“‘Authority’ is the permission we give others to change us.” – D.Searls
Fundamental
Georgia Patrick: “Succeeding in business is not as hard as many try to make it. As long as you start with the customer in mind and keep that central to everything you do, you will do just fine.”
“Bubble” Like In “Soap,” Not “Bubble” Like In “Gratuitous Excess Where You Drive Your Stock-Option Ferrari Into A Ditch”
A nice series of metaphors of what connectedness really means vis-a-vis the Internet (go read the whole thing):
“I see the Net as a world we might see as a bubble. A sphere. It’s growing larger and larger, and yet inside, every point in that sphere is visible to every other one. That’s the architecture of a sphere. Nothing stands between any two points. That’s its virtue: it’s empty in the middle. The distance between any two points is functionally zero, and not just because they can see each other, but because nothing interferes with operation between any two points. There’s a word I like for what’s going on here: terraform. It’s the verb for creating a world. That’s what we’re making here: a new world. Now the question is, what are we going to do to cause planetary existence? How can we terraform this new world in a way that works for the world and not just ourselves?”
Doc riffs futher (cite):
“It’s silly to say, ‘I’m going to get in the middle of this thing and improve it.’ More importantly, [it] needs no mediation. It puts everybody, including The Media, on the outside. This doesn’t mean The Media have no advantages, or that they can’t help terraform the Net’s world. It just means that their business isn’t helping make the Net more of what it is.”
The implications:
- If the above is true, every one of your customers is a point on the sphere.
- So is every one of your employees.
- How can you get out of the way, and enable them to connect to get their respective jobs done?
Valuing Social Software
Scoble on social software valuations: “Doing the technology is fairly straightforward. I’m sure that could be built for $100 million or less. Probably far less if they really are smart about how they go about it. But duplicate the community and brand (er, those eyeballs, as Ballmer calls them) is far far far more difficult. The fact that he insists on calling me a set of eyeballs tells me Ballmer doesn’t understand the trend here.”
Coghead Goes Live
Coghead just went live! Here’s a full review over at TechCrunch.
Guy Kawasaki pens his take here.
Having worked with Paul, Greg, Sarah, Steve, Brian and the rest of the team for many months, I can tell you that they’ve been cranking round-the-clock and have put a great app together.
Congrats to all.
(disclosure: Coghead is a customer.)
More On Context
Nancy Scola: Can It Still Be Facebook If You’re Mom’s On It?
Scola’s key bit:
“Take this for example. Facebook has a feature…Enter in your login name and password for your Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, or Hotmail accounts and Facebook will spider through your address book to tell you who you know already has a profile. And with one click, a note is sent to your contact asking if you might be Facebook friends.
If they happen to be in my same regional network — so for me, the one for little old New York City — then bam!, they’ve got instant access to my profile.
With that, Facebook me is the me I am to my entire real world address book. (And with Gmail, that’s everyone I’ve ever emailed.) I’m no longer protected by the narrow confines of the organization I work for. It’s almost too much for me to take, to open myself to inspection by every possible future employer/professor/friend/enemy in the world.”
More on this context issue here.
Facebook: A Great Way To Hobble A Brand
There’s been a ton of Facebook news recently, first with their “privacy trainwreck” (which was not really a “privacy” issue per se, but more of a perceived exposure issue, more here from danah and here from Doc), and most recently with the opening up of Facebook to all comers.
Now, with respect to this issue, Facebook’s Carolyn Abram writes:
“I’ve been asked to explain why we’re launching this expansion. You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again; here at Facebook, we want to help people understand their world. We started at one school, and realized over and over again that this site was useful to everyone—not just to Harvard students, not just to college students, not just to students, not just to former students. We’ve kept growing to accommodate this fact.”
This is very interesting, I must add with a bit of irony, as three days prior, Facebook’s Abram wrote:
“I have received and rejected over eighty friend requests from people I don’t know. It’s not because I’m a terrible person, and it’s not because I think all of my would-be friends were sketchy people; it’s because I wasn’t comfortable with people I didn’t know seeing my information.”
“Facebook is open. I’ve already received friend requests from companies selling their wares by creating a Profile. I am also faced with more contexts than i can deal with.”
This context-switching is the challenge that other “mass market” brands in the social media area are going to continue to have as they expand. As danah noted directly above, there are certain aspects of one’s persona that are “in context” in one case and “out of context” in others. (Here’s a real-world example, snark here.)
This issue is especially acute when trying to force-fit a mass-market brand into the business context. Design decisions that may that have worked fine in one context might be jarring in another. For example, I recently received a Facebook “friend request” from Stowe Boyd, who I know professionally. After accepting the request, I was presented with the following screen (click to enlarge):
Some of the choices (e.g. “We dated” and “We hooked up,” in particular) just don’t work in the business context.
Bottom line: When designing a system that may be used in multiple contexts, it’s critical that the people using the system have the ability to tailor it to their world. One-size-fits-all decisions can’t work and, even worse, will undermine the brand’s credibility in the market.
It’s Official: Google To Buy YouTube For $1.65B In Stock
Google says:
“Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.”
Self-Inflicted Trademark Dilution
Selling a house is always an activity frought with the possibility of customer service peril. This is especially true when, in addition the buyer and seller, thirteen other organizations are involved (4 different mortgage companies, a title company, lawyers, three different banks, one brokerage, one utility, one airline and one phone company). The whole story from Shannon Clark spans three thousand plus words, but one particular vignette to share here.
“A national bank, Bank of America, told me that internally they can’t deal with customers of their bank from any state for any state. Instead if you want to, say deposit almost the FDIC limit into a new account, but happen to be doing that NOT in your (new) home state, you are just out of luck – they can’t figure out how to handle their divisions (all with the SAME branding mind you) as one, merged entity. Needless to say, I didn’t take them up on this rather shocking display of completely horrible service.”
This leads me to my new favorite quote, from Wendy Seltzer, regarding what happens to brands and organizations after an ad infinitum series of M&A activities and corporate roll-ups. Seltzer:
“I call it ‘self-inflicted trademark dilution.’ Companies get so big they have nothing but brands and trademarks holding them together, then they treat customers with so little regard that they make the trademark stand for haphazard indifference, rather than goodwill. I think after a certain amount of this, the customers should be free to reappropriate the brand for their own uses — perhaps making those mergers somewhat less attractive to the investors.”
Nicely put.
CRM: The Impending Sea Change
Bits, pieces. Bits, bytes. Things are afoot, all pointing to an increased ability for the customer to control his or her own destiny more effectively. A few data points:
Steve Gillmor raps on two different ways that the actions and behaviors of customers (he calls them “users”) are captured into the emerging world:
“By definition, the Windows data represents behavior under the terms and conditions of the Windows/Office/DRM/PlaysForSure contract with the user — managed via IT, structured around the corporate hierarchical notions of enterprise ownership of user data and behavior, and so on. And in turn, the same can be said of the Google/Skype/Yahoo/Salesforce contract — different in that users can navigate across corporate domains but remain subtly constrained by, as Doc suggests, the tyranny of inference derived but not related from the user’s behavior. Both clouds are captured, prisoners of war in the battle for access to the intentions of the user/creator of these signals.”
“It’s a market opportunity to equip the demand side with better tools for relating to the supply side. That’s what Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is about. When we have that, the supply side will start rebuilding their CRMs as systems that actually relate to us, rather than try to corrall and milk us like cattle.”
Dave Winer thinks it’s about getting critical mass:
“If I had a place where I kept my movie ratings and gave [Netflix and Yahoo] a pointer to it, they could read it and I would control the data. It would be very easy to set up, the technology is no trick at all. The hard part is getting enough users to do it this way to gain critical mass.”
[ed. – I’m a technologist, and I’m also a pragmatist. There are some portions of this that will be solved via technical means, naturally. But, in my gut, I still feel that a big portion of this will be solved the way that business has been done for the past few millenia, by way of actual people connecting with each other and building trusted relationships.]
Now, Mitch Ratcliffe tempers Doc and Steve with a very rational position:
“Attention often comes after the initial exchange has been offered, so the evolution of demand-side systems for making our desires clear should evolve from the bottom up and obliterate the existing CRM system as a mechanism for command-and-control. But no one has found the motivating force that will catalyze a market reversal and the likelihood is that the market will never flip over because, frankly, we don’t always know what we want until we see it. That’s the creativity and innovation folks are always talking about in action—new value comes from contrarians who reshape the world rather than just roll with it.”
Here’s some further thinking on this, intended to provoke discussion:
(1) Where we are today
(2) Where we seem to be heading
(3) A place of ultimate “crowdsourcing” (we may also be heading here)
(4) The parking lot of a Phish concert
I really like the idea of Area 2. It’s a place of give and take, where vendor and customer meet as equals.
Further reading: The corollary