Marc – ‘keep plugging away’ sounds like a good plan!

Just look at the flywheel principle in Jim Collins “Good to Great”. Stick at it and don’t change direction and at some point you’ll have an unstoppable force. It’s just you will never know which of the thousands of pushes on the 2.0 wheel is going to be the one that hits the tipping point.

http://www.netimperative.com/netimperative/news/2008/october/1st/14m-brits-visited-a-blog-in-august

Thank you for sharing this thought, that I recognize from my own experiences. Here are my thoughts on this: HYPES come and go. Blogs, microblogs, MSN, Second Life could be hypes, who knows. Some may even survive for a long time, but the TREND is here to stay, and this trend is: people share content in peer-to-peer networks, using social media (in whatever hype available). The impact of this trend on marketing, sales, internal communications, brand management and our organizational structures will be massive. You, at BT are on the forefront of that trend, never mind the late majority.

Andy – interesting stats on blogging. I’m sure the numbers that are blogging are not sustainable but I don’t necessarily think having fewer is a good thing – as long as we have mechanisms to extract value (e.g. RSS; Google blog alerts etc.) then the more-the-merrier as far as I’m concerned!

Social Media tools make it easier for people to share goals, experience and direction.

Middle management generates bureaucracy, and yearns for stability.
In 1992 as a low level employee, there were 6 management layers between me and the BT Chairman. I got promoted (more than once).
There are now rather more than that. Yes, the company has changed and globalised.

Doers (as opposed to managers) now have – I think – substantially easier access to each other and to the strategic direction setters than ever before.

The problem for a large corporate is adapting to the fact that it does *not* control all the channels (Twitter/Facebook etc.) and recognising that relationships build outside the intranet, and we have to make it *easier* to work inside rather than outside.

FWIW, I think we’re really going the right way with MyBT/Signpost , but wondering who the mavens are that will lead to the tipping point of adoption. (Enough buzzwords?)

Re the blogging is dead question, there is ad hoc research that I would like to share.
I am currently doing a project for a retail client that involves the gen Y age group. Part of the research is around social media etc and one question we are asking everyone (UK + Ireland) is about the social media they use/visit etc. So far out of about 120+ people we have face to face interviewed (only about a third of our way through it), only 2 people have said they read blogs. Surprisingly many even asked what a blog was!!!!
As an active blogger, this was somewhat disturbing, and when I have pushed further (out of curiosity of course) I have had a similar answer – why blog when I have got Facebook or Bebo.

Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing if the number of bloggers shrunk a little? Surely those numbers quoted by some people, of new blogs being created/written etc are unsustainable aren’t they?