by Rob Paterson
June 28, 2011 at 7:15 am · Filed under
Adoption
We have had a lock out of the postal workers here in Canada for about a week – preceded by a series of rolling local strikes. What the unions want of course is job security and to hold onto their pensions.
But the result appears to be that they have cut their own throat. The heart of their business is business mail – principally bills! What we have seen is a massive switch to online billing that is being made ever easier by the billing companies. (Globe and Mail)
Count Nicole Mackoway among the people who saw the strife at Canada Post as a good time to make a switch. Ms. Mackoway, a stylist based in Edmonton, decided to get rid of all her paper bills – two power bills, two credit card bills and three phone bills.
“I hate getting bills in the mail anyway – this way any mail that comes will be fun,” she said.
ING Direct, a bank that conducts its business by Internet or phone, had 350,000 customers switch to online banking in the past two weeks. Almost half of its 1.8 million Canadian customers now receive their banking statements exclusively online.
“The postal strike created a small catalyst at a time when it’s already easy to make a change to online,” said Peter Aceto, chief executive officer of ING Direct Canada. “Canada Post has gone from the thing we relied on most to communicate a few decades ago to becoming a smaller part of our lives.”
Canada Post will lose at least $2,352,000 a year in revenue from ING Direct on stamps alone, assuming the company sends each of those 350,000 people one letter a month at the commercial price of $0.56 a stamp.
It isn’t just banks that will save from the switch to online bills and statements.
At Shaw Communications Inc., a telecommunications company, about 70,000 people signed up for online billing in June.
“That’s probably 10 times more than we would normally see,” said Peter Bissonnette, Shaw’s president.
“Clearly the labour disruption has driven that behaviour,” he said. “We’re very pleased that customers are finding other ways to do their billing.”
Enmax Corporation, a Calgary-based utility, had 5,000 customers enroll in its online billing system – a “very dramatic increase,” spokesman Ian Todd wrote in an e-mail.
Soon, like the telephone the only mail we will get is junk mail. For the only calls I get these days are spam too.
In many countries the post office has been privatized. The call to privatize Canada Post will escalate.
The US Mail is not exempt from any of these pressures and surely the clock is ticking here too. (Link to an excellent article and infographic here)
The web takes no prisoners.
by Joe McKendrick
June 25, 2011 at 10:57 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Media
As if readers of this blogsite didn’t need more evidence of the power of online networks to lead companies, careers or personal interests in new, greatly expanded directions. Three researchers recently took a hard look at what happens when executives re-energize their networks in a new article in MIT’s Sloan Management Review, and report a compound effect. (Subscription required to view full article.)
The researchers urged executives to renew ties that had been dormant for three years or longer, and came to an interesting conclusion that there’s an incredible amount of value in your dormant ties — in fact, they may be “as valuable — and often even more valuable — than current ties,” and that “insights from dormant ties tend to be more novel, and more efficient to get, than those from current ties.” Plus, thanks to social computing resources, dormant ties can be revived in an instant — no need for tracking down people through common acquaintances, forwarded mail, or phone calls.
For a number of years, I have been pondering the impact of digital workplaces and systems on the serendipity effect. For example, when two old acquaintances run into each other on the street, and one happens to be pondering a business problem to which the other has an answer. I have spoken to some corporate planner who try to design their workplaces to encourage serendipity through building design and layout, promoting valuable chance encounters.
For a while, as the Internet and Web became the fabric of business, it seemed the remoteness of digital work was washing away any of these opportunities for chance encounters that keep things interesting. But if the MIT researchers’ findings are correct, social networks compensate by keeping old contacts alive and vibrant.
by Rob Paterson
June 23, 2011 at 8:45 am · Filed under
Social Media, Trust, Trusted Space
A key principle of the web is anonymity. But there is a dark side to this too. Here is a snip from an excellent article in the Australian on this topic that contains elements that I cannot post here.
Cyber-bile takes many forms: from people posting pornography or sexually explicit comments on Facebook memorials to murdered children, to the person who set up a Facebook site which promised the return of abducted Queensland schoolboy Daniel Morcombe if the page attracted one million members. To most right-thinking people this sort of stuff is unbelievably cruel, surely the outpourings of a small number of sick minds. Hoaxers regularly hack into Facebook pages, defacing pictures or spreading rumours that can cause untold pain, panic and embarrassment. And then there’s the constant background chatter that eats away at people – mostly women – in the public domain. It seems everyone has an opinion now, and they want to be heard. But when did they become so mean and, in some cases, downright terrifying?
Sydney newsreader Jacinta Tynan calls them the faceless brave. “When people want to give me a compliment, they tend to email me directly,” says the journalist and author. “Those who want to say really horrible things will go online and do it anonymously. They’re suddenly very brave when they don’t have to attach their names or their faces to their comments.”
Trolls have made it harder for the corporate world to enter social media. I think that this is why so many sites now ask for a Facebook or Twitter ID as part of the commenting process – pure anonymity is a call to Trolldom.
Why is this happening and what to do?
Why do so many act out as Trolls? Why did so many “Good Kids” riot in Vancouver? Might an answer be again part of the paradox of our way of life. So many have no role, no status and so no real voice. For is not a real voice always attached to your own personal authority? You don’t have to be a CEO or a Government Minister to have real authority either. You have to have real confidence in your self and be part of something that has meaning. Your name then has power and adds power to your words. Viktor Frankl found this power even in Auschwitz. His captors could kill him or abuse him at will. His life was not in his control. He was scum to them. But he would not let them take his spirit. This is what I mean by “Real” power.
In pre industrial society, you lived in communities where you were known by many. This might have been oppressive in some cases but this being known also gave you your name and place. On PEI where I live, people know not only you but your family back 3 generations. What they “know” about you is a part of you that you can control – they know about your character. Such a society is how humans have lived for all time – except for now. We live today in a society where most of us mean nothing to even a small group let alone to our wider community.
This is why I think there are so many Trolls. I think that Trolls are an expression of the despair of how lonely and without meaning life can be in Industrial Society.
Perversely, this is also why I am also hopeful. For the web gives us all a chance to start to find meaning in what we do in public again. It gives us a chance to be known for what we do and how we behave. It gives us back our name. We don’t have to be “important” we just have to be true.
It is best on the web to use your real voice. And this then leads me to my final point today. If you use social media for your employer and you use a “corporate” voice. You are in effect a troll too. You seek to interact with real people but you are not present at your end. If you seek to have influence, you too must have a name and be you.
This is why people like Jordan Miller at Kotex and Baochi Nguyen at Boingo have such a following.
So what to do? Maybe a good first step for enterprises is to offer up a chance to have a real voice on your site – allow for opinion but don’t allow vitriol. Debate the issues with a real voice your self. It will be interesting to see how President Obama does this.
Be the change you seek. The more real you are the less place for Trolls. Few if any on the Kotex or Boingo sites.
