| Main centres: | 1-3 business days |
| Regional areas: | 3-4 business days |
| Remote areas: | 3-5 business days |
The challenges facing global businesses and the people who lead them
are now, more than ever, intertwined in the direct empowerment and
involvement of customers and stakeholders. The World Wide Web—
described by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as “an interactive sea of shared
knowledge…made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard,
believe or have figured out”—has dramatically accelerated the shift to
consumer-driven markets. For millennia, power has rested with those
resources: first with land, then capital, and most recently, information.
In a socially connected marketplace, shared knowledge is now emerging
as the ultimate resource. Information wants to be free, and in these
new markets it is: free of constraints on place, free of control on content,
and free of restrictive access on consumption
mation, thereby reducing the opportunities for marketplace exploitation—whether
by charging more than a competing supplier for otherwise identical goods and services
or charging anything at all for products that simply don’t work. Sunlight is a powerful
disinfectant, and the collective knowledge that powers the Social Web is the sunlight that
shines in these new connected marketplaces. The Social Web dramatically levels the playing
field by making information plentiful, just as it also levels businesses and organizations
that operate on the principles of making information scarce.
The Social Web exposes the good, the bad, and the ugly, simultaneously raising up
what works and putting down what doesn’t without regard for the interests of any specific
party. Web 2.0 technologies—expressed through social CRM, vendor relationship management,
collective ideation, customer-driven support forums, and communities where
participants engage in all forms of social discourse—act together to equalize the market
positions of suppliers, manufacturers, business and organizational leaders, customers and
stakeholders. To again quote Sir Tim Berners-Lee, “If misunderstandings are the cause
of many of the world’s woes, then (we can) work them out in cyberspace.
