As our business,
social and domestic lives increasingly overlap such purely personal questions
may also have implications on our professional lives in Selling .
'Legislation will
always be the tortoise to technology's hare'
warns IT
and media law specialist Sarah Needham at International Law Firm Taylor Wessing
in the Monday March 12 edition of Metro newspaper I picked up at Marylebone Station
, London. (Metro claims to be the world's most popular free newspaper.)
The
instant hurly burly of social networking in business through LinkedIn ,
Facebook and Twitter along with CRM data at the click of a mouse often prevents
Sellers and Buyers in business to business ( b2b )from pondering much on the
future.
The
pressures of survival in recession and the thirst for short term metrics of
sales management and demands for near instant response to client requests has
similarly distracted our thoughts away from the longer term implications of
Social media, CRM and Cloud computing.
Some unintended consequences of this ‘denial’
are now becoming apparent.
Consider for a moment some aspects about our personal digital assets and we may well see
some parallels for our business.
With the
emergence of cloud computing - the
storage of computing has moved from a local server to a network of remote
servers on the internet.. Such images , songs, movies, login, social network
details and on-line banking are all part of this new digital property.
Sarah Needham
cautions in the London Metro "
control what is publicly available on line during your lifetime- don't wait for
your executors or anyone else to sort out your public profile out after
death".
" Digital assets could be used 'in an
inappropriate and unexpected way' she warns.
"Always check site terms and conditions for
details of how your content will be used and don't wait for the state to
introduce protective legislation”
Here are
some statistics on digital assets quoted in the Metro article : source
Rackspace and Remember a Charity.
1. 80% of Britons own digital assets
2. Britons have at least £ 2.3
billion in digital assets
3. 3 out of four people say their
digital music and photo collections are strong sentimental value
4. 24% of Britons estimate they have
£ 200 or more worth of music ,photos and video stored on line
5. One in ten people has left their
internet passwords in their will or are planning to do so
6. 3 out of ten say they expect to
store all their music online by 2020
7. 1 in 4 says they will no longer
print photos by 2010 instead sorting them on line.
How
might/does this topic of digital assets impact sales management and selling?
Here are
some questions and thoughts going on in my mind at the moment.
For many of the delegates (managers and sales
executives) I meet on my courses I observe that the digital spaces they work in
, cross over. The lines between business, social and domestic life are more
blurred.
It is increasingly occurring that people’s personally
owned devices - Smart phones, Blackberries, I pads PCs.... have far superior
specifications than company owned PCs and mobiles. Since speed and performance
is so often the priority of the day, their personally owned devices are used in
preference.
Personal
and business digital data are assets that have a value and are a kind of
property.
1. How does legislation like the
Data Protection Act apply to data in the social media space in B2B?
Many
salespeople have contact lists on their personal LinkedIn, Twitter
with
information about their clients and digital conversations.
2. Does it make any difference that
the data is held on a personally owned device/ software rather than one owned
by the employer ?
3. If your address book and contacts
in your personally owned Microsoft
Outlook has information on Clients who does this data belong to if the software
was bought by the salesperson but holds client details of your employer?
4. Who owns the data on you on your
profile on in Linked In?
5. Who owns the data on Linked In group forums
you belong to?
6. Who owns any video clips you
create to demonstrate your products and services that you have filmed on your
smart phone for business?
7.
Who owns business related videos you have
downloaded?
We have now
become video reporters with the smart phone.
8. Who 'owns' your twitter profile ?
9. Who 'owns' your copy and content
on your work blog?
10. If your CRM is stored on the
'Cloud' who owns these digital assets? ( let alone security concerns you or your clients may have)
I guess there are many more and even better questions we should be considering.
I would welcome comments and advice from
sharers of this blog. Please add your comments.
Of course in the original story
of the tortoise and the hare we should remember the tortoise did eventually win the race.
Will the digital tortoise win this digital race?
Taylor Wessing
Sarah Needham
Thank you for an informative blog post! Figure out the
ReplyDeleteDigital Asset