Digital transformations

Objective

For too many ‘the web’ began as and remains an electronic billboard – slightly more sophisticated, but essentially static and unidirectional. There are very few – notable well-known exceptions are perhaps Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Twitter – which have really unlocked the power of the web to make it dynamic and interactive. Despite its power and ubiquity, many use Google, for example, as an accelerated ‘look-up’ directory, and even though YouTube has democratised the power to broadcast it remains essentially one-way.

The marketing opportunity presented by the web is to find, engage and interact with customers in wholly new ways, to change the customer’s place and role in business structure and, perhaps most of all, to transform marketing mindsets so that customers are no longer seen as being on the receiving end of communications.

A paradigm shift is taking place in the use of media technology (see table overleaf).

Your objective is to recognise this paradigm shift for what it is – a fundamental rebalancing of relationships between producers and consumers.

Context

The world is now divided into digital natives and digital immigrants:¹

• digital native – anyone born in the era of mobile digital media (iPods, MP3s), unlikely to be older than 21;
• digital immigrant – everyone else.

Such a bold distinction – insightfully radical to some, wilfully simplistic to others – describes a major cultural, behavioural and attitudinal shift. It depicts a wholesale generational shift in the way consumers expect to receive and transact information and entertainment. With it comes a paradigm shift in who controls and has access to data, and who understands and uses enabling technologies.

As the number and power of digital natives grows, many organisations will be forced to respond to this generational change with teams most likely largely made up of digital immigrants. This does, or will, require organisations to undertake major educational programmes to learn about new technologies and new consumer behaviours.

Quite simply, you need to know who your digital immigrants and digital natives are, and to shape your response to this paradigm change by being realistic about where your overall team sits on the native–immigrant spectrum.

Challenge

The biggest single challenge you face is to get your team to confront change. You have to find ways of enabling them to face the enormity of the paradigm shift being experienced.

One approach is to present a series of change facts. For example:

• the number of years it took for TV to reach an audience of 50 million was 38 – for Facebook it was 2;
• the top 10 jobs advertised in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004;
• the number of Google searches is now 1 billion per month and 15 per cent have still never been made before;
• the amount of information created in a year now reaches 1.8 zettabytes (= 10²¹), more than in the previous 5000 years put together;
• on average each person in the USA tweets three times per minute; and
• the number of internet devices was 1000 in 1984 – and is forecast to reach 15 billion by 2015.

What these facts highlight is both the scale and the rate of change. You have to stress how the change facing your organisation is big and fast.

Success

In the face of a sea change, you must be bold enough to change the terms of debate within your team. You must adopt an interrogative style, demanding answers to a whole new set of questions.

As with any paradigm shift, your role is to embrace it, not hope it will go away – to become an active insider and not remain a passive outsider. No leader can expect to have the answers to all the questions, but you can make sure the questioning happens.

Pitfalls

The risk lies in the leaders who think changes don’t affect them, their teams or their organisations. Those who stand in the face of such a shift may find themselves outflanked. Consider for example:

• Which music providers adopted file-sharing as an opportunity rather than a threat when it emerged?
• Which 24-hour news organisations planned for speedier news delivery to be available via Twitter?

These two examples are real lessons about change defeating complacency. Today you must be prepared to confront the uncomfortable and sometimes downright scary. Telltale signs of resistance are:

• the leader who defends the status quo on the basis of tradition – tradition is, I am afraid, the refuge of the complacent;
• the leader who doesn’t use social media – how can you understand the way digital natives live?;
• the leader who sees new media as a continuation of producer-led, control-based communication – failure to understand the power of ‘user-generated’ communication betrays a lack of insight into the changed balance of power.

Many leaders can’t be digital natives – but they can admit their existence and ensure that their insights are valued.

Leaders’ checklist

• Recognise that the digital era represents a paradigm shift – everything is up for grabs.
• Understand the profound difference between digital natives and digital immigrants.
• Help your team to realise that if they are over 21 they are likely to be digital immigrants and that they need to learn from the perspective of digital natives.
• Accept that you will need to lead a process of tough interrogation of received assumptions.
• Appreciate that today’s scale and rate of change are unprecedented, and that the nature of change itself is changing.
• Consider – given the scale of change – identifying digital champions in your team.
• Remember that many insights into the nature of change will come from organisations you do not recognise as competitors or partners.