A weblog by Christopher Carfi, since 2004.
Finally get to meet Hugh McLeod tonight, who’s in town for a couple of days. Details here if you want to come say hi.
This aspect of blogging never ceases to amaze me. Have read each other’s stuff for a couple of years, have exchanged innumerable emails over time, Lisa and I even hosted a Stormhoek wine dinner here in Half Moon Bay last summer. Yet, just realized we’ve never met in person. Weird.
(click here to subscribe to this feed)
Episode 12, about 30 minutes.
Today’s show was a grab bag of cool stuff
With Jake McKee, Lee LeFever and Christopher Carfi.
Related Links:
Video: RSS in Plain English
Common Craft Show
Social Media and CRM 2.0 Seminar
KickStart Workshops with KickStand
Ben McConnell Church of the Customer
Sony PS3 Video – How They Blew It
Caleb Chung – inventor of Furby and Pleo (interview )
Ugobe makers of the upcoming Pleo (wikipedia) (blog )
Prey by Michael Crichton (Amazon)
Huffington Post
Visible Technology (Lee’s Post)
American Marketing Association
Ben McConnell – How Not to Pitch Bloggers, part 2
Clue Unit – JPG Magazine Giveaway
EgorCast – Big in Japan
Webvisions, Portland, Oregon
Headed to the Economics of Social Media (EconSM) conference in LA today. EconSM is taking an interesting pitch on the space, focusing on the business side of social media, as well as the creative side.
Seeya there.
(click here to subscribe to this feed)
Episode 11, about 30 minutes.
Today’s show was focused on the topic of co-creation
With Jake McKee, Lee LeFever and Christopher Carfi.
Related Links:
Clue Unit iPod Giveaway
eModeration sponsor for iPod
Dell Ideastorm
Lego Hobby Train
GoldCorp – co-creation mining story
Wikinomics
Threadless
American Idol
Chris Anderson The Long Tail Pre Filtering vs. Post Filtering
Cafe Press
JPG Magazine
Derek Powazek
8020 Publishing
Coghead
Spock
American Airlines
United Airlines
Just received one of the most unbelievable email form-letter responses I’ve ever encountered. Had filled out a web form to find out more information about a product we were considering integrating into a solution for a client. Here was the response (details changed to protect the guilty):
“Dear Mr. Carfi,
Thank you for your email and your interest in viewing (company/product name) Demo. My name is Chuck [redacted] and I’m Director of Sales.
As you can well imagine, we get more then 50 contacts a week from folks like yourself who are interested in our software and we normally reject more then 80% of those folks we speak with because we do not feel we have a business fit or we do not feel they will be succesful [sic]. In this regard, I would need to speak with you first, to see what you are looking to do and to see if we do in fact have a business fit before we could discuss our demo.
I’m available to speak with you tomorrow (Friday) or next week.
Please let me know of your availability and we can take it from there.
Thanks again for your interest–
Chuck”
The hubris of “we’re doing you a favor, and if you’re worthy we’ll talk to you” blows me away. Why make it harder for your prospect to learn more about your company, your people or your product?
What are you hiding?
Up in Boise speaking at KickStart, along with Leif, Ben McConnell, Tac Anderson and a host of others. Outstanding event, and looking forward to the lunch conversation with Caleb Chung, inventor of Pleo.
(p.s. Props and a fabulous gift to the first commenter who can identify the classic rock source of the title of this post.)
David Cushman asks: Does a straightforward transaction site need a social element? He then answers, eloquently. Cushman:
“[A] shop which ignores the attributes of 2.0 is a shop with a limited shelf life.
Why?
1. Consumers want to co-create. If your shop site doesn’t allow the community of users to share their ideas about what it should sell, rate what is on sale, come together to propose improvements to what is on sale etc etc – you’re locking out all the value of the network. Let members of your community pitch next year’s ideas, rate them and shape them – and big up the things they love. If they score down some items – don’t sell them.
The community has spoken.2. Two-way flow of communication beats the market: How do you know what your users want NEXT. The market shows you what they want now, and also what they don’t want – but it can never tell you what next year’s hit or miss is. Your community can – if you’re engaged in a two-way flow. This is genuine ‘consumer insight’ based on real conversations with real people – not on generalised assumptions that “we know our market”.
3. Convergence of buyer/seller/product developer/user/employee: If the employee and the user is converging in the concept of user generated content – the same can be said of communities of people trading together. eBay writes this large: The buyer and the seller converge. The buyer is also converging with the developer/designer (think BMW cars for a solid example happening now – the customer customises). This is a 3-dimensional version of a person – not a one dimensional “treat me as the customer… and only the customer” approach. In a ‘shop’ community environment one person can be a buyer/seller/developer/user/employee
4. Trust is communal: Trust is now created in a wiki-way. The social tools of 2.0 (eg diigo) make it ever easier for people to share what they think of a product or a supplier with their community, rapidly and in a way that is much more readily trusted by most consumers than old-style marketing messages. Sony tells you its PlayStation 3 is the dog’s. The community tells them its made a heap of mistakes (1.1m views on YouTube of How to Kill a Brand 1.1m of PS3 vs Wii – apple style). How does your shop help the community decide what to trust?”
(image credit: yewenyi)
Had a great conversation on Friday with CEO Paul McNamara and Sarah Franklin from Coghead as a run-up to Web 2.0 Expo this week. (Disclosure: Coghead is a customer.) Some key bits they shared:
The point that Paul kept returning to during our conversation was that of “empowerment;” that is, what they’re trying to do is to enable a new class of customer to create his or her own web-based apps, both simply and rapidly, and provide a tool to fill the gap between “management by spreadsheet” and ERP-type apps. The demo that Sarah showed me illustrated the point nicely, showing that a snazzy, data-driven web-based app could be created in short order through the Coghead interface while taking a list of ERP System features and integrating a few that could be fully customizable.
A particularly interesting bit was the illustration of “mashouts,” enabling information from Coghead apps to be embedded into arbitrary web-based apps outside of the system. Pretty nifty.
Additionally, it appears some Coghead developers are building their own apps for resale on top of the platform. The primary example that was talked through was for a company called allRounds that is building a “system that facilitates interactions among investors, companies, and exchanges in the private capital markets” using Coghead’s tools. Worth checking out, if for no other reason than it illustrates an interesting “long tail” case, where an app is created for a very specific purpose that previously would have previously been infeasible due to either the cost or effort required.
Bonus bit: The Coghead video is kinda cheesy-funny. Heh.
Paul Ward was one of the participants in the Social Media and CRM 2.0 workshop that Paul Greenberg and I hosted this week in DC. A snippet:
“Just finished sitting in on a morning session of BPT Partners’ CRM 2.0 Certification program, and I have to say, they’re doing a really good thing with this offering.
OK, so the topic of the day was social networks, about which I’ve done a lot of writing, speaking and — above all — thinking. Chris Carfi of Cerado gave that part of the presentation, and did a fabulous job — a great balance of describing the big sociological and technology shifts businesses should know about as well as specific examples of how social networks are expressed through current technology.”
Thanks, Paul! Was great to meet you in person.
(BTW, we’re doing our next session in May 2007 in Naples, FL…c’mon down!)
Nick Douglas: “Tag clouds are to Web 2.0 what lasers are to rock concerts. OLD.”
