Among the audience- The Economist weighs in on New Media

Debbie Weil at BlogWrite for CEOs pointed me to the Economist's New Media Survey which is from their April 22nd, 2006 issue.

i love the phrase 'participatory media' and am glad that the traditional media is using it to describe the new media culture. It is obvious that there has been a recent explosion of creativity that is driven by this new-media culture in which we are no longer just the audience but have become active participants.

If you have met with me recently we might have talked about what some our calling the 'My-Space' generation and how that is starting to affect the enterprise. As the workforce gets younger (and all that baby boomer knowledge walks out the door) i am betting we will see more and more employees who come into enterprise as participants. In the Economist piece it refers to what Chris Anderson says is the most powerful industrial force of our time--peer production.

Recently i have been working with companies to facility the input of company, executive and industry information into strategic account plans (SAPs) which are account management tools that help account teams produce a complete view of their customers that is shared across teams, management etc. in order to ensure successful strategies to retain and grow business. In order for SAPs to be useful to the account team (not just management) there needs to be an ongoing conversation between anyone that touches the client and everyone needs to see some personal benefit of sharing information. The traditional problem with SAPs is not what data can be automatically inputted into the document but getting sales people to actually add value based on their interactions with the client and actually believe that there is indeed value in sharing or at least recording that information.

If enterprises nuture the -peer production- force that Chris Anderson talks about with tools that encourage participation as part of the daily work flow i think we will see two things- 1. those companies will be able to recruit and retain the best talent coming into the workplace with a participatory mind set and 2. sastified customers