Sparked!

Last night, a little venue called Spark was held.
The notion was to connect really smart people – who are down-to-earth good leaders in high-tech – to learn from our firm the latest on transforming business and marketing models, and meet one another to exchange, interact, engage with one another. We barely mentioned the name of our firm and we never talked about us (for which we were critiqued, mind you) because that wasn’t at all the point.
It was fun. Really fun.
It was brainy. This mix of birkenstock-wearing engineering brainiacs, entrepreneurs of one size and another, and unbelievable marketing and product champions of high-tech firms together in one room. Separate tables but one room.
The decibel level was high.
And people are emailing today about ideas. Real ideas. Ideas that could create longer-term value.
Things like ‘social influence on content. I think a firm like yours would do well to try and differentiate where the “wisdom of the masses” makes sense and doesn’t. I’m not convinced this works in all circumstances.” and “developer models seems the critical new piece to avoid the dinosaur fate of big behemoth software companies”, and “There’s at least a $200M idea germinating!”, and “nobody is really talking about making the Knowledge Worker more productive. If we learned one thing from Drucker it’s that making the knowledge worker more productive is the key to making firms more productive in an idea economy. This is where I’ve been thinking as it relates to business critical communications and productivity.” All good sparks.
Related to one section of what we advocated last night, as if we needed more proof: Google announced today several services that draw on contributions from users to help identify popular Web sites. Our point: Social networks choose what’s important and groups form opinions. Not vendors, or their PR agencies. The power just moved from vendors and what do they need to do next to be effective consumer marketers is the question.