This post was one that was originally posted here, but kind of got lost in the mix, and I wanted to repost it for two reasons. First, this is a great example of using the Web to create and be creative. I was surfing Flickr, a free picture sharing site, and I found this great series by Indy Kethdy, he had them marked with a Creative Commons license, so I downloaded them, created a video, and then composed a soundtrack to the photostream. Then I posted the video on YouTube to share. This sort of the full-circle of open sharing, social media and creativity on the Web. My second reason is less profound, I know the site has some new readers, and I thought that they might enjoy checking out this video montage. Enjoy.

Indy Kethdy Video Montage with Matt Borghi Soundtrack

Surfing Flickr, as I so often do, I find images that inspire me. Last Friday night, though, I found the fantastic work of Indy Kethdy. I spent hours, and hours pouring over his pictures of Lake Michigan from around Wisconsin. I started to hear music in my ears, and imagined putting these images to sound. I was in luck, because Indy had set his pictures with a Creative Commons license that allowed me to make a video of his photos, put them to music, and then post it here for you to view. I highly recommend visiting Indy’s Flickr page – http://www.flickr.com/people/indykethdy/ and getting a taste of his excellent artistry first-hand. First, though, check out the video homage and the music that I created from the inspiration of his gorgeous still images:

There’s a lot of talk about social media and the role that companies can and/or should play in social media; but the one thing that I’ve learned is that there’s almost no place for social media in the closed organization. Companies that aren’t transparent and are secretive don’t have much of a chance with social media because social media really requires you to put it all out there, and open yourself to public scrutiny. With that said, it’s important to note that if you’re a closed company then your employees and customers are probably already out there in the social media sphere talking about you.

This is where I qualify the first sentence where I talk about there being “almost no place for social media in the closed organization”‘; there’s always plenty of room for “reputation management” or as it was called in the bygone days of yesteryear damage control. However, this part is also likely lost on the closed organization, because they believe that keeping their head down and going with the flow is the best approach, and sometimes it is, a little passive for my taste, but I could see how some might view it as effective, at least from the perspective of ‘if you ignore something it will go away’.

However, I would submit that in the age of social media, or the Web, in general, an organization that tries to live under those old rules is really just signing their own death certificate. It may not happen right away, but like so many great companies that have crumbled, it will happen slowly, until all falls apart, and everyone stands around in the aftermath scratching their heads and asking how this could happen. Yes, it’s a leap from not using social media to an organization’s foundation crumbling, but it becomes less of a leap when the organization has closed up so tightly that they’ve turned their back on their customers.

For many years, I’ve been inspired by the Taoist concept called Wei Wu Wei, doing by not doing. This philosophy can be applied in many ways, but since the focus of this site is digital strategy, let’s focus on that: When you’re doing digital strategy the greatest success is found when you’re working with the Tao, or loosely translated, the unseen current of the universe. If you’re working against the Tao, then somehow, you just won’t succeed, or succeed for very long. Why? Because you can force anything, but forcing, by its very nature infers opposition, or opposing something… many dollars and much energy can be spent to force things, but eventually dollars and energy run out and whatever was being opposed prevails. If you’re working with the Tao, then there’s no need for force, because there’s no opposition.

You only have to look at what drives and what’s driven the Web to see that this is true. Whether it’s open source projects like Unix, Linux, Apache, or openness and sharing that occurs naturally on the Web, think Twitter, Facebook, or earlier BBS systems, or the approach of company’s like Google who’ve tried to harness these open source, sharing models. They’re successful, because, mostly, they work with the Tao rather than opposing it. Microsoft is a good example of an organization working counter to the Tao, specifically now, as they try to use dollars and energy to push their Bing search service to overcome the natural and organic (or Tao-centered) adoption of Google.

If you want to succeed, be concerned less about being a success, and more about how you can add value, centered in the Tao the rest will surely follow.

Note about Taoist references.

I’ve been a student of Taoism and Zen Buddhism for nearly 15 years. Early Zen was influenced greatly by Taoism, which preceded it, philosophically, in China, and so much of what’s been written in both schools of thought is complimentary. This isn’t always true, but frequent enough to mention. Taoism isn’t a religion as much as it’s a life philosophy. I’m wary of mixing anything that be construed as religious with my professional work, but I’ve been working on a translation of the Tao Te Ching, and I’ve come to see many examples of how working with or against the Tao can predetermine success or failure. In fact, patterns were so great that there was a point when it was hard to not correlate success and failure to how centered or uncentered in the Tao a given organization or service was. Anyway, there are sure to be more references to Taoism as I move through the translation and come to understand more of these small and ordinary mysteries…

With all of the hype that’s going around right now about Bing potentially knocking Google of the search mountain, I felt that this article was very timely; and yet another story that talks about open and transparent is better than closed and opaque. This is the story of Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The article, by Michael Calore taken from the This Day in Tech pages at Wired.com: June 5, 2002: Browser, Philosophy Born of Turmoil, Defeat.

Closed… that’s how many companies today think they can operate their business and successfully employ a digital strategy.

In a world where the lines between what’s work and personal become more blurred, and folks are reviewing message on their Blackberry’s in bed at night, or doing more and more work from home, how can any organization expect that there won’t be some blurring between not just the work into the personal portion of life, but also the personal part of life bleeding into work. They’re hand & glove, and in a world where business wants to leverage social media, transparency and openness for business gains, that doubled-edge sword cuts both ways when social aspects of the business can’t be contained in quite the same way they were in days of old.

This makes businesses very uneasy, and this Business Week article: Web 2.0: Managing Corporate Reputations serves to illustrate this. While a fair journalistic effort, at least from the model of closed, and old model business communications, the story offers very little in the way of what it means to be open, and how openness and transparency can transform corporate reputation, and in some cases define it (Read: The truth will set you free… or when there’s nothing to hide, there’s nothing hide from). However, we’re in a transitional phase, so it makes sense that an open and transparent perspective can be lost especially when you’re talking about big businesses who’s business it’s been to keep things cloaked in darkness.

It’s not fair to think that business can expect employees to be on Blackberry, Facebook, or Twitter dealing with clients, customers, reputation, etc, thus leveraging these new outlets… and that somehow the personal aspects of people’s lives won’t enter the fold. The human experience is messy business, and if you don’t want those lines being crossed then make those lines very clear, and eliminate these pieces from your strategy, because they’ll just be inauthentic in a forum where authenticity rules. Otherwise, the fact that humans can have off-days and make bad decisions is inevitable, and it’s also inevitable that some of that may bleed into business. It happens to everyone, all the time, let’s just be with that, and move on. If a company is authentically open and transparent, nobody will care about an employee’s drunken mis-step or other unsavory details of their life getting out.

An organization with a successful digital strategy embraces openness, transparency and the reality that we’re operating in a world that’s forever out of our control.

I’ve only been subscribed to Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist blog for a couple months, but I’ve found his perspective to be very thought provoking. Yesterday, he posted an article from 2007, as an aside to a more current post, and I have to say the title, Web Strategy: How To Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website, caught my attention. While I don’t talk specifically about Jeremiah’s core ideas, his thoughts stimulated a different discussion for me regarding the future of the corporate Web site.

The idea that the corporate Web site might be outmoded is something that’s been on my mind over the last couple months. There are so many new tools, and in the current paradigm many companies see these as a fragmented communications approach that lacks focus. However, a new paradigm might categorize the various modes of electronic communications, RSS, micro-blogging, wikis, blogs, Facebook, and other tools as the full communicatons picture when done in concert together with the same emphasis that the company Web site gets, rather than pursuing these new modes as a secondary, not necessarily as pertinent communication mode, as many organizations do. It’s a bold idea.

However, this approach would have to be open, and open to all… and that’s a scary idea.

Jeremiah nails that here:

“Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
“This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace.”

This is the beauty of the Web. This the power of the Web in its rawest, most unadulterated form, but you can’t control it, management can’t control it, and the board of directors can’t control it, it’s people driven, and while a scary prospect at first, it’s the people that we’ve taken the responsibility to serve. We should absolutely want an environment where we can know what the people want with perfect clarity, and then be prepared openly and honestly evaluate those requests.

There’s a great Wall Street Journal article here that talks about how Google is using an algorithm to track and identify which of their employees are most likely to quit. Taken from Scott Morrison’s Wall Street Journal Article:

“The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.

“Google officials are reluctant to share details of the formula, which is still being tested. The inputs include information from surveys and peer reviews, and Google says the algorithm already has identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.”

This is a really interesting article that illustrates Google’s ability to be proactive, and really ahead of the curve. Imagine if most companies cared enough to not only see how their employees felt, but to actually take action to do something about it. A lot of folks in HR and management pay lip service to trying to help the employee out, but when the rubber meets the road that rarely comes to pass, either because the organization is too busy reacting, or because the pro-active and dynamic nature of employee engagement and internal communication is something that’s shuffled about into a communication purgatory that many managers believe falls outside the scope of their responsibilities and/or daily business. Leave it to Google to have their pulse on this.

It’s no secret that I am biased towards Google. I’ve experienced first-hand their openness and generosity while attending a Joomla conference that they hosted at the Googleplex in 2007. In fact, Google is a company that absolutely embraces the idea of the gift economy that has made the Web great, and to some extent, I would say made the Web happen at all, and also they are totally indicative of the openness that I’ve talked about here before. Google’s not going anywhere. They get the joke about what it takes to be successful; they understand, holistically, the requirements of that success. We’re sure to hear about more great and innovative ideas from them.

This morning I was reading Seth Godin’s blog, catching up on items in my reader, and came across the post: “What kind of open are you looking for?” Basically, this is an explanation of some of the various flavors of what it means to be open. I refer to this a lot when talking about electronic communications and the Web, specifically open source technologies, or the LAMP flavor of Web, but also the broader context of egalitarian nature of the Web, so I thought it might be helpful to others to see some other examples of the open philosophy.