ECIN-Newsletter: Wer hat Angst vorm Corporate Blog?

Die ECIN Newsredaktion [ecin.newsletter@mail.ecin.de] berichtet in ihrem Newsletter von 28/03/07:

Wer hat Angst vorm Corporate-Blog?

27.03.2007 - Die meisten Unternehmen verzichten drauf – die wenigsten haben damit Erfolg: Die Unternehmens-Online-Tagebücher. Ob es daran liegt, dass Bloggen zu viel Zeit in Anspruch nimmt oder dass man es für wenig effektiv hält. Fakt ist, dass nur etwa fünf der Dax-30-Unternehmen mehr oder weniger engagiert eine Art von Corporate-Blog betreiben. Das berichtet die
(http://www.computerwoche.de) Computerwoche. Trotzdem gäbe es
Erfolgsgeschichten: Beispielsweise Frosta-Blog.de, Saftblog.de oder Fischmarkt.de. Hier kann der Corporate-Blog zu einem wichtigen Baustein in der Unternehmenskommunikation werden. Es gibt aber auch die Kehrseite: magere Zugriffszahlen und das fehlende Interesse bei Kunden, Experten oder Wettbewerbern sich auf einen Dialog mit den Machern der Online-Tagebücher einzulassen. Entsprechend auch das Fazit der Wochenzeitschrift, dass viele deutsche Corporate Blogs sich in kleinsten Nischen langweilen und häufig schon nach wenigen Monaten wieder eingestellt werden. Dass viele Unternehmen keine Blogs betreiben, liege, laut Computerwoche, an der Angst die Kontrolle über die Kommunikation zu verlieren. Man fürchte eine mögliche Beschädigung der Marke, schlechtere Image-Werte, nachlassendes Vertrauen der Kunden und nicht zuletzt Kosten für eventuelle Auseinandersetzungen vor Gericht. Hinzu kommen die Kosten für einen Blog, der über lange Zeit laufen soll. Abhilfe können ein so genannter Flash-Blog leisten, der nur bei Bedarf und für eine überschaubare Zeit aktiv betrieben wird.

Multitasking slows down the brain

Apparently, the productivity of brain-workers is easily drowned in a river of symbols, sounds, and pixels. "Multitasking at the office desk, the steering wheel, or the bicycle is therefore a bad idea. This is what the New York Times reports: . "Slow down, brave multitasker, and don't read this in traffic."
My consequence: I'll switch on my email periodically - every hour or so - but don't have it running continuously anymore.

RAEM

Fred Turner's "From counterculture to cyberculture"

On March 8th I wrote about Turner's book "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" and dean commented that the "Introduction", which is available on the UC Press web site is worth reading.

I have bought the book and read the intro; dean is right.
RAEM

What are "Creative Commons" rights - The short version

EDUCAUSE, a education web site in the USA, has summarized the principles of Creative Commons rights in a 2-page nutshell. Nice & useful.
RAEM

ITIF-Study: Digital Prosperty

The New York Times of today had an article by Steve Lohn on "Study says computers give big boosts to productivity". The study was authored by R.D. Atkinson and A.S. McKay of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation in Washington, DC. The 67-page report is available at the ITIF web site.

I only had enough time to look at the list of contents, thumb through the pages, and read the conclusions. The study seems to be worth a closer look; in contrast to most reports on dIT Atkinson and McKay did not forget agriculture and the developing countries.

RAEM

The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?

Euan Semple has some short, practical management advice for Enterprise Web 2.0.

RAEM

Cellphones reduce price variation

The blog "Communications" leads to a study by Robert Jensen on the impact of cellphones on fish marketing and prices in Kerala, India.
Here is an exceprt from the blog:
"The short summary — cellphones improve information flow, which makes markets work better and results in quantifiable benefits for all parties. Waste (~6% of the fish were unsold before cell phones) has been eliminated. Fishermen profits are up 8% and consumer prices are down 4%, directly driving a 20 rupee/person/month consumer surplus, the equivalent of a 2% increase in per-capita GDP from this one market alone."

Jensen's conference presentation can be found here: Seventh Annual NBER-NCAER Neemrana Conference

RAEM

The changing organisation of R&D

In a briefing on corporate R&D the Economist of March 3rd 2007 outlines the changes of corporate R&D since Vannevar Bush's "Science: The endless frontier" (1945).

The thesis of the contribution is: Whereas Bush suggested the separation of "R" from "D" , the key idea for organizing "R&D" is to integrate the two as closely as possible and, perhaps link them with marketing and consultancy servcies too.

Some key sentences from the paper:

"The approach to R&D is changing because long-term research was a luxury only a monopoly could afford."
"The research and development that Bush tore assunder are once again becoming entwined. Old-fashioned R&D is losing its ampersand"
"Only a few years agao researchers were judged on the basis of patents and papers but today they roll up their shirt-sleeves and work alongside the company's consultants.."
"the old model or research of 'putting people in a bubble', is over, he [Bernardo Huberman of HP] says. The most interesting research is now done 'where technology touches people' ".
"Everything we do is aimed at avoiding a 'handoff' - there is no 'technology transfer'. It is a bad phrase at IBM." (says Paul Horn research director at IBM)
Google "employs very small teams to work on a small number of ideas, some of which may turn into big hits. Failure is an essential part of the process. 'The way you say this is: 'Please fail quickly - so you can try again.' " [Eric Schmidt of Google]
"The new model of R&D turns researchers into the shock-troops of innovation."
"And now I realise that there is at least as much creativity in finding ways to take the idea to market as coming up with the idea in the first place. I would have spent my time differently had I figured this out early on." [J.S. Brown, former director of Xerox PARC].

RAEM

Landsburg finds a trade-off between income and leisure

Steve Landsburg is an economist who writes in Slate. In his latest contribution he is concerned with the increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth and of leisure time: the richer become more rich than they were in 1965, whereas the poor have more leisure time than they had in 1965.

RAEM

What leads to success?

Richard St. John presents at the TED conference: "What leads to success". It is a fun video to watch: Short, crisp, and probably not totally wrong.
RAEM

Stewart Brand - again

I don't know what it is - chance or selective perceiption? After reading his book "The clock of the long now" sometime in the 1999 or 2000, Brand dropped more or less out of my active memory. Now his name caught my attention twice within a few days. First there was the article about him in the New York Times (see my blog: Steard Brand; An environmentalist who has learnt a lesson from an economist"). Now it is a book review by Henry Lieberman in "Science":

From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006. 353 pp. $29, £18.50. ISBN 9780226817415.

Perhaps Brand is worth a few hours of reading; we'll see.
RAEM

Stewart Brand: An environmentalist who has learnt a lesson from an economist

Stewart Brand is an erstwhile follower of Paul Ehrlich, an icon of environmentalism and an early pioneer of social computing. Now, according to the New York Times, he considers himself a scientific envrionmentalist in contrast to romatic environmentalists. and he is now favor of genetic engineering, of nuclear energy, population growth and urban sprawl.
What I like best in the NYT article is Brand's reaction to the bet that Paul Ehrlich lost against Julian Simon:

"... Professor Ehrlich’s theories of the coming “age of scarcity” were subsequently challenged by the economist Julian Simon, who bet Mr. Ehrlich that the prices of natural resources would fall during the 1980s despite the growth in population. The prices fell, just as predicted by Professor Simon’s cornucopian theories.

Professor Ehrlich dismissed Professor Simon’s victory as a fluke, but Mr. Brand saw something his mentor didn’t. He considered the bet a useful lesson about the adaptability of humans — and the dangers of apocalyptic thinking."

Would that our politicians who are presently worrying about climate change had the same attitude.

RAEM

WiFi services as a marketing tool

In the New York Times of March 04 2007 Randall Stross compares WiFi-services offered by coffee places, bookstores, McDonalds, and the like with air-conditioning offered by movie theaters when air-conditioning was not yet available in most homes in the USA.
The economic question is: Why are WiFi-services sometimes free when some, such as Starbucks, charge for the service?
The problem is a nice one for Barzel's theory of property rights (Barzel, Y. 1997. Economic analysis of property rights. 2nd ed. Cambidge UP). Barzel distinguishes between economic and legal property rights. Legal rights are the rights the state assigns to a person. An economic right, in contrast, is the ability of an individual to enjoy a piece of property. Moreover, a property right is usually defined not for a single thing but for a bundle of attributes of a good. The bundle can be undundled, re-bundeled, as the seller sees fit. When you buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks you also buy the right to use their free sugar, sit down on an empty chair (you don't buy the right to tell some other customers who are already there to bugger off), but you don't buy the right to use their WiFi-services. For that you have to buy an access card, in addition to the coffee. At other places, you buy the right to sit down and to use the WiFi together with the coffee, hamburger, donut, or whatever.

The important point is: Coffee shops , like movie theaters, are selling several rights but leave some in the public domain: Airconditioned movie theatres sell enterainment and the comfort of a chair in a chilled place but leave the chill of the foyer in the public domain. Coffee shops sell coffee, but leave the right to use their sugar, to sit on chair, to use the bathroom, and, perhaps access to their WiFi, in the public domain. How they define their product, i.e which rights they bundle together and which they leave in the public domain, is a matter of cost and of demand and the question for the shop owner who considers whether or not WiFi services should be sold or left in the public domain for all patrons to use for free is: What is the impact on revenue? The cost of providing WiFi are unaffected by the decsion - but revenue may be affected by it. Some sellers, such as Starbucks where the shops are usually full, will decide to sell WiFi services, whereas others, with fewer customers and unused seating capacity, may decide to leave WiFi in the public domain in order to attract more business for their remaining products or servcies.

RAEM