THE DREAM IN ACTION

Bottom up is the way to grow anything these days. Construction workers have know this for…well, forever. Surprisingly the idea of bottom up growth is just getting around to startups, politicians, and corporate America… probably in that order.

37 Signals

When Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals was first building his company he was inspired by chefs. He shared at a talk recently that he found it interesting that even though chefs have all these cooking secrets they don’t hesitate to share them. Chefs write books about their secrets and host TV shows giving their secrets away. Their “secrets” became their product! This appeals to any individual. Myself for example, with no cooking stills at all (my gf can attest), am very intrigued by some cooking shows just because they are teaching me to be the expert. In reality what they are doing is giving me the power of information. This power of information is what reaches and appeals everyone. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t want the power of information. What Jason discovered is that empowering people with information can create a huge following or audience and that audience becomes a few things:

• a powerful marketing team
• a powerful support team
• a very powerful and lucrative customer base

This realization has helped 37 Signals to become a very profitable software company with a huge audience on its chosen communication platform, their blog Signal vs. Noise. This ground up approach, starting not with big name software publications or traditional “respected” media, but with their own blog that anyone could subscribe to proved to be hugely successful.

Building Obama

The next, perfect, example of embracing bottom up growth is the completely unexpected win of PE Barack Obama in the presidential election 2 weeks ago. There has been no shortage of coverage on how PE Obama has utilized non-traditional media to build a huge following of over “8,000 Web-based affinity groups, 750,000 active volunteers, and 1,276,000 donors“. It certainly shows that by reaching out through social media tools DIRECTLY to the people and not only through debates, press conferences, and traditional media PE Obama was able to create a loyalty to his cause maybe stronger than any in the past. He certainly was the first to use technology is such a huge way during a presidential campaign. Whether it directly affected votes I’m sure could be debated but certainly through donations his involvement and attention to this group had an enormous and undeniable effect.

As startups may have realized this trend first, as is normal in the tech world, the political world has now shifted in the realization that reaching the “common man” directly is a very powerful act. Daniel Debow, CEO of Rypple, wrote in his recent Huffington Post blog post:

I think Obama’s improbable election will be the final “evidence” point that convinces the business world that they need to understand the change that is coming to their way.

I believe this to be very true. Adapting to change is what keeps a business alive at any level and smart corporations must and will react to this shift.

GE opens up to bottom up

Just as getting into politics on this blog is something that I almost never do I’m going to comment on my employer General Electric because it has recently made moves towards embracing bottom up growth that I totally respect.

GE recently launched a site called GEreports.com. GEreports is basically a blog for GE. They cover anything from how much the company is spending on it’s revolutionary ecoimagination campaign, to posting talks from CEO Jeff Immelt (which are really awesome in person). They share recent new products from all of the different GE portfolio businesses and overall does a good job of showing the public (the bottom) what they are up to. I’m sure the growth of GEreports.com will not sky rocket right away but as large corporate blogs grow and as companies let their communications departments have a bit more freedom and openness I think that they could become very powerful communication platforms for the general public, investors, and in my case…employees.

This last move from closed to open and from top down to bottom up that is beginning in corporate America is a bit surprising to me, but very encouraging. As we grind through a very tough economic state we see a call for great regulation and disclosure from corp America. The start of blogs and other communication platforms from corporations to the public will do nothing but encourage this sort of open and honest behavior. I’m not naive enough to think that if a corporation has a blog it means they are immune to scandal. However, what it does mean is that at least someone inside the organization understands the importance of reaching to the bottom without using traditional, slow, and overly scrubbed media to inspire openness and growth.