Josh Bernoff’s day 2 keynote from Forrester Consumer Forum.
Key point: Objectives, not technology, need to lead your effort
Don’t build a community just because your competitors do. Don’t just try to “generate buzz” - what is the goal you hope that buzz will accomplish? Figuring out what you’re trying to achieve will let you then measure what you are doing.
It isn’t “how do we get involved in the groundswell” but what problem are we trying to solve or what opportunities are we trying to create.
These are the main objectives:
- Listening
- Talking
- Energizing
- Supporting
- Embracing
Analogies to organizational roles:
Research -> Listening
Marketing -> Talking
Sales -> Energizing
Support -> Supporting
Development -> Embracing
In the groundswell (ie, in the web 2.0 era), each of these needs to be transformed a bit. He went through each of them with some examples, including vendors.
Unfortunately, I didn’t hear a single mention of the use of open source to help deliver on these objectives - each objective ended with a brief table listing approaches and vendors - but no mention of assembling your own solutions with open source frameworks, despite the reality that open source frameworks are often the best solutions in many of these spaces.
I know Forrester hasn’t historically focused on open source and I don’t expect them to - but buying product solutions from proprietary vendors isn’t the entire universe. He also didn’t really cover how you integrate these solutions together - so that you don’t end up with five siloed solutions but a cohesive strategy and integrated set of applications which exchange and share data. [Note: this did come up during the Q & A - see the end of the notes below.]
(more…)