The times, they are a changing.....

Two posts in the hopper today from the London scene - early swallows yet, but is it a sign a summer is icumen in?

First, news that London social media consultancy Headshift has been sold to ex-Razorfish CEO Jeffrey Dachis' new gig, the eponymous Dachis:

We are ready to move beyond the experimental phase to create real business transformation. Leaving behind the niche world of enterprise 2.0, we are ready to work with businesses at a senior level to run change programmes aimed at bringing their processes, internal IT and communications into the Twenty-First Century.

It has never been cheaper or easier to collaborate online. It has never been easier to harness people power to drive business performance. It has never been easier to engage with customers and business partners. Yet, as we know, most companies have come to accept an overly bureaucratic, process-heavy high-cost model of doing business as the norm. They need credible partners who can operate across technology, organisational design and business analysis to help meet this challenge, not just evangelists or technology vendors. That's our role.

...and achieved via merging into a larger entity to get more ooomph - some rules of business never change

But the overall point they make is very valid, ie transaction costs have never been lower, information transfers at rapid speeds, and the economics of these new mediums are different. It also points to the professionalising of the whole "Social Media Expert" market, something we alluded to earlier, and the move to transformation outside of the early marcomms areas (But we would say that, Broadsight's strapline is "transforming business for the networked century....." and most of our work with the Web 2.0 technologies has been in the non-marcomms areas). Being bought by a US outfit with a $50m rollup war chest is significant however, for Headshift and for the industry.

Secondly, Quirk's crowdsourcing marketing tool Ideabounty has seduced Unilver onto the service for Pepperami - 110 million sticks of Peperami are eaten annually and to top that, in the last year, the brand brought in £38 million for its parent company, Unilever.:

Unilever is pioneering an innovative new model here - instead of keeping the whole process with one agency, they are spreading their wings and picking the fruit from where it is most ripe. A break-down of the model would be as follows:

1. A brand (i.e. Peperami) puts a brief up on the Idea Bounty site, looking for the best solution to a brief. They offer a Bounty in return for the best Idea.
2. The brand selects the best Idea and then approaches either a pre-selected production partner (in the case of Unilever, Smartworks) or the best suited agency to execute the Idea after it has been chosen.

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As you can imagine, this has stirred up quite a controversial conversation - there is a large amount of resistance out there, especially from agencies that feel very threatened by the shift toward crowdsourcing. The Peperami brand campaigns centre around a character called "The Animal", which was created by creative agency, Lowe. They had previously held the Peperami account since 1993.

A small, innovative "New Media" agency takes the account from old player - not exactly revolutionary, but the gear shift in methodology to crowdsourcing is.

By the way, its $10,000 for the best Pepperami idea, so if you have the yen to contemplate salami schticks......

So kudos to Quirk and Headshift - this is what validation looks like. But its not revolution, its evolution and will continue - I like Euan Semple's point:

People have always needed help on how to best run businesses taking into account the prevailing social and technological environments and that is all we are doing now. Not a movement, not a fad, not a revolution. Just the ongoing evolution of how to do stuff well given the tools currently at our disposal.

It's Lean Operations, Jim - just not as we know it..............