Angel Island Fire – October 12, 2008
by Christopher Carfi
Edgy
Seth writes:
"The web comes down to bumping into things we might disagree with. That’s my favorite part. It’s where the learning happens."
Yes, and…it’s more than just the "bumping into" that matters. It’s actively seeking out the edges where different ideas, approaches, industries or histories intersect.
Edges are where the interesting stuff occurs. Homogeneity is boring, predictable and unremarkable.
Bob Frankston (more) once told me "If we’re not disagreeing, we’re not making progress." (Note: The reason I couldn’t agree with Bob’s statement at the time is an exercise left for the reader. 🙂) And his point was spot-on — mindless, or even mindful, agreement can’t create something new.
If you’re disagreeing (civilly, I trust), you’ve found an edge. Explore it.
One of the books that has most influenced me over the years is entitled Out of Control, by Kevin Kelly. It’s a collection of real-world examples where "biology" and "technology" intersect. Perhaps the most salient chapter is the one on the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona. To whit:
"Life keeps rising. It rose again and again inside Bio2. The bottle
was fecund, prolific. Of the many babies born in Bio2 during its first
two years, the most visible was a galago born in the early months of
closure. Two African pygmy goats birthed five kids, and an Ossabaw
Island pig bore seven piglets. A checkered garter snake gave birth to
three baby snakes in the ginger belt at the edge of the rain forest. And
lizards hid lots of baby lizards under the rocks in the desert.Urbanization is the advent of edge species. The hallmark of the modern
world is its fragmentation, its division into patchworks. What
wilderness is left is divided into islands and the species that thrive
best thrive on the betweenness of patches. Bio2 is a compact package of
edges. It has more ecological edges per square foot than anywhere else
on Earth. But there is no heartland, no dark deepness, which is
increasingly true of most of Europe, much of Asia, and eastern North
America.The messy living thing knitting itself together inside Bio2 was pushing
back. It was a coevolutionary world. The biospherians would have to
coevolve along with it. Bio2 was specifically built to test how a closed
system coevolves. In a coevolutionary world, the atmosphere and material
environment in which beasties dwell become as adaptable and as lifelike
as the beasties themselves. Bio2 was a test bench to find out how an
environment governs the organisms immersed in it, and how the organisms
in turn govern the environment. The atmosphere is the paramount
environmental factor; it produces life, while life produces it. The
transparent bottle of Bio2 turned out to be the ideal seat from which to
observe an atmosphere in the act of conversing with life."
Find the edges.
Video: Customer-Driven Markets
(RSS readers: click here to view the video)
A huge shout-out of thanks to Sean Bohan who recorded this session that I facilitated at the July, 2008 VRM workshop. Topics:
- What are "markets?"
- What are the different types of markets?
- Auctions
- Concept-driven markets
- Customer-driven markets
- Where we go from here
Would love your feedback!
Tweet Emotion
"I’m now connecting with people I haven’t talked to in 20 years. Well, I’m still not talking to them, but at least now I know what they had for breakfast." – Overheard, regarding Twitter
(N.B. I saw this flash by on one of the screens at OpenWorld, but unfortunately didn’t catch the name of who said it. If it was you or someone you know, please drop me a note so I can cite it appropriately. Thanks!)
Other Perspectives
A few other folks sharing their thoughts on Oracle Openworld (#oow08):
- Paul Greenberg (has nine posts and counting up so far)
- Josh Weinberger
- Denis Pombriant
- Oliver Marks
- Larry Dignan
- Michael Krigsman
- Dennis Howlett
- Lauren McKay
- Barney Beal
Related: Early oow08 posts
1000 Miles To Go For The Enterprise And True Customer Relationships
As noted in my earlier post, spent the last two days up at Oracle OpenWorld, mainly focusing on how they were presenting their offerings that are being hung under the "Social CRM" banner.
First, the pragmatic bits. Oracle still has a long way to go to truly embrace the notion that the customer can be in control, or at least be a mutually beneficial party, in the business relationship. Exhibit A, the cringeworthy tag line and subhead on the page shown above. What does it say?
"Oracle Social CRM Applications leverage Web 2.0 technologies to help sales people identify qualified leads, develop effective sales campaigns and presentations, and collaborate with colleagues to close more deals quickly."
I don’t even know where to start with that messaging and the general wrong-way-rubbing that it induces. Perhaps the easiest thing to point out is that it’s still 100% focused on the sales team, and implicitly views the customer as the enemy, or at least simply the next transaction. One of the demos that was shown at the event last night illustrated how one of their new tools could make it easier to identify that sales opportunity that was looking like it was slipping into the next quarter’s business, and how it aided the sales manager in identifying it and enabled him to encourage the rep to do anything possible to bring the business in before the quarter ended. (N.B. Recall item #7 from the customer’s point of view: "I want to buy things on my schedule, not yours. I don’t care if it’s the end of your quarter.")
There were two bright spots, however. Number one was the communication that Oracle SVP Anthony Lye shared this morning. A few quotes and comments from this morning’s presentation, from the Twitter stream (listed newer-to-older):
-
kitson: #oow08 #Lye [Damn. Battery’s dying, and there’s no outlet here. If I fall silent, that’s why.]
kitson: #oow08 #Lye "I don’t like ‘CRM 2.0’ because someone’s going to come up with ‘3.0’ and ‘4.0’ Versioning a strategy is flawed."
-
- acclimedia: @ccarfi Thanks for the great live tweets! Some valuable insights. #oow08
- kitson: #oow08 #Lye "I don’t expect to sell this [Social CRM] to everyone."
- kitson: #oow08 #Lye "CRM for the first 10 years was about data capture."
- kitson: #oow08 In a briefing with Anthony Lye of Oracle’s CRM…
So, it’s appears clear that Anthony Gets It with respect to what the right things to say are. Now, just to turn the Sayonara around to embrace the customer as relationship partner is the task at hand and exhibit that understanding via product, positioning and action.
The other bright spot was a proof-of-concept demo that was shown for customer The Body Shop. This was an iPhone application that started to inch down the path to giving more power to the customer, or at least include her in the relationship at some level. Here are a few quick shots from the keynote.
Here’s an entry-screen to the application, which a customer could bring up on her iPhone when she walked into the store. Behind the scenes, profile information on preferences and purchase history would be available.
Oooh! Product! The sort of nifty thing here was access to ratings of this particular product both from the "at large" community, as well as the specific ratings from your "friends" and/or "people like you."
A hop over to a "loyalty card points" page, where points could be redeemed for discounts, etc.
Choose from one of a bunch of options for the "loyalty" bonus: Redeem Now, Email/SMS to get Rebate, Share with a Friend, or Donate to Charity.
Ok, we chose "Redeem Now." Discount code is available, take the "coupon" to the register to save a few bucks at checkout.
What I was NOT able to get were any details on how "real" the application is. The demonstration that was shown was very, very scripted, and quite a bit of the demo required the suspension of disbelief once you started to delve into the details. For example, the details around the explicit sharing of a lot of (really) personal data among "trusted" friends was assumed to "just work," with neither the social nor the technical nor the identity underpinnings given any level of discussion.
Another big thing to note: the access to purchase history and preferences and the like is wonderful, but the information still is 100% in the hands of the vendor. So, although some of the ideas feel a bit like VRM, the implementation still needs to take the big leap – let the customer control, edit, change, and manage her own data. That part is still most definitely not there. We still have the silo problem – if you had one of these apps for The Body Shop, and one for the movie theater, and one for the restaurant down the street, we’d still have the Tower of Babel problem we have today. Of course, it would just be a shinier Tower of Babel, since it’s on the iPhone.
But…it’s a start. Where we are now with the enterprise and how it will connect with customers feels a lot like where Big Media (and in particular the newspaper industry) was in about 2004-2005. Technically, the tools are in place, or soon will be. The real challenge is NOT a technical one. It’s a social challenge. It’s a humbling, or perhaps a realization, of the marketers and sales people in large companies that, no, they really are *not* in control of the "message," whatever that is. Thoughts around this were written in 2004, and before that in 2000. Those things still hold true, and it boils down to this:
The customer really is in going to be in control. Deal with it.
In The Stream
Was up at Oracle OpenWorld (#oow08) for the last couple of days. They had HUGE video walls that were pulling comments from one of the social networking systems they had in place for the event. Very reminiscent of what we saw at SXSW with Twitter a couple or three years ago.
Connect / Reflect
(N.B. This post originally appeared on March 12, 2007. But it completely recaptures where things are today, with all sorts of thoughts from Mobilize, BlogWorldExpo and Oracle OpenWorld mashing and spiraling wonderfully in my brain.)
—
Tara gets asked: "How do you guys get any work done with all of the things you are involved in?"
Stowe writes: "In a world of flow, information will find us. And we will find ourselves more connected, in a richer world, with a different form of attention."
I totally agree with both of them. And I also think that we need to nudge the thinking along just a step further. "Flow" is needed, and for individuals in an organization to be part of what’s going on, they need to be in it. Agreed.
Back in the early and mid 90’s, I did a lot of whitewater rafting, primarily on the Gauley River in West Virginia. Once you were in the flow, you were in the flow. No turning back. However (and this is a big however), if you were in the wrong part of the flow, things got very dicey, very quickly…sometimes with significant consequences.
Before jumping into the flow, you need to know the direction you’re going. Just as importantly, after you come out of a particularly turbulent part of the flow, you need to look back, and think about what worked, what didn’t, and what you’re going to do next time.
At SXSW this weekend, was thinking about this a lot, and realized there are really two parts of it:
- Part of the time you’re in the midst of the flow, and connecting with people and ideas
- Part of the time you’re taking a breather, and reflecting on what just happened and what’s going to happen next…
(Gauley photo credits: The fine folks at Ace Whitewater, from whom I learned as much as I ever did in any classroom. Jack & Tug…thanks again!)
Mobilization
Off to Mobilize today. Seeya there.
GigaOm’s next-generation mobile conference, Mobilize is a one-day conference
designed to bring to you the future of the broadband mobile web. Using
the existing industry as a platform, we will examine emerging ideas and
emerging markets.
tags: #mobilize #mobilizeconf
Study Results: Online Communities and Business
Francois Gossieaux from Beeline Labs, along with Deloitte and the Society for New Communications
Research,
has done some great research on how organizations are using online communities in both the business-to-business (b2b) and business-to-consumer (b2c) contexts (some nonprofits were included in the mix as well). Over 140 organizations were included in the study, which covered online business communities with only a few dozen members, all the way up to communities with over 10,000 members. While we’re on the topic of online businesses, the idea of using tools similar to this keyword position checker google could help you get a better understanding of the SEO side of it all and finding ways of improving your business.
Here’s a link to the Tribalization of Business study results.
Some key quotes from Francois about the findings, by way of an interview with Shel Israel:
On organizational structure: “Most community efforts ended up reporting in to the CMO, even though
that is not where they all originated. In the recent past, most
community activities started somewhere as a skunkworks project – only
to be rolled into the CMO’s turf after the program gained recognition.”
On technology versus strategy: “Another surprise was how many companies started their community
initiatives as a technology platform decision – only to realize that if
you build it, they may not come. Some very successful community
executives suggested that if your community cannot survive in a Yahoo!
Group-like discussion environment, it will probably not survive
anywhere. One of the more important factors for the success of
community initiatives is the content strategy for the community – not
the technology strategy.“ (emphasis added)
On bringing marketing back to the customer perspective: “We believe that CMOs have an opportunity to transform their role
into that of Chief Customer Officer – and represent the Voice of the
Customer at the executive table…Leveraging the power of communities and the customer insights that
they provide could put CMOs back in the strategic seats where they
belong.”
The last word: “Please, don’t start your community project as a technology platform selection.”
