When I see things like Matt Harding’s video of him dancing around the world it makes me think ‘Wow. How on earth did he think of doing that and how could something similar be applied to the companies I work with to help them reach out to new customers?’ After all, he has over five million hits on YouTube alone for the video; now add in Google videos, Yahoo, MySpace… that’s a lot of eyeballs.

However, my experience in general of companies adopting Web 2.0 has not been positive. Most are caught up in a world in which they have control over what is released about them and their services. Like a despotic government controlling what the press can say, modern service companies that present themselves as the ideal partner, exciting, innovative and flexible – all recoil in horror when presented with some ideas for reaching customers that go beyond the norm.

So everyone is working on creating corporate blogs? Well, my experience is that the first thing people are concerned about is the uncontrollable nature of the blog environment. What if the reader comments say something negative about us? What if the competition starts making a point of commenting? What if the chief executive can’t spell – shouldn’t we run everything through three levels of editing first to check grammar and adherence to the corporate line first?

And what about other interactive environments such as Flickr, MySpace, or YouTube? I recently arranged for punk legends Buzzcocks to play a 1977-2007 celebration gig at the University of London. They agreed to give a talk in the theatre pre-gig on the relevance of punk and youth culture in 2007. Now, as Buzzcocks were probably the first band to create their own label – and therefore the creators of the indie movement – I thought the connection with bands of today using MySpace to usurp the record labels was so strong that a corporate sponsor wanting to reach a youth audience would be easy to find. However, it proved harder than I thought – all the companies I have good connections to thought I was nuts to suggest that they should sponsor a rock concert. So although I had the band on board with the idea, I couldn’t go ahead with it. No points for forward thinking and the potential advantage of being seen in front of 1,200 of the best and brightest young people in London then.

One of my own companies is using YouTube in an interesting way, but then that is because I gave them the idea and I don’t immediately benefit from giving away my ideas to them, apart from them hopefully doing better as a result! Take a look here.

I have discussed the idea of using YouTube with a number of the outsourcing service providers. I thought that it would be a great way to present a young and funky (hey, this is Web 2.0!) and global image – just what many of them are striving for. The problem I kept hitting was a fear of people uploading spoof videos that might reflect negatively on the brand. Oh well, whatever happened to the old adman’s saying (apologies to Oscar Wilde) that “all publicity is good publicity?” Is the fear of talking about outsourcing still so powerful that companies would rather lurk in the shadows than enter a brave new world?