Ok, so the effort of just keeping one blog going is proving to be a chore, so two is now out of the question.
So after my last post on the Forrester Research survey on Trust and Corporate Blogging, I got contacted by a Corporate Blogger!
I mentioned Joel Spolsky's blog Joel on Software in the post and got an email from Dan of Fog Creek Software - Joel's Company. He said thanks for mentioning Joel's blog in such a nice way, and offered me a free copy of Joel's book - "Smart and Get Things Done".
So not only is the Joel on Software blog one of the best corporate blogs around, it is also actively listening to and following up with the blogging community. A nice touch. And a good example of corporate blogging done right.
To top it all off, Joel actually signed the book on the inside cover:
"To Paul,
Be smart!
Get things done!
Eat Fruit!"
I am way ahead of you on that third one!
And to all those Marketers out there that might scratch their head and wonder how a CEO of a software development company can add anything to the Marketing world, Seth Godin called the guy a "genius". I don't think Seth throws that term around a lot.
So Joel's book is squarely on the top of my reading list. From a brief mention in a blog post, to a follow -up email, to a free book, to a review of the book I will post down the track. That's how it all works.
That's how you build trust.
There has been a bit of a flutter lately about the whole issue of Corporate Blogging. A recent post from Forrester Research on their Groundswell blog highlighted some data that showed only 16% of people trust Corporate Blogs.
Well, we arrived in San Francisco after 3000 miles of driving, site seeing, eating, more driving, picture taking, more site seeing and yes, more eating.
So we have made it to half-way on our trek across country. We're currently in North Platte - a smallish town in the center of Nebraska.
Well, we finally got on the road to San Francisco. My wife and I are moving out there for good and we left last Friday for a 12 day vacation road-trip across this great country.
There is a site called the KPI Library that lists Key Performance Indicators for a range of business areas. It's a community site of sorts so the KPI suggestions largely emanate from users (as far as I can tell).
Recency is defined by the number of days or weeks since the customer has performed the action (purchase, visit, etc.) you are profiling. The more recently a customer has engaged in an action, the more likely they are to repeat the action, especially when encouraged to repeat by some kind of promotional effort.
I downloaded and installed Chrome the other day. Chrome is the new Google browser.
I came across a site called intrade on my general web surfing the other day. Intrade is a prediction market. You register for the site and can actually 'bet' money on the outcome of certain events.
There is a long history of prediction markets for all sorts of things from sports to Hollywood movies - 'long' in the Internet sense of the word, which is 'short' in historical terms. Wikipedia has a page giving some good background details.
I navigated my way to intrade as it was mentioned on a political news site. On intrade, McCain is currently siting at about a 40% chance to win the White House while Obama is in the low 60% range. This was interesting as poll after poll puts them in a dead heat.
I looked into the intrade system a bit and it looks fine (I am no expert here but at least I understand it - there are probably some pretty smart people behind it). You buy and sell 'contracts' with other traders and the price of a contract varies between $0 and $10. Each 'contract' has an unambiguous binary outcome and is ultimately worth (at the conclusion of the event) either $0 for it not happening or $10 for it happening.
So if you buy Obama contracts at $6.10 and he wins the election, you get a payout of $10 - $6.10 = $3.90 (minus a commission - finally a Web 2.0 site with a business model!). If he loses the election you lose all your money as your contracts are worth $0.
This is the Obama chart on intrade:
So why does Obama look like a shoe-in on intrade but a lame duck in the polls? Is Obama mania getting into the heads of intrade traders? Do they long for change? Need hope? Feel higher taxes on the rich is the solution to their poor lot in life as traders? Likely none of these.
On the surface it's tempting to equate the prediction market to polling, but it's really very different. The intrade numbers aren't saying Obama is going to win in a landslide 60%/40%, all they are saying is he is most likely to beat McCain - margin unspecified (although you would think there would be a correlation between the strength of the prediction and the ultimate margin - we just don't know what that is).
So intrade traders think, given the current polls and events, Obama is still more likely to pull it off. However, if you look at the Republican v Democrat leanings (a vote that indicates preference for a party rather than an individual), support for a 'generic Democrat' is strong.
Or in other words, McCain is neck-and-neck with Obama despite strong support for a Democratic ticket, an unpopular president from the same party, an unpopular war and an economic downturn.
You would think a logical trader trading in presidential picks would give McCain better odds considering what he as overcome to be even at this late stage. Of course balancing this is Obama's huge war chest - money for political advertising - that will be unleashed in the coming weeks. Obama media saturation here we come.
Although even with that war chest, I don't think I would give Obama much over a 50% chance. He still seems over priced.
Ultimately though, no one really knows who is going to win. Prediction markets for political outcomes are just a stab in the dark as there is no set of logical sequences or historical precedents that point to one outcome or another. There is just a whole lot of future uncertainty.
It's like trying to predict the price of oil. Demand and supply can be forecast somewhat accurately, but Israel bombing Iran's nuclear facilities with no UN backing can not.
I'd like to see the political prediction markets on intrade react when Obama reveals he is the illegitimate child of a certain elderly Arizona senator. It could be true...
Posting has been light over the last few weeks as we are still gearing up for our move to the West Coast. It's amazing how many things you have to do to shift 2 people, an apartment and a cat (the cat being the most difficult!).
I just came across this cool widget from a new site called youcalc. It's an Olympic medal count you can sort by total, per capita or per some GDP figure.
(if it's not working for you, you can look at it here)
When you look at total medals won by population (per captia), the list changes drastically - New Zealand is in the top 10!.
It's tempting to say the per captia list reflects the real success as medal total 'normalized' by population puts both large and small countries on an equal footing. It's hard to compete on absolute basis when China has 1.5 billion people to pull from!
It's tempting, but also wrong. Population size is a factor only if you have the investment to make it one. India won almost nothing yet is the second most populous country in the world. They invest almost zero in Olympic sports, and it shows.
Many of the small countries on top of the list (Jamaica for instance) have also benefited from athletes attending American schools where investment in track and field is strong. Their success reflects this investment.
I'd love to see a list adjusted for both population and investment in Olympic sports. That would equalize countries a lot more. Although I have a hunch a fully 'normalized' medal table based on per capita Olympic spend in USDs adjusted for athletes that train outside of their country of origin probably won't catch on. Not much of a ring to it.
I came across a fun site today that demonstrates just how much we rely on the ubiquitousness of the click to navigate the online world.
www.dontclick.it
It's actually a piece of art submitted as part of a Masters Degree in Communications by a German student, Alex Frank.
It is both an incredibly annoying yet interesting experience all at once.
It's like having no electricity in a black-out - you don't realize how much you depend on something until you lose it.
Thinking about the excessive amount of TV advertising I've consumed while watching the Olympics lately, I was beginning to wonder if new Marketing trends were just a bunch of hot-air.
So I pulled the following data from Google Trends.
This is a chart of the search and news volume for three phrases 'social media', 'traditional media' and 'TV advertising' - search volume is on the top, news volume is on the bottom.
Sometime around the middle of 2007 you can see 'social media' take off as a phrase.
Of course, this is old news to Social Media advocates who have been living and breathing this trend for the past year and a half. But what's interesting is the downward trend for the 'TV advertising' line.
Either Jo Public has stopped searching for generic 'TV Advertising', or Marketing practitioners have lost interest. I think it's probably a bit of both.
Watching the Olympics you wouldn't have guessed.
I remember working for the arm of a car financing company who wanted to understand the entire car-buying process from start to finish.
After weeks of research it become abundantly clear that initial impressions and interest generated by advertising were trumped by personal search, peer recommendations and plain old stubborn loyalty to the brand you already had.
Which makes it even more surprising that most car advertising is deal focused - treating the process as if it's an impulse buy. Sort of like picking up a six-pack of coke at the local supermarket in a 2-for-1 promo.
This deal-focused ad spam mentality has to be sustained by some type of industry insider myth - it just doesn't seem like it should work. And it wouldn't surprise me if it doesn't given the ridiculously inaccurate ways companies tend to measure the ROI of TV spend.
I am mentioning this now as the current oil-price woes have spurred a whole new round of deal spamming car ads that try to convince consumers something that gets 20mpg on the highway is somehow a good investment. As if being top 5 in class for 3-row SUV's with 4-cylinder engines and red bumpers is somehow a meaningful point of differentiation.
Maybe it's because I am watching the Olympics and hence more TV than normal that I am noticing this. Just like I am now noticing the spam ads from my own cable company that try and get me to buy their new Triple-Play package that somehow miraculously costs less per month than the Double-Play package I have. As I have no interest in the additional phone service, these ads are a constant reminder of how badly they are riping me off.
TV advertising is such a waste of time.
One of the things I have become increasingly interested in over the last year is UI (User Interface) design. As we develop our software product, how it looks and feels to the end user becomes an extremely important part of the process.
And as we are developing it using the latest Microsoft technology, it was interesting to read this interview with Jensen Harris - one of the lead designers for the new Office Ribbon UI in Office 2007. Here is a link to Jensen's blog post on the topic.
The actual presentation Jensen gave is a good watch. It's impressive to see all the data Microsoft collects go to use in the design process (what does it tell you about work habits in the 21st century when the most used function in Outlook is 'delete' - 14x greater than the next most used function, 'reply/send'?).
Having read and listened to the talk, here are my musings on the process:
1. There is no way - no trickery of layout, no fancy use of color palettes, no sophisticated code - that can really reduce the complexity of 250 separate functions in MS Word. The developers and designers are on a collision course with diminishing returns on simplicity. At some point, if a program becomes large enough, it becomes complicated.
2. The Ribbon UI - where all commands area accessed via a tab interface at the top of the page (see here) - is a useful innovation for the 'average' user. This seems to be partly the reason it was developed - to help more people use and utilize more functions. However, it's not necessarily an improvement for the 'power user'. It lets you master more functions, but doesn't allow significant depth of mastery - the kind of depth that allows you to completely customize your UI experience.
3. The most significant UI design conundrum is designing for both the 'average' and 'power' user.
4. Don't be afraid to give the user 2 or even 3 ways to access the same function. They will figure out the way that suits them the best. Everyone is different.
5. Don't give the user 2 or 3 ways to access EVERY function - they will come for your head. The art in UI design, like all good creative endeavors, is to know when to stop.
6. Get out of the way. Don't let the UI dominate the experience. Great UI's are like hazard lights on a car. You should never notice them until you need them. And they provide a useful function.
I don't think the Ribbon UI meets all of these challenges. It still seems bloated. But then, going back to point 1, you can't design away complexity. You can only design for it.
I'm struggling through a busy patch at the moment so posting has been light recently. My wife and I are gearing up for our move to San Fran later in the year (we currently live in NY), so there is a lot of stuff to sort out - not least of which is shifting a cat 3000 miles.
So I am taking a moment to post about something that I have been increasingly coming across - the importance of understanding 'scale'.
And by 'scale' I mean things that scale on some type of exponential curve. The Long Tail describes the scaling process inherent in the aggregation of markets for certain types of goods. The ubiquitous 80/20 rule describes the typical scaling of customer revenue. And in Clay Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody, he points out that in social interactions, these Power Laws (as they are called) are everywhere. This is a Power Law:
While Power Laws have been written about extensively, I don't think they are well understood. Mostly because, as human beings, we live in a very linear world. We're not good at understanding things that scale exponentially. Power Laws are all about extreme scaling. Mostly though feedback and multiplier effects.
A good example of this mis-understanding is the Sprint campaign that was widely criticized on blogs and social media sites. One of the criticisms leveled at it was the auto-response email you received if you tried to email the CEO (who gave out his address at the end of the TV clip). It's a fair criticism. A personal appeal from the CEO doesn't feel very personal if you get a canned response back. But it's not surprising. On the graph above, Sprint occupies a position near the steep part of the curve. It has millions of customers. The CEO can't have a conversation with each one of them.
I heard people comment that Sprint should have just hired more people to respond. And that if smaller companies can do it, why can't they? Customer numbers follow a power law - the more customers you have, the more you get, the more you spend on getting more, etc. Social media tactics - two-way conversations, dealing with customers as individuals, having tailored conversations, etc. - don't work as you climb that curve. They can't. You can't add resource to deal with those conversations at the same rate as you acquire customers because you can't add resource exponentially and stay in business.
A lot of Social Media pundits talk about the 2-way nature of conversation these days not understanding that what works for a 100 person outfit is not going to work for a company ten times larger with 1000x the customers because of the way customer numbers and resource scale. Joseph Jaffe's Delta Skelta debacle is a good example. As is the Target example.
In Jaffe's case, he's right to want to claim compensation for what happened to him, but wrong for thinking Delta can somehow treat him differently on the merits of his individual issue. He's probably one of a few 1000 people they need to deal with on a weekly basis. A simple policy for his situation is the most efficient way to deal with it. A full-blooded, tailored conversation for his individual needs is not. The fact that he got a direct response from Delta is more a reflection of his standing in the blogging community than his value to them as a customer.
Now I'm not saying that having a canned email or a standard policy letter is 'good' - in the sense that it is the best type of customer interaction. It's not. All I'm saying is that it's a realistic response to this issue of scale.
Shirky makes this same point when talking about weblogs in his book:
As is normal in a power law distribution, most writers have few readers. Such readers and writers can all pay similar amounts of attention to one another, forming relatively tight conversational clusters... As the audience grows larger, into the hundreds, the tight pattern of 'everyone connected to everyone' becomes impossible to support - conversation is still possible, but it is in a community that is much more loosely woven... Once writers start getting more attention than they can return, they are forced into a width versus depth trade-off.Essentially, as reader numbers scale exponentially, the blog writer has no hope of increasing their 'attention resource' in a similar way. You can't add attention exponentially. You don't have enough of it to start with!
I am about half way through Clay Shirky's new book, Here Comes Everybody. I had read some initial critical reviews (which I can't find the link to anymore), but I think they were misguided. It's a fascinating book about the way we organize ourselves and how the Internet has changed 'organizing'.
I'll look to write a review after I have finished it (hopefully soon), but I thought I would make a quick post about The Point.
The Point is a website for organizing group action. It's the purest form of 'Internet Organization' I have come across and is a shining example of the central tenet of Shirky's argument - it's not so much that the Internet 'brings us all closer', it's that it removes the inherent 'cost' of organizing.
There is an important lesson for Social Media in there. It's not about interrupting people's conversations or even being a part of them (brands have no purpose or right to inject themselves into private conversations), it is about using Social Media tools to mobilize (organize) customers who share your brand as a common interest.
What you organize them around is up to you - but the options are limitless and the cost negligible.
That is the real power of Social Media.
I wrote a post a while back about using visualizations as metaphors. Seth Godin recently posted about how useful he found pie-charts when compared to your average bar chart. He got a lot of flak for this as most visualization experts will tell you the opposite - that bar charts are a far superior visualization tool.
I believe Seth's point was similar to the one I was making in my first post - that sometimes a purposely overt graphic (such as a single pie with one large piece sticking out) is the best way to make a point. You could structure it as a metaphor, or it could be a simple exaggeration. Some political 'data spin' maybe?
The reason Seth thinks like this is because he is a Marketer. Marketers spend their lives (inside and outside their company) trying to convince people of things. To a marketer, a presentation that presents just the facts is pointless. Facts without an argument that in some way enhances the Marketer's agenda is a waste of time.
This is a good thing. You're paying your Marketing people to have a point of view.
To many data visualization experts though (and scientists), facts are these pure things that need to be wrapped in cotton wool and protected from opinion and false hypothesizing. Hence their dismay at the misleading pie-chart segment size error in displaying quantitative information.
The gulf here, between Marketing and most data visualization experts and BI (Business Intelligence) people, is about the size of Texas.
But you need both points of view. Marketers who get paralyzed by facts tend to do a poor job. I know too some people that will sound strange, but we're not talking about denying the existence of gravity, we're talking about challenging or changing perceived norms. If you get too caught up in why x number of people don't do y, you are never going to try and figure out how to make y work.
Likewise, show me a company run by data visualization experts. No more commentary necessary.
What you really need is a mix of both mentalities. You need enough understanding of numbers and graphs to know when to break the rules. And enough respect to know when not to.
I think Seth has a pretty good balance.
Gareth over at Brand New posted a short musing on why we need to concentrate on building Social Brands rather than executing Social Media campaigns.
I agree. And I've said it before, Social Media is not a call to inundate the web's social channels with advertising, it's a call to change the way you do business.
Why? Because the Web has changed/is changing the way people work and play. It's not simply another media medium.
Your brand/company exists in two places these days - its physical existence (where you work, the employees, the products, the infrastructure) and its digital existence (its website, search engine presence, online conversations about its products/services, customer complaints and compliments, etc.) . The digital presences needs as much care and thought as the physical one.
Imagine if a customer tried to contact you in the 'real world' and you had never thought to put in a phone line or build a door to your front office? We take these things for granted in the physical world - it's laughable to think of a company without a phone system, or indeed a front entrance!
Why do we NOT take them for granted in the digital world? Why do all companies not have blogs? Why won't some respond to online conversation? Why is it difficult to find the email address of the CEO? Why do they ignore customers trying to have fun with their brand or product?
Why? Because they are not paying enough attention to their digital presence. Not managing it properly. Not investing in it. And not using any of the tools consumers are using to help them navigate this new frontier.
As long as 'digital media' is relegated to a subset of Marketing and 'Social Media' a subset again, this will remain the norm.
Social Media is not a strategy, it's a call to manage your digital presence with as much care and thought as your physical one.
