Year: 2006

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MeshForum 2006 – Anil Dash

PICT1102.JPGAnil Dash from SixApart is speaking about blogs. First quote: “How many of you know what a blog is?” Contrary to defining blogs as a technology or platform, instead Dash described a blog as “a way to connect.”

Ratio of writers to readers in the SixApart network have changed from 1:40 to about 1:1000 for blogs that are “public facing.”

Two thirds of the users on LiveJournal are female. “A haven for those who want to communicate in a way that’s private and controlled.” On LJ, it’s more like 1:6 or 1:8 of writers to readers.

“You might read 1000 feeds…but you don’t have 1000 friends.”

“Real influence is not measured in raw numbers. Real influence is related to the number of people who you are connected to who really care about what you think.”

“The New York Times thinks they compete with the Washington Post. The New York Times is not competing with the Washington Post. The New York Times actually competes with recipes from my grandmother. The New York Times competes with information from my friends.”

“There are only a couple of different ways to connect. A person can connect at a really high level with 6-8 people, and at a moderate level with about 150 people.”

The most popular community on LJ is “Oh No They Didn’t” … a community of about 250,000 celebrity gossipwatchers. Most of those people watch this information on their “friends” page — they intersperse this information with information from their friends and family news.

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MeshForum 2006 – Robert Scoble & Shel Israel

PICT1094.JPGRobert Scoble and Shel Israel gave a little bit of background on their book Naked Conversations.

Key points: Listening…a person who starts a blog on “quilting” will be indexed in two hours.

Shel Israel tells a story about Vyew, instigated by Dennis Howlett. Vyew listened to the needs Dennis and incorporated feedback into their product within days. Outstanding.

“A startup can get instant global feedback by an audience who cares…it’s R&D on steroids.”

“One of the things that blows me a way is that during the course of a week, I have conversations with people in a dozen countries.”

“Fundamentals are just that…fundamental. But these things take time. Blogging is not the revolution — conversation is the revolution.” — Shel Israel


Q: What’s the difference between a “group” blog and an individual blog?

A: (scoble) Within Microsoft, group blogs are discussed in a committee. They are vetted and approved, they are slowed down and watered down.

A: (israel) I think group blogs are going to get more unfiltered over time. Right now, if you look at the tech sector, the only big one is TechDirt. (Scoble rebuts, that some teams within Microsoft have team blogs that are very popular.)

Q: As people blog, are the able to be more of themselves? I’m interest in the differences between who people “are” when they’re on a company blog? Are people able to be more of “who they are” when they’re on their blogs?

A: (israel) By companies allowing companies to allow middle level employess to blog, they are creating a culture that is humanizing the company. (ed. – BRAVO!). What is happening…we want to remain humans when we go to work. We want the world to know “I’m more than just the person who sits in cube #72X.”

Q: What would you do if you were going to blog about issues you were having at work with a supervisor?

A: (israel) You’d want to think about that. Yes, test the membranes of the company…but dont be stupid. When you blog, don’t do things that will prevent you from getting your next job — digial lasts forever.

A: (scoble) If you’re going to take on your boss, or take on your management, you have to know that you’re taking a risk. Have your eyes open, and that you’re taking on a culture. Go in with your eyes open and know that you’re putting your job on the line. Someone link Mark Jens broke a rule…talking about financial results, and that will get you in trouble in a public company. He poured fuel around his own feet, and lit it on fire.

Q: How do you deal with comments, especially when the comments devolve in incivility?

A: (scoble) I’m now taking the “living room” rule. If a comment is not something that I’d expect to hear in my own living room, I’ll take that comment out. I don’t want to subject my readers to that.

A: (israel) If you have a company, these kinds of negative comments are going on anyway. For me, the big education is in listening to the negative comments. Skip past the first sentence where they call you names, and go to sentence three where they get to the root of their issue. Companies that can do this inch closer to their customers, and the wisdom of crowds sets in, and companies begin to get a lot wiser.

Q: Christopher Allen asked about the “Tyranny of the Popular.” “I want to take the ‘long tail,’ and cut off the head. The ‘popular’ dominates the first twenty pages.”

A: “Aggregators of the popular like Memeorandum are like purified sugar, and you need some fiber in your life.” – Scoble

More thoughts: Howard Greenstein

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Marketers Out Of Touch With Customers

On the heels of the previous post, which has some saying “CRM is dead,” comes a very interesting article by Barney Beal. Here are some points of note from the article, quoting a recent study from the CMO council. (All stats below were sourced from Barney’s excellent report.) According to the study:

  • Two thirds of respondents said they have no formal system for tracking marketing’s role in acquiring new customers
  • Over one third don’t have a model of their “best” customer or opportunity
  • Just under a third have no reliable data on profitability of key customers
  • Nearly 50% said someone other than marketers influences the “segmentation and targeting strategy”*

Now, those points noted, there is a huge reliance on existing “CRM” systems. This, however, is frought with some problems. 33% of the respondents cited their CRM systems as their primary information source. Yet the survey found that “40% of the respondents rated their customer data systems as ‘weak’ or ‘very weak’ in timeliness and depth; availability of useful data; reports and analytics; and relevance to marketing strategies.”

The whole article is here.

* – N.B. I still despise the terms “segmentation” and “targeting” in this context. The first to me seems like it refers to tearing the customer limb from limb. The second seems to indicate a viewpoint that the customer is prey that is to be stalked and bagged like a trophy elk. But I digress.

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Customer Managed Relationships

Seth writes:

“It might be more than just semantics. Disney Destinations Marketing has a new department: Customer Managed Relationships. Here’s the quote from them that Tim shared with me, “CMR is our version of CRM – just a slight nuance regarding our philosophy that our guests invite us into their lives and ultimately manage our presence/relationship with them.”

Sounds a little bit like Haystack, doesn’t it?

Also, there’s a nice primer on CMR from CRMToday. According to them, CMR is three things:

1. An ability to rethink, to reshape your organisation and its knowledge so that it is at the disposal of your customers

2. Internet enabled management tools which customers use to get what they want

3. An ability to react to the information being generated and used by customers in order to increase profitability

Here’s a link to the primer.

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Tech Note: New Typepad Anti-spam Features Come Online

My amigo del fuego John T. Unger has some good news for Typepad users. Apparently, TypePad has released a new feature about an hour ago that now allows users to ban specific words, including URLs, to defeat spam comments and trackbacks.

This is good news. I (and I would assume many other Typepad customers) have been fighting daily battles against the overlords of spam, especially over the last two weeks or so. Another tool in the arsenal is great to have.

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Transitions, Progressive Disclosure And Progressive Trust

In looking at Dave’s site while pulling together thoughts on MeshForum, I came across his fantastic post regarding transitions in physical spaces, such as buildings. Dave:

“The experience of entering a building influences the way you feel inside the building. If the transition is too abrupt there is no feeling of arrival, and the inside of the building fails to be a sanctum.

While people are on the street, they adopt a style of “street behavior.” When they come into a house they naturally want to get rid of this street behavior and settle down completely into the more intimate spirit appropriate to a house. But it seems likely that they cannot do this unless there is a transition from one to the other which helps them to lose the street behavior. The transition must, in effect, destroy the momentum of the closedness, tension and “distance” which are appropriate to street behavior, before people can relax completely.”

Is it just me, or does this also feel similar in many ways to the idea behind progressive disclosure in interface design, or progressive trust in relationship building?

Bonus term: Intimacy Gradient

(Edited to add: I think I’ll use the word “sanctum” more often. It’s a good word, and perhaps underappreciated.)

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Links, Links, Links

“Link” is a word we all throw around a lot. A lot. Let’s go to the source on this for a minute (source: answers.com):

noun

  • A unit in a connected series of units: links of sausage; one link in a molecular chain.
  • A unit in a transportation or communications system.
  • A connecting element; a tie or bond: grandparents, our link with the past.
  • An association; a relationship: The Alumnae Association is my link to the school’s present administration.
  • A causal, parallel, or reciprocal relationship; a correlation: Researchers have detected a link between smoking and heart disease.

verb, transitive

  • To connect with or as if with a link: linked the rings to form a chain.
  • (Computer Science.) To make a hypertext link in: linked her webpage to her employer’s homepage.

verb, intransitive

  • To become connected with or as if with a link: The molecules linked to form a polymer.
  • (Computer Science.) To follow a hypertext link: With a click of the mouse, I linked to the company’s website.

Now, those are just some of the definitions that are in current usage. And they are all about connection.

chicago4
(social networking exercise, Chicago, IL, 2005)

When two things are connected, a link joins them. Take some linked items, and join them together, and all of a sudden you have a network. Dave Gray writes:

“Networks form the basis for everything, from the tiniest atom to the entire universe. Understanding networks and how they function may be one of the most important competencies of the knowledge economy.”

I agree with Dave. Which is why from Sunday-Tuesday, like Dave, I’ll also be at MeshForum. It looks like there’ll be a few other folks there, as well:

And many others, too. Here are a few links where you can learn more about MeshForum, register, or even check out the Haystack-based network we’re setting up for the event.

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Some Real Stories from New Orleans

As noted here, BrainJams New Orleans is tomorrow. A few quotes via Jerry Cashman, who has traveled down for the event.

Jerry writes: I took time on my flights and during the hours it took me to find a wireless connection to pulse the “spirit of New Orleans”, ask locals a lot of questions, and listen, listen, listen. Here are some of the quotes:

“You go BrainJams! There are so many needs in New Orleans. We will need help for at least 10 years. The help can be almost anything. However, it needs to be on things we have identified that we need help with.” — Small business owner with four food processing plans on the Louisiana gulf coast and a fleet of 10 fishing vessels.

“You mean the technology community wants to help? We got all these checks from technology companies into the American Red Cross for the first few months after Katrina. Now, they are nowhere to be found. Don’t people know thisis when we really need the help!!! We haven’t even cleaned up and the Hurricane season is just about to start again.HELP!” — New Orleans City government employee.

“This is my first time back to New Orleans after Katrina. If I known things were still this bad, I would be organizing a group like BrainJams for the Airlines industry. In fact, I will bring it up at our convention today,” — Continental Airlines executive attending an Airlines industry conference in New Orleans.

“BUSINESS SUCKS! Please help us,” — small business owner on Bourbon Street.

“We have so many technology needs it isn’t funny. For example, it would be great to have a community web site with functions like bulletin boards. For example, we still don’t know where all our former staff is after Katrina. Each hotel, such as us, posts a request for updates from our employees on our web site. But, it would be much more efficient if there was a New Orleans wide web site for that kind of information, updates on the rebuilding process (so dispersed people know about key updates – such as the Superdome reopening on September 24, 2006), etc.” — Hotel manager, Central Business District.

“Jazz Fest used to bring in a lot of tourists who’d revel in staying at one of the many Historic Hotels in New Orleans. We just haven’t seen it yet. We hope Thursday, Friday, and Saturday will be better. But, right now it is mostly locals. Could you use the web to simulcast Jazz Fest performances next year. I bet people would pay good money and the proceeds could go to the festival and to the rebuilding efforts. We need virtual events to supplement our biggest treasure and asset – our music!,” — Night club owner.

“Could you link Houston and New Orleans better electronically? They are currently housing 400,000 of the 500,000 Katrina refuges. There is no effective linkage on schools, housing, FEMA assistance, rebuilding efforts, and basic details for the residents of both cities in one simple, easy to read spot on the web. Plus, there are lot of dirty little secrets no one wants to talk about. For example, crime has gone up by 36 percent in the past three months in Houston (mostly in the neighborhoods where Katrina refugees reside). I don’t want to say there is a corelation, but it is very interesting that crime went up right when the federal assistance started to slow down or go away).” — Business owner in Houston that has involvement with three partnerships in Louisiana.

“People do not what is going on here!!!!! A girl from a club at Bourbon Street was killed two days ago because a dispute over $500. $500!!!! Guys can’t find jobs and they are killing people because they are desparate. And no one is telling the story. Why can’t you use those blog things you are talking about to get the stories out that the media won’t tell????” — New Orleans native and Bourbon Street bar patron.

Check it out here.

Bonus: Perspective from Tom Foremski

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Alternate Headline: “Local Woman Starves While Waiting For Carryout”

Great bit from Jacqueline Church: “Confessions of a DiningIn 12-Stepper“.

“[The customer service supervisor] can understand why I’m upset, he’d like to help me. He suggests that it’s probably that they’ve run out of the items I ordered. I’m not buying it. He offers that it might be that the website had items that the catalog (printed four months earlier) did not have. (that’s the ‘sympathize with the customer’ part of the script) Nope, ordered from the admittedly more current website. Then he says, it’s probably an issue with the time of day. The items I selected might be only available on the lunch menu and by the time I finished the order, it was dinner menu time. I ask him why there is no indication on the website or the catalog of limited availability. Has no answer. Now, he’d like to help me by taking my order.

FOR GOD SAKES WILL SOMEONE MAKE ME A G&T ALREADY?”