Acceptance.
Browsing through my RSS feeds the other day and spotted this press release:
RBC Direct Investing – the online trading arm of Royal Bank of Canada – is tapping social media with the introduction of a “community” that will provide investors with access to blogs and discussion forums that are relevant to their trading strategies.
It’s pretty obvious to everyone in the industry that blogs (and online social software tools generally) are a relevant part of the financial services landscape. It seems a long long long time ago when in 2004 we started experimenting with internal blogs at DrKW. Let’s just say that this initiative – led by JP and Malcolm and the other thought leaders we had in our IT department – and championed by yours truly on the ‘front office’ side was met with… well let’s just say some mild scepticism. But to be fair, we were however allowed to continue our experiments, indeed I’m pretty sure that Rod was the first equity analyst from a mainstream sell-side firm to publish a public blog. Most of our competitors were stuck somewhere between anger and denial.
The real take-away however isn’t – “I told you so” (but I did!) 
– but how fast things (attitudes) actually changed. The world is accelerating. Leaders are losing the option of “letting their succesor deal with uncomfortable change…”
