Christopher Carfi

Spent last weekend in Portland with a group of old friends. Had never visited that fine city previously, and…I have to admit…I am smitten.

Positives:

• A very real, laid-back vibe and no-nonsense attitude
• Rogue (not only do they have the dead guy, but they have bacon as an appetizer on the menu, fercryinoutloud!)
• Gorgeous natural surroundings
• Public art that actually engages
• A killer public transportation system
• Coffee…everywhere

Negatives:

• Um, nothing. Loved the place.

While there, Leif and I had a chance to spend an afternoon quaffing java with Aric Wood from XPlane. (If you’ve ever seen any of the cool and useful information graphics in magazines like Business 2.0, they were done by XPlane.) The key insight from the discussion:

“Time-to-understanding” in a conversation can be used as a competitive advantage.

In other words, if you (and, by proxy, your organization) can communicate and connect with a customer more quickly and more richly than the other guy, you have a significant lead in the race. How to do this? A “Top Five” list of do’s and don’ts:

1) Do use multiple modes of communication (written, verbal, visual, experiential) in order to communicate
2) Do look for common experiences and past shared reference points to which novel concepts can be tied
3) Do use the appopriate technology as a medium
4) Don’t use PowerPoint when a note card will do
5) Don’t bury the customer with loads of jargon and acronyms

Bonus: Don’t make things more complex than they really are

Portland, I’ll be back.

(photo credit: drewish)

Finally back on terra firma after a non-stop 10 day stint on the road. Stories and thoughts from Portland, OR; New York City; and the Techdirt Greenhouse to come shortly.

Robert Scoble and Lewis Black

(Robert, congrats on the new gig!)

Just finished the first session at the Innovation Marketing Conference, which was a presentation by Russ Klein, the CMO of Burger King. Short presentation, about 30 minutes or so, with a couple of key themes. The biggest “a-ha” that came out of the session was the idea of “social currency.” Rushkoff defines “social currency” thusly:

“Social currency is like a good joke. When a bunch of friends sit around and tell jokes, what are they really doing? Entertaining one another? Sure, for a start. But they are also using content — mostly unoriginal content that they’ve heard elsewhere — in order to lubricate a social occasion. And what are most of us doing when we listen to a joke? Trying to memorize it so that we can bring it somewhere else. The joke itself is social currency. “Invite Harry. He tells good jokes. He’s the life of the party.”

Think of this the next time you curse that onslaught of email jokes cluttering up your inbox. The senders think they’ve given you a gift, but all they really want is an excuse to interact with you. If the joke is good enough, this means the currency is valuable enough to earn them a response.

That’s why the most successful TV shows, web sites, and music recordings are generally the ones that offer the most valuable forms of social currency to their fans. Sometimes, like with mainstream media, the value is its universality. In the US right now, the quiz show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” is enjoying tremendous ratings because it gives its viewers something to talk about with one another the next day. It’s a form of mass spectacle. And, not coincidentally, what is the object of the game? To demonstrate one’s facility with a variety of forms of social currency! Contestants who can answer a long stream of questions about everything from sports and movies to science and history, are rewarded with a million dollars. They are social currency champions.”

It is currency, like the greenback, that we exchange with those around us as part of our everyday interactions. In other words, “social currency” is the stuff we talk about with our friends, and colleagues, and family.

Burger King’s Klein centered his presentation around this idea of social currency. (It was, in fact, a central them of BK’s investor road show as part of their IPO.) Is is the core of how they market. In his words, the reason BK markets is invoke the “Did you see that?!?!” factor around the water cooler. They see their marketing as a means to add BK memes to the “social currency” supply.

What other organizations do you think are very accomplished at adding “social currency” to the environment? Who gives us things to talk about?

Bonus question: In particular, do you agree with Klein’s assertion that Burger King is accomplishing its goal in this area?

Am at Columbia University at the Innovative Marketing Conference. Shaping up to be an interesting couple of days. More soon.

Hey Greg…you are now officially polluting the language. <grin> Wired says that “Going Bedouin” is part of the hot, trendy jargon to watch.

(click photo for larger image)

Next stop, the OED. Why not? “Podcast” made it…

Campfire
Originally uploaded by Beej Jorgensen.

The title of this post was cribbed from one by the same name by Chris Brogan. In it, Brogan ponders why he writes, why he creates, why he does things that oftentimes seem to have no direct monetary outcome. What did he realize?

The whole post is here.

On a related note, had a great lunch on Thursday with Heather Gold. One of the key points we agreed on:

In an increasing number of situations, the personal is the professional.

In other words, the person, the whole person, should be able to show up at the office. Not just the cookie cutter caricature that is playing the role, but the whole person and all of his or her skills and perspectives and even weaknesses. More thoughts on this from Heather here.

Paul McNamara has put together a set of incredibly well-researched and thought-provoking posts on how technology adoption occurs within businesses, and does a helluva persuasive job challenging some of the legends and lore that have built up over the past couple of decades (example: Why did the PC win the enterprise in the early 80’s? “The spreadsheet,” you say? Wrong.). Here are a few excerpts; I encourage you to check out the whole series. (n.b. If you got value out of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, you’ll likely learn a thing or two from Paul’s series as well.)

Part 1: What is a “p-wave?”

“Shifts in technology use in the business world often happen like earthquakes. At first, they are felt suddenly, like a p-wave. After the technology p-wave, things continue to shake in the industry — often for several years — like an s-wave. But it’s what happens during the p-wave that can determine winners and losers.”

Part 2: The PC Revolution and the Forgotten Killer App

“Conventional wisdom holds that the spreadsheet (Visicalc for Apple and Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC) was the killer app that got PCs into big companies. It’s true that lots of PCs got sold into the Financial Services sector because of the spreadsheet. But this explanation is somewhat incomplete. Outside of the Financial Services sector, a less recognized force was also at work. A small spark had ignited big sales of PCs to Fortune 500 businesses: it was the introduction of the lowly 3270 emulator.”

Part 3: Linux Displaces Unix and the Myth of the Basement Hacker

“The Linux p-wave hit in 1998/1999. It wasn’t until halfway through the p-wave that we even realized what was going on. The way we found out was a story in itself. Our engineers had put a signature deep inside the OS that enabled a web-server to respond to a network query by saying “I’m an Apache web server that is running on Red Hat Linux”. Mike Prettejohn had formed a business called Netcraft which routinely pinged millions of web servers to gather statistics about the Internet and had figured out a way to read these signatures. Mike called me in late 1998 and said, ‘are you guys aware that Red Hat is about to overtake Microsoft in the number of web servers on the Internet?‘”

Part 4: Technology P-Waves — Jolts to the Market

“I’ve described how earthquakes happen in two phases — the p-wave (a short powerful impulse) and the s-wave (the sustained shaking). In reality, the p-wave and the s-wave emanate from the same spot. The reason we experience them as two different events is because they travel at different speeds. The p-wave travels much faster than the s-wave. How far you are from the epicenter will determine the time interval between when you experience the p-wave and when you experience the s-wave.

A technology shift happens the same way. The p-wave of a technology shift is characterized by large numbers of smaller-scale decision makers (individual contributors and first line managers) nearly simultaneously deciding to adopt a new approach. The technology p-wave travels fast because biz-sumers decide and act faster than larger-scale decision makers. They are closer to the problem and their decisions carry less risk.”

Part 5: Software Simplified — The Next Technology P-wave

“The truth is that if you talk to just about anyone on the front lines today, whether they are in sales, finance, manufacturing, marketing, or any other operating group, you find remarkable similarity in the stories they tell. They all feel like they’re not getting the applications they need to do their job well…If you talk to the IT guys, they are also frustrated. Deep down they understand the needs of their internal customers, but they simply don’t have the time or the budget to respond.

These are exactly the conditions that are ripe for a p-wave shift. And new generations of Web-Service approaches are exactly the right kind of solutions to start the cascade.”

I’m still wrapping my head around the whole thing, and I really like the metaphor of different types and speeds of adoption happening in parallel, via the p-wave and s-wave analogies. Good stuff, Paul.

(disclosure: coghead is a client)