, Duke, Harvard, and Stanford, as well as pioneers such as the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco and the Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Washington State have begun to offer tailored programs to MBAs who want to marry traditional business skills with innovative approaches to solving social problems. Different from nonprofit curricula, which typically provide the fundamentals of fundraising and grant writing, these specific business school programs combine the finance and management training of a traditional MBA with electives that address topics such as venture capital and investing in emerging markets. But conferences like IESE's indicate that social entrepreneurship is not yet fully integrated into all business school curricula and that it still needs the extra limelight. As long as not all business is social business, business that is not social will still find a safe harbor.
Business and ethics have of course been intertwined since the days of the Greek polis. Adam Smith, the spiritual father of the homo oeconomicus, wrote a "Theory of Moral Sentiments" before he wrote "The Wealth of Nations." And yet, business that is good for society has always been in need of being extrapolated through catchy labels (business ethics, CSR, corporate citizenship, social innovation, social entrepreneurship, etc.), invariably heralded as the Next Big Thing and slowly moving up the food chain from a window-dressing PR tool to a truly integral strategy driver. Recently, Fast Company coined the new, chic term "Ethonomics" and even made it one of the key pillars of its relaunched web site:
"We live in a world that's resource-constrained but ingenuity-rich. So an upstart generation of entrepreneurs - and innovators within the world's biggest companies - are founding businesses that are good for the world as well as the bottom line. They are practicing social change through urban revitalization, sustainable agriculture, green IT, alternative energy and online community-powered investing. Any business that claims to be truly sustainable and innovative should be increasingly efficient with energy and natural resources, transparent and accountable, and good on balance for people and other living things. Ethonomics is a hybrid of technology, design, and social responsibility, and at Fast Company we believe it is the future of business."
In Barcelona, this young upstart generation of entrepreneurs and innovators shared its ideas, seeking advice from those who had been in the field for some years. For example from Kyle Zimmer, the president and co-founder of First Book:
"Whenever you hit a point at which you feel you have no idea what you're doing (and if you don't reach that point quickly, you're not moving fast enough), make a list with the ten most acclaimed experts able to answer your questions. And then call them one by one even if you have never met them or your list includes Bill Gates. It doesn't matter. Tell them your story and ask them for help. Some won't call you back. In fact, I can pride myself with not having been called back by some of the most accomplished people in the world. But you'd be surprised how many will."
Jessica Jackley Flannery, co-founder and chief marketing officer of micro-lending marketplace Kiva, was another one of the veterans present, and her talk made most of the MBA students in the audience beam. Social entrepreneurs are simpaticos, of course, and you'd be hard pressed to find a MBA student these days who would not want to be a social innovator. Wall Street fame is so yesterday. Flannery epitomized the case for a new 'meaning' and emphasized the power of storytelling: "If we all understood each other's stories, the world would be a better place." Stories create empathy, and empathy breeds the solidarity needed for taking action. In light of the dire economic situation in developed countries, Flannery half-jokingly said she wouldn't be surprised if a young entrepreneur in Uganda were soon to lend money to a job-less banker in Manhattan. Globalization in reverse. In any case, innovative banking such as Kiva's is no longer only focused on helping developing economies. New web-enabled finance 2.0 models and infrastructures attempt to overcome the financial crisis in the US.
Entrepreneurs and innovators may be much needed these days, but "how can you be doing good when we are not doing so well?" the conference asked. With almost 14% unemployment in Spain, it was brutally aware of the need to discuss the creation of "Sustainable Value in a Downturn." Aside from the assumption that recessions can hold tremendous opportunity for any entrepreneur (as Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek point out), social entrepreneurs in particular seem to weather the current investment pullback rather well. The Skoll Foundation is currently conducting a survey, to be presented at the Skoll World Forum in March. Preliminary results indicate that most of the social entrepreneurs have been affected by the economic downturn in some way or other, but only 10% of the respondents say that they have been severely affected.
"A crisis is a terrible thing to waste," Paul Romer (now famously) said, and hopefully the current recession will not lead to a Great Depression but a "Great Disruption" (Paul Gilding) that requires us to build the foundation of our economy from the ground up. In his brilliant post on "How To Be a 21st Century Capitalist," Umar Haique writes that "Capital deepening is the foundation of next-generation value creation." By that he means "assets with intrinsic, durable, human value - not the lemons Wall Street was in the business of hawking. It is only by capitalizing the things we really value that the spark of value creation can be lit again." He predicts that "next-generation businesses will be built on next-generation assets:" "Yesterday's businesses were built on cash, factories, and IP - financial, physical, and intellectual capital. Next-generation businesses are built, instead, on human, social, natural, and cultural capital - to name just a few."
(Credit:
Literacy bridge)
Everyone's talking about the new Kindle, but here's a product that may present an even more radical innovation in the e-book sector: The Talking Book, created and distributed by the non-profit Literacy Bridge, is a low cost audio player/recorder with special features for Knowledge Sharing and Literacy Learning. It was developed entirely by volunteers and costs less than $10. The device involves an ecosystem to produce and share locally relevant audio content, allowing users to record their own messages and distribute them within local networks through a device-to-device copying capability. Other features include slow play for reading practice and some interactive features (for educational lessons and games).
The man behind Literacy Bridge is former Microsoft program manager Cliff Schmidt, who studied artificial intelligence and spent much of his time thinking about how literacy can play a role in moving people out of poverty. Schmidt believes that in a country like Ghana having spoken information at hand will help people avoid lengthy trips to visit clinics or other offices. As a next step, he envisions using the Talking Books to reach women in Afghanistan (90% of whom are illiterate), but ideally the device could of course be used anywhere in the world.
While it may not have the media hype of the One Laptop per Child project (yet), the Talking Book may indeed yield greater impact. My colleague Jordan Kanarek nailed it: "The thinking behind the device is compelling, and the opportunities that come with using commodity components to create a rich service are fascinating."
(Credit: Plan Spark)
Now that the exhaustively inspirational Pop!Tech 2008 is over, it’s worthwhile taking a look at what’s next, in other words, at the conference's theme for 2009. The organizers’ choice is pretty telling and may be indicative of a larger shift among not only the elite thinkers gathering at Pop!Tech, but also broader public opinion. Succeeding this year’s theme “Scarcity and Abundance” will be “America Reimagined,” a “top-to-bottom look at America’s opportunities, its challenges, and its future” that promises to explore what it means to be a “superpower in the age of the Second Superpower -- the Internet.”
This theme reflects many of the informal conversations that took place at this year’s Pop!Tech where the predominantly American attendees were wondering whether in light of the depressing news on the economy every morning they maybe ought to spend more time thinking about how to solve critical domestic issues rather than trying to save the rest of the world. The Pop!Tech curators obviously recognized this latent mood and acknowledged that the pendulum has begun to swing back from innovation at the bottom of the pyramid to innovation here at home, where the top of the pyramid has gotten bloated and all of it poisoned with debt. Concerns about a new isolationism, however, are not warranted: “There is not a single global challenge that can be addressed without the US,” as the Pop!Tech site points out.
That’s true, although the relationship between the US and the rest of the world has mutated from a dependence on America to a dependence of America. “Over the past decade, America has made itself a savings-poor country and will be running financial deficits with the rest of the world for the foreseeable future,” writes economist Charles R. Morris in his book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown,” which -- released in February of this year -- offers a both sober and prophetic account of the crisis: “The United States, the ‘hyperpower,’ the global leader in the efficiency of its markets and the productivity of its business and workers, hopelessly in hock to some of the world’s most unsavory regimes. (…) that’s where a quarter-century of diligent sacrifice to the gods of free market has brought us. It’s a disgrace.”
And no one can say we haven’t been warned of the coming agony: “For more than a decade, the international financial cop, the International Monetary Fund, forecast a hurricane was heading toward US shores, as did many heads of the treasury and the Fed,” writes economist Juan Enriquez in an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe. “There are five basic drivers of these crises, all based on excess: high income concentration, too much debt, too much reliance on foreign money, not enough tax revenue, and reckless government spending. Time after time governments believe they are different. They are bombarded by warnings but ignore, postpone, spend even more, and crash.”
Now the great unwinding is ahead of us. The US is an over-leveraged economy that has been spending 5 to 7 percent more each year than it earns. A $1,000 investment in Freddie Mac is presently worth less than the return on the bottle deposit of $1,000 worth of beer bottles. With so much debt as assets on the balance sheets, and most of it collateralized as “toxic waste,” as the financial wizards call it, it will take more than social innovation to prevent Allan Greenspan’s “flaw” from becoming an apocalyptic systemic failure – it will take a drastic behavior change.
The US requires a massive restructuring to address its debt, cutting back on its borrowing, spending, and wars. The alternative is “ugly,” as Enriquez stated in his Pop!Tech address. His analysis of the downturn and his passionate plea to the new administration (and the American people) was the emotional highlight of the conference and a welcome grounding in a distressing reality. Enriquez was agitated and the Q&A after his session just didn’t want to end. Fortunately, he also presented concrete solutions to fix the mess, in the form of his “ten commandments:”
“1 - Save the dollar
2 - Fundamentally and brutally restructure debt
3 - All entitlements are fair game:
- If you are 60-65, you probably just lost big chunks of your nest egg
- Social Security/Medicare benefits are intact
- If you are 55-60, we need two more years’ work from you
- If you’re 55 and under, we need three more years
4 - Cut back military by 2% per year for 10 years
5 - Cap medical costs at 18% GNP
6 - Triage our support for companies (do not attempt to save dying whales)
7 - The program has to be bipartisan. It has to make both Democrats and Republicans unhappy.
8 - Simplify and broadly apply Sarbanes Oxley, apply it to government, apply it to hedge funds.
9 - Invest in growing start-up companies (which create most jobs)
10 - Treat education as a varsity sport (and continue to recruit foreign PhDs)”
Download his presentation as pdf
See the full video:
Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from PopTech on Vimeo.
Immediate action is of the essence: The new administration has 30 days, Enrique noted, to make significant changes based on these commandments. If it fails to do so, the consequences will be a breakdown of public infrastructure, a hike in unemployment rates, and social tensions. "Every great empire has fallen by going into bankruptcy," he stated.
Yet the damage is not only materialistic, it is spiritual. The American people need to rebuild America, but, maybe more importantly, they need to re-imagine it -- with confidence and utmost transparency. The covert irrational exuberance in the financial markets, which has occurred outside of regulatory oversight and is now gradually revealed, has shattered trust in institutions both in the business and public sector. "Supercapitalism has spilled over into politics, and has engulfed democracy,” as Robert Reich, Clinton’s first secretary of labor, diagnoses. Public policy debates have become, Reich observes, “on closer inspection, matters of mundane competitive advantage in pursuit of corporate profit,” with the notion of the "common good" disappearing.
In 2009, citizens and consumers alike will therefore ask for more transparency, more accountability from any kind of governance, as well as for more platforms to actively participate in the process of governance themselves. The rising power of amateurs, the emergence of mass-collaboration, crowdsourcing, user-generated content, and prosumers will extend to the political realm, and the open-source nature that the Obama campaign pioneered on such impressive scale, will extend to the new administration, setting up a social media-enabled “new deal” between citizens and government based on transparency and collective civic intelligence. Applying emerging technologies and new communication paradigms to the realm of governance will likely see a renaissance. More than a decade after visions of digital democracy and e-governance were rendered hopelessly visionary, they will be put forward again with reinvigorated momentum and new practical relevance in a brave new politics 2.0 world. America can and must lead this effort.
It’s a sign of troubling times when it is science that gives you faith. Another Pop!Tech speaker, the British neuro-scientist Peter Whybrow, explained in his talk how markets rely on basic human instincts that reside in the Reptilian brain and how a “buy now, pay later” mentality has led to an abundance that remains unquestioned because we tricked ourselves into a positive feedback loop. The good news from Whybrow though is: It’s only during times of scarcity that we use our human intelligence to its full effect. You can also say: scarcity is the mother of innovation. This presents a unique historic opportunity for the creative class. Reimagining America will be followed by Rebranding and Redesigning America, and all will be daunting tasks that require the skills of artists, entrepreneurs, designers, architects, writers, and marketers. Innovation is no longer only a critical economic factor, it has become a moral obligation for all creative people.
(Credit: Pop!Tech)
(Credit:
Pop!Tech)
I will be attending the Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine this week. For the twelfth year, Pop!Tech will convene a network of 600 remarkable thinkers, doers, leaders, and global change agents in science, technology, social innovation, business, environmentalism, globalization, media, education, and many other fields for a four-day exploration of ideas shaping the future.
This year, the organizers will pay particular attention to the 21st century dynamics between systems based on scarcity and those based on abundance, in areas ranging from digital social networks to biology to peacemaking. Among the speakers are Chris Anderson (Wired, "The Long Tail"), Malcom Gladwell ("The Tipping Point"), Paul Polak (IDE), Clay Shirky ("Here Comes Everybody"), and Frank Warren ("Post Secret"). I especially look forward to meeting in person linguist George Lakoff (communication graduates like me may recall him as the godfather of "framing") and "songstress" Imogen Heap (I'm a big fan).
My employer, frog design, supports Pop!Tech's Accelerator program, which has the mission to incubate social innovation ventures. Together with a coalition of partners including iTeach, the Praekelt Foundation, Nokia Siemens Networks, Aricent, and the National Geographic Society, we have been working on Project Masiluleke over the past year, a path-breaking effort that harnesses the power of mobile technology to address one of the world's gravest public health crises. This ambitious initiative will leverage the ubiquity of mobile devices in South Africa to help fight the country's crippling HIV/AIDS and TB epidemics. Robert Fabricant, executive creative director at frog, and our partners will present Project Masiluleke to the public at the conference on Friday.
I will be blogging from Pop!Tech so stay tuned for more.
The conference wants to attract academics and professionals interested in learning and discussing ways in which user-centric and affordable technology can improve the world around us. It will bring together such far-ranging fields as social entrepreneurship, engineering, design, economics, development, and environmental studies in search of new opportunities for the private and voluntary sectors.
The organizers expect 300 attendees. Confirmed speakers include Bernard Amadei (Engineers Without Borders), Ken Banks (Kiwanja), Cameron Sinclair (Architecture for Humanity and Open Architecture Network), Denise DeLuca (Biomimicry Institute), Steve Glenn (LivingHomes), Erik Hersman (Afrigadget, White African, and Ushahidi), Paul Polak (International Development Enterprises and D-Rev), and others.
(Credit:
Learning by Connecting)
"The difference between the optimist and the pessimist is that the pessimist has more facts," said Jean-Paul Betbèze, Chief Economist and Head of Economic Research Department, Crédit Agricole S.A., in a panel at the Millken Institute's Global Conference 2008 in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. True as this may be, his statement stood in sharp contrast to the overall vibe of the event: Yes, we can, was the prevailing sentiment, and the overwhelming majority of attendees would probably have outed themselves as fervent optimists, despite an abundance of fact-featuring PowerPoint slides supporting each of the panel discussions (I've never seen so many pie charts in my whole life). In fact, the gathered crowd was comprised of optimists with lots of money to spend on the world's most pressing problems (poverty; terrorism; population; resources; energy; environment; human rights; social justice; etc.) and may well have the power and means to solve most of them if they wanted to. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and micro-lending pioneer, pointed out: "We wanted to go to the moon, and we went to the moon. If we really wanted to end poverty, we would have ended it a long time ago."
After listening to him and some other brilliant minds, I felt over-inspired and under-accomplished, ready to change the world or at least my life. It was indeed a humbling experience. And yet, it stunned me to realize that many members of the powerful elite are struggling to cope with the new realities of business and society. The difference between being on top and being ahead, between being innovator and pioneer, became obvious in several of the panel discussions, particularly those that addressed the changing media landscape, the ongoing digital revolution, changing consumer behavior, and the new business paradigms that come with it.
These trends include:
- A surge in broadband penetration enabling ubiquitous content distribution and hyper-social connectivity
- The explosion of user-generated content: every minute 10 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube
- The collection and the friction-less, platform-independent distribution of content as the next big challenge for media and communication companies
- Mobile as the new container and memory device: 85 years of video (a whole lifetime) will be able to be stored on any new iPhone in a few years
- The power shift from content providers to media distribution platforms (Comcast, Hulu, etc.)
- The consumer consuming on his own terms
- The "prosumer" as a market force to reckon with
- The wisdom of the crowds as a source of innovation ("we are smarter than me")
Lex Fenwick, the CEO of Bloomberg LP, exemplified the old guard's awakening almost in real-time. First he boasted that he invented email and created the world's most valuable user community (of 350,000 customers) "by mistake," then he warned of giving users too much control ("they may join forces to challenge your prices"). Barry Libert, CEO of collaboration software provider Mzinga, nailed him on this: "If you have something to hide from your customers, or you are afraid of giving them too much power, you have a problem." At the end, Fenwick had converted from Saulus to Paulus, from "From Me to We," and, in a cathartic turn of events, he admitted he had learned quite a bit from the panel: "Thank you for your insights. I am inspired to make a few changes to the Bloomberg community based on this discussion."
Other companies have made this leap before him: Amazon, Netflix, Virgin Mobile, P&G, Dell, and recently Starbucks are all moving from a firm-centric to a network-centric organization, building and leveraging their community of users by giving them a voice in strategy, product development, and marketing decisions. They understand that crowdsourced and peer-to-peer business intelligence helps them overcome the "not-invented-here" syndrome, reconciling "inside-out" and "outside-in" innovation. Libert: "If customers cut the red tape and re-connect with customers, that's making it easier for them to find out what they really need." Of course it's always easier to proclaim a new paradigm than defending an old one, or as someone noted on another panel: "If you're a futurist and you think ten years ahead, by the time you're wrong, no one will notice."
Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo and in-character as enfant terrible, thrived in the devilish charm of the futurist. In a panel on "The New Rules of PR," he joyfully exposed the insecurity of his audience. It was not so much his co-panelists -- some old-school PR pros who bravely defended their profession against his "PR is dead" claim -- but rather the ensuing Q&A that demonstrated how disturbing the new rules still are for many who have held the power in organizations for decades and find it difficult now to grasp and embrace some of the earth-shattering changes happening these days. "Should our CEO blog?" -- Yes. "How do I stay in control of my brand if our CEO gets critical comments to his blog posts?" -- Well, the truth is, you don't. Just let go. Brands are assets in the public domain. With production capabilities and financial assets off-shored and out-sourced, brands are ever more important as the only remaining indispensable value of a company, and yet they are ever more volatile. In this open-sourced, hyper-transparent economy, your customer owns your brand, and no brand platform, no brand book, no rigid compliance guidelines designed to protect your idea of your brand, can change that. Brands are social funds. Your mission is to raise their intellectual and emotional capital. The creation of brand equity is a cooperative act based on the values that you share with your customers. And, by the way, marketing's job is to promote these values, not to invent them.
In a panel on "Business Innovations that are Changing the World," Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said: "Let's not forget that the fundamental goal of any corporation is to change the world and not just to satisfy the interests of particular stakeholders." Indeed, this was the overarching theme of an economic summit that was all about social: social innovation, social media, social networks, social web, and social capitalism. What once was a noble mission is now a mandate for CEOs: the future of business is social, both in terms of raison d'etre and modus operandi. Companies that open themselves up to promoting and fully leveraging the social dimension of human beings in order to create smarter and more effective solutions for social problems will be the winners of this new social economy.
The focus on the micropreneur, he argues, is "understandably appealing, but thinking that everyone is, and should be, an entrepreneur leads us to underrate the virtues of larger businesses and of the income that a steady job can provide." Indeed, the number of SMEs is disproportionately lower than the number of one-person shops in developing economies, which is precisely the problem to be grappled with. "Businesses that can generate jobs for others are the best hope of any country trying to put a serious dent in its poverty rate," Surowiecki contends, while microfinance "rarely generates new jobs for others."
Because of these shortcomings, the so-called "commercialization" in microfinance aims at creating a new style of microfinance that raises funds from the financial market and operates sustainably on its profits. Furthermore, philanthropic organizations have begun recognizing and filling the market gap between micro-finance and traditional, bank-led SME finance: Google.org, The Soros Economic Development Fund, and the Omidyar Network have announced that they are partnering to create a new $17 million SME investment company for India to create job opportunities and spur greater economic participation for a larger segment of the population.
Yet I wonder if -- aside from these efforts -- one could in fact leverage the "magic" of microcredit to support SMEs. The appeal and power of microloans lies in the immediate personal linkage it creates between creditor and individual borrower -- the smaller the loan, the bigger the perceived impact (and the emotional reward) for the creditor. What if microcredit sites like Kiva.org or Microplace.com added a premium feature that would let users aggregate a select percentage of their microloans towards SMEs or invite them to contribute partially to larger investments in SMEs, on top of their microloans? Or maybe these sites could offer a "Give-to-one-company" option that would mimic the "Give-to-one-person" notion and allowed them to track the impact of their investment in an SME over time?
As if it needed any further proof: These days, the most disruptive innovations are "invisible" and take place in the world of "financial innovation."
