Web Simple

Eric Schmidt’s talk at the Washington Ideas Forum last week was chock-full of interesting ideas. A couple of the money quotes:

“Washington is an incumbent protection machine”
“Technology is fundamentally disruptive.”
“People are always shocked at how real disruption occurs and how much change can occur through empowerment.”
“The first message about human nature is that human nature is overwhelmingly positive.”
“Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it”

See more Ericisms on The Register.

Schmidt said that technology can “completely change the way government works,” and seemed to want to change government to something more transparent, more populist, and more connected to what people want.

“I would say the average American doesn’t realize how much the laws are written by lobbyists,” Schmidt replied to the interviewer’s question about the government-people disconnect. It’s “shocking,” Google’s CEO continued, “now having spent a fair amount of time inside the system, how the system actually works. And it’s obvious that if the system is organized around incumbencies writing the laws, the incumbencies will benefit from the laws that are written.”

So what does Google, an incumbent organization with a strong lobbying presence, want to do? Here’s one idea:

We’re at a point now in technology where we really can change the entire political discourse if we want to. Typical example would be that everybody here has a mobile phone. In fact, you have more than one. The fact of the matter is that in Washington, and I’ve been part of this for years, people write lots of reports about things. But they never test them. But with the mobile phone you could just ask. You could measure everything. And you might be surprised at to what people actually do versus what they say they do—one of the first rules of the Internet. So it seems to me that you could completely change the way that government works and the way the discussion works.

I like the idea of actually testing stuff in the real world, vice relying on thinktank papers. But I’m not sure what he actually means. Last time I checked, members of Congress only wanted to use their cellphones to collect voter’s cell numbers in order to SMSpam them.

Or, as The Atlantic parsed Schmidt’s statements, “Mobile phones and personal technology, for example, could be used to record the bills that members of Congress actually read and then determine what stimulus funds were successfully spent.

The Google message seems to be that putting technology into the hands of more people is “disruptive” to the current (corrupt) political process, and Google is part of the social solution.

Ars Technica rightly points out that “To a degree unique among communications enterprises, Google represents itself and what it does as part of a process of nation building. To some extent, it can pull this off because the company is relatively new; it does not reside in the tainted auto or financial services sectors. And so Google can claim to stand outside outside politics, offering business tools and a philosophy that could guide America back towards redemption.”

You can watch the video here.

More

A client in the financial services sector recently asked me for my thoughts on how trends in social media will affect the way their sales force engages and closes a deal with a new customer.  After pondering the question, I offered the following scenario:

It is just as likely the customer-agent meeting will take place at a local coffee house as a traditional office. The potential customer will have done some comparative shopping of products, looked at comments or recommendations your current customers or competitors have posted on the web, and will have searched the virtual fingerprint of the agent via LinkedIn, Facebook,  Google, etc.

Sitting down to a fully-personalized beverage (I get to have it exactly as I want it, all life should be that way!), the customer will be connected to the internet via a handheld device and able to confirm, refute or clarify their own info, and the inputs or comments from the agent, within moments of the need to do so. The customer may even provide a running commentary about the meeting live to friends and family—via Twitter, Foursquare or Facebook—or record it in a public forum like Yelp.

Bottom-line: the engagement will be on neutral turf; the customer will be armed with information that may or may not be your messaging; and, the customer’s take-aways from the encounter have the potential to be shared with an un-calculable audience in seconds. (more…)

More