Headshift Acquired By Dachis Group

The Dachis Group, headed by ex-Razorfish man Jeffery Dachis, has bought up the London based social media company Headshift. This deal has shaken the social computing world.

The Twitter comments were flurrying all day yesterday: @amayfield summed it up best:

"Headshift/Dachis massively significant. Not marketing, not just an agency takeover - a new sector shaping up: social business" @amayfield

Let's not underestimate the importance of this deal. This deal is saying that businesses are now going to have to have social computing as the major component of the way in which their business operates.

When the rest of the world has been faltering Headshift have had their best quarters at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. But what is next? Co-founder Lee Bryant has posted on Headshift's blog:

"We are ready to move beyond the experimental phase to create real business transformation. Leaving behind the niche world of enterprise 2.0, we are ready to work with businesses at a senior level to run change programmes aimed at bringing their processes, internal IT and communications into the Twenty-First Century. It has never been cheaper or easier to collaborate online. It has never been easier to harness people power to drive business performance. It has never been easier to engage with customers and business partners. Yet, as we know, most companies have come to accept an overly bureaucratic, process-heavy high-cost model of doing business as the norm. They need credible partners who can operate across technology, organisational design and business analysis to help meet this challenge, not just evangelists or technology vendors. That's our role." Lee Bryant, Headshift Co-founder

Coincidently McKinsey Quarterly have published 'How companies are benefiting from Web 2.0: McKinsey Global Survey Results'. In it they state:

"The heaviest users of Web 2.0 applications are also enjoying benefits such as increased knowledge sharing and more effective marketing. These benefits often have a measurable effect on the business." McKinsey Quarterly

McKinsey then go on to say:

"According to our research, the 20 percent of users reporting the greatest satisfaction received 80 percent of the benefits. Drilling a bit deeper, we found that this 20 percent included 68 percent of the companies reporting the highest adoption rates for a range of Web 2.0 tools, 58 percent of the companies where use by employees was most widespread, and 82 percent of the respondents who claimed the highest levels of satisfaction from Web 2.0 use at their companies." McKinsey Quarterly

Now that McKinsey taking this seriously then so will most big businesses.  In fact the report says that "despite the current recession, respondents overwhelmingly say that they will continue to invest in Web 2.0."

I would like to offer my congratulations to all the Headshifters I got to know during the 18 months of PwC and Headshift working together. I know that a lot of work would have gone into this and I know that there was a lot of hard work in the years running up to the deal. This is an exciting time for not only Headshift but for social computing and business as a whole. I'm looking forward to see what changes we will see in the next 18 months of this fast moving social world of business.

Blue Skies Ahead? - View from Headshift's office by Headshift's Lars Ploughman

Reboot Britain 2009

Reboot Britain saw a 700 strong bunch of social media crew congregate in Institute of Electrical Engineers on Monday 6th July 2009. Organised by NESTA the idea was to see how social computing can be used to reboot the British economy. As the sessions were running concurrently Nick and I decided to split up for most of the day's events in order to take in as much as possible. Reboot Britain Through The Medium Of LEGO! It was very much a politically themed event with the Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt stating his case for the Conservative party being a political party which is more in favour of decentralising which is what this stuff is all about - it helps small companies, voluntary organisations etc. He argued that government expenditure of over £25k should be transparent on the web. When the whole expenses thing broke out I tweeted (as I am sure many others did to) that we should have a real-time feed of all expenses that are being filed. This would have to bring about more "bang for your buck". I floated in and out of a few things at the start with people telling me nothing new mostly based around why working collaboratively is such a great idea. There was a session on banking where Kris Jenkins from Bullion Vault sold his company quite well. It allows people to buy gold which is stored in some Swiss warehouse and which holds its value pretty strongly. I thought it was an interesting model. I only caught the end of Mick Fealty aka Slugger O'Toole's chairing of The Stalemate and thought he did a great job of collecting four very intricate questions and then having his panel answer them in under five minutes. That was one of the most impressive things for me all morning. There was a social LEGO stall in the coffee area. A lady beside me, Laura Hyde from Chain Reaction, explained that the idea was to get people to make things out of LEGO that we think would help reboot Britain. This was collaboration on many different levels. The lunch was amazing. It was good to see Jeremy Gould who I met once before and have since got to know him much better via his online presence. I met Jeremy when he was nearing the end of his tether in Whitehall so when Tim Davies delivered his 50 Small Hurdles to Online Engagement in Government it was funny to see Jeremy exclaim "Why didn't I do this a year ago?".  (Check out more at http://www.interactivecharter.org.) I felt during the Interactive Charter session that there is a definite "them and us" mentality when it comes to this stuff. The guffaws of incredulity of the other side just not getting it and being so far behind. To be honest it reminded me of the mentality of Northern Ireland politics. In order for anyone to progress you must find the common ground with your opposition. Then you have to build on that. I think that there are too many in this area of the webby world that are unsympathetic to the "misgivings" of the other side. That for me needs to be addressed as much as "them not getting it".That shirt is clashing real bad with your shoes A big problem with the event was the technological infrastructure - or lack of. The wifi was very flaky but it wasn't just the attendees that were suffering, Lee Bryant had to deliver his entire presentation without slides due to the "entire building" requiring a reboot. Lee was urging us to build our own infrastructures and was particularly critical of the government.  They need to focus on doing more with less - fund smaller innovative projects rather than throwing money away on projects with the companies they outsourced to then turning the problem back on the government. A comment I particularly loved around call centres being a system where companies pay a bunch of people a whole load of money for to get your customers to actively hate you. Howard Rheingold was the highlight of the event for me. He delivered a bunch of info which I tweeted. Here's a better synopsis:

• We have to go beyond skills and focus on literacies. It's not enough having the equipment, it's knowing what to do with it. "We have to be a detective these days" he said. Funny but a coder told me that back in 2000 when I was dealing with the UNSUBSCRIBES of the Spice Girls' mailing list.
• RSS and Twitter are not a queue they are a flow. I have been telling people that you have to see Twitter as a rainfall and it's up to you to look at the raindrops.
• Social capital as "knowing how to get things done without going through official channels."
• If you don't take the risk of failure you won't be able to achieve things.
• You can download HR's socialmediaclassroom.com for free.
• YouTube & Digg = http://www.youbama.com/ - a product of a student of @hrheingold
• "Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him."Ernest Hemingway, 1954 Read Rheingold's post on Crap Detection 101
• Crowdsourcing the filter is worth looking at if you want to filter out the crap.
• Schools need to rethink their structures and ways of working. There is no backrow in a circle - this was tweeted quite heavily.
• Schools are places where we park our kids when we go to work.
• One of Rheingold's instructions was that only 3 kids were allowed to take notes on the wiki. The rest had to add after the lesson. Nice.
• Another of Rheingold's instructions to his classes was "5 of you can take notes on laptops but if a 6th laptop opens then all of you must close your laptops." This enhances collaboration from the outset.
• Can't help but think that these kids are going to be so frustrated when they hit the "real world" of business.
• HR's shoes are clashing with his shirt real bad :'( Nice belt though :)

After the event a lot of us headed to the RSA for some free drinks laid on by BSCE the sponsor who then proceeded to thank people before handing the (barely working) mic over to Dan Hannan MEP. It was a long day and I didn't fancy listening to another Tory M(of any)P spouting politics, however, he was good...really good. He discarded the mic and commanded the audience like a young Christy Moore did as Mick Fealty put it. Hannan explained with great passion that it's so easy for us now to buy a car on eBay yet to get a driver's licence on the web is practically an impossibility. It's not that the government is any less crap than it used to be, they are operating at the same crapness. It's just that we as a world have moved on but they have stayed still. And it's not just Labour and the Tories that needs to step up to this plate. It's all parties. "Do you know which political party gets the most hits on the web? The BNP!" Sobering end to the day.

Handy Links

• Nick's Review of Reboot Britain
• Reboot Britain schedule
• Google's Blog Search for Reboot Britain
• Flickr's tagged photos of rebootbritain
• Horward Rheingold's mentions in Twitter for Reboot Britain
• List of attendees ordered by first name by Tebbo