Waves of Change
Tidal waves of change have come upon us in the past several years due to the internet and the inherent connectivity it brings.
The internet and the world wide web have forever changed how companies operate and how people interact. Not only have we seen these changes due to the emergence of social media, but these changes also have occurred as a result of collaborative voices we now hear in the blogosphere.
Technological advances have empowered the individual to speak up and talk back to those in authority. Those who can raise their voice via blogs and practice citizen journalism have an ability to become an advocate for interests and causes they are passionate about. This power to raise an individual digital voice and collaborate with others without coordination is turning every industry and every company upside down.
Employees can now broadcast internal corporate injustices to a global world via blogs, thus initiating reform in HR practices. This global voice is reinventing customer service policies and marketing strategies. Micro-influencers are a specific form of bloggers who are redefining how companies are spending their marketing dollars. With between 10,000 and 500,000 followers on average, micro-influencers are a force to be reckoned with (Wissman, 2018). This capacity to collaborate without coordination is changing how companies communicate within and among the stakeholders inside their ecosystem, and it is turning news media upside down as well.
Importance of Diversity and Inclusion via Blogs
According to one expert, we are seeing networks emerge instead of trees as a means to define and understand this new world order (Lima, 2015). Bloggers across the globe are serving an important purpose, networking together to aggregate diverse populations of individuals around common interests, values, and ideas.
Global corporations are beginning to utilize blogs as an internal means to communicate between diverse populations and deliver best practice to employees who are geographically or departmentally separated. Collective Intellect and collaborative problem solving are usurping top-down hierarchies and decision-making norms. Companies that succeed have an ability to interconnect within this network, tap into collective thought, effectively use technology, strategy and human insight to filter and find the trends.
Empirical evidence has demonstrated that inclusive companies produce a cash flow 2.3 times greater than their non-inclusive counterparts (Suzuno, 2017). Thirty-five percent of companies who implement diversity perform better than those which are homogeneous, they are almost twice as likely to be innovation leaders and they are 70% more likely to seize a new market (Suzuno, 2017).
Companies that insist upon clinging to an old way of doing business, who choose not to change and who refuse to listen to these voices are beginning to falter and fade away.
Collaborative Intellect of Bloggers Online
We are starting to recognize power of collaboration, use of technology and data analytics to learn at a rate which up to this point has been beyond human capacity. In this new technical day and age, it’s as though we are miners seeking gold. In order to find the small flakes of insight placed on the ether by millions of blogs, we must, like the miner sluices for gold, vet the information we encounter with our human intellect, big data, and computerized sluice, washing away what’s irrelevant, leaving the truth and trends behind.
It is the convergence of technology, brilliant computer programmers such as Johnathan Harris (2007), bloggers with ideas and passion to institute change, and those seeking information who are issuing in an enormous amount of change. It requires collaboration by many to fully harness innovation in this day and age.
After attending a Diversity and Inclusion networking event earlier this week, it dawned on me that inclusion is the precursor to collaboration, which is why diversity and inclusion initiatives are so critical for companies who seek to survive. In order for people to be willing to collaborate, they have to feel that their contributions will be heard. People must believe they have an opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way…that there is a place at the table for their ideas. Without inclusion, there is no collaboration.
Diversity is key because it means we have peers who think differently and can break out of a status quo through conversation and debate…
…and this is the brawn of the blog.
It gives a global, inclusive voice to those who are passionate about their interests, causes, and ideas. Those who follow these bloggers validate their opinions and enable them to serve as a catalyst for change. Bloggers who serve as credible sources to professional journalists provide an important service to the world by offering desperately needed local coverage to global issues. To fully capitalize upon the collective intellect of humanity, it is imperative for this inclusion to extend to all.
With the power of the internet, good ideas have the potential to come from individuals across all corners of the globe who wish to collaborate. Unfortunately, according to Vucinic (2005), 83% of the population on earth lives in societies without access to the independent press, and this makes the voices of diverse, collaborative bloggers who engage in citizen journalism all that more important to hear.
Accessing the Global Data of Bloggers Worldwide
According to Manuel Lima (2015), a visual information artist, networks are replacing trees as the primary analogy of mapping information. It is quite eye-opening to see and consider what brilliant computer scientists are able to glean from the information that citizens send out into the ether via blogs, pictures, posts, etc. on this global network. Consider Computer Programmer Johnathan Harris, who has created programs such as WeFeelFine and Universe (Harris, 2007). These programs canvas the entirety of the web every several minutes, aggregating the most recent posts of bloggers from around the world, to identify trends among this data. The fact that tools exist which can simultaneously observe millions of unknowing individuals and their daily blogs and aggregate such data is a bit concerning.
Such technologies are concerning to those of us later adopters who are beginning to enter the ether and are unsure of how much information about ourselves we wish to reveal to the world. For some bloggers, their posts represent an opportunity to institute change and even the scales of justice and there is no hesitation to disclose. It is important for professional media to exercise due diligence when encountering bloggers, to understand whether the individual or company involved in the blog is being forthright.
Threats to Full Disclosure
While there are virtually limitless opportunities that technology affords to those in this country with a computer and an internet connection, there exist very real threats to that opportunity to speak. In some countries, governments strictly censor content (Shirky, 2012; Vucinic, 2005). Within the United States, we enjoy the freedom to share the exchange of ideas, however, we face an unusual threat to our voices, and that is being silenced by our own choices.
According to Pariser (2011), Google and Facebook utilize filter bubbles which internalize various signals and tendencies of each user to formulate algorithms that aid in the search process. At first glance, these filter bubbles appear to serve the need of the seeker, utilizing past choices and search trends to identify the most relevant results. However, just as they have the ability to use tendencies to make searches more efficient, these filter bubbles also have the capacity to learn our preferences and filter out key information that we may be seeking.
Blogs are an important emerging voice in our world. It is critical that these voices are heard.
About the Author: Mary Beth is graduating this spring with a Ph.D. at Troy University in Sport Management, where her research interests involve organizational capacity in sport. She is the Sport Management Department Chair at Pfeiffer University, a liberal arts institution near Charlotte, NC. She has 15 years experience as a Marketing Director for an LPGA tourney, Marketing Director for a US Olympic National Governing Body, sponsorship sales executive for an NBA sports and entertainment property, VP of Marketing and Ticket Sales for a hockey team, and she aided press operations during the 1996 Olympic Games as an Interview Room Manager. Mary Beth enjoys thinking about new ideas and solving business problems.
Follow her on Twitter @mb_chambers or LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/marybethchambersphd # # #
References:
Harris, J. (2007). The web’s secret stories. TED. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAvNlh2Z0GI
Lima, M. (2015). A visual history of human knowledge. TED2015Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/manuel_lima_a_visual_history_of_human_knowledge
Pariser, E. (2011). Beware: online “filter bubbles”. TED 2011. Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles
Shirky, C. (2012). How the internet will (one day) transform government. TEDGlobal 2012. Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government#t-11586
Suzuno, M. (December 19, 2017). 6 statistics that will convince you to prioritize diversity & inclusion. Teamable.com. Retrieved from: https://blog.teamable.com/6-statistics-that-will-convince-you-to-prioritize-diversity-inclusion
Vucinic, S. (2005). Why we should invest in a free press. TEDGlobal 2005. Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/sasa_vucinic_invests_in_free_press?referrer=playlist-media_with_meaning
Wesleyan University. (n.d.) Information literacy. Retrieved from: https://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/infoforyou/infolitdefined.html
Wissman, B. (March 2, 2018). Micro-influencers: The marketing force of the future? Forbes. Retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrettwissman/2018/03/02/micro-influencers-the-marketing-force-of-the-future/#111da7876707
Comments