MCDONALD: That’s the premise when Paul and I talked about this which is – everybody hears it – who’s walking the walk and how do you walk the walk? I don’t even know where to start.
WASILEWSKI: Hopefully we’ll give a start today, but in terms of the question, is the Web out of Control, I think there is another related question and that is, is the Web out of Room? Interestingly, a year ago there was a research firm called the Merdes Research Group. They warned that “consumer and corporate use of the Internet could overload the current capacity and lead to brown outs within two years.” That’s according to MacWorld magazine. To that end, just a little bit more, in 2008 ComScore should that Americans viewed more than 11.8 billion videos – film duration of almost 558 million hours – that’s almost two hours per American during the month of July. There are only 142 million U.S. Internet viewers – they watched an average of 80 videos per viewer in July. So, you can see how the Web killer aps are actually clogging the Web because these bandwidth-intensive applications, video and social networkings particularly, are really taking up a lot of bandwidth. Now, back in business school I remember a classic management theory talking about the span of control of the manager and by extension the organization controlled variables in the marketplace. That was sort of classic management. That’s changed. Not only because of the Web, starting in the mid-90’s, but now with Web 2.0, control is going more and more to the buyer, to the consumer. For insurance carriers, agencies, service providers and trade associations in the insurance industry it means one important thing – organizations just don’t have the degree of control and authority they once had.
One key reason is the growth of social media which I’ll describe briefly and highlight a few examples – there aren’t all that many just yet. Additionally, prior to social media coming on the scene there were a lot of interactive tools – access to information, databases and so on – they’re not necessarily social media but those are very important within the industry. So, to answer your question, Paul, it’s not that the Web is out of control, but that there’s a new world order and the Web is really enabling that. Those organizations, those people previously in control have lost some of that control to consumers.
Now, the old TV show, Get Smart, which was reincarnated this year as a movie, I’m a bit of a fan and if you recall there was an organization called KAOS, the International Organization of Evil, and the good guys on the show were from Control and the joke of the show, of course, was that the guys from Control bumbled things all over the place and still won – still saved the day. Now the new Chaos is not a nefarious organization but I might point out ironically, Google, which is the world’s largest and most used organizer of information, has a corporate mantra of “Don’t be evil.” But chaos is what’s happening on the Internet; but it’s a chaos created by and directed by consumers. Consumers are asserting their influence and participating in a new array of social media. The new chaos, in fact, is organized by consumers and businesses for their own benefit. Social media is a new term, about two years old. It describes Web-based services, some of which have been around for some time and others that are relatively new.
Now, there’s an important book – ironically enough it’s a book – that’s defining social media. Charlene Lee and Josh Bernhoff of Forester Research wrote a book this year called “Groundswell – Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.” Now their definition of social media is: a social trend in which people use technologies to get things they need from each other rather than from traditional institutions like corporations. Now, I just want to point out that they say it’s a social trend, not a technology trend. I think that’s important. They cite three drivers of social media which are really coming together at this time in the last couple of years. One is people’s desire to connect which has been around since the cavemen, including the most recent caveman we see. But also interactive technologies referred to as Web 2.0 – these are web services that provide some level of user interactivity and then the third driver is online economics which they define as traffic equals revenue.
So, if there is control being lost, who loses control? First of all organizations haven’t loss all control. They retain a great deal of control but the difference now is that they have to assert influence, and a lot of organizations aren’t quite sure of how to do that just yet. The reason they have to do this is financial institutions especially are in a different consumer environment. In the past organizations, because of their responsibility, their position, their market share, their knowledge, or their information, had control. Now corporations, media, lawyers, trade associations and governments are losing some of that control and it’s subsiding. The different now is that consumers are now willing and able to listen to their peers in an online environment. That’s having more influence on them than ever before. Five years ago or even more recently, insurance companies were working on a one-to-many basis. They were doing broadcast marketing. Now the broadcast marketing that they’re doing is really coming into an environment where consumers are in a multi-party, multi-faceted, multi-channel environment. There’s a lot more influences on the consumer then there were just five years ago. So, the insurance company, the insurance producer, the trade associations, Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10