There's going to be a lot of posts this year about Twitter. Here's an early contender for the best of that particular bunch by Venessa Miemis who deals much better than I could with the realisation that Twitter is really really important.
And, if I was talking about me personally, I'd have to agree. 2009 will always be the year that I got Twitter and Twitter got me. I'm smitten and can't imagine life without it.
But, I'm guessing that, like me, you have to spend a good deal of your time in the offline world working with offline people. People who aren't on Twitter. People who don't read blogs. For them, 2009 was the year of The Google.
I've been lucky enough to take part in a number of strategic planning events this year, as manager (before I quit my job - yay!), as board member and as facilitator. Strategic Planning events are often pretty samey in the way they're organised. Participants cover forests of flipchart paper to SWOT PESTs while wearing Six Hats and drinking indifferent coffee.
This year, unusually, the conclusions were similar too. People have finally noticed that The Google is affecting everybody. They realise that there isn't a single business in the private, public or non-profit sector that won't be affected by The Google. Everybody's terrified.
This might seem like old news to you. But I'm talking about people whose only connection to the web is via Microsoft Outlook. People who pay underlings to Google stuff for them and book train tickets. These are people whose idea of hi-tech is to send amusing email attachments to each other. All of them can see that the Google is going to affect them or wipe them out - possibly without even trying.
In one of these strategic planning days I took part in, The Google was in every box of the the PEST and the SWOT. And these aren't IT businesses. These are organisations from right across the board. Even a tech-savvy reader like you would struggle to see the immediate effect that The Google might have on them. But they can feel it. (This is one of the silly things about strategic planning days - the findings are often code for 'stuff we probably should have realised last year'.)
Of course, they don't really mean Google Google. Just like we 'Google' things on the web when we actually mean 'search', these people mean disintermediation, obsolescence and displacement.
And they're not just afraid of the bad stuff. They're also beginning to realise that they have whole departments of people they don't need any more. And that those long-term contracts with suppliers which used to feel canny, now feel like handcuffs. They realise they're going to have to face all this and fire some of their friends and restructure whole organisations. Some of them realise that paying people to Google stuff for them won(t wash for much longer. They're not looking forward to any of this. (Yes! We can save hundreds of thousands of pounds a year! Oh, sh. . .)
Because of Malcolm Gladwell, everybody's familiar with the idea of the Tipping Point. So I won't carry on overegging the lily any more.
But 2009 was the year of The Google. For every company and organisation in every area of public, private and not-for-profit enterprise.
Even those in education and training.
2010's going to be fun.
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