web 2.0 vs management 1.0

Today I went to the Internet World conference at Earls Court which was free but pretty awful on a number of levels. It was atrociously badly organised, the stall holders were generally pretty useless and the presentations were just plain poor. All except one guy. Dorian Harris from skoosh

I'd settled into a seat in the Web 2.0 area and was basically killing time until lunch. I almost ditched his speech because I'd already sat through 2 poor talks introducing me to the concept of social networking (use it to network... ooo...) and being told how wonderful BT something or other was. The next session was described as "5 ways to make your site 2.0" and if I hadn't had a seat I'd have given up. A guy I'd seen loitering around the other talks shuffles up to the front of the area, he's wearing jeans and a non branded tshirt and has a messy pony tail. Then he switches the laptop and the projector off.

No presentation.

He stood there with a scruffy bit of paper and a bottle of water, pacing up and down and gave one of the best talks I've ever heard.

He spoke of the fact that a website is an extension of a company, there's no point being web 2.0 if you are still on management 1.0, there's no point asking other people to talk if you're not prepared to listen. You need trust; trust between employees and management, trust between customers and sellers, readers and bloggers, search engines and sites, technical and marketing. The trust has to go both ways and if you can't do that, then there's no point trying to be 2.0.

He concluded by apologising that he didn't actually have the advertised 5 points, that as he'd been writing the talk he realised that it just didn't make sense to then give 5 easy steps. There are rarely "4 quick ways to create a marvel", that sort of thing trivialises the issues and stops you thinking about *why* you want to do something.

It was a 20 minute talk in a crappy little theatre set up in the middle of a noisy exhibition hall with no flashy slides and an awful microphone setup and there were people standing 5 deep around the edges trying to hear him. It was wonderful.