The Cranky Middle Manager Show 118 We Are Smarter Than Me Barry Libert
The Cranky Middle Manager Show #118
Howdy, today we follow up on Episode 95, when Rich Maltzman talked about Wearesmarter.org, and how they were writing a whole book based on a wiki. Well, the book is out and we have the co-author, Barry Libert (you can see video of him) of Mzinga.
Show Notes
0:00 Welcome to The Cranky Middle Manager Show. Today we look at “We Are Smarter Than Me- How to Unleash The Power of Crowds In Your Business” and the show is dedicated to Ibn Khaldun- the study of crowds and demographics is more vital to business than ever.
2:36 The crowd is no favorite of Bertrand Russell.. under what conditions do crowds do great things???
4:00 Welcome Barry Libert to the show. Nice to claim credit when you have a few hundred contributors. The book is all about how companies have used social networking tools to turn R and D, innovation, marketing over to crowds of chowderheads like you and me- and it’s working.
6:05 Even a company like Proctor and Gamble used 500,000 moms to design and sell Dawn DirectFoam. How’d you like to get total strangers to help you literally strike gold?
8:15 What is “social networking” and what’s the big deal? Well on one hand it’s MySpace and FaceBook (that’s the social part). On the other hand it’s a new way to work using networks.
12:35 This is about more than sharing information…it’s connecting real people- you and me folks. What if bad people come in to your network, though, and how does paranoia play in to this deal?
17:51 We look at some examples of this in work. Nike is replacing millions of dollars of advertising with people talking to people through discussion boards.
21:15 Barry talks about something they’re doing in their own company to drive their business.
27:55 What’s Barry reading???
Deborah Tannen “You Just Don’t Understand”
John Gray, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus
November 5th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
[...] The Cranky Middle Manager Show 118 We Are Smarter Than Me Barry Libert [...]
November 17th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
[...] John Battelle’s is pitching Conversational Networking really hard right now. He recently made a podcast appearance on this Cisco techcast to specifically address the changing social networking culture. Cisco, by the way, has managed to insert WebEx as a player in the social media landscape (a bit of a stretch) in their frenzy to “2.0-ify” every title of every article, web site and podcast for every product they sell. It is amazing how far reaching Mr. Battelle’s online marketing influence stretches, even into well established and industry dominant corporations like Cisco. It seems the Wikinomics effect may turn out to be a self fulfilling prophecy. If Proctor and Gamble can use 500,000 moms to design and sell Dawn DirectFoam and Barry Libert and Jon Spector can get the intelligent crowd to write a book anyone ought to be able to tap into the hive mind, as long as they are willing to communicate with the hive. [...]