I find myself fascinated by the posts that Tom Mandel has written on open email as social networking here and here. While I was in college, back in the pre-Internet, pre-PC days, I worked as an editorial assistant at a magazine, a job that entailed transcribing, typing, and distributing reams of interoffice memos, not to mention handling, reading, filing postal mail for senior editors. This was considered a prime job because of the opportunity to immerse yourself in the editorial business via the correspondence of experienced professionals. Thus it was with interest I read Tom’s posts about tagging email and open email servers that would allow for the spread of the “tacit knowledge” of which “email is chock full.” So true.
It also occurred to me when reading the wide variety of posts here that the networks we are talking about differ in two big ways — one is what I will call the value chain. I’ve written about this before, and essentially it is the notion that for any network you can follow the creation of value as it moves from node to node. Another main point of difference is the nodes themselves. In Tom’s posts, he postulates a network where email and conversation threads are the nodes. In other posts on this blogs, nodes under discussion include people, views and transactions, services, energy networks.
Not that this is an all-inclusive list, by any means. Simply an illustration of what I’m coming to see as building blocks of social networks — nodes and value.
May 29, 2007 at 10:45 pm · Filed under
Supernova07
In my last post, I reported on JP Rangaswami’s open email system. By opening his email to his staff, he has essentially created a ‘cost-free’ collaboration forum with no learning curve.
I can easily imagine the value of an email server add-on that would allow anyone to turn any email to which she had access into a message thread. Perhaps something like this exists.
Email has always been collaborative in some sense — that’s what “cc:” is for after all. Open email extends this utility. But there is more one could - and should - do with email.
Because email is chock full of tacit knowledge, it’s an ideal content base for tagging and social networking.
Collaborative groups are pre-defined - as in the case of JP’s staff - and leave little headroom for any ‘emergent’ result. People in the group share collective intelligence and add to it too, within the limits of the group.
But, if email could be tagged, we would share collective intelligence in an even more useful way and would allow people to integrate and extend knowledge by mashing up an even larger variety of sources — including, in this case, what must be the largest unstructured knowledge repository in existence: email.
opened access to his email to his staff. By treating his email as an open forum, he has found that his associates are more involved in his interactions with others. He has found that they can use this — particularly his sent mail — is a great learning opportunity.
Stowe points out “how revolutionary open email could be in a historically closed and secretive corporate context.”
Although this is analogous to making email like forums and wikis, the key difference is that you are using email as the entry point. It’s not a separate wiki/forum site.
Good point. “And,” Jimmy adds, “since it’s a tool that everyone uses already, it’s more likely that the non-alphageeks you work with might be more likely to use it.” That’s an even better point.
Jimmy asks whether readers think this would work in their companies — and I’ll ask the same thing.
It’s not clear which is a crazier idea: making computers understand the nuances of human language, or building a startup search engine to compete with Google and other entrenched giants. PowerSet is trying to do both. Even in its pre-launch stage, the startup is generating significant buzz for its technology and backers, as well as the massive opportunities if it can deliver on its ambitious goals.
In this conversation, I speak with PowerSet CEO Barney Pell about the future of search, the Semantic Web, Web 2.0, and just how our interactions with computers might improve in the coming years.
Among the many interesting sessions being held at this year’s Supernova conference is one entitled “Dark Matter: Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy?” The premise of this panel discussion is to explore the range of under-the-radar activities - such as search marketing and behavioral targeting - that may be forming the “real economic backbone” of the Web.
The Internet economy is usually associated with the disruptive forces being wrought by the likes of emerging or well-established players such as Google and Amazon on consumer-facing marketplaces. However, another economic effect of Web technology that is just starting to be felt is the decomposition of traditional organizations into loosely coupled confederations of business units and entrepreneurs.
This is being driven by approaches such as service-oriented architecture, software as a service, and Web 2.0. At an operational level, the applications that drive business are increasingly being standardized and decomposed to the point where they can be assembled or disassembled into composite applications that can be adapted to changing business processes. At a higher level, we may be doing the same with organizations.
A couple of years ago, John Crupi, CTO of JackBe Corporation, and formerly CTO of the Enterprise Web Service Practice at Sun Microsystems, identified this phenomenon as the “composite company,” which essentially will be a collection of services drawn from other enterprises. Another way to describe this type of organization is the “loosely coupled enterprise.”
The loosely coupled enterprise aggregates services on an on-demand basis to meet customer demands, on demand. Many, if not all, of such services may be provided from third parties. The impact on business agility and speed to market will be enormous.
That loosely coupled enterprise is already a reality today in many sectors. I’ve had the opportunity to sit in on seminar led by Mohan Sawhney, professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, who observes that many of the best-run companies may not be producers themselves, but networks of producers, orchestrated by a front-end broker of services. Sawhney says, for example, that some mobile phone companies already provide a good example of this orchestrator role, in that “they don’t do anything themselves, they just collect the money.” Networking equipment giant Cisco Systems comes close to this orchestrator model: “85 percent of Cisco’s products are never touched by a Cisco employee,” he pointed out.
Just as businesses are evolving into loosely coupled components, so to are the systems that support them. “Five years from now, the concept of an application will be obsolete,” Sawhney said. “They will all be services, combined, mixed, matched and reused as needed.”
Over the years, there has been a great deal of angst about the viability of the “hollow” corporation, which links processes and services to customers, but produces nothing itself. Thanks to new technologies, what was a linear supply chain is now close to being a synchronous network, affording better visibility and control over processes.
In turn, the rise of the loosely coupled company may open up new opportunities for smaller businesses that can provide these required services. Trends in the software industry may point to the shape of things to come. In a book published last year, Bob Walsh identified a new breed of company: the “Micro-ISV” (independent software vendor). As applications continue to break down into loosely coupled components, enterprises will rely more on functions provided through the Software as a Service model, versus developing and maintaining everything in house.
The industry is still wrestling with issues with universal online identity and security, as well as reliability and data storage to address issues posed by reliance on a network of services, versus a single service provider.
MicroISVs may be the providers of these service-oriented components, perhaps charging for individual services on a per-transaction basis. A MicroISV may be an entrepreneur working from a spare bedroom; or it may be a unit of a larger non-IT enterprise as well. Online marketplaces can bring together both producers and consumers of Web services to fulfill such on-demand requirements. In addition, many of the new software startups today prefer to deliver their products over the Web, as on demand services.
One microtransaction may be a few pennies, but a few thousand a day across many services will begin to add up to some real money.
A few days ago I was talking to the CEO of a large media company. They’ve been experimenting with different advertising models on their long form video content. She’s excited about the results.
A week earlier, a CTO of one of the leading blogging companies talked to me about their experiments with social network-based viral ads and how they search for influencers. In between those two conversations a CEO from a European agency told me that CPG companies are struggling trying to redefine their advertising approaches at “the moment of truth” – when customers are making their purchase decision. All of them agree on one thing: advertising is changing and they are not sure where it is going to take them.
What we have been seeing for the last several years is just the beginning of systemic changes to the entire advertising industry. And these changes are accelerating. Since early March, U.S. prime-time viewership for the four biggest broadcast networks was down 2.7 million to 37.6 million people, from 40.3 million during the same period in 2006 – only some of it due to PVRs. The change is more profound: our media consumption is changing. In addition to spending more and more time on the Internet, PVRs, iPods, Zens, and other devices means that we are watching TV very differently than we were watching even a year ago, but we are using the same old measurements – adding a 24-hour window after the shows to measure PVR watching doesn’t reflect the extent of changes in our viewing habits.
The Internet has its own problems. Just 3 weeks ago IAB published an open letter to comScore and Nielsen/Netratings asking them to submit to an audit of their numbers.
At the same time advertisers are asking for data about commercial watching on TV and time spent on websites rather than just page views. The advertising value chain is changing, the lines between promotion and advertising are blurring, new forms and approaches to advertising are constantly being tried. But measurements haven’t caught up. We can’t agree on what we are supposed to measure and how.
It is one of those rare moments when the entire domain model that everyone has been using for many years is changing. Unfortunately we are still thinking about the industry using traditional archetypes. We talk about TV advertising dollars moving to the Internet, inserting ads into VOD, selling avails on eBay, measuring page views, and using upfronts for the Internet. Instead, we should look at the entire advertising system as a single structure that needs to be planned, developed, managed and measured across media and methods using integrated approaches measured and adjusted in real time. This is not going to happen soon. And it is not going to be easy. It will require reorganization of agencies, media distribution, marketing departments and budgets, development of new automated systems, integration of measures, ad planning and media buying not only for TV and the Internet but also digital signage and radio, and close coordination with direct mail. A key prerequisites of these new realities: data capture and aggregation from as diverse sources as STBs, Internet, game consoles, POS, location sensing devices, portable media players, kiosks, etc., is not only difficult technically but will require partnerships that are not going to happen for quite sometime.
It is time for the advertising, media industries, and advertisers, to develop this vision and to figure out how to get there as soon as we can.
Last week I was in Paris at the annual Xtech conference, listening to some of Europe’s (and America’s) best developers and open data advocates sharing their experience. One of the talks that really had an impact on me - actually, left me with my jaw hanging open - was Gavin Bell’s What is your provenance? in which he explores the unintended social networks that we form online.
Even ten years ago, our identity was formed of things such as our postal address or phone number, and these data were generally not available to people unless we gave it to them. Now much of our identity these days is available online, held at a distance from ourselves by social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and a host of other fora. How much can people find out about us without us being there? What kind of composite image of ourselves can we create from the information we’ve scattered across the web?
Gavin decided to find out what picture is formed of him by the data that he and other people have published. He started with the about page on his own website, GavinBell.com, which points to a number of other places where Gavin has identified himself using the rel=”me” tag. This includes his Flickr photos page which then leads to his Flickr profile. That links back to GavinBell.com, with the rel=”me” tag, strongly identifying these two pages as belonging to the same person.
Of course, Flickr also provides lists of buddies - data that can be scraped, along with screen name, real name and location (if given). By following the buddy list links, it’s then possible to scrape the data from his friend’s buddies pages, building up a picture of his wider Flickr network.
But there’s no reason to limit this data trail to Flickr. Scrape the links from friends’ profile pages, follow them, find more rel=”me” tags, more links to other social networking sites, such as Upcoming, and examine contacts there, and a clear picture of who knows who and what the web knows about each of them emerges.
The same works for any number of sites, Magnolia, Vox, Digg, Cork’d, and Gavin went on to talk about how you could use the same techniques with blogs, Del.icio.us and tags to form a picture of what you think you write about on your blog, and what other people think you write about. Fascinating, yes, but also alarming.
One of the things that struck me was that, logically, I know that there’s lots of information out there about me that people could collate to form a picture of the sort of person I am, what my interests are, who I know, where I go. Emotionally, though, I didn’t realise just how easy it was until Gavin showed us.
Last autumn, Facebook decided to expose its user’s actions within the site in a ‘news feed’. Suddenly, it was easy to see who was joining or leaving which group, who was leaving messages on whose walls, and who was friending or splitting up from whom. Users rebelled - whilst all of that data was there for people to see if they dug deep enough, no one was expecting it to be collated and exposed.
The underlying assumption in Facebook - and indeed, in life - is that others shouldn’t collate and expose your data without good reason. Indeed, much of the work that we do with the Open Rights Group, a UK-based digital rights advocacy group, is about the government collecting or collating data in ways that are not in the public interest.
The cynical might say that it would serve me right if someone did aggregate all my personal data and publish it for the world to see, but we all generate data - scads and scads of it, much of it perforce. And we can’t prevent others from doing with it what they will - it is, after all, out there. Question is, how will we deal with having that level of transparency foisted upon us?
One of the unexpected benefits of the blogging phenomenon has been the way that blog search engines such as Technorati have exposed the richness of the non-English web. Back in the olden days, when the internet was flat, you saw the web through your own linguistic filters - English was the dominant language and it spread as far as the mouse could click. Now there are vibrant Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and even Welsh communities online that are easily found and accessed. Wikipedia comes in 252 languages; Google search is available in over 100 languages. No longer do we live in linguistic silos unable to see or interact with speakers of other languages - instead, multilingualism is all around us.
But the web still errs towards a very basic view of language, assuming that language and nationality share the same borders and that people use language in an either/or manner. Reality is far more complex than that and in this video conversation I talk to bilingual language-blogger and social media consultant, Stephanie Booth (Climb To The Stars).
On Saturday I flew back from the Personal Democracy Forum, the fourth annual gathering of tech-savvy political bloggers in New York. At Friday’s main event, the several hundred attendees heard Eric Schmidt, Lawrence Lessig, Thomas Friedman and others discuss the state of the political process in the Internet Age.
But most of the interesting action took place off-stage in the hallways and at Saturday’s unconference, where dozens of participants swapped business cards and agendas. A sense of passion and energy filled every corner of the event.
Tomorrow morning I fly to Miami to take part in the E&P/MediaWeek Interactive Media Conference & Trade Show, and the contrast could not be more striking. I don’t want to prejudge the gathering, but I expect a far less upbeat crowd, as newspaper circulations continue to plummet (here’s one reason why) and the transition to the online medium is a sometimes painful thing to watch.
As the new media landscape continues to shift and emerging media forms emerge, one takeaway is that niches of passion hold much more appeal to readers than the traditional structures of objectivity and dispassionate reporting erected in another era. When was the last time you saw an online newspaper crusade for a reform, urge you to sign an online petition, or give you organizing tools to go out and make a difference in your community?
It would be an interesting experiment to create widgets around political reform, community activism, public-spirited fund-raisers, organizing toolkits, or other passion-based campaigns. In other words, widgets of passion.
But somehow, I don’t expect any such heretical ideas to come out of Miami.
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.
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.
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.
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 what’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.”
