This time last year I was working with a service design consultancy in London, sharing insight on web2.0, social media and new business trends.
Reporting on the new to visionary marketeer and pioneer Kevin Gavaghan of FirstDirect fame, I summed up the main facts and trends as I saw them in January 06 as follows:
Openness People(user)-centricity Push-to-pull Long tail
When sketching out how these themes affected customers, users, people and humanity in general, I distinctly remember sitting in the same seat in the kitchen as now feeling amazed to be part of a revolution. The thought piece I wrote is attached to this post to download. It’s broad, wide-ranging and in a format inspired largely by Kathy Sierra’s great new/old contrast posts mentioned in a previous post.
What I realised is that for my entire working life I’ve been participating directly in the evolution of a transformation of business, culture, education and life in general.
Particularly since the open-source adventure at Getfrank (we ran our infrastructure and products on linux, perl, mySQL, Zope, Plone, Python etc) the social media/software movement has increasingly really been embraced into the mainstream – we were far too early in the UK. Being one of the founding partners of the Zope UK Trade Association at the House of Commons in 2004 was a great moment and just tonight on BBC Radio 4 In Business ran a half-hour feature on the impact and of the movement.
Of course there’s stacks of other memes and variations and derivations on the 4 main themes above but I guess the only one that I’d add to that list after a year is network utility. By that I mean being useful to networks and this largely derives from the insight I’ve gained from working with the great folks at search marketing specialists, Spannerworks, at home in Brighton.
The road ahead looks great – there’s stacks more adventures to be had, it really is just the beginning. I’m so glad I didn’t become a chartered surveyor.
