When discussing social web and how it relates to marketing, the focus is mostly on consumers and the communities formed around products and services. Engagement, immediate feedback and responsibility, empowerment of fans, flexibility and having a human voice are the blueprint for companies when interacting with consumers.

Photo by Julia Manzerova, under a CC License

The discussion on how these values translate on a Business-To-Business scenario is quite recent, with companies like Dachis Corporation or recent initiatives by SAP exploring these brave new waters. But one thing is to have a 10000 feet view on social business, another is having to deal with day-to-day operations, from procurement to human resources.
We all have heard stories about greedy managers or other forms or corporate assholes, that don’t care about the latest social technologies and are usually control freaks, oblivious about our oh-so-noble concepts of social capital, long tail or crowdsourcing. And worst, they push businesses into a new form of Prisoner’s dilemma.

The prisoner’s dilemma is a fundamental problem in game theory that demonstrates why two people might not cooperate even if it is in both their best interests to do so

Even if we have the best intentions and try to collaborate with other business, the fact is that the amount of effort we put on using social technologies isn’t returned with the same level of commitment by other companies which we deal on a regular basis. Much to blame is the selfish need for maximizing shareholder value that still prevails on many companies (despite having caused the recent economic crisis), forcing stakeholders not to invest in values and technologies more supportive of innovation and social responsibility.

Unlike Business-To-Consumer markets, the reason why i find this dilemma still stands on B2B is because of low adoption of public publishing platforms. Even if we consider Yammer or Linkedin, most of business conversations are shielded by corporate guidelines with a veiled interest on lack of transparency.
When will we see the corporate equivalents of Facebook and Twitter? Where companies cooperate in their best interests, with no hidden payoffs and in a transparent market, where the conversations are regarded with the same importance as in consumer markets. It’s time to replace the traditional industrial complex of pushing goods for the markets with a more design and socially responsible model, where hidden agendas are hard to maintain under public scrutiny.

Yes, i know it’s a dream. But so was landing men on the moon.

The year was 2006, and the trend formerly know as Web 2.0 was in full steam. A group of brilliant folks decided to organize the first edition of Shift Conference in Portugal. I managed to find some free time and attended one of the workshops, on the theme of “Creativity” with Dannie Jost and Henriette Weber Andersen. Two years later, Henriette has really pushed the envelope further, both professionally and personally, with her latest achievement in the form of a free eBook: Why every company should be a rockband.

While working for companies with start ups and online marketing and PR, she also helped bring passion to the communities she’s involved, and continued her involvement with Shift as a Super Duper Advisor :).

Photo by redsoda747, all rights reserved

Unfortunately, i wasn’t able to attend the talk where Henriette presented the ideas on the book, but as a big fan of her personal rockband, i’ve asked her a few questions she kindly accepted to answer.

Henriette, Toothless Tiger, avant garde social business expert: who are you really ?
Who am I really ? I am a lady from the north hunting integrity, authenticity, remarkability, creativity, and trustworthiness in business all over the world. I am a first mover within tech and business and how to implement the ways and ideas of the internet in organizations. Heck some people even call me a guru =)

At Shift, we had a first glimpse on “why every company should be a rockband”, that has now been self published as a book. Sounds like there’s a story here, and i’d love you to share how this book was born and the main ideas discussed on it.

Well the book was born because my own book deal in Denmark got canceled. it’s not that I cry myself to sleep every night over it, it just shows that when you’re battling in places where i am battling – the publishing industry does not understand. I have felt it on my own body that publishing houses wants to make everything mainstream. I think mainstream is so incredibly boring and without attitude. It makes everything become normal. meh. Anyway I decided to make my own publishing house (called Toothless Tiger Press), where nothing had to be mainstream – it could be as quirky and strange and wonderful excentric, and all the power over the works had to be in the hands of the author. To make Toothless Tiger Press I needed to have an ebook. People at shift really loved the talk so I decided to work a bit longer on the slides and turn them into an ebook. It collided with my blog post on the 7th of December on 24ways.org – it was a blast and now it’s out there and people are sending me mails to say thank you – it rocks =).

The main idea in the ebook is that the world has changed and it doesn’t look a bit like “business as usual”. Still we conduct business as usual. s. It heavily related on some blogposts I have done on toothlesstiger.com for the past year arguing that “the business of business needs to be more than business”. and that’s the main idea. It’s a way of changing the world. which is also why I hope that everybody will read this ebook and react on it, and spread the ebook like wildfire – in some way – making something more.

Bands have groupies. Companies have …
groupies too and fans. Groupies are the hardcore people surrounding your company and who can’t live without it. Fans are more moderate. You need to work on getting people who purchase your products to first become customers, then to become fans, and if you’re lucky they will become groupies as well.

We’re both very interested in creativity. Bands have it, the web as lots of it, but companies are usually stifling it. Are companies behaving like the music industry instead of focusing in being rock bands?
I think that the creativity is lacking in companies because of control. In some companies it’s extremely hard and I think that some companies are acting as the music industry. let it go man. You can’t control the chaos of the web. it should not be managed – it should be lead. so let go of the command and control mentality, it doesn’t really belong in a rockband (or in the music industry – but I guess they are waking up to see that)

Game time. Match each one of the brands / companies below with a rock band.
(I haven’t given these much consideration so I hope I won’t be held responsible that much)
Nokia : R.E.M
Motorola: Lordi

Nike: MGMT
Adidas: Daft Punk

Ford: Sisters of Mercy
Honda: Nightwish

PriceWaterhouse: The Pogues
Accenture: The Corrs

McDonalds: Hanson
Ben&Jerry’s: spice girls

Pepsi: The Doors
Coke: Janis Joplin

Amazon: Coldplay
Google: Red Hot Chili Peppers

H&M: Abba
Zara: Manu Chao

Head on to Toothlesstigerpress.com and get your piece of a rockband for your company today.

Update:
Added links to the original concept and the talk’s slideshow.

Some might say the internet, and digital imaging in general have caused a revolution in the business of stock photography. This might be true from the buyers’ point of view, as there’s an almost infinite range of work available online, from the exclusive rights-managed photographs for someone in the advertisement industry creating a large budget campaign, to the royalty-free microstock for a small webdesigner creating a local website.

© Pedro Pinheiro

On the other hand, from the seller’s perspective, if you’re a semi-professional photographer (meaning that you don’t live of your photography, at least not exclusively), the ratio between the work involved and the money you get for it is still not very attractive. I’m not talking about the photographic work (I’m not defending getting money for crappy work), but the time effort in promoting your work. This is due to two main reasons – the market for microstock is heavily fragmented, so to make any non-trivial amount of money from $1 sales (from which you get $0.50), you have to upload a lot of photos into lots of different services, and tag, categorize, and price-range every single photograph on every of those different services. The second reason is that at the other end, it’s very difficult to get your work into the big services like Getty or Corbis – it’s a “you don’t pitch your work to them, they’ll find you” kind of situation, that usually only works for big professional career photographers, and not for semi-pro photographers even if they have a good and relevant portfolio.

There’s a service that is trying to bridge this gap, PhotoShelter. For me personally, it hasn’t worked because it’s too complex. The idea is great, you upload your work, set the kind of rights available for each photo and the price, but I find that the whole process is just not… elegant. To be fair, you do get to keep a much higher percentage of the sale price as compared with all the other services. They’ve even created a way to import your photos from flickr, but you end up having to redo a lot of the meta-work you’ve already done previously. It works for professional or very serious semi-pro photographers with a lot of time they can devote into selling photographs, but not for everyone.

This week Getty announced they’ve struck a deal with flickr to “scout” for good photographers and photographs and invite them to make their work available on their collection for sale. This is a good step (although opinions differ, PhotoShelter had quite a strong reaction to the news), but it may only take care of the top, rights managed end of the spectrum.

© Pedro Pinheiro

What would be a real revolution for the semi-pro (or even amateur) photographer? What if flickr extended itself into (also) being a stock photography website? Their whole system is beautifully simple, to the point that a lot of creative professionals go there to seek visual inspiration. In part this is due to their system of rating photographs by what they call interestingness, an automated system that takes into account the views, comments, and other factors of each photograph, and which makes (usually) the best and more appealing photographs come to the top of every search. It’s an online social model that has really worked towards a tangible goal.

Flickr could make a killing in the mid and lower end range of the market. With the same ease that the rights of photographs can be set (from copyrighted to a creative commons license), they could have the option to set a “for sale” flag, with a simple price matrix of resolution/rights, and take care of the whole process for photographers. They have one of the broadest collections in the world, the exposure, the user base, the almost perfect rating system. If they could overcome the legal hurdles and create a “for sale” system with the simplicity they’re known for, it would be a real revolution for semi-pro photographers and the stock photography business. You’d get the ability from the same amount of work, of being able to “show off” your work, and also make some money from it.

This is a guest post by Pedro Pinheiro, a Twitter buddy and a photographer. I asked him to write a few words about the changes on digital photography and specially the whole stock business. One of my main pictorial sources of inspiration is Flickr, and was interested to know how a talented photographer (earning some online revenue from their work) felt about the recent Getty images + Flickr deal. Perhaps it was just Yahoo running away from Microsoft (Corbis CEO is Bill Gates), perhaps it was another industry adjusting to the online world. Pedro knows the best. Thanks @ppinheiro76.