Recently in Blogosphere Category

I'm posting this because Forrester, the analyst firm which advises so many companies on how they should manage their web presence, just destroyed their online ecosystem. History has a way of repeating itself, because we don't learn from our mistakes. In terms of online brand presence, we are often our worst competitor.

Here's the same mistake, made by another famous institution.

Back in middle of 2009, the folks at Harvard Business Review moved to a new online home. They left the shelter of the business school and established a site of their own. They switched domains from hbswk.hbs.edu to harvardbusiness.org.  

Good idea, bad execution. 

Why? Because when they moved, they switched the old site off.

At the time, I created two charts - a before and an after - to see the extent of the damage they had caused to themselves:

BEFORE:



AFTER:


Overnight, they went from being the center of the thought-leadership universe (BusinessWeek, The Economist, Knowledge@Wharton, The McKinsey Quarterly, and Strategy + Business were all satellites in the old ecosystem) to a stand-alone with no connections.  They lost 80-90% of their traffic, and more importantly, they lost their preeminent position in Google and Yahoo.

Luckily, being Harvard Business Review, they recovered.  But they lost important ground to their competitors. Knowledge@Wharton has far outpaced them online.

And now Forrester makes the same mistake.

Last night’s “disaster” for the Democrats should have been easy to predict without any polling at all.

A simple look at the Alexa numbers tells the story:

Scott Brown: 72,289
Martha Coakley: 255,865

The difference? About 100,000 votes.

Now let’s look at social media.

Twitter >> 

@ScottBrownMA 16187 followers, 728 lists, 732 tweets

@MarthaCoakley 4347 followers, 355 lists, 599 tweets

Facebook >>

Brown 128,950 fans

Coakley 18,588 fans

And when I look at the online ecosystem, it’s dominated by Brown:

So is online engagement everything? 

Maybe not, but this has to be a wake up call for the snoozing Dems.

The Republicans have learned their lesson after Obama, and won’t cede the online space again.

I have been rather quiet on this blog for several reasons, chief among them a series of projects which required my full time attention.  But now it's time to break my blog-silence. 

The catalyst? CO2isgreen.org - a group whose central premise is basically: "human beings breathe out carbon dioxide, so it must be good to produce even more of it!"

Disgusted by what I saw, I decided to run a quick analysis on CO2isgreen.org and their sister site PlantsneedCO2.org.  The "right-wing conspiracy" appeared instantly:



[click to enlarge]

The Nation digs into the story here, even as the Billings Gazette and Cody Enterprise spew out misinformation.

The online ecosystem includes the following cast of characters and sites, led by one H. Leighton Steward (who almost seems like a decent guy if you read his bio).  The network includes the Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) and reality-denying sites like worldclimatereport.com, climate-skeptic.org, Inhofe's blog (we're paying for it), icecap.us, globalwarminghoax.com, the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Science and Public Policy Institute, FOX News, Michelle Malkin, humanevents.com, and all the usual attack dogs of the corporate-run media.

What's even more interesting is that this week, a group of large corporations -- including New Mexico utility PNM Resources, California utility PG&E, power generator Exelon and Nike -- denounced the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's opposition to climate legislation.

More on this particular circus here, and if you want to make a difference >>

BTW, this technique of business-funded propaganda is not new. And it does claim real casualties...

The traditional meaning of the term "business ecosystem" was developed in "Strategy as Ecology" an insightful article by Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien (March 2004, Harvard Business Review). In it, they defined business ecosystems as the "loose networks- of suppliers, distributors, outsourcing firms, makers of related products and services, technology providers, and a host of other organizations."

Let's define an online ecosystem as the network of sites which create a neighborhood around an industry, website, brand, product, people, or topic - it includes all your stakeholders and more - partners, suppliers, competitors, customers, analysts, commentators, journalists, bloggers, prospects, and citizens.

Whether you like it or not, your company's website sits in a neighborhood, surrounded by other sites which make up your online ecosystem.

In effect, this is your digital footprint. Companies with large active ecosystems have large footprints. Companies with weak ecosystems, understandably, don't. Of course, the idea is to position your company in the right place - so that it will be found by your customers - past, present, and future.

How are you going to do that?  By becoming a hub in your industry's ecosystem.  And how are you going to do that?  Stay tuned.

Virtually all executives now buy into the wisdom of Bill Joy's observation that "there are always more smart people outside your company than within." Almost everyone pay lip service to the idea of open-innovation -- that coming up with new value in the marketplace often depends upon connecting effectively with other companies and individuals.

For the past eight years, I have been studying online ecosystems, learning to discern patterns of traffic, relationships between sites, and the relative positioning of competitors in a crowded (or not so crowded) marketspace.

In this blog I look forward to sharing my insights and discoveries as we learn about different types of online ecosystems.  Join me as we discover, analyze, measure, and  learn to leverage online ecosystems 

Feel free to contact me >>