Why aren't PR Pros using Viral Video?

Bulldog Reporter, which is one of the best publications/websites serving the public relations community, today published my opinion piece on viral video. They did an awesome job of editing it and presenting it. Hats off to them.

  ¶ 7:48 PM 0 Comments

  Online advertising overtakes print in Britain The Guardian reports that online advertising now exceeds newspaper advertising in the UK. This in a country that has about 15 national daily newspapers and is addicted to its tabloids. Broadcast advertising is in a clear downward trend. Is this a leading indicator for the U.S.?

Meanwhile, newspaper editors fiddle while Rome burns.

Labels: advertising, mainstream_media

  ¶ 1:44 PM 0 Comments

  Tech PR War Stories Episode 2 is live The second episode of Tech PR War Stories is live.

David joins us this week from a Microsoft developer’s conference. Some attendees are complaining about how Microsoft treats them, and they’re blogging openly about it. Paul and David discuss the issue of openness and the emerging PR paradigm of embracing the bad with the good. What’s important is the conversation, they agree, not controlling the message.

Thanks for all your comments. Please keep 'em coming!

Labels: PR, social_media

  ¶ 9:16 AM 0 Comments

  Yahoo to Offer Unlimited E-Mail Storage - washingtonpost.com Yahoo will lift the cap on e-mail storage. David Filo tells the Washington Post, "We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails."

I've worked with people who kept thousands of e-mails in their inbox. I always wondered how they could manage such chaos. I guess I was the misguided one. It was just a matter of waiting for technology to catch up with their organization style :-).  ¶ 7:02 AM 2 Comments

  Is Exchange vulnerable to open source? When I saw the news nugget about Yankee Group's forecast that 23% of Microsoft Exchange users may defect to open source, I had an inkling of who was behind it. Sure 'nuff, it's my dear friend Laura DiDio, who is never one to shy away from controversy. Laura's taken more than her share of bashing from the various vendors she's criticized over the years, and some people question her research methods. But I admire the way she stirs things up and gets people talking. If more Exchange users begin to examine open-source alternatives after reading this report, so much the better.  ¶ 6:52 AM 0 Comments

  An impressive meetup for The Strategy Paradox You know social media is mainstream when the big accounting firms get on the bandwagon.

This evening I attended a meetup for Michael E. Raynor, author of the new book, The Strategy Paradox. I learned of it from HeyLetsGo, a regional social network. I wanted to meet Raynor since he co-authored one of my favorite business books, The Innovator’s Dilemma and his new topic sounded like it might make interesting fodder for a blog I write on innovation.

It turned out, though, that the social-media aspect of the meetup was as interesting as the author. The event was an experiment for Deloitte. Held in a small upscale restaurant in downtown Boston, it had no guest list. Anyone who showed up was free to attend (and with open bar and a fine selection of hors d’oeuvres, it was a bounty for those who did). Promotion was through an announcement on PBWiki and news of the event spread entirely through word of mouth. Mark Doerschlag posted the notice on his MarksGuide.com, a blog devoted to professional networking, posted the notice on HeyLetsGo, which is how I learned of it. Anyone could have come: in that respect, it was quite different from the tightly controlled press events of yesteryear.

Deloitte reps delivered a short presentation highlighting the experimental nature of the event. There were no attempts to sell the company’s services. Everyone got a free copy of the book. I’d say there were about 30-40 people there.

I found the audience to be of surprisingly high quality, given the lack of restrictions on attendance. In addition to spending some quality time with the author, I spoke with several other attendees whom I had never met before. All were business professionals with a strong interest in social media and in the strategy-focused topic of the book. It happened that nearly everyone I spoke to was self-employed. Several appeared interested in the networking aspects of the event. All were bright and inquisitive and the type of people who will probably blog about the book.

I don’t know if this meetup will ultimately prove successful in promoting the book, but I was impressed with both the attendees and the discussion. I’ll certainly be looking at applying this idea to marketing my own book, which is due next month. For an event with so few restrictions, I thought it was a notable success and a testament to the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

Labels: meetup, social_media, strategy_paradox

  ¶ 10:32 PM 3 Comments

  Tech PR War Stories David Strom and I got together at the recent New Communications Forum in Las Vegas to catch up on things. We've both been around the tech media business for a very long time, and while we've never worked for the same company at the same time, we've got plenty of mutual friends and experiences.

David came up with the idea of creating a podcast for the public relations community that would communicate what we've learned about the best and worst of PR. Both he and I have been on many panels in front of PR professionals, talking about how to work with the media. The appetite for this kind of information seems to be insatiable, and a podcast is a quick and easy way to capture some of our experiences.

So this week we recorded the first episode of Tech PR War Stories. Each week, we'll get together and talk about some aspect of technology media, whether it's news, tips, advice, rants or reminiscences.

We're really going to try to update this one every week, which sounds like an impossible dream to me. However, David has been publishing his Web Informant newsletter every week for many years, so I guess where there's a will, there's a way.

Please listen to the inaugural program (it's only 14 minutes) and let me know what you think. If you have iTunes, you can find it here. This is a work in progress and we want to make sure the programs meet your needs. We're pretty much open to anything!  ¶ 3:51 PM 6 Comments

  My E*TRADE tale: how NOT to treat the customer Financial institutions are known for treating their customers like cattle, but my recent experience with the E*TRADE brokerage has me envying the cows.

I use E*TRADE as a backup to my bank, occasionally transferring money into the brokerage for investment. Often these sums are pretty large. The transfers have always been smooth in the past, but when I tried to move a fairly large sum out of E*TRADE and back to my bank two weeks ago, the transaction didn't go through.

The trouble was that the system didn't tell me that the time (although E*TRADE claims it did). It simply made my accounts disappear. So when I noticed a week later that the transfer had never gone through, I went online to look at my accounts. They were gone. All of them.

I stayed calm, and called the brokerage, which told me to call back in the morning. When I called today, I was told that the accounts had been frozen as a security measure and that I had to go through an identity verification process to make the transfer. Okay, that's reasonable, but why hadn't anyone called me when I initiated the transaction 10 days earlier?

They did, on March 13, I was told, and they left a message. Really? I never got that message. And I wonder why they left one message in nine days ago and didn't bother to follow up when I didn't return it? It doesn't sound like they were all that keen on getting to the bottom of the story. Well, they tried to reach me, I was told.

What number did they use, I asked? I was read an old work number and I hadn't used in about five years. Did anyone notice that the voice mail that answered the phone didn't identify themselves as me, I asked? They didn't have an answer for that.

I've been making large transfers like this for years, I said, and I've never been run through this gauntlet. I was told that it's a new policy to confirm all large transfers. Really, I asked? No one at either E*TRADE or my bank asked any questions when I transferred an even larger amount of money into the account a few weeks earlier. So it's only suspicious when you transfer money out, I guess.

By the way, I'm still waiting on some paperwork that the E*TRADE rep was supposed to send me on another issue seven months ago. It doesn't really matter. By the time I get the paperwork, I'll be with another brokerage.  ¶ 9:40 AM 0 Comments

  IBM offers fascinating insight on evolving media world A perceptive analysis of the evolving media world comes from IBM, of all places. A 36-page report by IBM Global Business services that was recently posted on IBM's site foresees the media market falling into four basic classifications (with compound annual growth rates through 2010):

Traditional media (5%) – The model most media companies use today.
Walled communities (10%) – A combination of professional- and user-generated content delivered to a limited number of subscribers who either pay a fee or part with information about themselves to gain access.
Content hyper-syndication (33%) - Proprietary content is delivered through many channels, often in exchange for a license fee.
New platform aggregation (16) - Collection and packaging of content that is primarily user-generated.

By 2010, traditional media will be a $340 billion, market, with walled communities reaching $240 billion, content hyper-syndication $25 billion and new platform aggregation $50 billion.

So market growth has clearly shifted toward sectors that combine user and professionally generated content. As the report notes, five of the 10 fastest-growing websites last year were CGM aggregators.

Other interesting sound bites: "Worldwide revenue from new media channels – such as Internet advertising, mobile music and online games – is expected to reach nearly US$55 billion in 2006. But that pales in comparison to the US$455 billion in revenue that traditional channels are expected to yield in 2006."

"According to a recent [Forrester Research] study, if advertisers had an additional US$1 million for marketing, 50 percent of them said they’d spend it on Internet search, 42 percent chose other forms of Internet advertising, but only 19 percent mentioned television."

The report concludes with 10 recommendations for media companies, such as bringing consumers more directly into the content development process and loosening up on ownership rules in order to gain share.

The forecast of 33% CAGR in content hyper-syndication surprised me, as did the predicted $240 billion size of that market just three years from now. It suggests that Viacom, Sony and other digital-rights management flag-wavers are shooting themselves in the foot when they try to rein in file-sharing services. The recording industry is learning a consumer education campaign is far more effective than lawsuits in turning music downloaders into informed, paying customers. Part of hyper-syndication is giving a little away in order to get new customers on the back end.

This report is well worth reading if you're interested in the future of media.  ¶ 7:17 AM 0 Comments

  Wikibon is a great idea David Vellante has some ideas about revolutionizing IT market research. A former senior vice president at research firm International Data Corp., Dave's been running Barometrix, a successful startup focused on ROI measurement for several years. But here's the new idea: a couple of months ago, Barometrix spun out Wikibon, a company that's trying to apply wiki technology to market research.

The idea is to develop a rich research resource based upon contributions from knowledgeable people that are assembled and edited in a wiki. the first topic is information storage, but the goal is to apply this idea to other IT markets as well.

What makes this very Web 2.0-ish the idea of building a research product from content that is contributed for free. Research companies have always placed a premium on their ideas, and charged handsomely for it. Wikibon assumes that there are a lot of smart people out there who would be grateful just for the recognition. That is a fundamental Web 2.0: the assumption that good information doesn't have to be expensive.

Dave's competitors will no doubt hate this experiment, because they dislike anything that undermines their value proposition. But I think this is a heckuva good idea, and I'll be eager to see how it turns out.

Labels: social_media

  ¶ 10:22 AM 0 Comments

  Author Jackie Huba on Citizen Marketers Citizen marketers: respect them, engage with them and make them your fans because they’re defining the message about your company and your products.

That was the message from Jackie Huba, co-author of Citizen Marketers and Church of the Customer Blog, who addressed the Social Media Cluster of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council this morning.

Jackie offered lots of examples of how individuals are influencing markets through blogs and online video. Here are my lightly edited notes from the meeting.

Who are citizen marketers? The content they create is actually branding for the companies they talk about. One reason we use this term “citizen” is that we see a link between this new media and the Bill of Rights. There’s a freedom to speak and a freedom to assemble.

Fernando Sosa and Thomas Hilditch of Chicago met at Second City because they were aspiring comedians. Their funky McNuggets video. “McDonald’s Nuggets by Fernando and Thomas” has been a viral hit. The funny thing about this was this was almost an accidental citizen marketer thing. They were going to perform one night and came up with this rap. The friends thought it was so funny that they recorded it, uploaded it and it got over 100,000 views. If you’re McDonald’s, that’s fabulous publicity.

Cell Block Tango is a homebrew video that’s had over four million views.

The MyBarackObama.com blog came out when Obama announced his presidential candidacy and 70,000 people signed up in a week. There are 2,400 self-selected groups but it was created by people, not the campaign.

Podcasting is another phenomenon that not taking off as quickly, but research is finding that heavy radio listeners are listening to traditional radio less. NPR gets over 2 million downloads a week. With podcasts, there can be comment around the content. Now people can collaborate around the content and have a discussion. You can’t do that with radio.

George Masters – in November, 2004 he was a vocational school teacher in Southern California but very interested in graphic animation tools. He created an animation about his iPod. Wired magazine picked it up and starting writing about a home-brewed iPod ad, saying it looked professional. The New York Times picked it up from there and then CNBC. It changed George’s life: he got an offer from a graphics animation firm and that’s what he does today.

Brian Finkelstein posted a video of a sleeping Comcast tech on YouTube and six days later, the Times picked it up. The Comcast tech was fired, but the big question for Comcast is why was the guy on hold for 90 minutes in the first place?. Go to Google today and type “Comcast technician” and the entire first results page is about the video.

Let the seller beware. If you have a bad product or service, the consumer has the microphone.

Mike Kaltschnee of HackingNetflix.com tried to get on Netflix’s press list and received a brush-off response, which he posted on his blog. When Netflix realized how influential he was, the company did a 180 and how treats him as it would a member of the mainstream media.

Jim Romanesco runs StarbucksGossip.com (subtitle: Monitoring American’s favorite drug dealer). He’s a Poynter institute journalist who does a lot of work at Starbucks. He’s actually scooping the media on some things. When Starbucks recently had some bad earnings, the company blamed it on new products that were increasing wait times. He posted about this and store managers began to contact him to say they had told the company eight months ago that this was going to happen.

Jackie spoke about a category of publishers she calls “the fanatics:”

SlaveToTarget.com is a blog by a 28-year-old mother all about Target. She writes about great new products and generates sales. People actually go out and buy the products that she recommends. Target ignores her. Why?

Rabid fans of the soft drink Surge launched a website called SaveSurge.org to try to rally support for a campaign to bring back Surge. They called themselves soda activists. They weren’t successful, but Coke did start to test a product called Vault. People were contacting the authors saying that Vault was a lot like Surge, so the group started VaultKicks.com to encourage Coke to go national. Coke eventually complied. Today, if you type “vault soda” in Google, nearly all of the links are to SaveSurge and VaultKicks fan sites.

There’s another category she calls “the facilitators:”

Paul Mullett runs mini2.com, a site for Cooper Mini enthusiasts. Last July, a mystery ad started running, inviting people to visit the site at midnight on a certain date. It turned out that BMW had given the site operators and a few other journalists a preview of the 2007 minis. At midnight, the site posted photos of the new mini to an enthusiastic crowd.

So who are these people?

We found that these people perceive these activities as “productive leisure.” For them, it’s a fun outlet to communicate with other people who love what they love. It’s a bridge from what they do in real life to their passion.

You might think that this is a lot of content. But there’s something we call the 1% rule: most of the content is created by only 1% of the visitors.

Microsoft’s Channel 9 is mostly created by people within Microsoft. They have 4.5 million visitors a month and only 11,000 contributors.

QuickBooks community has 100,000 monthly visitors but only 900 people who create any content.

It may be only 1%, but that 1% is very powerful.

How do you take advantage of this trend?

Reach out to your fans. Last week, TurboTax partnered with Vanilla Ice to get people to create raps about taxes. People are actually doing it!

Another successful example is Converse, which asked people to create videos about their Chucks sneakers and upload them to conversegallery.com. They got 1,800 submissions and Web traffic rose 66%. Sales doubled in the months after the videos ran.

She cites the Chevy Apprentice campaign as an example of a viral campaign that didn’t work. Environmentalists hijacked the campaign and it spread into mainstream media. GM’s problem was that they didn’t reach out to people who loved the product. They just enabled people to be nasty. Reach out to your evangelists, the people who love what you do. Try the contest.

Invite co-creation. When Shakira’s latest album didn’t sell well, her record company took one of the songs – Hips Don’t Lie - and asked people on her fan site to contribute videos of themselves dancing to the song. They got thousands of submissions and the song became a hit. Was the video the reason? Probably not, but it was a great marketing campaign to use fans to be part of what was going on.

Create communities. Discovery Channel has a little-known division called Discovery Education that targets professional educators. You can download images and video to bring a PowerPoint to life. Teachers love it and Discovery Education has 70% market penetration in schools. But awareness among teachers was low. So Discovery Channel decided to invite educators to join a program – the Discovery Education Network – that gave teachers the opportunity to come to a program to learn more about how to educate with these tools.

Discovery also launched the Discovery Educator Network where anyone could register, get a blog, join a discussion group, exchange presentations and materials. They’re attracting people who love what they’re doing.

Q&A

Any comment on Viacom’s decision to sue YouTube/Google?

These clips are the new 30-second ads. CBS is one of the top channels on YouTube. Some big media companies get it and others don’t. CBS gets it.

There seems to be a total breakdown in use and abuse of a brand. What are the implications?

There are some rules that protect consumers from using brands, such as parodies. iPodMyBaby had to change their name to iPopMyBaby. If you go to my blog, you’ll find some brands who are sending cease-and-desist letters to fans. One movie company got the bloggers to actually take down a blog. It’s a confusing time right now.

How did you write a book with your significant other?

Ben has a journalism background and I have a marketing background, so it worked great. He did a lot of the background and I interviewed a lot of the citizen marketers.

What do you do if you’re a regulated company?

A lot of this hasn’t been sorted out. I was talking to a company last week whose lawyers were very concerned about starting a blog. One side argued that the blog was a personal opinion but others were saying it was company communications. There are a lot of CEO bloggers but can’t think of any in regulated industries.

How about ROI?

A lot of it has to do with word of mouth. Fred Reichheld has done a lot of work to say what percentage of a customer base would recommend the product to others. He comes up with a score he calls the net promoter score that measures the value of loyal customers. A lot of people are doing this just because they need to learn about it. I would measure subscribers to your content, people who want to hear about you every day.

How do you get the budget?

We’re seeing a lot of companies not budgeting for this. That’s one reason we see so much interest in contests; the money comes from the promotions budget. A lot of companies are discovering that the value of the campaigns is traffic to their websites.

What’s the next big thing?

I have no idea! How do you predict the next YouTube? All I can say is that the next big thing will relate to participation.

Labels: consumer_generated_media, social_media, viral_marketing

  ¶ 10:29 AM 2 Comments

  Why most viral video is stupid Bulldog Reporter's Daily Dog has an exceptionally thoughtful and well-informed article on the viral video craze that lambastes marketers for trying to add in viral buzz after a campaign has already been created. Author Andrew Foote's point is that anything that doesn't look genuine will be savaged by the community - and rightly so. He cites some excellent examples. If you're a marketer trying to get a handle on the viral phenomenon, read it.

Labels: social_media, video, viral_marketing

  ¶ 5:57 AM 1 Comments

  South by Southwest lessons learned

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Labels: social_media, sxsw

  ¶ 5:31 AM 0 Comments

  Dan Rather underwhelms I didn’t expect much out of Dan Rather’s appearance at South by Southwest and so wasn’t very disappointed that it didn’t deliver. It was a missed opportunity, though. There was the chance to question Rather about all sorts of things that the audience cared about, including the relevance of mainstream media in market with millions of voices, the low public perception of the media in general, the future of citizen journalism and the relationship between social and new media.

Instead, the moderator, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, opened the one-hour session with a question about Rather’s confrontation with Richard Nixon more than 30 years ago. That was an event that I suspect scarcely 10% of the audience even remembers, much less cares about, and it got the session off to a bad start. The rest of the hour proceeded through a short series of relatively tame questions about the state of journalism, along with rambling answers by the newsman (this may not be the moderator’s fault; sometimes interview subjects put restrictions on topics they’ll address). Rather had some good messages for journalists, but they weren’t his audience. The issues that I believe the audience really cares about weren’t even raised until a brief Q&A.

The highlight was Rather’s pointed criticism of what he called “access journalism,” or a style of reporting that trades off aggressive reporting for access to inside sources. Journalists too often protect their sources in order to become part of the inner circle, he said, and political and business figures willingly exploit this weakness. He blamed this trend, in part, on the decline of media competition as media ownership consolidates and the increasing distance between news operations and their parent companies.

“Very often the source is using the reporter and the reporter is using the source, but when the source begins to believe that the reporter can be part of the team, that’s when things get dangerous,” he said.

Rather said that journalism needs a “spine transplant,” a return to its role as an independent advocacy for truth and disclosure. The role of the journalist is as a watchdog, he said. A watchdog barks when it suspects danger but doesn’t lie down or attack. It’s a warning system that keeps those in power on their toes.

“Do we still believe that the documents of government belong to the people and not the people in power?” he asked. “The president is not a descendant of the Sun God. This person is elected by the people and part of what [journalists are] expected to do is check on them.”

Rather’s message was a welcome call for a return to the values of Edward R. Murrow, whose name he invoked twice. But I think the audience was interested in hearing more about social media. Rather’s own knowledge deficit in that area - he didn’t mention YouTube or podcasts once and appeared awkward using "Google" as a verb - was painfully evident. As someone whose CBS career was arguably brought down by bloggers in the Rathergate incident, you’d think he would have more to say. But the question about Rathergate, like so many others, never came up.

Labels: journalism, mainstream_media, social_media, sxsw

  ¶ 4:36 PM 0 Comments

  We're still making this up as we go along

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  ¶ 9:06 AM 0 Comments

  Las Vegas as a standard for user design

The best session I’ve attended so far at South by Southwest was also the shortest: a 25-minute presentation by interaction designer Dan Saffer called “Learning Interaction Design From Las Vegas.” Perhaps it’s because I just came from a visit to Las Vegas, but I found the analogy to America’s Sin City to be a strikingly appropriate as guidance for good design.

Citing Vegas’ remarkable success at appealing to its target audience, Saffer pointed to the Strip’s excellence at human factors design. “Vegas understands user experience,” he said, noting examples like carpet patterns that are designed to keep people within a building and ceiling painted like daytime sky in order to rob the visitor of a sense of time. He displayed a quotation – “Withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgment more sensitive” – to illustrate the need for designers to suspend the urge to create designs that meet their own standards of beauty in order to build products that people want to use.

Examples: the extravagant buffet lines in Vegas casinos appeal perfectly to the overweight middle-American tourists that are their best customers. Wedding chapels that announce themselves in bright incandescent lights may offend many people, but they do a great job of appealing to their target audience. And hotel complexes like Paris allow customers to experience France without the inconvenience of dealing with the French.

In particular, he dwelt on slot machines as examples of a near-perfect user interface. From type so large that it’s readable by the legally blind to the more than 400 sounds that some machines emit to the tactile feedback they provide, slot machines are finely tuned to give users a satisfying experience, on average, every six seconds. Which is why, he said, they’re a bigger business that the four largest fast-food chains combined.

Saffer’s playful jab at designers was to discard their upper-middle-class tastes and just design for their users. He said one reason MySpace is so popular is that it provides a Vegas-like experience for its customers. In aggregating so many functions in one place, it’s the online equivalent of a Vegas casino complex.

If you’ve worked with many designers – and I’ve known some very good ones – you know that their Achille’s heel is a tendency to design what’s elegant rather than what’s useful. Saffer’s message is something more designers should consider. I couldn’t agree with him more.

Labels: design, sxsw

  ¶ 4:46 PM 0 Comments

  E-mail marketing remains strong

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  ¶ 8:59 AM 0 Comments

  Reflections on Day 1 of SXSW

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Labels: blogging, social_media, sxsw

  ¶ 10:56 PM 0 Comments

  Why there'll be no social media bubble South by Southwest is my seventh social media conference in about a year (the others were Syndicate, Gnomedex, BlogHer, Podcast Academy and New Communications Forums in Boston and Las Vegas) and I’m again impressed with one thing: the lack of interest in financial rewards or profit motives on the part of the participants.

That fact was driven home to me again this evening, in a panel session called “Production Companies 2.0: Taking Online Video to the Next Level,” which featured some of the early winners in video blogging. In contrast to the industry panels of a decade ago, which were all about creating huge new brands and reaping rich rewards for the founders, this session focused on issues of artistic control, voice, independence and freedom from the pressure of commercial interests.

Ryanne Hodson of RyanIsHungry.com spoke about the importance of not signing away control over content to investors, while Andrew Baron of Rocketboom boasted about new features on his site that enhance social networking features and make it more useful to viewers. “The vast majority of our discussions about Rocketboom are about how to make it better for the audience,” he said.

Where money was discussed, it was always in the context of how video bloggers could manage to make a living from their craft. Rock-star blogger Robert Scoble actually drew oohs and ahs from the audience for mentioning that he had signed a sponsorship deal for his video blog totaling $300,000. A decade ago, such a small amount would have prompted snickers.

As a veteran of forward-looking industry conferences going back more than 20 years, I find this spirit remarkable – and refreshing. Ten years ago, the tony Internet industry confabs attracted swarms of bankers and venture capitalists looking for the next billion-dollar company. Entrepreneurs who played the game successfully at the time were rewarded with billion-dollar payouts. In contrast, Jason Calacanis, arguably the most successful social media entrepreneur to date, sold out to AOL for $25 million. That’s nothing to sniff at, but it’s a far cry from the payouts awarded to the founders of Yahoo, Lycos and Broadcast.com.

Last September, I wrote a column in BtoB magazine (the original doesn’t appear t be online since BtoB revamped its website) arguing against the probability of a social media bubble. “Bubbles need air supply in the form of venture capital and inflated expectations for investors. They also need a payoff. Almost none exists in this market,” I wrote at the time. I still hold firm to that position. Perhaps the big money is still waiting on the sidelines for a viable business model to emerge, but I think they’ll be waiting a very long time. The Internet bubble of the late 90s was driven by investors’ misguided assumptions that the Internet was a channel for big media and big brands to emerge.

In fact, the opposite is true. Social media is fulfilling the Internet’s promise to make it possible for millions of small communities to form around very specific areas of interest. People now have the tools to share and comment upon information that’s compelling to very small groups – and to do it at almost no cost. Political super-blogger Glenn Reynolds calls this phenomenon An Army of Davids and the terminology is apt. The Internet is all about specificity, not generality. It just took us a decade to realize that.

Labels: social_media, sxsw, video

  ¶ 10:06 PM 0 Comments

  More Tagging Insights An interesting panel on tagging explored some of the applications and the social and commercial implications of tagging as these tools mature.

One angle that interested me is that groups develop their own syntax for tags and the characteristics of those tag lists are different as a result. One panelist pointed out that “social.network,” “social_network” and “socialnetwork” have different meanings on different sites and in different communities because the groups who agree on these syntaxes are using them to tag different kinds of content. On del.icio.us, people tagging “design” are referring to visual design while on Magnolia they’re referring to software design. Same tag, different groups, different meanings.

I was also interested in some interesting applications of tagging to more traditional collecting. Some libraries are making it possible for their visitor to tag books in their collections. This makes it possible for libraries to build super-catalogs that are much richer than traditional card catalogs. Some museum curators are finding that visitors to their collections have very different descriptions of what’s in them than the curators themselves. Tagging enables them to unlock that consensus of critical opinion.

One panelist pointed out that tagging serves a hierarchy of needs and as you advance in the hierarchy, it becomes more important to tune in to the syntax that others are using. At its most basic level, tagging is a way to save information. As you move into community applications, it’s important to understand and adapt to standards used by others. It’s also important to become more thorough in tag selection so that you help refine content descriptions for others.

Tags can affect traffic to your own content. One panelist noted that his sister’s photos tagged “voyeur” get more traffic than any other photos, clearly because they appeal to a base human instinct.

They’re also a way to find out what groups are thinking. Look at these tags for an album by Kevin Federline. Does this tell you something about this artist? Incidentally, Amazon has moved into tagging in a big way as a means to help customers find products that interest them. In this application, Amazon is relying on other customers to recommend products through their tags, without the intervention of professional editors or retail professionals.

Labels: social_media, sxsw, tagging

  ¶ 5:45 PM 0 Comments

  Tips on designing consistent user interfaces Notes From Getting To Consistency: Don’t Make Your Users Think
SXSW, Saturday morning
Panelists: Paul Schreiber from Apple; Jennifer Fraser, Corel ; Alex Graveley, VMWare and Steve Johnson, Adobe.

Products don’t have to look the same, but they should perform the same. When you do something in one program, the same sequence of keystrokes or clicks should do the same thing in another program. Example of shortcut keys, which frequently don’t work the same from program to program.

Example of the USPS automated postal counter. It makes you answer yes/no in awkward sequence. “Is there any question that the package will fit? Will your package fit?” First question sets you up to answer “no,” but second requires you to answer “yes.”

Consistency doesn’t mean staying consistent with your entire legacy base. Apple was smart in ditching the floppy drive and just moving on. You shouldn’t let the needs of a very small number of users constrain you from innovating.

There are costs to inconsistency. Tech support costs are higher. You may actually alienate customers if they believe that you’re ignoreing their platform or designing an inferior product for it. You could incur costs to reverse-engineer consistency later.

Electronic Arts hasn’t changed the UI for Madden Football since version 1. What’s the customer’s goal and what can we do to help them achieve that goal as quickly as possible? If you can do that using consistency that users expect, then that’s great. But if you have to break a sequence to achieve a goal for the user, that’s what you have to do.

Go out and watch customers. If what they’re doing to achieve something doesn’t make sense, redesign it.

Adobe saw wide-screen monitors coming into widespread use and so provided a way to easily reconfigure the UI for different aspect ratios.

But they won’t always tell you what they want. Malcolm Gladwell was recently talking about spaghetti sauce. He said that spaghetti sauce makers used to think there was one ideal kind of spaghetti sauce. But it turned out there were different groups of tastes that people wouldn’t admit to. They liked chunky spaghetti sauce but didn’t think to say that. Prego figured this out and made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Who are your users going to be? You don’t need to be consistent between interfaces for a fourth grader and a legal secretary. Likewise, when you introduce something new, do you do it for your new customers or existing customers? Different expectations if you’re introducing something that helps people get started with the product. In that case, you don’t need to consider consistency with previous versions.

Cross-platform considerations. How much do you make it look like your product on another platform and how much like the other platform’s conventions. There’s “OK-Cancel on Windows, “Cancel-OK” on the Mac. You need to conform to these conventions. VMWare is creating its first Mac product and has had to revisit its whole approach to interface design to make the experience consistent for Mac users.

Features are the F-word. This was a point Steve Johnson made. Engineers fall in love with new features, but features can disrupt the user’s experience. Are you introducing features for the user or because you think it’s cool?

Labels: sxsw

  ¶ 1:19 PM 0 Comments

  SXSW contrasts I'm at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference for the first time in its 14-year history. It holds great promise as a fusion of film, music and interactive digital media, but my first impressions are that the organizers need to drink more of their own Kool-Aid.

This conference is about the leading edge of design and user experience in digital media. However, the conference website is anything but intuitive. Try finding the schedule of sessions there. Compliments to the organizers, though, for providing a nice interactive calendar app.

Registration just doesn't make sense. Even if you're pre-registered, you need to fill out a card to have your badge processed (why wasn't this done in advance?). You fill out the card on the bottom level of the Austin Convention Center, then ride the escalator to the top level to get your badge, a process that requires having your picture taken (why is this necessary) and then waiting for a prinout. Then you have to go back to the floor level to get your schedule, then back to the top level to attend a session.

The show bag is being given out in an enormous first-level room that looks 90% empty. Why this wasn't used for registration is unclear. For a conference designed by techies who pride themselves on efficiency, the whole thing is pretty chaotic.

Let's hope the content is worth the aggravation!

Labels: sxsw

  ¶ 12:09 PM 0 Comments

  Piper Jaffray analyst tells why Google is central Here's an interesting Q&A with Piper Jaffray's lead Internet analyst Safa Rashtchy in which he talks about why Google is the most important company in the user revolution. This is because Google puts users at the center of everything and makes it possible for them to manage information the way they want. This is distinct from portals, which assumed a lower level of user knowledge and so organized everything for them.

He also talks about how kids communicate differently from adults. Sharing photos and videos is fun for them and they multitask when they communicate. I noticed this on a plane the other day. I was surrounded by teenagers and all of them were engaged with some kind of electronic device all the time. Yet they were chatting with each other without removing the earphones from their ears. Kids today are incredibly nimble in the way they manage technology. There is a huge difference between them and their parents in this respect.  ¶ 12:25 PM 0 Comments

  Did JetBlue get it right?
Is this JetBlue video effective? This is a topic of debate here at New Communications Forum. Some people are saying this is a master stroke of corporate honesty and transparency, an effective use of social media to deliver a message that looks genuine and unscripted.

Other people are saying that the CEO looks panicked, scared and not in control. There's also debate about whether the production value is right. Does this look like it's been engineered to look "rough" and is rough right for a message like this? Would David Neeleman be more effective in a studio with a coat and tie and professional lighting?

These are the conundrums marketers face in using social media. What works on TV doesn't necessarily work on YouTube.

There's one thing JetBlue did right, though: it acted fast and it went direct to the customer. As Steve Crescenzo said in a panel discussion today, "It takes most companies three weeks to get an article about the United Way approved by HR. JetBlue got a Customer Bill of Rights through the legal department in a week. "

Labels: newcommforum, video

  ¶ 5:19 PM 0 Comments

  Weinberger NCF keynote: users take back power Popular blogger and Cluetrain Manifesto co-author David Weinberger gave an enlightening and funny keynote presentation to the New Communications Forum in Las Vegas this morning. Here are my notes:

For the last 100 years, broadcast has dominated our communications and our democracy. Broadcast is now being put in its place. Many-to-many communications will become more important than broadcast.

It’s not about the content. We’re able to get past broadcast because we’re able to escape reality. Broadcast works because it’s constrained by the limitations of reality.

You can’t be in two places at the time, so everything has to have its own place. It’s a terrible limitation that the digital world escapes.

In mainstream media, there’s a limited amount of space. So only a few things get to appear and only a few people get to right. It’s the same order of information for everyone. Take away those constraints and now everybody can talk. We decide what’s interesting to us.

The authority system is changing. This goes back to the basic assumptions of our culture. The base assumption is that the larger the project, the more control you need. If you want to build something big, you need managers and managers to manage the managers.

The Web is the largest collection of human intellect we’ve ever built. It’s also the most usable and reliable. The Web is a permission-free zone.

Most of our institutions are built around the urge to control. But now the walls are down. A business isn’t the best sort of information about its products. You want to find other users. If you want to know how it is to drive a Mini Cooper in Boston in the winter, you’re not going to get the best information from the Mini Cooper website.

Broadcast gives the same message to everybody to drive down the cost of marketing. The only issue with this is that there’s no market for messages. Nobody likes being messaged. So we’re engaged in war with our customers, trying to make them listen to something they don’t want to hear.

Whole notion of markets has been affected by the notion of messages. Actual markets consist of customers and they’re talking all the time. We do it in discussion sites, mailing lists and consumer rating sites.

What is more boring than classified ads? They’re boring. But on Craigslist, we talk about what we’re posting in classified ads. And we do it through tags. We are so social that we even make bookmarks into a social activity.

Marketing, business and media are all about fake, phony voices. Conversations are open and honest.

What weblogs aren’t. They’re not about cats. They’re not about people in their pajamas writing about cats. They’re about things that we care about.

Encyclopedia Britannica has 65,000 important topics. Wikipedia has 1.5 million topics, including the deep-fried Mars bar and the heavy metal umlaut. Britannica is constrained by the physical because 65,000 topics fill 32 volumes.

Blogs aren’t journalism. They’re blank pieces of paper. The fact that they’ve been judged in the context of journalism is because the media can’t get past itself.

Journalists define their value in terms of their judgment. That has passed into the hands of readers. Since people first began exchanging news articles by e-mail, judgment passed into the hands of users. That’s our front page, what we recommend to each other. The Web is a recommendation engine and it has been since the beginning. A good example of how this plays out is Digg.

This week, USAToday introduced a bunch of conversational components, including Digg-like recommendations. But there’s only a thumbs-up, not a thumbs-down. This misses a key characteristic of readers, which is we want revenge. USAToday also introduced bloggers on its site. This is a titanic change, also links to things outside of USAToday.

We’ve been telling businesses for a couple of decades that information is important and businesses want to control important things. It turns out that NOT controlling the information actually makes it better.

Blogs aren’t professional. They are written sub-optimally. You don’t have time to ponder and polish. We give them pre-emptive forgiveness. There is an acknowledgement of human fallibility, the very thing that marketing messages don’t have. Marketing messages are perfect and we hate that. Humans are fallible. They make us human in ways that marketers won’t permit.

Bloggers with just a few people linking to them are little knots of community. Every blogroll link is a little act of selflessness. The Web was built out of these little acts of generosity.

Home page of NY Times: Every link on the home page links back to the New York Times, except those that link to ads. This is narcissism.

Blogs aren’t simple: Good marketing is supposed to be boiling things down to a few memorable words. But ideas aren’t simple. A Bush position paper 2,500 words long generated more than 2,500 links from bloggers. We take things that appear simple and make them complex. We’ve been living under this regime of broadcast simplicity. We’ve been spoken to as morons for years but we don’t speak to each other that way.

Blogs aren’t content – Content is really important, but it’s not just the content. If you go into a store and take a shopping cart and take all the clothing that fits you and nothing else and put it in a pile, they’ll throw you out. That’s because they own the organization. But if you put up a website where people can’t find what they want, they’ll throw you out. People want to own the organization.

You shouldn’t believe what you read in Wikipedia. That doesn’t mean it isn’t credible. If you read an article on something you know about, you’ll probably find errors. You look at how heavily it’s been edited. Look at the discussion pages, which have amazing learned discussions. What makes Wikipedia credible is that it puts up notices about articles that are suspect. There are more than 100 warnings available and you can create your own.

The presence of these warnings saying that this article isn’t perfect makes Wikipedia more credible. It’s more interested in informing us that speaking as the voice of God. It’s more interested in having us come to informed beliefs. You’ll never see these notices in the NY Times, Britannica or marketing materials.

The attempt to be infallible drives out credibility and makes us look like assholes.

Peer-to-peer is about us making the communication world ours again. Wikipedia is for us. It’s ours. It cares first and foremost about us. Craigslist is ours. People fall in love and get married on Craigslist.

YouTube is ours. It enables us to organize content the way that we want to, the way no TV channel ever could. It feels like ours. It exists for us.

Google feels like ours. That simple home page feels personal. If marketers saw that home page, they’d want to throw all kinds of ads around it.

Labels: blogging, newcommforum, social_media, tagging

  ¶ 3:08 PM 0 Comments

  Tap customer conversations for blog content Lee Odden suggests that customer interaction can be great blog material.

It's a good idea. Lots of businesses have customer service groups and many of them capture customer conversations in their databases. Why not take the best questions and answers, clean them up and expose them on a blog? So what if it's the same as an FAQ? This approach is faster and it'll probably do better on search results.

Add this to your list of successful approaches to blogging that don't require a lot of time or money.

Labels: blogging, open_source

  ¶ 8:51 AM 0 Comments

  USA Today redesign continues reader involvement trend USAToday debuts a new site design incorporating user comments on news stories, a recommendation engine, blogs from external sources and links to news on other sites. The most distinctive feature appears to be the inclusion of reader comments directly on news story pages. While this isn't a new idea, USAToday is the largest mainstream media outlet that I'm aware of to take this approach.

The innovation I'm waiting for is when a major news site starts inviting readers to actually contribute to the reporting process. That doesn't mean deputizing citizens as adjunct reporters, but could involve them contributing background and first-person sidebars. I still think mainstream media could learn something from Wikipedia.org and its much weaker companion Wikinews.org. Wikinews, in particular, is a fascinating idea, but the site doesn't have enough traffic or contributors to really work. Could a site with USAToday's throw weight make a companion news wiki successful? Somebody's to figure it out one of these days.

Labels: consumer_generated_media, journalism, mainstream_media

  ¶ 8:45 AM 0 Comments

  MP3's perilous future Wired News reports on a federal jury's big legal judgment against Microsoft over licenses to MP3 technology and questions whether MP3 has a future if the patent claims by Alcatel-Lucent are upheld.

This rather important story has received only scant coverage in the media that I can see. If MP3 is abandoned by the software industry, it'll inconvenience a lot of people, but probably leave us better off in the long term.

MP3 is not a terribly high-quality format and it doesn't support some features, such as bookmarks, that would make podcasting more useful. It has triumphed in the market for the same reason that VHS video did: it was in the right place at the right time. The best standard doesn't always win, and that's certainly the case here.

If Alcatel-Lucent tries to wring every royalty it can out of this situation, it will score a short-term win but kill MP3 in the long term. The company will be better off accepting 10 cents on the dollar from a few big players and then putting MP3 under a creative commons-type license. It would get some good PR from such a move and could then position itself as a leader in developing digital audio formats.

Labels: open_source

  ¶ 8:31 AM 0 Comments