Note:  this post originally was published on ReadWriteWeb:

Anyone who has spent any time in the enterprise 2.0 business - for me, it's been five years - will admit this, if pressured: by far the greatest challenge for the market is not corporate fear, cluelessness, or laziness - the usual scapegoats. The challenge is something far more elusive: getting people in the company to adopt the program meaningfully, persistently, and scalably. The truth is that many enterprise 2.0 programs fail to gain traction because they actually require work. In the enterprise, culture matters, and culture is not something you can easily add, game, or integrate, like the latest 2.0 widget.

But that's where the consensus ends. A large number of businesses have not been able to move forward with their enterprise 2.0 programs for lack of confidence on the right way to approach culture. One side of the consulting world has spoken up rather aggressively, with the message that culture can be addressed with something called "change management."

But the phrase alone is enough to scare off most of the market. It sounds too expensive - and it often is - and in many cases it just adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to a smaller set of things that can be done.

Here are a few things that I observed work well, sometimes with the support of people in the consulting community who see the need for a leaner, meaner approach.

The Audit

It might seem like a rather obvious place to start. But many businesses jump on enterprise 2.0 projects without first asking what their constituents are actually doing. What tools do employees, partners, and customers use? What are they using them for? Think broadly about these two questions before conducting your "audit" - a fancy word for listening - because we tend to think narrowly about social media.

First, we tend to exclude services and tools that de facto are social, but because they originated in an earlier era, they do not enter our minds in this context. Second, we tend to exclude activities that are not directly related to communications and collaboration, but yet might have value to the enterprise social network.

Several years ago, when I was in the consulting business, a large telecommunications company asked my agency for general recommendations on their social strategy. In our audit, we discovered that while an overwhelming number of people inside their ecosystem were loath to contribute or comment on blogs and social networks, a great number spent time networking with peers on LinkedIn groups. Neither the tool - LinkedIn - nor the activity - professional development - made the initial list of things to examine in our audit. But after this small discovery, the project moved on a faster track for the company.

The Mirror

If the insights from the audit are good, an effective next step is to share them with managers in the company. Done right, this exchange of information does several things at once. First, it makes visible to the top of the organization what's happening at the grassroots. Second, it educates managers on the range of immediate tools and ideas it has at its disposal (recall the little epiphany we had at the telecommunications company). Third, it helps stimulate conversation about how the company might support a promising trend.

Some time after staffers at Best Buy began demonstrating the power of employee-driven communications - best evidenced in the now famous Blue Shirt Nation - my former agency prepared a number of documents, videos and other artifacts that essentially held a mirror to the organization (see Charlene Li's "Open Leadership" for more color and detail). This exercise helped pave the way for other projects at Best Buy that had the support of management. As many early thought leaders in the Enterprise 2.0 world have noted, the most successful projects start at the bottom but meet at the middle, with support from the top of the organization.

The Metatribe

Sometimes, the mirror takes the conversation to another place: how the programs that a company strategically decides to support might have a catalyzing effect on the entire company and its ecosystem. In the world of political marketing, we've learned how a few very diverse groups - e.g., women, Latinos, progressives, conservatives - can rally to a cause, despite their differences.

Recent, I looked at how the 2010 elections inspired a number of operatives - on the Left and the Right - to court the big unwieldy Latino metatribe. Similar opportunities exist for large companies with diverse constituents who might come together if only they understood their part in the company's social agenda. Best Buy's Twelpforce - a big part of the company's public brand - comes to mind, and there are perhaps a few others that demonstrate this principle.

But a company may not even need to go there to enjoy the benefits of 2.0, nor will it need to spend much time to get something meaningful started. Best Buy and other companies that are featured at industry conferences as case studies all got started by listening, thinking and supporting.

That's the fastest path to adoption today, and I don't see anything better on the horizon.

Uh, maybe, but only for some of the lessons it might teach

After a long week of PR of the unwanted kind, Facebook met with reporters yesterday to unveil a number of features that seem particularly well-aimed at quelling consumer discomfort with privacy issues. The two most noteworthy -- and newsworthy -- features are:

--you can now download all the data you have ever posted to FB in a neat little zip file. As Rob Pegararo of the Washington Post notes, this is "an enormously important change for Facebook and its users. It ensures that the communication that we have downloaded remains our property and free for our reuse."

--Facebook Groups, an old feature, will now behave the way most simple collaboration platforms behave -- they can now be private, and more feature-rich with some of the tools that have been adopted by ad hoc groups and small business.

Again, the timing and the substance of the announcements feel like a response to the negative chatter that the film has been generating. In fact, yesterday's press briefing was CEO Mark Zuckerberg's first outing since the film's debut. But for anyone in the business collaboration market, there's another, less-sensational story brewing here, and it is certainly worth following. A colleague asked me last night, will Facebook Groups disrupt the Enterprise 2.0 market? We'll have to wait and see, of course, but from where I sit, this has potential to disrupt the general business collaboration market because, quite frankly, this is Facebook, and they've got so many people on their platform. But the disruption is likely to play out differently across the various sectors of the market.

On the low-end, Facebook Groups is likely to put pressure on vendors that provide simple collaboration tools -- for example, 37Signals, Ning, and Google. We'll have to see how much pressure -- some of these tools are quite popular and quite good. But on the higher end of the market -- the part of the market that sells to the enterprise -- the disruption is likely to be more subtle. The enterprise will require a whole lot more functionality, and more in the way of privacy and security. But Facebook Groups could help evangelize the new architectural requirements for business collaboration. It wouldn't be the first time that Facebook taught the business community something about collaboration -- think of all the Enterprise 2.0 vendors who cannot resist telling customers that they are a "Facebook for the enterprise"? But the new lesson from Facebook -- obvious to some, but not yet clear to many -- is that collaboration with people outside your company needs to be in the cloud -- how else would you be able to freely connect and collaborate with them? And it has to be do-it-yourself, scalable, and in an environment that allows you to move easily from public to private spaces, and yes, manage all those spaces. Long-term, that's probably bad news for "software"-based systems (e.g., JIVE and Microsoft Sharepoint). But it's gotta be good for the cloud.

We'll be watching this closely, for sure. In the meantime, it will be interesting which story will play out longer after this week -- the story that Facebook is beginning to take privacy and consumer data more seriously, or the story that social-business software is being challenged by the social business cloud. I'm betting on the latter. And I'm betting on the cloud.

Intergrating old stuff into new stuff, and why that makes sense

Earlier this week, Google surprised the social media market with a small but important tweak to their Voice service. Now you can make phone calls - to real numbers, to real phones -- directly from your Google email panel, without having to sign into the Google Voice environment. On the surface, this sounds ho-hum, especially if you are a Skype user and familiar with the Skype Out service. But this is not an innovation in technology, but an innovation in user design whose time has finally come. More and more, folks in the 2.0 world are beginning to understand that voice matters. And integrating voice into other environments is something we’re going to see a lot more of. Why:

*Despite our increasing attachment to Web 2.0 tools, our default position in the workplace is 1.0. Google may understand this phenomenon better than any other company, but Microsoft got there first. For most people in the workplace, their email panel is the homepage. By integrating other tools -- both old tools like voice and newer stuff from the Web 2.0 toolkit -- companies like Google are helping people to integrate various modes of communication into a single user environment. They are not alone -- it's the next wave of innovation in the world of enterprise social networking -- but Google is in a position to educate the market about the potential for a new default page.

*By integrating the older tools with the newer tools, companies like Google are helping people to more easily navigate the worlds the live in. I have some first-hand knowledge of this. In 2007-2008, I worked as a consultant to the team at Ribbit (later acquired by BT), a Web-based telco company that introduced a service similar to Google Voice. We codenamed the service Amphibian, understanding that its great potential value was in helping people to bridge the physical world of voice with the virtual world of Web-based services. It's safe to argue that we are all amphibian today, and in the integration of the old with the new will continue to help us.

*By integrating the older tools with the newer tools, companies like Google are helping to create new uses for the older tools. This will become more apparent as technology vendors in the "enterprise 2.0" market begin integrating email, IM, and voice in more truly social environments. When email, IM, and voice become data objects that can more easily be shared and retrieved in social environments, they will not just become 2.0; they will have greater value. One of the big raps against voicemal and email is that they tend to get buried in private siloes, forcing the individual to keep toiling for others everytime there's a request for information trapped in those siloes.  By making it easier to share this information, in environments where the info can be more easily retrieved -- technology vendors are aiming to make older tools more useful.

Google is certainly not alone in chasing this opportunity, but as the owner of one of the world's largest default pages, it will certainly do its part to educate the market.

Charlene Li's latest book challenges executives to ask one big question ... and many other little ones

[NOTE:  Charlene Li discusses her book at the kick-off of BroadVision's new speaker and social-networking series, Clearvale SecondFloor, August 18]

I am not a big fan of business books -- at least those that put forward a simple theory that can be applied across all fields, all disciplines, all walks of life. I'll admit to liking some of these -- particularly when the writing is good -- but I tend to prefer the very rare business book that poses a serious question -- or questions -- in a more story-driven narrative. Example: former BusinessWeek reporter Anthony Bianco's THE BIG LIE, a story about the evolution of HP's current board of directors, and the "pretexting" scandal that engulphed the company several years ago. There are several important questions in this book embedded in the narrative -- questions about corporate governance, about the difficulty in living up to a corporate legend, about the moral requirements of executive leadership -- but you wouldn't mistake THE BIG LIE for anything other than the potboiler it is. Bianco's book was published in May, just a few months before the current HP scandal broke, but I suspect it's getting another look by business people looking for infotainment at the beach this summer.  Prediction = THE BIG LIE will become a bestseller on Kindle over the Labor Day weekend.

Truth is, it's harder to write the other kind of business book -- the one that doesn't necessarily tell a Hollywood-grade story, but that instead puts forth an intellectually or emotionally compelling argument for what a business person should do in the face of big business challenges. Charlene Li -- the well-known social technology consultant and founder of The Altimeter Group -- has succeeded in that category with OPEN LEADERSHIP, a new look at social technology that reaches the reader intellectually and emotionally by taking another tack: by challenging you, the reader (the business executive, and proxy for your company), to honestly examine, “how open are you?”

The premise here has been covered in other books, and it goes something like this: a number of forces, including the social tech revolution, are bringing inevitable changes to the enterprise.  And one of those changes is “loss of control.” OPEN LEADERSHIP, like other good social tech books, presents case studies that illustrate how business leaders are not just coping with these forces, but innovating as well. But unlike other books of this genre, Li’s book puts executive readers -- the people who can support or stop change at their companies -- into the narrative.  Running that reader through a step-by-step “openness audit,” she takes the conversation down from the level of abstraction where most business books live, and forces the reader to engage as the protagonist in a future story – the story of what an executive might do in a world where one can no longer rely on “command and control.” Soon after you are done with the audit, Li asks the question, “now that you know how open you are, let’s look at how open you need to be.”

It’s at this point in the journey – pretty early in the book – that you are likely to first feel the emotional impact of OPEN LEADERSHIP – especially if you work in a traditional corporate work environment. For many companies, the gap between current state and future state is significant. But Li does a nice job of breaking down the journey into smaller steps – drafting a “covenant” (not “contract” --  a more modern but less socially savvy construct) to get agreement and alignment with the different constituencies that make up a social tech program; designing your program to meet clearly defined business objectives; driving adoption (a fatal weakness for many if not most social tech programs); dealing with curmudgeons, and other late adopters; teaming early adopters and late adopters as a strategy for eliminating roadblocks. One of my favorite sections is on measurement, a topic most people in my world find impossible. Li quotes John Hayes, CMO at American Express: “we tend to overvalue the things we can measure, and undervalue the things we cannot.” Completely agree. But I love Li’s suggestion that we look at metrics like Net Promoter Score, which measures success according to how much business your network delivers and refers.  It's a testament to Li's professional integrity that she doesn't give short shrift to measurement, but instead make a case for the most innovative thinking on this subject in the post-2.0 era.

But my favorite section comes later -- in the last chapter. Li closes with six mini case studies of people who really take up the challenge of open leadership and set out to transform their organizations. We’re talking about big, complex, seemingly unmanageable orgs, with not too much in common, at least on the surface: Cisco, Dell, P&G, the State Bank of India, US Department of State, and Best Buy (full disclosure, my former client). You may feel a thrill here and there as you go through this chapter. And if you do it’s perhaps because you can relate to one of the protagonists in these little stories. And that’s the great charm in Li’s smart book, which makes the individual reader the main protagonist. Though the story for each reader is yet to be written, the book lays out the steps almost as effectively as a users manual.  Not exactly the kind of book you'd bring to the beach on Labor Day weekend, but most definitely the kind of book you'd like on your desk when you are done with THE BIG LIE, and are ready to get back to work.

Why Agencies May Accelerate the Mainstream Development of the Virtual Business World

Over the past few months, I’ve written extensively about the inevitable trend toward virtualization. And by that I do not mean the virtualization of hardware – the domain of companies like VMware, my alma mater – but rather the virtualization of work environments, the virtualization of tools for working in those environments, and the virtualization of the larger world of business so that companies can easily navigate those environments -- and import those tools -- for a seamless work experience. The future of business, as I see it, will usher in a new era of architecture. But this time the buildings and structures will not be made of stone, steel, and plastics. And they will not be designed by people with degrees in architecture, civil engineering, or landscape design.  Those buildings and structures will be virtual, and they will be designed by businesspeople, like you and me.

But like every other design revolution, not all people and businesses will be favored at the start. There is, in fact, one general category of business that may be strongly favored because of where it sits in the virtual business world. As the new “middlemen” (more on that relentlessly disparaged term in a moment) in the vast and interconnected ecosystems that are emerging, agencies – advertising agencies, PR agencies, interactive agencies, business consultancies -- have a unique opportunity that we can all learn from and emulate.

I. Virtual work environments Already this is happening. The phenomenon is called Enterprise 2.0: businesses around the world are building virtual workspaces optimized for more effective communication and collaboration, inside and outside the enterprise. Why are agencies at an advantage here? Three reasons (at least) …. First, because they are in the business of acting as proxies for other companies (the definition of “agency”), they may have a greater need for these workspaces. More clients, more workspaces, to put it simply. Second, the nature of the agency requires a finer sense of architecture than the average business. The agency – the PR agency, for example – may have the need to architect both private and public workspaces for each and every client. (In the PR world, imagine a public room -- for every client -- for press briefings, alongside a private room -- for every client -- to prepare and vet the content for those briefings). Third, the agency itself is a near ideal environment for innovation in collaboration. They were among the first adopters of technology in the early days of Enterprise 2.0. They will be among the most active adopters as Enterprise 2.0 crosses into the mainstream.

II. Virtual tools

Here’s where it starts to get interesting. These virtual workspaces that businesses are now building are packed with any number of cloud-based, virtual communication and collaboration tools. Soon we will see enterprise computing applications integrated into those environments. In the meantime, the very fact that we are beginning with communication and collaboration tools – blogs, microblogs, wikis, video, bookmarks, to name just a few – favor communication agencies. Not only are these tools so well suited for people in the communication trade; people in the trade in fact are in a great position to develop new tools that foster communication and adoption. At the extreme end, expect a few agencies to actually invest in the development of new technologies (for example., The Dachis Group and nGenera). But in the magic middle of the market, expect agencies to collaborate and co-create with tech companies as they begin to grasp that this is a world in which tech and the trade can easily meet.  That's where we are investing, with our distributed consulting community, Clearvale SecondFloor.

III. The Larger, Virtual World of Business

Speaking of the middle, there’s a bigger point I’d like to make about agencies: where they sit in the larger world of businesses makes them uniquely qualified to jumpstart the inevitable Enterprise 2.0 revolution. It’s not just that they serve as proxies to so many businesses all over the world, a point I make in section I. It’s also the talent that they bring to this new world as it’s being constructed. They are not just middlemen – a role that I expect will win new respect as the business world begins again to appreciate the people who facilitate relationship building – but MadMen as well: creatives who give shape, purpose and meaning to the campaigns that drive business in the larger, virtual world of business. As I note in an earlier blog post, not all such talent resides inside agencies or any company for that matter. But agencies enjoy a surplus of that talent, and I expect that they will rush forward as others in the market ponder the possibilities.

Because of the topic -- and because I am so busy -- I will make this post brief.

There's an interesting article in Information Week, citing a study that shows that people feel overwhelmed when they have more than 50 emails in their in-box.

This used to be a problem for a small class of people -- information junkies who couldn't understand why they got so much email every single day.  Now it's a problem for most of the working population.  But the problem, I suspect, results from the same cause today as it did years ago.  It's not the information junkie in each of us that's creating the problem.  It's the information pusher.  And you, my friend, are very likely a pusher.

Consider -- how often do you use email when:

--a quick phone call would have done the trick?

--IM might have been more effective?

--a ping to your social network would have been faster, smarter, more responsive?

Of course, there are issues with each of the above.  Sometimes, the phone feels too much like a burden (for the caller and the call-e).  And not everyone is on IM or social networks.  In the end, email overload might owe a lot to the simple fact that it has such a wonderful user experience that we cannot help but use it, even when it's not appropriate.  That's an interesting challenge to the vendors of communication tools, and we should expect more innovation from them.  In the meantime, to get less email, try sending less email.  And when you get the results, call me.  I use BT/Ribbit, which will transcribe and forward your voicemail to me in text.  As I said, the phone can be a burden.  But put a nicer UI/UE on top of the phone, and the whole thing feels so much better. 

Ever since I joined the company, I've been finding myself answering the same question over and over. "Why did you go inside?"

Depending on who's asking the question, it can mean, "why are you giving up consulting, and going inside a company"? Or it could mean, "why are you going to the 'private' side of social media after so many years focusing on the 'public' side."

Truth is that I haven't exactly given up consulting. Helping to develop BroadVision's professional services strategy (e.g., Clearvale SecondFloor) squarely keeps me in that world. Nor have I been spending all my time on the public side of social media. At least half my social media engagements as a consultant were on projects that could have been called Enterprise 2.0.  I didn't call them that, but I could have.

But the "inside" question resonates on both levels for me -- I truly wanted to go inside a company, and lately I've been thinking that the in side of social media is the place to me. There are at least three reasons:

1. The workplace is the new social place. There was a time -- not too long ago -- when the Web2 world began to recognize that marketing was moving to the edge of the network. Jeremiah Owyang was a big proponent of that idea, and it got a lot of attention. And it made sense -- with the rise of social media, people were making their own media, creating and finding their own places, so marketers had to go where people go. Practical implications here. One: it was no longer enough to create your own place (the corporate Web site). Suddenly, you needed a strategy to connect with people in other places ... and a huge market -- consultants, practitioners, adopters, complainers -- kicked in. But something happened along the way. Folks began to recognize that the digital/social workplace was a good place to connect from and to the edge of the network. After all, a giant swath of people on social networks spend big chunks of time each day jumping back and forth from their enterprise desktop apps to their non-enterprise social networking apps. The big trend in enterprise 2.0 these days? Integrating the edge (social media applications) into the enterprise social network. In other words, the edge is now inside.  The preferred way to connect with places outside the enterprise is to integrate with platforms inside the enterprise.

2. The workplace is where things get done. And there's an app for that.  It's called enterprise software. Another big trend? The minituarization and integration of enterprise apps into the enterprise social network. It's probably the most interesting conversation in the market today, and I'd argue that it is not overhyped. If you accept the premise that the digital/social workplace is the place to be, then it follows that enterprise apps -- which theoretically can have a far bigger audience in social environments -- will need to be there, too. Already a lot of activity in this area (search the following:  Enterprise 2.0 and workflow and business processes -- you'll find lots to read), and we (my company) intend to make this a priority.

3. The inside view cares about things like privacy and security -- things that are sometimes disincentives for public social networks.  But they matter to every single person on the planet. The Facebook privacy debacle taught us at least one thing: for networks like Facebook, privacy features can certainly be a disincentive -- it can interrupt the torrid pace of network growth. But for social media companies toiling on the inside, it had better be in their DNA to care about these things. And if it's not in their DNA, they had better hire for it (and from the looks of recent hires at Enterprise 2.0 companies, this appears to already be happening).  That will be good for everyone, inside and outside the enterprise. But from I sit, I can already see that the action -- and innovation -- will be inside/out. Happy to be here, and I'll be sharing more about what we are doing as we move along that path.

I've been meaning to post a short review on "The Power of Pull" -- one of the most interesting new books in the growing "enterprise 2.0" library -- but I had been debating what exactly to write.  For authors John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison have published a volume that on its face looks like one book, but in reality is actually two.

The first is aimed at the known world of business-book buyers who largely are interested in understanding the latest thinking in business theory or the businesses that exhibit best practices (e.g., "In Search of Excellence"). "Pull" -- which makes an elegant case for why businesses in the post digital/social need to rethink their entire approach to people (their staff, their partners, their customers) -- does not disappoint. The thesis, stated simply -- then rigorously illustrated -- is that "rather than individuals serving the needs of the institutions, our institutions will be recasted to serve the needs of individuals." And rather than continuing to spend massive amounts of energy and capital "pushing" toward individuals, businesses would be better off learning how to enable individuals to "pull."

With so much focus on the power of ever emerging power of the individual -- for which there is probably an historical, economic imperative (the more powerful the individual, the more powerful the business and economy) -- it's no surprise then that "Pull" also wants to fit the mold of an even older type of business book -- the self-help book ambitious business people. The most interesting sections of the book profile some of the tech world's most digitally and socially savvy players, and offer the readers tips on how they can be more like them. At times, "Pull" feels less like a book written by John Hagel and more like one written by Dale Carnegie ("How to Win Friends and Influence People"), but for a hipper, smarter, Web 2.0 crowd.

No matter -- "Pull" is worth the read, and the tendency to veer from big-business tome to self-help book simply belies the tension in this book that makes it so interesting. In a world where the individual is the thing, the individual becomes a worthy object in our search of excellence.  In fact, I see the potential for a post-2.0 book that exclusively focuses on that search.  We can thank the authors of "Pull" for that.  They very convincely make the case that now more than ever, business is personal.

Many of you know that I come from the enterprise 2.0/web 2.0 consulting world, and several of you have pointedly asked, "how can you ever leave the world of consulting?"  As the new CMO at BroadVision -- the first company I have joined since my 2001/2002 stint at VMware -- my first job is to help bring the new product, Clearvale, to market.  But for a number of reasons, the product -- the first "network of networks" for the social enterprise -- cannot be the only focus.  A great deal of talent in the 2.0 world resides in small, nimble, influential consultancies, and for quite some time I have been thinking that a platform for matching customer needs to available talent could have add significant value to the marketplace.

With that thought, this morning we announced our plan for Clearvale SecondFloor, a global community of best-in-class consultants.  I've already spoken with a handful of great consultants who will be joining CSF, but I will take the opportunity to meet with others next week in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.  We will also be launching a monthly speaker series, starting with July 14t ah Q&A with Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group. She'll be talking about her latest book, "Open Leadership." In the meantime, check out today's announcement for more detail, or go directly to our partner page to see how you might join us.

EXCERPT: The many experiments in crowdsourcing “professional-class creative” have given us something else to think about — the use of the word “creative” is a term that the advertising community has branded and defined too narrowly. As the entire universe of crowdsourcing has demonstrated, the work that people can be tapped to do is the most important stuff there is. For the essence of “creative” is creating, the making of things, without which there’d be nothing (literally).

This post was first published on AllThingsThatRise.

It’s not often I can point to a trend in social technology and get truly excited. The business benefits of social tech have long been established (the effectiveness and efficiency of networked communications), but so have the human costs (distraction and dependency on networked devices). But there’s a trend that’s (a) just beginning to mature and (b) shows real promise to benefit both business and the human condition — really. I’m talking about the many systems and platforms that have been used to “crowdsource creative” — that is, to tap human networks to create new ideas, products, and services. These platforms have been used to create everything ranging from t-shirts, corporate logos, to earnest solutions for world peace. Regarding world peace, that’s not exactly the kind of human benefit I’m thinking about (more about that in a moment). But the range of things that can be crowdsourced — both mundane and sublime — is worth considering. I like to bunch these things in three general groups:

*Platforms that crowdsource the creation of products and services. Perhaps the best known example of this is Dell IdeaStorm, an initiative that’s enabled the company to tap its most avid customers for ideas that contribute to product and service development.

*Platforms that crowdsource the creation of ideas. The idea here is to organize groups of people to innovate, develop new ideas, and solve problems that have eluded organizations that have attempted these things on their own. There are lots of examples of this, from the famed InnoCentive site (most recent challenge: clever solutions for responding to recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico); to the $1 million Netflix competition (which enabled the company to develop a superior recommendations system); to the very recent $1 million Edmunds Toyota Prius challenge (“re-create unintended acceleration in a car and then solve that problem and prove the whole thing to us”), to the many experiments that are being conducted at Ideascale, a platform that “empowers communities to drive innovation” by enabling them to collect ideas from “customers, give them a platform to vote, the most important ideas bubble to the top.”

*Platforms that crowdsource the creation of professional-class content. Of the three general classes of crowdsourcing creative, I find this to be the most interesting, for three reasons. First, most of these platforms tap communities of professional-class (or near professional-class) participants. No longer do businesses need to limit themselves to consumer-driven user-generated content (USG); they can avail themselves to professional-generated content (PGC) as well. Second, because of the professional standing of many participants, they are generally more Web savvy and better connected; a brand that engages one of these communities might get instant marketing at the start of a competition because so many members of the community are likely to publicize their participation. Third, the very fact that businesses have begun to crowdsource actual “creative” — the term that the advertising industry has given to any and all artifacts (design, images, video) — from the creative disciplines has serious implications for traditional business models in the world of marketing, communications, and, yes, advertising. Examples of PGC platforms are Logoworks (acquired by HP) and 99designs, which crowdsource the creation of logos and Web design; MOFILM, which helps brands crowdsource the creation of film and video; Aniboom, a global community of professional-class animators; and Talenthouse, perhaps the most audacious of all platforms, attempting to create a virtual marketplace for the entire “creative” community (art, fashion, film, music, design — and that’s just to start).

These many experiments have given us something else to think about — the use of the word “creative,” which, as I noted, is a term that the advertising community has branded and defined too narrowly. As the entire universe of crowdsourcing has demonstrated, the work that people can be tapped to do is the most important stuff there is. For the essence of “creative” is creating, the making of things, without which there’d be nothing (literally). And, as companies like MOFILM, Aniboom, and Talenthouse are demonstrating, the things we are talking about are potentially great things — this is not the world of amateurs, but a newly organized world of professionals — and people on their way up (e.g., MOFILM has done a great job connecting with students in film school) — who are motivated to work in environments that are less hierarchical and more network-centric. That, of course, has long been one of the promises of the Social Web, but I believe that “crowdsourcing creative” is pushing the outer edges of social technology design and that we can all learn a lot from it. I’ve been watching this market for quite some time (disclosure = Aniboom was a client of my agency a while back), and these are three things I’ve observed.

(1) The best platforms have defined value from the start. As I said, many of these platforms are looking to create important things for which there is a clear and compelling market need (from a cheaper logo for starting a new business, to breakthrough technology that can transform a business).

(2) The best platforms are driven by social design. It’s no accident that many platforms connect with their participants through contests and games. The challenge, always, is to devise the right kinds of incentives for the creative community in question (to put the “centive,” for example, in InnoCentive), and this is where innovators in social technology are spending most of their time. But the bigger lesson for all is just how important “game logic” has become for so many experiments on the Social Web (for a smart look at this opportunity, check out the recent Business Week article by John Hagel and John Seely Brown examining what businesses can learn from multi-player games like World of Warcraft).

(3) The best platforms have found a way to connect with the “out crowd,” the most talented professionals that are too remote, too invisible, too shy to rise inside the traditional enterprise. A colleague of mine recently pointed out that one of the cooler things about “crowdsourcing creative” is the opportunity to engage with someone who for any reason — too shy, too far away, invisible behind the corporate lens — to get noticed otherwise. This, I believe, can have a profoundly healthy effect on both the businesses that recruit talent and the people who have it. Healthy for business, because there’s nothing so vulnerable as a company that depends on a small “in crowd” mentality; better to tap the best talent there is, wherever it is. Healthy for the person who has creative talent, because the making of things is the bedrock of a happy life. Put the two together, and you’d have the kind of organizational culture that’s required to compete in the new digital/social economy. But whether or not that’s too idealistic, engaging and supporting “the out crowd” might make for a happier corporate life. As Freud said, “love and work are the two cornerstones of our humanness.” Solving for at least one of these challenges — shall we start a contest? — sounds like a good thing to do.

[Acknowledgement: Big thanks to Tatiana Josephy and Chris Advansun for their research and insights on companies featured in this post.]