Archive for April, 2008
by Christopher Carfi
April 27, 2008 at 3:33 am · Filed under
Uncategorized
Embracing blogs to connect with a company’s network of customers is fait accompli for the tech industry, but what about the rest of the planet that doesn’t put its every movement up on Twitter?
Here are four retailers that are using blogs and social media in an attempt to better connect with customers.
WalMart
Revenue: $375 Billion
# Locations: 6,800
Notable URL: http://www.checkoutblog.com/
Notable post: "Great News About WalMart’s Milk" (over 230 comments)
After several failed attempts at blogging, most notably the reviled "WalMarting Across America" shill blog, the planet’s largest retailer might be starting to get its act together. In 2007, the Bentonville, Arkansas company launched the "Checkout Blog," a group blog penned by nine of its corporate buyers that covers topics from the garden to video games to sustainability. A definite step in the right direction for the company, with actual employees communicating about their individual areas of interest, with minimal company shilling taking place.
McDonald’s
Revenue: $23 Billion
# Locations: 30,000+
Notable URL: http://csr.blogs.mcdonalds.com/
Notable post: "A Trip Down Memory Lane" (Good handling of a troll in the comments)
WalMart wasn’t the only retailing behemoth to receive derision for its initial forays into blogging. McDonald’s, too, had its challenges. (Hopefully, you missed the fake "Lincoln Fry" blog, about a french fry shaped like the 16th President of the United States. Yes, it was as abysmal as it sounds.)
The company behind the golden arches now has a "Open for Discussion" blog with weekly postings on topics regarding "Corporate Social Responsibility." While certainly better than the LIncoln Fry, there are still some challenges here:
1) It looks to me like someone at McDonald’s headquarters has committed to some sort of MBO of "one blog post per week." As such, the posts are infrequent and not heavily trafficked.
2) While it’s great to spread the wealth, all the most recent posts on the site (March-April 2008) are from different authors. Accordingly, each post is starting with a "who I am and what my role is" statement. This also means that the revolving cast of characters hasn’t a chance to connect with readers. It’s drive-by blogging.
3) To their credit, comments on the blog are open. However, the paucity of comments makes me think that either (a) the blog is receiving almost no traffic or (b) the comments are being heavily moderated. The bold TERMS AND CONDITIONS of the blog also state: "McDonald’s owns any comments or other content that you post on this
site. That means that McDonald’s has the right to make, have made,
offer for sale, use, sell, copy, distribute, perform, transmit,
display, modify, adapt and otherwise use your submission(s) throughout
the world in perpetuity in any manner that it sees fit without
compensation to you. McDonald’s also has the right to use your name in
connection with any use of your submissions." This is not the best method to develop trust and a long-term relationship with a customer.
Starbucks
Revenue: $9 Billion
# Locations: 15,000+
Notable URL: http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/
Notable post: "Vote For All Day Bold" (Giving contrarian viewpoints their due)
Of the four retailers profiled here, Starbucks has gone the furthest with respect to using social media to not only connect the organization to its customers, but to enable customers to rally around ideas as a community. Their "My Starbucks Idea" site is a venue where customers can submit suggestions to the organization, vote on the suggestions of other individuals, and see which ideas are going to actually be implemented by the organization.
The best part of the site is not the technical implementation but, rather, the cultural one. Starbucks does not seem to be censoring comments about their organization in any way, even when the feedback is less-than-stellar. For example, one representative comment on the site states:
"Decaf drinkers want strong coffee also. I go (or used to go) to
Starbucks because of the decaf Sumatra, Verona etc. I can get Pikes
Piss coffee from Tim Horton’s or McDonald’s. My grandmother makes
stronger coffee. Starting today I am no longer a customer of Starbuck’s
coffee except for whole beans. I urge everyone reading this to follow
my lead and make Starbuck’s understand that the reason we (used to)
spend our money on their overpriced coffe is because it is the best and
no one else offers a strong decaf. There is strength in numbers - walk
away today!"
The key thing that Starbucks realizes is that these conversations are taking place anyway. If this site didn’t exist, customers such as the individual above would be making these comments in other forums that were removed from the organization, or on his or her own blog. With My Starbucks Idea, the organization is getting the feedback in realtime, and has the opportunity to address issues in a rational and constructive way.
Whole Foods Market
Revenue: $4 Billion
# Locations: 270+
Notable URL: http://wholefoodsmarket.com/socialmedia/blogs/
Notable post: "Slow Down and Green Up" (Rich conversation)
Although their CEO got himself and the company in some hot water by commenting negatively about a competitor using a pseudonym (n.b. the investigation into his actions has now been concluded), Whole Foods has a farmer’s market full of blogs, podcasts and videos they are using to give customers a variety of methods to learn more about the organization.
by Isabel Hilborn
April 26, 2008 at 2:56 pm · Filed under
Network Theory, Social Platforms, Society and Culture
Supernova’s theme for 2008 is “Challenges for the Network Age” - you can read more in this post by Kevin Werbach, Supernova’s founder.
One of my clients, Scott Draves (known as Spot), is an award-winning software artist, some of whose art is based on a complex network. I’ve interviewed him to learn more.
Isabel Walcott Hilborn: To create your art, you work with networks — made up of both people and computers. Can you explain how networks factor into your creative process?
Scott Draves: Right, much of my art harnesses a large collection of computers and people into a cyborg mind: “the Electric Sheep“. It’s a distributed screensaver that produces an abstract animation influenced by everyone who watches it. My intention is to produce artificial life in virtual reality.
So there’s the literal network of thousands of computers working together as a supercomputer to animate the “sheep”, a distributed render farm. These computers also form a p2p bittorrent network for sharing the final animation files.
The people behind the computers form another network — everyone who’s watching can vote on whether not they like what they see, and the more popular sheep reproduce with a genetic algorithm including cross-over and mutation. So the sheep evolve to satisfy their human audience.
There’s also “intelligent design” in the sense than people can use additional software to make their own sheep, and submit it to the gene pool. So there’s an artificial intelligence competing and collaborating with crowd-sourcing. What makes this design network go is Creative Commons licensing, which reduces the resistance in this circuit of mind, binding it together.
There’s another and much larger network: the software that implements this work is itself Open Source. The client and server are free software under the GPL, programmed by a globe-spanning team. They are made from components and tools developed by thousands of programmers over decades, based on science and mathematics published worldwide.
The Electric Sheep are standing on the shoulders of these giants, our technological and artistic fore-fathers. This is a network too, the web of ideas, in which every artist, and every person, is ultimately engaged.
Isabel Walcott Hilborn: How long did it take to build what you have? Can anyone make a network?
Scott Draves: The Electric Sheep started in 1999, but were based on a rendering algorithm that I developed in 1992. So the Electric Sheep have been growing for a very long time, but there are certainly networks that have gotten larger in less time, like say MySpace. So yes, anyone can start a network, but whether or not anyone will join is another question.
Isabel Walcott Hilborn: What are some of the key differences you see between working with a network and working independently?
Scott Draves: When working with a network you have given up a degree of control, so you have to very carefully consider everyone’s motivation. The network only exists by the will of the participants.
Some networks move at a glacial pace, which can be frustrating. For example, writing software portable and reliable enough to run on almost any Windows PC or Mac is hard enough. Doing so through a “committee” is glacial compared to solo hacking where I can try out ideas every minute, instead of monthly. I can only roll out a new client/server protocol once per year.
The reward, however, has no substitute.
Isabel Walcott Hilborn: What benefits have you gained from creating a network to make your art?
Scott Draves: In my case, the network is an essential.
Isabel Walcott Hilborn: What are the main challenges you see coming from your network?
Scott Draves: On the technical side, the biggest challenge has been finding the bandwidth to run the server. Ultimately broadcast should get built in to the infrastructure of the net (what if ISPs ran torrent seeders?).
The human side is more complicated. The GPL and CC have done a good job of handling the intellectual property issues so far. But we still face simple problems like vandalism, and what I call the “Las Vegas Effect”.
The screen-saver is based on the popular vote, and often the most popular sheep seem to appeal to the lowest common denominator: they have bright colors and fast motion. I call this the “Las Vegas Effect” and it’s something I struggle with. As “god” of the system I could obliterate any sheep that displeases me, but I almost never interfere so directly.
Instead I channel my personal aesthetic into the “Dreams in High Fidelity” which is the dual to the screen-saver: instead of low resolution for free, it’s High Definition for a price. These limited edition works contain only sheep actively selected by me, assembled according to my design, and re-rendered at vastly higher quality.
The two versions are symbionts: neither could survive without the other.
UPDATE:
As the Featured Artist for Supernova 2008, Scott Draves projected his limited edition fine art “Dreams in High Fidelity on two screens at the Technology Showcase and Gala. The projection of his work at this event was made possible by the Panasonic Projector Systems Company. The dual projections are also visible in many of the video interviews on the Sevenload site.
Here’s a snapshot of the projected work at the event, courtesy of Lisa Rein:
by Christopher Carfi
April 19, 2008 at 1:17 am · Filed under
Uncategorized
All sorts of good things going on this week. Here we go!
1) The “networks don’t have people…people have networks” concept floated here has become a full-fledged snowball.
- Ross Mayfield - “Here’s some related Soylent Green.”
- Demian Entrekin - “Individuals create value for organizations through the impact of their Project Network, not through their position in the organization chart.”
- David Wallace - “It’s about the people, people.”
- David Cushman - “When you aggregate personal data in profiles (eg facebook) you risk imposing structural limitations on the conversation and on the way groups form. This leads to severe restrictions on value and growth creation in your network.”
- Marshall Lager - “It’s why Facebook (for example) has been having trouble - it takes ownership of pieces of you.”
2) A point of caution on the “social media divide” from Francine Hardaway (with more here) - “Fellow geeks, we live in a dream world — a world of Twitter - Twhirl - Friendfeed - AlertThingy - Seesmic. And if you think most people reading this can identify any of those things, think again. Moreover, if you think there’s a chance of any of those crossing the real chasm in the next ten years, think again.”
3) A pragmatic step toward mobile networking for the iPhone (disclosure: we helped with this one)
by Isabel Hilborn
April 18, 2008 at 12:08 am · Filed under
Uncategorized
Last December there was a Slashdot post about the possibility of Blockbuster being sued by Facebook users for releasing their movie-rental history without permission.
Today Wendy Davis wrote on MediaPost that sure enough, Blockbuster has been hit with a lawsuit out of Texas that threatens class action. Either some enterprising class action lawyer started beating the bushes for a greedy client, or someone was really pissed off enough to want retribution. I wouldn’t be surprised if both were true.
Imagine suddenly discovering that your entire queue of movie rentals was distributed to your Facebook network. Did you want your ex-boyfriend to know that you were renting every single boo-hoo chick flick ever made? Did you want your friends from work to find out that you actually love those third-rate sci-fi thrillers you always make fun of? Did you want your constituents to know you were renting porn?
How nobody could have thought of this, on either the Facebook side, the Blockbuster side, or the agency side, before it happened, is astonishing to me. They actually set this up as an opt-out, not an opt-in, program. A slashdot user (IcyNeko) posted text he received from Blockbuster:
“If cookies detect that you have a Facebook account, regardless of whether or not you have installed the Movie Clique(TM) application, then activities on blockbuster.com such as rating movies or adding movies to your Queue will be sent as notifications to your mini-feed and friends’ profiles… If you want to permanently disable the Facebook integration … you can easily change these settings … .”
Unbelievable!
I especially hate it when social apps are improperly implemented because it causes a chilling effect for other businesses interested in trying out new word of mouth marketing techniques or entering into the social media realm. Risk-averse corporations don’t need any more incentive not to innovate. Remember the SCO debacle, that dissuaded many Fortune 100 companies from trying open-source applications out of the need to protect their deep pockets? What a waste of time, that it took the market a while to correct. (Incidentally, April 29th is a trial date for SCO v. Novell that John Fontana of Network World says could be the “last nail in SCO’s coffin”. Really, though, SCO died long ago.)
To conclude: There’s bound to be some fallout as people try to build businesses out of new technologies, especially while the revenue models are still under development. This is only natural. My hope is that the more egregious uses of networking technologies will fall by the wayside and be forgotten in the wave of successful apps. We can learn from the mistakes and move on. I count on public sentiment (like the Facebook Stop Invading My Privacy group) to correct the wrongs. But I guess the jury’s still out.
by Christopher Carfi
April 15, 2008 at 5:12 am · Filed under
Uncategorized
"If it happens twice it’s coincidence; if it happens three times, it’s a trend." - Anonymous
For the past few months, I’ve been dealing with one of those gut, right-brain feelings — not enough hard data to draw the graph, yet well-more than enough to get the spidey senses on alert. That gut feeling tells me that business is about to get really weird. Happily, I also have a feeling that ultimately said weirdness is going to manifest itself in a positive, transformative way.
The key driver behind this feeling has been the humanization of so many organizations that, heretofore, have been opaque and, well, corporate. Dell. GM. Salesforce. Wells Fargo. Oracle. In all of those cases, the organizations have started to make transformations from being purely represented in the marketplace by their sanitized, focus-grouped-to-death marketing departments into organizations where at least some identifiable number of their employees or representatives are having "real" identities online that integrate both their "corporate" and "human" sides.
As we discovered here, individuals from Big Companies self-identify online with a variety of sites online that they state as their "home base." For many of us, our blogs are "home" — when someone asks us "where can I find you online," we give our blog URLs. (This is the camp into which I fall.) For many others, a Twitter stream, or even a Facebook or LinkedIn profile might be that touch point. Some of us have separate homes, one for our "professional" self, and another for our "personal" self, perhaps even under a pseudonym. I have a feeling (again, no hard data here) that the generation coming online now will more strongly identify with themselves and their peer networks, rather than any organizational home online, regardless of how benevolent that organization may be.
Here are three other posts that are poking on different side of this:
Umair Haque: "There’s only one real answer: rethinking strategy itself. A world of
cheap, abundant, always-on interaction, where value is shifting to the
edges, demands a fresh understanding of what’s truly strategic and
what’s not."
Fred Wilson: "We are in the midst of a groundbreaking shift from a centralized
economy dominated by large "orthodox" companies to a "edge economy"
dominated by end users."
Jeff Jarvis: "Where orthodox strategy advises hiding information and making things
less liquid, what does edge strategy advise? Exactly the opposite:
release information bottlenecks and make things more liquid."
What do you think? Will organizations continue to fragment, and become more networked and organic, or is the current vogue of online individualism merely an outlier that will eventually return to a more traditional strategic state?
by Howard Greenstein
April 14, 2008 at 10:51 pm · Filed under
Uncategorized
One of the topics the group of Conversation Hub bloggers have thrown around is “Invasive Advertising and Privacy.” Coincidentally, the last few days have brought a lot of attention to companies like NebuAd and Phorm, which inspect your web traffic requests as they go from your computer, through your Internet Service Provider and out to the webserver answering your requests. There are excellent posts at the NY Times Bits Blog by Saul Hansel about NebuAd and Phorm. If you’re in the UK, you may have already heard about Phorm, as it has been the topic of a lot of discussion.
But what does it mean to really track your history? Here’s an example. Want to know what I bought at the Supermarket in February? Here you go! Go ahead, look at it.
That’s a screenshot of my UPromise account statement.
Wow, now you can target ads to me, realizing that I’m a pretzel eater. I’m sure there’s lots of pretzel-relevant advertising just waiting for me to click on it.
Did looking at my purchase records make you feel uncomfortable? It certainly did make me feel so the first time I saw a list of itemized supermarket purchases on a website that was getting the data from my market, credit card, etc. Of course, as a small inquiry will show you, there’s no lack of that data available for anyone to purchase. Companies like Catalina marketing print coupons at point of sale based on your purchase history, and they have patents behind that idea. Is getting a targeted coupon invasive?
It is ironic, as I’ve been going back and forth with the idea of the balance of marketing versus privacy since I wrote my first paper on it in my Master’s program in 1995. I’ll take you back to those days of yester-year now:
The Web presents an interesting paradigm shift. In television, radio, and print, content is created to appeal to a certain audience, whether targeted or broad. Advertisers sponsor the content in order to reach prospects with ad messages…Marketers are creating sites that are themselves the destination, the content, and the entertainment value the viewer/user/surfer is looking for…
Marketers are always looking to provide relevant ads to you. If they can, it becomes information, and not advertising. But if a practice doesn’t match your ‘gut test’ that’s probably an indication that there’s a problem. Phorm and NebuAd don’t pass my gut check yet. They make me feel uncomfortable. There’s a need to look more clearly at this before we accept it. If I find my ISP is passing them data, I’ll be looking for ways to route around this. How about you?
by Christopher Carfi
April 5, 2008 at 5:31 am · Filed under
Uncategorized
“Networks don’t have people. People have networks.” - Demian Entrekin
Was having dinner with Demian earlier this week, and the quote above was a pure moment of clarity. He is absolutely, 100% right. And, in those seven words, I think he summed up the next five years of our industry. Other data points:
Doc writes: “We have many relationships online. All of them, however, are defined and controlled (sometimes from both sides) within each company’s silo. What we don’t have are personally controlled global approaches to relationship, including privacy variables.”
Dave McClure writes: “‘Web 3.0′ is the condition which exists when someone is always ‘logged in’ on the web, and can move from site to site without ever having to re-enter a username/password.”
And Kevin brings it home: “One of the key questions for the Network Age is the interplay of aggregation and fragmentation…should we own our own identity though some user-centric ID model? Will change happen top-down, or bottom-up?”
The points above seem to point in a clear direction. We’re heading to an inflection point that is as significant as the move from mainframe to PC.
Having my information (social network connections, preferences, purchase history, etc.) stored in someone else’s silo makes no sense. Having my information stored in (literally) dozens of silos makes even less sense. (Yes, dozens. Think about it. Your information is in Facebook, and LinkedIn, and innumerable CRM systems like Salesforce — one for each vendor you deal with — and in Visa’s systems, and in…you get the point.)
The right point of integration is around the individual. Each of us is the center of our own universe.
(image credit goes to the inimitable david armano)
by Howard Greenstein
April 3, 2008 at 4:07 am · Filed under
Marketing and Relationships, Supernova08
Familiar title, no? How many times in the recent past have you received something like this on a social network service? “Forward this and see who looks at your profile the most!” “Forward this and a cute dog will wink at you.” Enough, please.
This is the note I sent to a friend today.
Friend:
Could you please go easy on the Funwall “forward this to see what happens” messages?
I seem to get them from several people at a time, and they take up my inbox and my time for not-such-a-great payoff. I value our connection and our communication, but these mass “forward this” mails are a bit too much. I’m considering removing apps that do this “mass forward” thing. Nothing personal to you - it’s just the way they’re set up.
What I hope my friend will realize from this note is that I do value our communication. And, that I believe there’s a place for forwarding fun viral items. But every network has someone who has done this just a few too many times and, while they may not realize it, it reduces the value of their other communications. The challenges of our network world include over-communicating, and the ease of ‘forwarding’ anything can add to the clutter, and reduce the signal of any form of communication.
It is like the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!” too many times. Emails from “that person who always forwards the forward-this mails” may get ignored. And that’s not useful for that person’s business or their personal brand.
Etiquette tip for social networks - before you forward that “forward this” message consider whether it needs to go to everyone on your list, or just a few people who you know will smile. Forward different things to different friends, and it is a valuable ‘touch’ to keep connected, and not an annoyance.
By the way, feel free to forward this blog post to everyone you know.
by Kevin Werbach
April 1, 2008 at 8:22 pm · Filed under
Social Platforms, Supernova08
Dave McClure’s rant on Web 3.0 as Hailstorm 2.0 is a great read for anyone interested in the future of the Web. It ties together many topics we cover at Supernova, including social platforms, identity, and the evolving online business ecosystem, not to mention Microsoft-Yahoo, Google vs. Microsoft, online payment systems, advertising, and more. At the end, though, Dave makes a shockingly dull-sounding observation:
“Web 3.0″ is the condition which exists when someone is always “logged in” on the web, and can move from site to site without ever having to re-enter a username/password.
That’s it? No semantic web? No 3D avatars? No free doughnuts? It sounds so… boring. I mean, c’mon, single sign-on?
Sometimes, though, the most important changes are the ones that seem too small to mention. To a great extent, the explosion of activity, innovation, and monetization on the Web since 2002 happened because most of us are now on broadband connections. And what makes broadband so valuable in daily life isn’t the speed… it’s the fact that it’s always on. Even something as basic as a search engine query isn’t so convenient when you have to make a dial-up connection to your ISP every time you start a session.
Dial-up made using the Internet a conscious choice, an activity delimited in time and space. Broadband makes it something you assume is always there, whenever you need it. It may not seem like a big difference, but psychologically, it’s huge. It’s the same phenomenon as Josh Kopelman’s penny gap — a little bit of effort changes the dynamics of the market.
Site log-ins are similar. If you have to remember a username and password for all sites you visit, you’re constantly reminded that they are separate islands. Equally important, the lack of ubiquitous identity and sign-on infrastructures means that your usage data and other personal information doesn’t flow freely across those sites. We’ve overcome the limitations of the Web as a series of static “pages,” but not the limitations of the Web as a series of discrete “sites.”
If you’ll recall from my Ten Challenges post, one of the key questions for the Network Age is the interplay of aggregation and fragmentation. Networked businesses tend to have massive economies of scale, not just in their physical infrastructure, but in their information infrastructure. At the same time, there is increasing value in hyperspecialization. Either way, though, the overhead of log-ins makes a difference. The more hyper-focused niche players I want to interact with, the harder it is to manage passwords and go to the trouble of connecting and personalizing each service.
Now of course, this leaves some big questions un-answered. Like, Will There Only Be One? Or Two? We may want a ubiquitous identity infrastructure that removes the scourge of log-ins, but do we want that controlled by Microsoft, or Microsoft and Google? How do the significant players — including those two as well as Facebook, MySpace, AOL, Plaxo, LinkedIn, etc. — think differently about these questions? Or should we own our own identity though some user-centric ID model? Will change happen top-down, or bottom-up? And what about those pesky bugaboos of privacy and security?
I guess we have a lot to talk about this year at Supernova….
by Isabel Hilborn
April 1, 2008 at 3:11 am · Filed under
Social Platforms, Supernova08
Just came across this interesting post by Max Freier looking at different patterns in linking behavior from users of top social sites. What does it mean that Jaiku is among the top 15 most linked-to sites by Twitter users? Just that they’re cross-posting on both and the links are automatic, or that they’re so addicted that they tweet in multiple places? Interested in your take.
