In March I gave the opening keynote at the Direct Selling Association's conference, talking about the breadth of opportunities in the economy and the role online social networks and communication might play in the future of the industry. From what I learned by preparing for and giving the keynote, I wrote a brief piece Six Key Insights into the future of the Direct Selling Industry.

Last week ABC TV did a short segment looking at the success of the direct selling industry during the downturn, and where it is likely to go from here, shown below. An excerpt from an interview with me was included in the program. During the interview I discussed the perception challenges of the industry, the role of generational change, and the use of social technologies in direct selling.

While it wasn't included in the final TV segment, in the interview I discussed the emergence of 'social commerce' as the likely center of much economic activity, and the potential for elements of the direct selling industry as we know it to morph into creating real in that space. The opportunity is there, however we have yet to see whether the industry will take it.

Among our awesome cast of speakers at SME Technology Summit, our opening keynote speakers Mark Pesce and Tim Pethick are two of the those whose insights I most look forward to hearing. Both have fantastic experience and insights into where technology is today and where it's going.

Mark's topic is below. Be sure to get along to see it!

Using the Network for Business Success

The past five years have seen an explosion in the ways we can connect with one another. Just five years ago email was a bit risqué – now people use Facebook and Twitter and Google Wave and don’t even give it a second thought. All of this ‘hyperconnectivity’ means we can be reached anywhere, everywhere, all the time. This has enormous implications for SMEs. More than just supercharging your rolodex, these network connections can become the channels to increased sales and productivity.

The network represents a new force, pressing down from the outside, as your hyperconnected customers (both satisfied and not-so-satisfied) use new channels to spread the word about your products. You need to be there, wherever those conversations are happening, whenever they happen. You really do need to have eyes and ears everywhere across the net. How can a small business afford to do this? New tools make it easier, but to make best use of these tools, you have to empower your employees to use them. Social media in the office is powerful – and a little bit dangerous. But with some simple ground rules, it can change your business.

On Tuesday I gave the opening keynote at the 38th annual global conference of international accounting network Kreston International.

Kreston are a very interesting organization. With revenues across the network of over $2 billion, they are the 13th largest accounting network in the world. The day of the conference they made the final step in becoming a network according to the IFAC (International Federation of Accountants) definition of a network. One of the critical issues in determining whether a group of firms is deemed a network is whether they have common quality controls. The appointment of a Global Quality and Professional Standards Director is a key step Kreston has taken.

I have long been fascinated by professional services networks. I wrote about them in my first book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, and in detail in Chapter 9 of Living Networks.

I am actively continuing to explore the nature of networks in professional services. How well they network very simply determines their success.

As such I was delighted to be invited to do the opening keynote on the conference's theme of Network to Win. It took the format of a participatory workshop run over two 45 minute sessions, getting the attendees to reflect on and discuss how they can best enhance the cross-firm networks that drive results.

Below are my slides for my presentation, provided primarily for event attendees. Note that they are intended to accompany my speech, not to be meaningful in themselves.

This article was written to frame The Insight Exchange's SME Technology Summit in Sydney on December 1 - while many of the references are to Australia the issues apply globally.

Small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) are taking a larger share of the business pie, and increasingly driving economic growth. This is one of the most important trends in business today, and one that will shape the next decade of business, work and society.

This powerful trend is driven largely by technology and connectivity, creating a world in which smaller, more nimble, better connected companies can outsmart their monolithic larger brethren, competing globally and tapping opportunities as they arise.

At the same time, using technology well in business is proving to be one of the most prominent drivers of success. Almost every aspect of business is becoming driven by technology. This is obviously the case with services businesses ranging from graphic design to even house moving. However this is relevant to every kind of organisation.

Gardening and worm farm retailers Wiggly Wigglers in UK, Caminito Argentinean Restaurant in the US, Brasserie Bread in Australia , Martell Home Builders in Canada and many thousands of others around the world are examples of companies selling highly tangible, everyday products that have built outstanding success through the use of online social media.

There are six key ways in which technology is changing the very nature of how smaller companies operate today.

1. Findability
Customers look for and find businesses in very different ways than just a few years ago. Search engines, recommendations from friends on social networks, and online services exchanges are now how most companies are found. Marketing has completely changed.

I was interviewed this morning on Sky Business Tech Report. Some of the things we discussed in the interview are:

* How social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others change how companies engage with customers, become more efficient, and being competitive.

SmartCompany magazine is running a webinar on Monday 16 November at 2pm: How Small and Mid-Sized Companies are Using Technology to Drive Business Success.

The webinar will provide a preview to some of the outstanding content at SME Technology Summit.

Amanda Gome, Publisher of SmartCompany, will moderate the discussion and share some of her insights in running a young and rapidly growing company, as well in covering the best of what's happening in small and mid-sized business in Australia.

Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, will discuss how companies can best take advantage of online outsourcing to build efficiencies, scale operations, and grow companies rapidly.

Suzi Dafnis, Community Director of Australian Businesswomen's Network, will draw on her extensive experience in building online communities using blogs, forums and other tools.

David James, CEO of Brasserie Bread, will share how he has rapidly grown a real-world business using Twitter and other social media tools.

See the full SME Technology Summit agenda for details of what they will be speaking about and where they fit into the array of valuable content available on the day.

And be sure to register for the webinar to get these speakers great insights! There will be three complimentary passes to the Summit drawn at the end of the webinar.

The Age today has an interesting article titled Outsourcing on steroids that looks at the array of online technologies that are enabling the outsourcing of small tasks and the crowdsourcing of design, innovation, and other key business functions.

I've noticed that in just the last few weeks mainstream media coverage of online service exchanges and crowdsourcing tools is picking up. As the article in the The Age concludes, "it’s certain crowd sourcing is a key business trend for the future". The

The article quotes me in two different sections:

Although odesk and similar sites such as elance.com are known for being a meeting place where businesses can access very low cost services, crowd sourcing is not just about finding the cheapest service provider possible.

Futurist Ross Dawson says: “Online services exchanges are places where anyone anywhere can get people to perform services; it’s about the development of a global talent economy. Some services are commoditised – you might want someone to count the number of tennis balls in a photo for the lowest price possible. But they also allow you to find the best person for the job and price isn’t always the primary factor why you hire someone, sometimes it’s more about finding talented people. I use odesk and the last person I hired wasn’t in Egypt or Latvia he was in New York.”

This idea of how best to tap the most talented - rather than the cheapest - professionals in the global market is the subject of my next book. I'll be writing a lot more about this on my blog.

Later in the article:

There's a great article in the latest issue of B&T Today on how Westpac, one of Australia's big four banks, is approaching working with its advertising and creative agencies. Here are a few choice excerpts from the article, which is well worth a read in its entirety.

Jee Moon, director of brand and marketing at Westpac [said] that an agency roster based on co-creation, not simply collaboration, is key to establishing and maintaining a strong brand identity.

She added the “one stop shop”, integrated agency model in Australia had “never materialised” and that a rostered agency model based on co-creation in which agencies do not simply coexist but coproduce was key to developing and maintaining a strong brand positioning.

“At Westpac we have moved from a contractual agency model, which we had with the Red House when there was little to bind the agencies together apart from a piece of paper, to a system of collaboration where our partners work together as a community of experts, and are currently striving for a true, co-creation model,” Jee said of her agency partners The Campaign Palace, Yello and Lavender.

My book Implementing Enterprise 2.0 has been selling at a very healthy and consistent pace since its launch earlier this year. The front page of the book's website features links to reviews of the book, including some very useful ones from ReadWriteWeb, CMSWire, and Inside Knowledge.

I thought it would be good to share some of the book's insights in a different format, so I have teamed up with Newsgator - who have been key proponents of the book - to do a free webinar on Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Practical Steps to Creating Business Value. The webinar will be held on November 18 at 2pm US ET.

We will draw six complimentary copies of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for webinar attendees.

Sign up for the webinar here.

Below is the webinar overview. Hope to connect with you then!

Newsgator's Director of Enterprise 2.0 Consulting Christy Schoon has launched a new blog Everyday Enterprise 2.0 at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Christy says "I'm going to write in plain English about everyday Enterprise 2.0 from my own on-the-ground perspective working with living, breathing social computing champions at Fortune 500 companies."

One reason I love the blog is Christy's four standard recommendations to businesspeople on where to start with Enterprise 2.0 (particularly the first one :-) ):

1) read Ross Dawson's sensible, plainspoken book "Implementing Enterprise 2.0"

2) read the Nielsen Norman Group's report "Enterprise 2.0: Social Software on Intranets"; and

3) if your company has at least 10,000 employees, join the 2.0 Adoption Council

4. Get professional help.

However I also like the rich content tone. It's very refreshing to see a post titledPimp My Site that happens to be a detailed discussion about the practical issues involved in Enterprise 2.0 adoption but begins:

My second blog post and I’ve already used the word Pimp. My Mom would be so proud.

Even if you are not a technical person, you may have heard about the apparently arcane robots.txt file which sits on websites but is seen only by computers, not by human visitors. The file contains instructions for search engines on what they can and cannot index and make searchable.

Note that in the examples below # indicates a comment line that is not read by the computer; the other lines provide specific instructions to allow or disallow access to search engines.

Let's look at the robots.txt file on Nike.com - www.nike.com/robots.txt

# *.nike.com robots.txt -- just crawl it.
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Crawl-delay: 20

In contrast, look at the file for Adidas.com - www.adidas.com/robots.txt:

# go away
User-agent:*
Disallow:/scripts/cud/cud2.asp

In fact this means that the entire Adidas.com site except for one file can be crawled by search engines, but the comment does seems to suggest a difference in corporate culture from Nike :-).

(Hattip to @larsv!)

And one more! ...continuing our series of translations of Social Media Strategy Framework, today we are launching the Korean edition.

See the original post for the full overview of the Social Media Strategy Framework in English and compilation of the framework in 11 different languages.

Click on image to download pdf

Please share this with any Korean speakers who would be interested.

Also be sure to let me know if you can suggest any improvements to the translation.

Blog search engine Technorati recently revised its blog ranking algorithms and created categories for the rankings.

The list of the top 10 blogs for small business provides an excellent resource for attendees of our SME Technology Summit in Sydney on 1 December, where there will be deep insights into all of the topics covered by these blogs.

Many of these blogs are for businesses of all sizes, but all of them provide valuable insights for small to mid-sized businesses. Check them out!

1. Online Marketing Blog
http://www.toprankblog.com

Covers digital marketing topics, focusing on social media, online PR and search engine marketing. A broad team of writers brings diverse perspectives to bear.

I first met Mark McCrindle when we were both part of a small team of futures thinkers engaged by a major bank for its innovation program. His company McCrindle Research provides a variety of research services focused on generational change. They also organize the Future Forum, an annual event run in several Australia cities which pulls together insights on key trends across all domains into a compact one-day session.

I will be speaking at the Sydney event on November 6, talking about Enterprise 2.0 and how to create the future of the enterprise, including how organizations can leverage social media for competitive advantage. A video overview of the event is below, full information and agenda here, and you can register here.

Future Forum Australia 2009 from David Birley on Vimeo.

Last week I gave the opening keynote at IPZ2009 Interactive Marketing Summit in Istanbul. Here are my slides for my keynote on the Future of Interactive Marketing.

It was a fantastic event, the fourth annual IPZ conference organized by Günseli Özen Ocakoğlu and Hakan Senbir of Marketing & Management Institute, which publishes a range of leading magazines including Marketing Türkiye.

In preparing for my keynote and during my visit I discovered many fascinating things I did not know about the Turkish online market. It is in fact one of the hottest and fastest-growing Internet markets in the world.

As it happens I have a very deep interest in language-defined online markets, such as Japanese, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Korean. Each of these markets – some within national borders and others spanning countries – has very different characteristics across all facets including which types of social media are used, which are dominant players, and the most successful business models. I have written about this before in the context of blogging languages and global media strategies, and will be doing further analysis of country markets soon.

Here are five facts that illustrate how exciting the Turkish online market is.

1. Turkey is the third largest country in the world on Facebook


Source: CheckFacebook

Coming from almost nothing two years ago, Turkey now has close to 14 million Facebook users, overtaking France and Canada earlier this year to be the third largest country on Facebook after the US and UK. Facebook does not dominate social networking in other high population countries such as Brazil, Russia and Japan, so Turkey with a population of 72 million and a very rapid uptake of online services ranks close to the top of the list.