by Paula Thornton
February 28, 2008 at 1:03 pm
· Filed under Barriers, Change, Control, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Freedom, Social Networking, User Revolution
Marketing Daily released a piece today that sounds remarkably similar to the key messages shared at FASTforward ‘08. It details the actions of Ford of Canada:
FORD MOTOR COMPANY OF CANADA is launching its biggest marketing push in six years with a campaign that focuses on letting Ford customers serve as brand ambassadors.
The ads carry the theme line: “A car is just a car until it’s powered by you.”
The campaign also includes a new Web site, Fordpoweredbyyou.ca. The site is intended as a social-media forum where consumers can air their opinions of the Ford brand, technology and vehicles.
“We don’t own the brand the way we used to; consumers own it. It’s not about claims any more. Consumers don’t want to be preached to. It’s about a dialogue and discovery, giving people the chance to comment,” he says. “We see it as more of a consumer site than our site.
I draw attention to the fact that Ford is an American company with the actions taking place in Canada. I add to that the fact that many of the brightest voices on this blog, are Canadians (I can only claim founder heritage in the 1600s).
I have noted more and more conversations where the opportunities to leverage 2.0 (or the willingness to embrace/adopt, typically in pursuit of innovation) are greater outside the US. The US was founded on the pursuit of freedom to act. With that freedom it became the economic leader of the free world. Are US enterprises typically places where people are free to act?
It would appear that the titans of industry need to take a step back and rethink their positions and their methods of conducting business. As Don Tapscott so powerfully illustrated in his keynote last week, the tsunami is on its way. There are crumbling foundations that will not withstand the force. And there won’t be armies bearing humanitarian aid in the aftermath.
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One vendor I met at the conference was doing business that involved U.S. intelligence and defense services. He said they’d been hanging back on working with FAST because it was not a USian enterprise. Once it becomes part of Microsoft, he said, that attitude might change. The free world is so much better to work with when you own it.
Paula – once again, kudos for surfacing a great non-tech example of the revolution at work. I shy away from the claim that Canadians are either more receptive or more at the forefront of the User Revolution; rather, I sometimes think that multinationals use Canada as a test-bed for new ideas for its full North American market because it is roughly one-tenth of its size and is relatively contained and distinguishable from a Marketing point of view.
With regards to the Canadian community, who else is there besides me and Jevon? Am curious as to who the closet-Canadians are who have been contributing, commenting, or reading ffblog. Let’s start a thread to examine whether or not there really are more user-driven examples up North.
Actually, Zia, I was unaware of your Canadian connection, so that adds more strength to the observation! Other very strong references are Robert Patterson and Jon Husband.
Besides that, I have an earlier experience that I’d not given much relevance to. In the latter ’90s I was working for a consulting group in Dallas that had identified a technical school in Nova Scotia (this is my recollection…and I don’t recall the institution), where we regularly pulled graduates and relocated them. We were working on advanced Data Warehousing principles and they were all bright and eager to jump in. Moreso, they embraced their new location and found awe where others did not. This perspective added to their abilities.
One has to wonder, are there deeper cultural issues — common attitudes and perspectives –that are now hindering many in the US?
In 2007 I dedicated considerable time to pull together a local conference on “Design Thinking” (http://designthinkingexec.backpackit.com/pub/1239101). The energy that gave critical mass to the topic came from Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Business, University of Toronto. The conference did not resonate as I had hoped. But, those who did take the time to immerse themselves in the topic, who read the related materials and who approached the topic with ‘awe’, have been changed by the experience. I only discovered in a conversation yesterday that there were those who seemingly came with expectations of being force-fed the topic, who walked away with nothing. This to me is a cultural indicatjion…
There may be another hint here. This is an excerpt from a Mark Hurst piece — something he realized long after the fact (recommend reading the entire piece for context):
[quote]
we finally got it: the vast majority of e-mail trivia players out there weren’t looking for Jeopardy mind-stretchers. Just the opposite, in fact. They wanted to open their e-mail, read a quick question, and know the answer right away, without having to think, do research, or indeed make any physical movement but a few keystrokes. Furthermore, they wanted quick feedback that they had gotten the question right and were doing great.
In other words, they wanted some perceived value – “you got the right answer!” – without having to work for it.
[endquote]
While there is an obvious element of ‘perceived value’ at play here, perhaps there is also a differentiator at play for ‘propensity to discover’. Perhaps the earlier sense of discovery that was prevalent in the US culture has waned (or has been engineered out). In the ’30’s and ’40s it was driven by a will to survive and recover (the depression) and the war. It was driven again in the ’60s by the space race.
I believe that what Tapscott was describing about the Echo generation is replete with indicators of ‘awe’ and intense discovery. What will happen as they enter the workplace — or will they, as was illustrated, simply create their own game and bypass the commercial workplace altogether?
This requisite since of ‘discovery’ appears to be lacking in many institutions, their methods and their means. I’m sure there are many who can share specific examples of this in action and its causes.
Various software companies … Microsoft being the latest example .. have created significant R&D presences in all three of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver because of (variously-cited issues) quality-of-life, good health care, diversity and tolerance, major universities for talent recruitment in each city – all reasons smart, creative, and talented people want to live somewhere good and challenfing to work.
Vancouver (where I live) recently announced the opening of a major Microsoft R&D centre here, and it (Vancouver) is one of the epicenters of development for the gaming industry (EA, Radical Entertainment and a host of other smaller but on-the-map gaming companies) … and a new World Digital Media Centre is scheduled to open in 2009. IBM also has a major research center here.
The Quebec government poured millions into a Cité du Multimedia region in “Old Montreal”, which is now paying dividends. Ubisoft’s North American headquarters and a major game development and research center is in (one of) the nouveau-bohemian districts of Montreal. Quebec City was / is the home of Copernic, a major search company and the parent company of Coveo, which I believe is ostensibly a competitor to FAST in the enterprise search field. Ottawa has a significant technology cluster (most of the west end of the city).
All three of the major Canadian cities rank highly on Richard Florida’s Creative Cities index. RIM (of Blackberry fame) came out of Waterloo, Ontario which has one of North America’s mist highly rated IT / systems engineering universities (University of Waterloo). Flickr came out of Vancouver, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake slaving late nights in a small office in Yaletown.
There’s more, but it would get boring and I’d begin to sound as if I were boasting about the country 
I read somewhere recently that Toronto is now seen as #3 city in tech in North America, after Silicon Valley and Boston (but I’d have to dig for the reference).
I found myself wondering several times during the FF conference if the Norwegian attitudes towards networking and the complexity of its linguistic structure might have something to do with FAST’s ability to move forward on the ways it understood and patterned linguistics into search software. I’d love to hear more on that possibility from its researchers, CTO and management.
A bit second-degree-ish in terms of Canadian connection, but I believe Bill Ives of the FF blog did some or much of his university work in Toronto, and I know he maintains connections with past Accenture (Toronto) colleagues.
Very interesting thread. If I may pull one sliver: Jon, your suggestion about a possible link between Norwegian (the language and its structure) and its skills with search software is something I’d be hugely interested in hearing more about, if Zia or anyone might wish to share their thoughts.
Tom and Jon – in regards to the Norwegian connection, you’re close. It is in fact our relationship to the universities in Munich that has attracted a great number (17?) of linguistics PhDs into FAST and that gives us in edge with respect to language decomposition, extracting entities and most interestingly the relationships between them.
..and yes, Paula, I am very much a Canadian. I’m from Montréal.
Heck…even Tapscott is Canadian!
http://www.newparadigm.com/default.asp?action=category&ID=18
Hi Paula and everyone
I have been following the FastForward conference blogs and videos with interest. Great stuff.
You say “One has to wonder, are there deeper cultural issues — common attitudes and perspectives –that are now hindering many in the US?”, and you also mention Roger Martin.
As I recently recorded on my blog (I am a hesitatnt and recent blogger) one of the best things I did last year was to hop on a plane from London to Toronto to go to the Workplace 2017 conference at the University of Waterloo. It was a stupendous experience. What a line-up of keynote speakers, addressing fundamental issues of workplace trends.
Roger Martin was inspiring but the person who blew me away was Richard Florida. Outstanding. He was speaking about the migration of the ‘creative classes’ and knowledge work to places where the physical environment and cultural attitudes allowed frredom of thought and action. This, of course, is my interpretation and paraphrasing of what he was saying. I thoroughly recommend listening to his sessions – available here at http://www.2017.uwaterloo.ca/index.htm
Anne Marie: Thanks for jumping in and for your perspective (especially so we can live vicariously through your experiences). Very glad you shared your enthusiasm over Richard Florida. It’s enough to make me pull his book “The Flight of the Creative Class” off of the top of the 3 foot stack of books next to my bed.
So many books…so little time…
And now all those Waterloo presentations and videos (I’ll check out Richard Florida’s video just so I can catch the entusiasm too).
Hi Paula,
A couple of items I thought I’d share. I had the opportunity to listen to one of the leads from GM (who is American) in their social media marketing strategy. What I learned was that their foray in to the world of blogs, was a direct result from frustration with traditional media. Chris talked about how the traditional media, and their reporters all wanted to tell the same story… “How the American automobile industry can’t compete in the world market”. So regardless of what GM wanted to speak of, they kept going back to that topic. Finally they said if they won’t publish the entire story, let’s go directly to the people. Give them the opportuity to ask the questions they want to ask, and provide them information that goes beyond what traditional media wanted to publish. It appeared they had a fairly elaborate campaign of utilizing WoM. Although my particular interest is less about marketing and more about collaboration, I still found his case interesting. Like Zia had indicated, I too find searching for applied concepts outside of the “tech” industry of extra insight.
The other thought (and it is just a thought with no real basis) is that perhaps the adoption of social media is a good fit with Canadian beliefs which tend to promote more “social” concepts (i.e. Universal Healthcare) then that of the US.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that the willingness to embrace E2.0 concepts would be any greater in Canada. Although, I would submit that some of the things we’ve been doing at Bell Canada are pretty exciting.
Cheers,
Rex
p.s. I am a Canadian! 
Hey, rex .. me too (Vancouver, by way of Montreal, Halifax, Edmonton, Southern Ontario, etc. – and Europe for a few years in between). And I am originally a born and bred American (NJ, then Connecticut … lucky enough to have two parents, one from each country)
There are, I think, some subtle / nuance differences that grow relatively large and important over time, stemming from the two countries “tag lines” ;-0) … “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” versus “peace, order and good government”.
I think we don’t see the term / concept ’socialist” as quite the big, bad, bogeyman that US citizens tend to, and we understand (I believe) that taxes actually contribute to the infrastructure of a society that then enables cultural and economic competitive capabaility. Not that we’re a socialist country by any stretch of the imagination .. but we haven’t completely lost sight of the common good yet, either, I don’t think.
In other words, we know that our taxes support health care, education, schools, bridges, roads, and a range of other stuff that make the society and country a good place to live and work. I keep hearing that lots of knowledge professionals from other parts of the world often would prefer to go live and work in Canada than in the USA … and that certainly seems to be more and more the case 9as mentioned above).
But hey, i am biased
Per Rex’s comments, leapfrogging is happening a lot — and it’s not just the technologies. It’s as if the technologies have awakened us all to the chain not being on our ankles. It’s like a “Network” awakening — and we’re not going to take it any more. Ancillary to, I consider it part of the 2.0 phenomenon.
But back to the Canadian thing…
There are two dimensions, the general social one (great examples/thoughts Rex), and the enterprise model (how culture, operations, etc. all get in the way). Across both of those dimensions the ’social’ aspects vary.
It would seem that if we were to come up with a ‘readiness’ model, the social attributes would be the strongest indicator, based on the evidences we’re seeing here…but it needs to be assessed along the two dimension general society (including the influencing operating factors as Jon pulled out, Taxes, which is really an artifact of financial exchange model) and the sub-culture of the enterprise. Social sciences aren’t my field of practice by any means so if anyone wants to jump in to identify something going on and/or a model that might ‘fit’ these observations. Jon, you’d likely have something to recommend we could look at and mull over.
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