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What Business Can Learn From Two Obama Campaigns

"Evidence suggests open institutions will perform better--and in many cases they already are."

The Atlantic published a conversation between Internet Guy Clay Shirky and author Don Tapscott about the difference between the soaring 2008 Obama campaign and the, er, less-so 2012 campaign—a difference he had characterized as the difference between "Yes We Can" and "We Know You."


It's really a placeholder for different approaches to the increasingly invasive (or informed, to choose a word with a less negative connotation) information age.

Interestingly, they got into what business can learn from the differences. Said Tapscott: "Evidence suggests open institutions will perform better—and in many cases they already are."

The much bigger opportunity for businesses is to go beyond targeting customers to engaging with them: from customer centricity to customer co-creation; from focusing on customers to co-innovating with them; from mass customization to mass collaboration.

Companies need to be transparent to build trust and engagement. They need to launch and participate in customer communities and encourage customers to self-organize. And they need to craft business models that enable customers to share in the creation of value. If Threadless.com can do it, anyone can.

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Check out the full interview for more.

Photo via Flickr (cc) user Neal Jennings.

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