More Experiences from The Conference Board Meeting
Here is an interesting experience shared by one of the attendees at the same conference. The person represented a respected foods and beverages company and also talked about the restriction on social media usage in their corporate office. He talked about how a senior product manager, who was required to comment on a blog about their product, had to rush to the nearest Starbucks outlet to access the social media website since it was inaccessible from within their corporate network.
Another participant made an observation about how people were using their high end mobile phones (yes including the iPhone) to access social media websites at the office since their corporate policies for internet access restricted them from visiting those websites.
Another experience, though not exactly discussed at the conference, is closer home. A friend, who works at a leading IT services company, with restrictive internet access policies, identified several alternatives to bypass the proxy servers to access social media websites. Now while this is much more dangerous than it sounds, the fact remains that restrictions always pave the way for innovations.
Quick response to Shaurabh’s comment on the previous post. While the companies listed in Shaurabh’s comments are leaders in their respective fields, the other commonality is that they also have a major stake in the development / usage of the new web. In fact some of these are at the forefront of technologies leading to the new WWW experience. So it is not surprising to see these companies taking the lead.
The companies I was referring to in the earlier post are large, brick and mortar giants, who have been in business for several decades and are yet to catch up with the changes in their consumer’s preferences. Infact some of the companies might be dealing exclusively with customers who may not have been affected by the changes in the WWW experience. These customers always had experiences created for them due their exclusivity.
But the point about not waiting for the small startups to provide the answers to problems about security and business models is valid. Companies like Progressive (Insurance), Wells Fargo (Financial Services) and BBC (media) have already taken the lead in adopting the next generation of Web and how?
