Category: Uncategorized

Sheer brilliance.

CNN: "If you want to test drive a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord, starting next month you’ll be able to do it at a Saturn dealership."

(thanks seth)

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Episode 15, about 30 minutes.

Today’s Topic: Interview with Deb Schultz on
Transparency

About Deb:

Deb Schultz is a
consultant and speaker who describes herself as an evangelist and rabble-rouser
in the relationship economy.  She is the former Marketing Director of Six
Apart, makers of blogging platforms
Movable Type,
Typepad,
Vox and
Live Journal.

With Jake McKee, Lee LeFever and Christopher Carfi.

Related notes and links:

Transparency = Authenticity
Six
Apart offers refund due to poor Typepad performance
Mena
jokes about incoming CEO
Apple and Google and Transparency
Jonathan
Schwartz’s Blog
Transparency may not be for everyone
The value of baby steps
How to start with transparency: ask questions, start a blog
Craig Newmark,
Craigslist and valuing
customers
Use the word "I" as in "I believe" vs "the company believes"
Huge connection between transparency and community
In today’s world, you cannot lie
Walmarting
Across America blog
debacle
Ask – Why am I creating this company/product and what do I owe my customers?

Bonus link:
Transparency
Tyranny from Trendwatching.com

Thanks for the great interview Deb!

It’s not unusual to see product reviews on a product site of a manufacturer.  We’re seen this for years.  Usually, we’ll find a few snippets of information, or a quote that (perhaps) was pulled out of context to show a product in its best light.

But what Sun has done goes steps beyond.  These really aren’t "reviews" per se.  Sun called these pieces "perspectives," but what they really represent is the ambient conversation that is going on around their products.

On Sun’s product pages, they’ve included a tab called "Perspectives," which pulls content from both Sun’s over 3,200 employee blogs, but also from across the web at large.

(These examples are pulled from the Sun X4200 product page at: http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x4200/product-blog.xml?st=2)

There are plenty of posts about specs and feeds and speeds, but now let’s check out some of the flow that is coming into this product page.

In particular, that last link goes offsite to here, a site called cuddletech.

The kneejerk reaction is "why on EARTH" would Sun link from its site to a customer site that contains paragraphs like:

"I want X4100’s, NOT M2 BULLSHIT. I want lots of them and I want
them quickly. I want a SunSolve worth paying for. I want a docs.sun.com
that has been updated and more easily navigated than what we had 5
years ago. And most of all, I don’t want to keep hearing that Dell
doesn’t have these problems!!!"

Why would Sun link there?  Because that’s where the conversation is happening, and it’s where the "live web" part of the customer experience is being documented, in real time, by a passionate customer.

A prospective customer will trip across the Sun page, go over to the diatribe, and then find the following:

"UPDATE2: I’m getting an absolute flood of mails from people
expressing the same frustrations that I mention and that we see in the
comments here. Sun Executives are aware of this and responded
immediately from the very top down. Sun may have its problems, but one
thing that I’ve always found to be true is that they are forthright,
honest, and responsive. I’m extremely appreciative of Sun’s
understanding and response. Remember, they can’t change if we don’t
make our demands known! Just switching to Dell doesn’t send a clear
message unless you tell them why you’re switching to Dell.  And what’s clear is we don’t want to buy Dell, but rather people feel they don’t have a choice.  But we do!  Sun is our company! Let’s help it be successful and drive it towards excellence. Remember,
despite it all we’ve got one hell of a base to build on!"

And then they would find the problem resolution, and a recognition of the process.

"UPDATE5: Wes Adams, Corporate Account Manager, Sun Enterprise
Sales Group, has helped us overcome our supply issues helping to push
through pending orders that previously were 3 weeks away, now the
system will be in our VAR’s warehouse on Monday morning at the latest.
We’re very pleased and appreciative.

I want to thank John Fowler, Andy Currid, Wes Adams, Johnathan Schwartz
and everyone at Sun for being so responsive to my inquires and taking
all of them very seriously."

Good on ya, Sun.  Nice job, both on the willingness to open up, as well as the handling of the particular customer issue.

(hat tip: skrocki’s weblog)

"Xerocracy."  Neat framing and concept.

(click here to listen – MP3)

(click here to subscribe to this feed)

Episode 14, about 30 minutes.

Today’s Topic: Non-traditional Discussion of
Transparency

•     Spammer Contacts Jake
   
•     Flickr Censors User
   
•     Engadget Drops Apple’s Stock Price
   
•     Heather and Derek Leave JPG Magazine
   

With
 Jake McKee, Lee LeFever and Christopher Carfi.

Turning
off comments at Community Guy.com due to spam
Spammer
responds, comments return
Eliza AI
System

Flickr
Censors Photographer’s Plea (slashdot)
Flickr
User’s Blog Response

Engadget
Post Drops Apple Stock by 4 billion in 20 minutes
Original
Engadget Post
Original
Email from Apple

Heather
and Derek Leave JPG Magazine
Why I
did it – Post by Derek
Heather’s
Response
JPG Magazine
8020
Publishing

Conference Chatter:
Dopplr – Travel-based
networking
PC to TV
Converter
Twitter applied to real world
friends and family

A bunch of notable stuff hitting the radar in advance of Supernova2007, which is happening here in San Francisco in June.  Just learned about two aspects of the conference week that looked especially interesting.

Challenge Tracks – The Supernova team has been putting together a number of interesting conversations around "challenges" to either conventional wisdom or current hype.  These include:

Challenge Track: Markets & Relationships—Finding the ‘Individual’ Point of View

Relationships are becoming the new marketing. Now that we have expanded
people’s networks through technology and ready access to information,
they are self-organizing in ways that allow them to leverage their
relationships as never before. They are inventing new products and
media. And they are demanding that business relate to them on their
terms.

Many terms are being used to talk about the newly empowered
“individual”: engagement, attention, community, authenticity, and
trust. Yet buzzwords alone provide little insight.  This Challenge
Track will assemble a variety of business disciplines to cut through
the confusion, and examine key market issues from the individual’s
point of view.  It will feature five sessions:

• Session I: Introduction to the new Relationship Economy
  
• Session II: Relate: Markets are Conversations, Part 2
  
• Session III: Reach: The new role of Advertising
  
• Session IV: Research & Measure: It’s about more than Metrics
  
• Session V: Where’s the Innovation?: Examples and Implications of the Relationship Economy
  

Challenge: Virtual Life or Virtual Hype?

Do most people really want to be immersed in 3D virtual worlds?  And
what are the real business benefits of these massively multiplayer
environments? This session will examine which activities will migrate
to virtual environments, and when physical forms will continue to
dominate.

Challenge: Web Tools—Collaboration and Disruption in the Enterprise

How can businesses take advantage of the open, networked, user-centric
innovations that power so much of the new activity on the public Web?
What are the tools that promote real efficiency and group
participation, and how will they change the way organizations behave?

Also, the Supernova team has set up an Open Space day that is going to get the kindling going for the rest of the week (it’s limited to 200 folks, and it is only $25 to attend the open space, so get on the list soon if’n you’re going).  From the site:

The Supernova Open Space Workshop is an open forum on the social, moral, technical, and strategic questions impacting the increasingly connected world in which we live. Discussions about topics like user control, neutrality, identity and open standards are setting the stage for future policies and economic decisions. Come to this event to learn more, participate in the community and shape the future of the New Network.

The Supernova Open Space Workshop is run on Open Space practices and principles. There are no pre-scheduled presentations, no keynotes, no panels. Instead, topics for discussion, questions are posed and presentations are offered up by participants when the workshop convenes, and scheduled the day it happens. Participants in the workshop need not be attending Supernova, although all Supernova attendees are welcomed and encouraged to participate. We hope to find ways to pull some of the insights from the Open Space Workshop into the more traditionally structured days of Supernova.

Check it out.

Michael Clarke at Green Tea Ice Cream takes the The Customer Owns Your Brand post and runs way downfield with it.  Great post.  Read the whole thing. Clarke:

"The argument (roughly that customers own your brand, that on a
socially networked planet, you cannot control their understanding of
what your brand is and that you have no choice but to engage in a
direct, multiple-levelled conversation with those pesky individuals you
expect to GIVE YOU MONEY!) isn’t new but his expression of it is
direct, devastatingly illustrated and distils the nuggets of wisdom you
might normally find spread thinly across several books-worth of popular
online marketing platitudes (you know the kind of book I mean) into a
single gnarly post.

Again, this isn’t new – most famously, Intel applied this very strategy back in the mid-nineties during the Pentium floating point debacle.  Andy Grove spun it out into one of those books
which illustrates how a) a PR disaster was turned around by a (then)
unusual act of honesty on the part of a chip manufacturer and b) how
the whole mess pushed Intel into the business of being a consumer brand
– a service company. Grove calls those moments in a company’s life
strategic inflexion points (see short portrait at Thinking Managers)
(guilty confession – it’s one of the more over-used phrases in my
vocabulary). Still, Intel was arguably in a position to have toughed it
out if they wanted to. Now, that isn’t an option. Here are three recent
demonstrations."

Go there to see the excellent examples he gives from Sony, Digg and Flickr.

The nice folks over at the Washington D.C. chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA-DC) asked me to provide my perspective on how “traditional” marketing is changing as a result of social media. It really is incredible where technology has come these days, check out this duplicator for an example of one of your options! Both these methods used together would be excellent for the marketing industry as a whole. But anyway that’s by the by, let’s really get into this topic.

—

You Don’t Own Your Brand —
Your Customer Does
by Christopher F. Carfi, CEO
of Cerado, Inc. (http://www.cerado.com)

Brand (n.)

1. A trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer.
2. A mark indicating identity or ownership, burned on the hide of an animal
with a hot iron.

(source: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth
Edition. http://www.answers.com/topic/brand
)

We marketers like to delude ourselves. We delude ourselves into believing
that if we can distill the meaning of a product or service to its very essence,
that if we can determine the perfect message and imagery, then the market will
internalize those things for which the brand “stands” (and perhaps
look a little less closely at the actual product or service to which the brand
has been applied). That’s what we do. We create “brands”
that will resonate in the market. If you’re looking to get your brand out there a little more with branded items, look into these promotional products design company.

But a “market” is not an undifferentiated mass of consumers[1] with
upturned gullets interested in gobbling up our marketing messages. A
“market” is actually a place. When you hear the word
market, think “bazaar,” not “customer segment.”

Some of the historically great “brands” are learning this the hard
way. Let’s look at Sony, for example. Some estimates state that
Sony is going to lose up to $1 billion dollars on creating and marketing its
new PS3 gaming console in its first year[2]. One BILLION dollars.
With that kind of money, they should be able to ensure that the
“branding” in the market is perfect, right?

Not even close.

Wikipedia defines “social media” as “the online tools and
platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and
perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms,
including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs,
message boards, podcasts, wikis and vlogs.”[3]

The ease of access to social media has flattened and democratized the
market/bazaar. Instead of those with the loudest megaphones and billion
dollar marketing budgets running roughshod over customers, we, the customers,
now have the ability to critique, to talk back and to connect with each others
and share stories and opinions. What does this mean for marketing?
It means that the old, top-down hierarchy of searing brands into the consumer
psyche is done. Over. Finished. It means that businesses have to engage with their consumers, building their brands on the ideas of their customers and their experiences. To achieve this there are now social media tools, such as this instagram bot and other automation tools, in order to help these businesses grow through social media and the engagement with their customers.

Let’s look at a tangible example. In the wake of the PS3 launch, an individual only known by the
online handle of “heavyarms117”? posted a video to YouTube entitled “How To Kill
A Brand”[4] (based on the song “How To Save A Life,” by The Fray). Here’??s the first verse:

Step 1, you make your console
cost the most,
You beat your chest and proudly boast,
Despite no good exclusive games
You make a bunch of ridiculous claims,

Then ignore our need to play online
Don’t make it fun like Xbox Live
Use Blue Ray, which I don’t need
Now you’re getting your ass kicked by the Wii

Sony, you went wrong, with your PS3
I’ll just keep playing my 360
Hope this song has helped, you understand
Now you know, How You Killed Your Brand…

Simple. To the
point. And devastating. As of this writing, the video has been
viewed 1,419,639 times, and generated over 12,000 comments. What was the cost to produce it? Minimal. The cost was some basic editing equipment that comes with every laptop
and a few hours of time.

1.4 million connected customers versus a
top-down, billion dollar budget? I’??ll
take the customer in that race every time.

So, if the customer is truly in
control of the brand, what can we as marketers do?

If the customer truly is in control as a result of the advent of social
media, the most important thing to do is to actually engage in transparent,
authentic conversation. Anything less
eventually ends up with a situation similar to the one in which we currently
see Sony and other brands. This means
listening in the blogosphere, and taking the pure, raw customer feedback that
is out there and bringing it back into the organization. It means creating social networks and online
communities where customers can engage with your organization and each other. It means acting not as teflon-covered
representatives of the organization, but instead engaging in natural exchanges
as the human beings that we are.

“But what if the customer is critical, or says bad things about us?” It’??s happening already on the over 70
million blogs online, and between the hundreds of millions of members of
existing online social networks. And
when it does happen, a marketer’s best bet is not to go into “spin”?
mode, but instead to address the issue directly. If there is no issue, or the facts surrounding the conversation
are incorrect, then correct them factually. However, if there actually is an issue, address it, and state
what is going to be done, and by when. For example:

1) Say what happened – State the case,
tell what happened, explain what the situation was. Don’t spin, don’t make excuses. Just state the facts.

2) Say what you’re going
to do about it â?? Inform customers about the short term fix. How are
you going to put out the fire?

3) Plan for Murphy
– Ok, the immediate crisis is over. What are you going to do to make sure this
doesn’t happen again

4) Report back –
Let the customers know what’s going on. Was the short term fix applied? Are the
long-term changes happening?

Following this simple process can avert the firestorms that erupt online
when an organization decides to batten down the hatches and ignore whatâ??s
actually being said about them via social media.

And so, here we are today. We’??ve
created an entire industry based on marketing via top-down methods, based on
the broadcast models of TV and print that have served marketing well for the
past fifty years. But things have
changed, radically and quickly. Customers are turning off the TV and putting down the newspaper and
getting their information about brands not from our billboards and glossy
collateral, but instead from their trusted colleagues online.

Even those colleagues only known online as “?heavyarms117.”?

[1] – “one who consumes”

[2] – http://www.ps3focus.com/archives/167

[3] – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

[4] – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R98qC0fd_1w

Derek Powazek: “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about community-building, it’s this: Do Not Lie. People are too smart and well-connected to believe a lie anymore. So, with that in mind, the story I’m about to tell is absolutely true as I experienced it.

Issue 10 will be the last one that Heather and I will have a hand in. We are no longer working for JPG Magazine or 8020 Publishing.

Why? The reasons are complicated, and the purpose of this post is not to air dirty laundry – it’s just to let the community know why the founders of JPG are no longer there. We owe you that much.”

(NOTE: If you have questions you’d like to ask Doug Engelbart, please leave them in the comments below and I’ll ask them to him next Tuesday.)

Next Tuesday, I’m going to be sitting down for a conversation with Doug Engelbart leading up to his presentation at MIT on May 17th, entitled “The Augmentation of our Collective IQ.” The audio of the conversation will be made available as a podcast. (Immeasurable thanks to Mei Lin Fung for setting this up.)

Doug is a legend of the industry. Just the first paragraph of his Wikipedia entry is filled with a compendium of the contributions he’s made:

“Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925 in Oregon) is an American inventor of Swedish and Norwegian descent. He is best known for inventing the computer mouse (in a joint effort with Bill English); as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs; and as a committed and vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and networks to help cope with the world’s increasingly more urgent and complex problems (which Horst W. J. Rittel and others since have called wicked problems).”

Doug’s current research is focused around the idea of “Collective IQ.” A bit more on that front:

“Today, his contributions are more widely recognized, but for decades the technologies he invented and demonstrated were largely ignored or misunderstood. And even now, with PC’s and the World Wide Web as direct descendants of his pioneering work, these technologies have not had nearly the transformative effect that Dr. Engelbart had hoped.

Until recently most of his inventions, as the industry gradually adopted them, were built into stand-alone computers. But from the beginning Dr. Engelbart conceived his techniques with networked computers in mind. His motivating concept, still largely untested today, was that information technologies could serve as the connective tissue between people and information.

The result, he said, would be an exponential increase in what he calls an organization’s “collective I.Q.,” which would in turn supercharge a group’s ability to improve itself over time.

In essence, Dr. Engelbart’s theory separates work into three categories. A-work, as he calls it, is the primary mission of an organization, like building cars or operating a health care system. B-work involves ways of improving A-work, and it is likely to be basically the same among similar organizations, be they auto makers or hospitals.

C-work, in turn, is about improving the improvement process itself. Although an auto maker might be loath to share information about B-work with its competitors, Dr. Engelbart’s hypothesis is that much good could come from their sharing information about C-work — about how to improve the process of recording and responding to consumer complaints, for example, which might enhance processes all the way down the line.

And that exercise might be equally valuable to a software company, a car maker or a bookstore — resulting in what he calls “high-performance organizations” that are much more capable of improving their work processes quickly and effectively.”

What questions would you like to ask Doug about Collective IQ, or anything else?