RoadTrip #4: From Crater Lake to Craters of the Moon

July 28, 2010 · 0 comments in Miscellaneous,Personal & off-the-wall,Road Trip


Craters of the Moon, Idaho. Photo by Shel

[NOTE:  This is the 4th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  just completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. The previous installment left off at Shasta Lake and this one picks up a few miles later. ]

From Lake Shasta we drove north past snow-crowned Mount Shasta. At Weed, Calif. we turned off I-5 and onto Route 97. With extremely few exceptions, we would not put wheels onto a highway for another 1200 miles and eight days. This was a wise choice.

On the Interstates you focus is on getting there, there's a sense of urgency. On back roads you focus is on being there's a sense of exploration. We stopped often to read historical markers, soak in magnificent views and enjoy assorted oddities along our way.

Route 97 extends north from Weed all the way to Canada. At an average height of 5000 is a scenic pageant of rivers, mountains, lava beds and forests.

Our biggest stop was at  Crater Lake, the bluest inland water body I've ever viewed. Filling 30 square miles of a collapsed volcano, it's surface is 7000 feet above the ocean and it's deepest point is 1900 feet, making it the deepest in the US.

From their, we continued north another 60 miles to the very pleasant little  city of Klamath Falls. Home of Oregon Tech and with a population of about 20,000, we had nice late-night Taco salads at Hidalgos Mexican Restaurant, then stayed in a safe, clean and affordable Great Western.

We continued north on 97 all the way to Bend where we caught up with Paula's daughter, her husband and two of our grand children for a weekend at Sunriver Resort. The first person to scout around this area was Kit Carson, but that was before it had its own airport, golf course, swimming pools and tennis courts. We got a great deal on a fabulous house that slept five adults and two kids for two nights for less than $1K. We biked, jogged, swam, ate at a great restaurant and on our own deck, enjoyed free in-home wifi and just sat on the rear porch looking at pine trees. I'm not big on resorts usually, but this one gets a top rating in my view for having a great balance between recreation and serenity.

After Sunriver, our goal was to get to the big tomato of our trip, Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. We drove a few miles north on 97 to US 20 east, which crosses into Idaho. We had no big plans for Idaho, a state that I know potatoes and HP printers. But we were surprised by its open space unrelenting beauty.

We made an over-night stop in downtown Boise at a Hampton Inn. The rooms were pleasant but the breakfast memorably awful.

In the morning, Highway 20 followed the Interstate for a while, then cut  into sparsely populated land you picture riding on a horse. It's a gently curvy road, part river meadow, rolling hills and some badland with mesa and cathedral rock formations erupting from time-to-time. There were also some large stands of white birch.

This was not an area for cute shops and restaurants. Paula and I had some steak sandwiches and we pulled over at Riley, Idaho. The sign said population 17, but I suspect they were exaggerating. We dined on rickety picnic benches, with a spectacular view blocked slightly by a port-a-johnny that was thankfully downwind.

We drove through the Sawtooth National Forest, the turnoff for the posh Sun Valley resort, abandoned gold mines and the out-of-use Rattlesnake Station, stage coach stop.

Then we went to the moon. Route 20's absolute high point is Craters of the Moon National Monument. I took the photo at the top of this page from one stop on a seven-mile loop. My photos did not capture the eerie sense of this area of eight volcanic disturbances, the most recent being a mere 1500 years ago. The lava fields we saw 800 miles west in Southern Oregon are part of this massive, unfinished area.

It really does feel like you are walking on the moon. Paula and I have seen the lava fields of the Big Island of Hawaii, but for some reason, these felt even more moonlike as we strolled upon the paths.

We stayed less than an hour and continued East. At all most every stop we felt the pang of wanting to stay longer. We had seen so much and had so much more to see.

Our next stop would be the tourist mecca of Jackson Hole, WY, where I had last visited33 years earlier. I learned that my memory could move mountains.



Betting against Apple & Mitch Joel

July 27, 2010 · 13 comments in Social Media,tech business

Mitch Joel, in my view, is a good guy. He's smart and his written and intelligent and popular book. We seem to agree on many issues. But one place where we are not joined at the hip is on our current views of Apple Computer.

Mitch thinks that all this negative noise--the Gizmodo incident, Ellen DeJeneris, FCC antitrust investigation, John Stewart and the most recent "antennagate" has done nothing to hurt the company.

Mitch sends evidence almost daily. He reports record lines in front of the San Francisco Apple Store, record sales for the year, and so on and so forth. Mitch offered to bet me $1,000 that a year from now, Apple will emerge unscathed from the current avalanche of unfavorable coverage. The loser would give the money to a favorite charity.

I am in no position to be gambling $1,000. Besides, unlike Mitch, I am not so very sure how all this will come out.

Someone else tweeted me, "Apple may be doing bad PR, but people don't care. I consider that an oxymoronic statement. PR, as I learned and practiced it, is about relationships with publics, not about hits from a press release or any such tactical nonsense.

Lately, Apple has been consistently doing a style of PR, that has surprised, angered and disappointed some people. I am one of them. At times I've considered them arrogant. At times they have played the part of the bully.

So long as they are the only ones making brilliant products, they can get away with such behavior. But the market is changing. Others have come out with very good phones and history suggests that those competitors will keep making better and better phones and with all that competition prices and margins are likely to slip.

This is where the PR gaffes come in.  PR shapes how people feel about a company. They involve trust. On rare occasions PR, has a dramatic, sudden impact on a company's market position. Usually the process is slower than that.

For a very large company the erosion can take a very long time. It took General Motors, for example, more than 20 years, to hit the rocks and they coupled bad PR  with building shoddy products.

Apple still builds fine products. But now there is a wart on the nose of the Apple hero image. Now, people who have not yet purchased an iPhone for the first time, may look at other options. Now, people who have contracts with AT&T expiring may shop around.

There is already a trickle of erosion. I know that because a small handful of folks on Twitter have told me they've switched or will.  I do not think the number will swell dramatically immediately.

But I think that if Apple does not change how it converses with its publics soon,  there is an excellent chance that it will begin feeling a loss of repeat customers and see new customer stray. I think that it's vendor-friendly service pricing [They get a share of AT&T's outrageous take] will go down and that impacts the bottom line.

In my view Apple needs to vastly upgrade the way it conducts conversations with customers.  Currently, its demonstration of responsiveness is Steve Jobs reading cherry-picked emails sort of the way the late Perry Como used to read song requests on his TV show in the late 1950s.

What Jobs is doing is performance-oriented, not conversation-oriented. It wows a few people for a short period of time, but most folk understand that it's hokey.

There are thousand, perhaps millions of people who now have fear, uncertainty and doubt about Apple. The best way to offset that is to join the popular social networks and to start using blogs and podcasts in a meaningful way.

We need to start seeing people who work at Apple, who are passionate about their work, who care about user concerns and who are not Steve Jobs.

I reduced my bet with Mitch Joel from $1,000 down to one drink, based on results of Apple sales/profit numbers one year from now. I am not extremely certain of winning. A large company is like a supertanker, running on an open throttle. It takes a lot of time and distance to change its direction. It takes a lot of time and distance also to change user perception.

What I am absolutely certain about is that Apple was in a much stronger market position six months ago than it is today. And if it does not alter course, the supertanker that is Apple Computer will eventually discover it is headed directly toward rocky shoals.

By then, it may be too late to alter course.

RoadTrip #3: Long road to Shasta

July 26, 2010 · 2 comments in Miscellaneous,Personal & off-the-wall,Road Trip

[NOTE:  This is the 3rd in a series of off-topic posts. I've just returned from a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. It was part-family oriented, part a visit to some of my best visual memories and in part a review of the new Ford Escape Hybrid, which Ford Motors loaned me for evaluation purposes.]

We began grumpy and came home exhausted. In between, Paula and I had one if the best experiences of our lives. We were gone 10 days, slept in nine different places and got to experience the bigness, the beauty and diversity of the American northwest.

The highlights of the trip were a two-day visit to Sunriver, Ore., a resort in Bend Ore., and visits to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. But the connecting points--the towns and back roads, the little spontaneous explorations were almost equal in interest and discovery.

For some reason our vacations are almost always preceded by about a week of tumult. This one was a record setter. Paula got sick. Her mother, Jean Berman, 91, had an infected leg, which doctors attached to a clumsy medical vacuum machine until a few days prior to our departure. Our younger daughter and her two small children visited us until the day before our departure. For the first time since my heart surgery, I was feeling some chest pains and worrying.

When the tires of the Escape rolled onto our street from our driveway, I was still waiting for Paula to shout out, "wait, I can't do this. I need a rest," but she didn't. We picked up Jean in Fremont and were on the road at 9 a.m. as scheduled.

It was 85 in Fremont at 9 am when we hit the road. By the time we stopped for lunch at the Vacaville In-N-Out Burger, it was 102. We did not yet know that our departure date would be the hottest day of the year in Northern California.

After lunch,  we connected north onto the tedious stretch of I-5 to Redding.  We bickered about unimportant things as we sat in traffic, looking at flat agribiz-owned farmland. The temperature kept rising. This was the most boring stretch we would experience. It was made more difficult by a few serious construction delays.

Redding turned out to be the geographic wormhole. Before it was redundant flatland. After were evergreen forests, pristine lakes and a surprising number of snow capped mountains--always a surprise in 100 degree weather.

The biggest and most breath-taking was Lassen  stands tall and powerful over everything else. We regretted not having time to visit Lassen National Park.

We turned off for the next point of interest. Lake Shasta was our first scheduled stop. We drove through the aging City of Lake Shasta onto Shasta Dam Road. As we drove through the small city, Paula and Jean wondered why there were no people on the streets in mid-afternoon.

Our dashboard said the outside temperature was 105 degrees.

We stopped for a moment to watch a few people swimming and boating and fishing and enjoying a cooler time than we felt in the parking lot. I caught site of a speckled eagle, the first I've ever seen. The fleet-flying, fierce-looking was far too fast for me to catch a photo.

At the dam, we spent a little time at the highly informative visitor center, where we caught our breath and felt our collective moods elevate. We were looking at incredible beauty.

We were on vacation.

[Note. Mount Lassen & the speckled eagles are file photos gleaned from Google images. I took the Shasta Lake & Dam shots.]

Old Spice becomes a meme

July 14, 2010 · 12 comments in Social Media,tech business

"Hello Ladies," says the oh-so-manly Old Spice guy. "Does your man look like me? No. Can he smell like me. Yes."

What a great combo. The Old Spice guy is both a spoof and at the same time an extremely cool and compelling reason to splash your face with an after shave lotion that chances are your grand daddy used to woo your grandma.

The Old Spice guy is Isaiah Mustafa,  a retired  football star. He clearly hopes the spots will leverage him into a new acting career. I think he has a shot.  I also think Proctor & Gamble has a great shot of resurrecting a 72-year-old aftershave.

This is all well and good, but from my editorial perspective, the importance of the Old Spice guy is that he is the most successful fusion of traditional advertising with social media to date.

The 30-second spot ran for the first time July 7 on national TV. I don't know how many people saw it there, but the spot has been viewed 5.5 million times on YouTube. Mustafa has made a whole batch of Your Tube spots that have been view an addition 6 million times. Many of the spots are in response to comments left to him on his Facebook account or Twitter where he has about 45,000 followers.

He's fast and funny on Twitter. He flirts without ever going over the line. He feels like a guy's guy. It seems to be just Mustafa, without admen or marketer mucking up what is his fabulous bantering ability.

This is brilliant integrated marketing. It pulls elements of the traditional Old Spice ads. But where the guy used to ride off on a white horse, now it's a motorcycle. The spot ends with the familiar whistle that Spice ads have had for years.

It has been a very long time since I have viewed any ads that are truly creative, and that brings me to what I fear the most about the Old Spice guy.

Shortly after P&G announces that Old Spice sales have boomed, little creative teams are going to be summoned into rooms and shown this ad.

"I want something like this for our client, and I want it by Tuesday," these teams will be told.  And thus this true original I fear is going to be followed by an endless parade of imitators.

What I would prefer seeing is the Old Spice guy serve as a new high bar for integrated advertising integration. Let's see someone outdo what has been done with this most memorable campaign.

Apple Stomps on the Conversation

July 13, 2010 · 3 comments in Social Media,tech business

By now you know, that there are some serious questions about the new iPhone 4 and its external wraparound antenna.

Perhaps the most damning of all was the credible and neutral Consumer Reports flunking it on reception tests that were reconfirmed by Engadget,

I have been following this issue rather closely. As far as the product itself goes, I am still among the many who tend to believe that this new iPhone 4 is the best iPhone ever offered. To me the revelation is that the crappy reception we have all so often blamed on AT&T was probably being caused by the iPhone and lying reception bars covered it up.

It seems that each damning report on the technology is offset by someone else.

This morning Marco Tabini tweeted me:

" Have you wondered how CR measured a *reception* problem w/o attaching wires to the phone? I have: http://⇥.ws/kf."

I read through his post saw a credible attack on the magazine's testing methods. It increased  my doubts of the problem's magnitude.

What we have is a legitimate controversy over a significant new product in the hottest of technology market segments. We have it at a time of mounting competition equaled by growing demand.

Any way you position it, Apple has tons depending upon it's success. And as the conversation ignites and amplifies, what is Apple doing? It is stonewalling and suppressing the words of its customers.

If they are actually listening to the volume and tone of conversation, then they are doing a better job of keeping it a secret than they did of keeping the iPhone 4 itself a secret.

Reports are up and have been reconfirmed that Apple forums--or "discussionsare" as the company calls them--is deleting all conversations about the Consumer Reports piece.

Now, Apple is not the most social of companies as you probably already know. But these discussions are the closest they come. I've used them and found them to be usually helpful. I have hoped that their success would open the door further into social media forays for Apple.

Instead this unilateral censorship is extending command and control policies into terrain where you don't usually see it. Oh es, companies review forums for appropriate behavior. You'll probably get your post deleted if you assert the CEO is having sex with a lower species, for example.

But users discussing issues and concerns with other users and perhaps a company representative is what forums have been about for better than 20 years.

I have been critical of Apple in recent months, because of tactics that seem extremely selfish and heavy-handed. And yet this type of stomping on legitimate customer voices sound more to me like the Chinese government than a company that built itself as an underdog champion who made cool stuff for independent people.

There are those who have been calling this the end of Apple Computer. That is silliness. Apple customers for the most part remain loyal and happy with the products. The company still has a long, long way to fall before the end can even be seen.

But they seem to be falling with accelerated velocity lately and I hope they veer off course before they do smash upon the pavements of Cupertino.

Lost sales may remain quite small. But Apple Computer would be wise to follow the Tipping Point subtitle advice: Little things can make a big difference and they can do it very, very quickly.

RoadTrip #2: A Great Escape

July 12, 2010 · 3 comments in Road Trip

My Ford Escape Hybrid evaluation unit was delivered a little while ago by Page One Automotive, the service that Ford Motors uses with professional auto reviewers. You may have noticed that I am not an auto reviewer. In fact, many former passengers will attest that I am not the best driver in the world.

This whole story goes back to Cordell Koland, who was the No. 2 guy at SIPR during most of the time that I owned the agency. He would eventually buy it from me. But when Cord first started working for me, I paid him enough salary to put him behind the wheel of a ten-year-old Honda.

So when I saw him drive out of our parking lot on his first day, I found it curious to see him in a new high-end BMW. Two weeks later, I saw the same guy leaving in an $80 K Mercedes. A little ;ater, after I saw his new red Jaguar, I pulled him into the office and asked him what was going on with the cars. I suspected drug dealing had had no desire for SIPR to serve as the front.

He explained that he reviewed cars from the San Jose Business Journal, where he worked until I hired him away. By reviewing cars, he was in a new high end vehicle every few weeks and he didn't have to own one.

I envied this. From Cord's starting point until today is more than 20 years.  But I always remembered Cord as having the coolest of scams with the car reviews.

A few years ago I met Scott Monty, who went on to become head of social media at Ford Motors. When I started planning this road trip I remembered both Scott and Cordell and connected some dots. I pitched him for an evaluation unit for this road trip I announced yesterday.

Too my amazement, Scott put me into the reviewer's evaluation system. I was contacted by Ford's Gwen Peake who asked me for details on how I would use the vehicle. I had originally requested a Ford Fusion Hybrid. I had rented a Fusion a few times on other trips and had been impressed. I had even tried to convince Paula to buy one when she needed a new car. Now that there was a hybrid, I was even more interested.

Gwen steered me to the Escape Hybrid instead. It is larger and more powerful than the Fusion and as an SUV the sight line will be much better when driving through the scenic wonders of Crater Lake, Sunriver, Or, Jackson,Yellowstone, Rushmore, the Dakota Badlands and other wonders of the US northwest.

So far, I have not yet even driven around the block. I have examined it closely and am currently trying to determine how to plug my iPod into the Microsoft-powered dashboard. [Hints will be gratefully accepted.]

I have to admit that I love this vehicle at curbside. It is compactly built yet roomy. Like other hybrids, it is silent. The engine cuts off when you idle too long, but lets the air conditioning keep running.

My deal with Ford is not to be a company mouthpiece, but to tell you readers what I think of Escape Hybrid. I am a reviewer--not a shill. But I have to tell you, this car has made a most favorable first impression.

RoadTrip#1 On the Road Again

July 11, 2010 · 7 comments in Road Trip

[Yellowstone Falls, Wyoming]

I was a student in the 60 and did many of the things that students did back then. Among my favorite diversions was the road trip. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, I had a love for jumping into a car with a few close friends, remarkably little money, and a three-buck road map to guide us along thousands of miles. Our objective was nothing more than to look out the car window and see the many looks of the US as you passed from urban to rural to mountains and to an ocean where strangely,  the sun set, rather than rose.

The road trips started small, then grew. After finals at Northeastern University, in Boston, Mass., my first road trip took me to Washington, DC.  Next came Montreal,  then the old Route One local road to Florida and Miami Beach.

But the vertical road trips were relatively small compared with the horizontals that would follow.

From 1967 and 1975, I crossed the continent three times in each direction. First was five guys in a 1961 Ford Galaxy with four classmates, and three fenders. Then with two political lefties in a beat up International Harvester. Finally I went off solo in an old Ford that broke down in Tennessee. I continued on  by thumb.

On these trips, I visited every state in the Union except Alaska and South Dakota. I meandered into Canada and Mexico. I had many adventures and encounters. They shaped who I would become as did Kerouac's spontaneous writing style.

But what stayed with me for so many years, was the land I got to see and sometimes touch. North America is a diverse, wondrous and mostly beautiful place. For me, it has inspired poetry and sometimes patriotism.

Patriotism was not a popular word among my friends in the  60s. We were angry about many government's policies. I had an earring, wore bell and hair that hid my shirt collar.  We were angry about a war and a draft that forced us into it personally. We were astonished to discover racism was an institution and indignant, that while we studied so many other people suffered.

Many of my friends, for a lengthy stint, started to hate the government and in so doing the country itself. What stopped me from becoming one of them, I am convinced, were these road trips.

I went out and actually saw the country. I met people  in parts of the country that looked and felt so very different from folks in my New England.  In our conversations with each other, we almost always found we had more commonalities than differences.

These conversations changed my perceptions of so many things. They still do now that I spend so much time online having conversations all over the world and discovering how very similar we are too each other.

I've been think a lot about this ever since last fall while watching Ken Burns National Parks series on NPR. More than anything I saw, traversing the United States, the National Parks were etched the most clearly in my mind. National Parks made me appreciate my land and respect a government that sets such places aside for people to see and appreciate rather than exploit and develop.

It is now 43 years since I first went cross country in the United States. So much has changed. I have live a life. I have grandchildren sleeping down the hall as I write this.

My wife Paula was not a college kid in the 60s. She was in her first marriage and raising two daughters and she had no time to protest and experiment as I did. She has only been to one national park.

While watching the Ken Burns series, I remembered one trip, when I and my traveling companions got stuck behind an over-sized camper that was moving a lot slower than we wished to go. We wanted a clear view of the beauty around us, but instead we were staring at this camper's back bumper. On that bumper there was a sticker.

"Too old to work. Too young to die. Just traveling" it said.

I'm now, I would guess, about the same age as the folks who were in that camper back then.

Paula and I decided last fall that we would take a road trip this summer, she for the first time and me to revisit roads previously travelled with a different set of eyes.

Originally it was going to be at least a month on the road, but I've had an odd year. There have been health and business issues. We shaved it down to just 10 days, but we are cramming much into our journey.

We leave Wednesday for Sunriver, Ore., to see more grandchildren and family. On the way up, we'll circle Shasta and Crater Lakes. Then we cross southern Idaho, stopping at the Craters of the Moon National Monument, then on to Jackson, Wyoming and Grand Teton National Park.

Yellowstone National Park will be next. We expect it  to be the highlight and I'll be there for two nights and 3 days. Then,into southwest South Dakota to see Mt. Rushmore, the Black Hills and Badlands, before turning back toward home in a route that takes us through Park City Utah, and our favorite week end destination of North Lake Tahoe.

And this time. there will be no hitchhiking. Ford Motors has agreed to loan me a Ford Escape Hybrid for evaluation on the road trip. I'm sure it is in far better shape than that old International Harvester. I'll tell you how it performs along the way.

For the next couple of weeks, this blog will be mostly about this road trip. It will serve as an online diary, which is what blogs were originally about. I will share with you some of what we see and experience.

I hope you enjoy vicarious travel

Speaking Failures, Social Media & VC Opps

July 7, 2010 · 3 comments in Social Media,tech business

For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking about some of my least successful speaking engagements.

Once I followed Craig Newmark at a conference of librarians. He told them he thought librarians were sexy and that he grew up spending his happiest hours in the libraries of Northern New Jersey.

This was a tough act to follow right there. But I got up with a PowerPoint presentation, telling a group of people who mostly took notes on yellow legal pads, how Google had forever disrupted their businesses. Not only did they hate what I had to say, but  was the last speaker on a long agenda and stood saying things they did not like while they envisioned Sunday traffic a busy airport.

That was a memorably bad experience, but the two worst I have done were standing before Silicon Valley venture capitalists in the last few months of 2009.

I was promoting my Twitterville book. Most of my presentation comprised of stories about small companies such as Stocktwits, CrowdSPRING and VergeNewMedia who had each used Twitter to get started. My takeaway message was that Twitter was one of a whole arsenal of social tools that could help a new company get on the playing field at greater speed and at lower price than was previously possible.

I had assumed the poker faces I saw in the audiences were because these guys traded in silicon-powered horses for a living. I was wrong. They were stern-faced because they had come looking for new opportunities in social media tool-making companies.

They wanted to invest in the next Facebook or Twitter.

Yet, my sense were these guys would have passed on the opportunity to invest in the first Facebook or twitter, because no one had yet drawn a social media box in their investment categories chart.

Years ago, I spent lots of time around VCs, much more than I do now. They were scary-level smart, just like the entrepreneurs. They invested in people and dreams and took great risks on technologies being built by teams who were still clueless on business plans.

These days, the VCs I meet are often more like bankers. They want a predictable return and they don't want much risk.

Such strategy is safe, but they will never, NEVER be in early on te next Facebook, Twitter or much else. The big money is to be made on starting categories that do not exist at the moment.

The place for  social media may still be a new company, particularly one who would like to stick it into the eye of an elephant like Facebook. But chances are far more likely, the next great startups will not be in social media as a category. They will be using social media to to build great, lucrative companies in other categories.

Social media as I have written, is normalizing.  People are using the tools less to talk about the tools themselves and more to get their jobs done. Social media tools are being integrated into go-to-market strategies.

I

Social Media and Story Telling

July 6, 2010 · 12 comments in Social Media,story telling,tech business

I have always liked telling stories.

In second grade, I told a story and the teacher made me stay after school for it. After that, I switched to nonfiction. Story telling stayed with me. I majored in it in college and then I became a journalist.

I remember my days as a newspaper reporter and editor with great joy colored by nostalgia. What slowly strangled the love, was that being a reporter required a vow of poverty. I have never found great virtue in poverty and I did not like it.

So I became a PR guy. This provided me with some level of affluence, at times, but it really threatened by dedication to nonfiction story telling. It also put me into a culture that loved bullet points far more than stories.

Then social media came along. More than half a lifetime had passed, but finally I found a venue that is made for story telling. Stories work so much better in most social media venues than do "three key points," or "six steps to a more perfect complexion."

The thing that you need to realize is the power of storytelling is in the simplicity of the tale.

In business, we very often have a tendency to try to sound as smart as we can. We try to show how much complexity goes into whatever it is we are selling. People want to know how easy it is to drive that car far more than they wish to understand the principals of torque.

Complexity is not memorable and it is rarely fun.Audiences often doze more and retain less.

But a story, ah, a story. I bet you can tell me a story you learned from your childhood and I bet you smiled when you recollected it. You can probably tell me who told or read it to you and where you were.

Can you do that with a recent business diagram, or PowerPoint bullets?

I didn't think so.

Open Letter to Steve Jobs: Join the Conversation

July 3, 2010 · 9 comments in Social Media,tech business

Dear Steve,

First off, thank you for all the brilliant, innovative products you created over the years. Thanks for demonstrating that hardware can be more than a commodity. Thanks for showing that software can be simultaneously simple, elegant and powerful.

And above all, thanks for being the star of the greatest comeback story of Silicon Valley history.

As a customer I have been consistently satisfied and often surprised by what was in the products I bought from you. I have forgiven you a certain arrogance in tone. For example, I was prepared to hate a support staff that required I make an appointment and stood under a sign calling them geniuses.

Except that they consistently have solved my problems, usually in prompt and painless fashion.

You are the underdog that got over the others; the Fortune 50 company with street creds; the rebel whose cause was to provide better stuff for the creative elements in the masses.

But Steve, just now, now as you become the biggest and most valuable of all personal computing companies, now you seem to be sprouting warts on your previously flawless face and I fear your image is turning uglier faster than you realize.

From March until today, there have been a series of missteps--not in product and business strategy--but in the sort of stuff that make people respect, trust and like you.

One night a geek left an iPhone prototype on a bar stool triggering a series of events that would have caused Apple Computer some minor embarrassment.

Steve, you should have shrugged, but instead, many of us feel like  you behaved like a schoolyard bully. The image of police storming a Gizmodo editor's door will be remembered as Apple police storming that door. When Ellen DeGeneres, did a cute and forgettable skit of her difficulties texting on an iPhone, Apple demanded an apology, it made it memorable. Many of us wondered when Jon Stewart if you were becoming "the man, if there were not more truth than humor in the question.

That bring us to your bungled handling of the iPhone launch, which ironically is the most successful phone launch in history in terms of numbers. But several issues, particular fear, uncertainty and doubt about the antenna have blemished the launch.

As evidence trickles out over this slow-news holiday weekend, it appears that you were right. The antenna is probably a non-issue as you said it was. But Steve, customers were concerned and you dismissed their concerns in a manner that seemed pretty glib to me.

Your style reminded me of Marie Antoinette.

You may recall, she was a regal lady in the pre-digital era. When she asked why people were angry, she was told they had no bread. She shrugged it off as a non-issue. "Then let them eat cake," she shrugged.

Perhaps, she was simply ignorant to the depth and breadth of people's feelings. In any case history sees her as incredibly insensitive to the needs of people whose lives she influenced. Seven years later, she was shown the bleeding edge of the Guillotine.

Steve, I am not suggesting that you are in danger of decapitation. But I need to stress in the strongest of terms that your current position as reigning hero can end and it can end abruptly and violently if you loss touch. Tech history is filled with cases of once dominant companies who overestimated the power of size versus customer championship.

You are facing new levels of competition. You are facing customers that used to adore you, suddenly scratching their heads and sitting back. I am among those.

Steve, I became convinced that the iPhone 4 was a great phone in about 15 minutes. I went to Twitter and I asked people who had bought it, about reception. Fifteen people said it was great. The 16th is in the UK with a different service provider and he was having problems.

But I think I'll wait. I just don't feel as good about you as I used to. It makes me curious about the Droids. The number of Droids coming out and the parade promised from other handset makers convince me, there will soon be an entire bakery of alternative cakes to choose from.

Steve, every second of every day there are conversations going on about you and Apple and it's products and attitude in social networks. Your customers influence each other and they influence your prospects.

Apple has managed to be among the least social of all tech companies until this time. It has done so by providing great products and services so that the conversation streams have gushed with Apple love.

A few years ago I coauthored a book called "Naked Conversations." My co-author and I observed that most companies that embraced social media had problems they needed to fix. "If you have great products and your customers love you, you may not need social media."

Steve, that was five years ago. A great deal has happened. People are talking about you all the time and it is not all filled with Kumbaya love notes. Much of what is being said is not true, such as is the case with the antenna.

But you need to join the conversation, now Steve. People need to know that Apple people are concerned and responding to customer concerns. Steve, very seriously, it is strategically time for Apple to join the conversation.

Social Analytics

June 29, 2010 · 10 comments in Social Media,tech business

Those of you who know or read me, know that I am not much of a measurement kind of guy. I have been stating for several years that the tools of social media measurement are still primitive. Besides, we have not quite figured out just what it is that we want to measure.

In previous times, we wanted to measure  demographics, click-thrus, lead generation from a marketing effort and so on. This stuff is relevant I concede, but it just isn't the essence of social media programs.

Social media is more fluid than that.  It is harder to boil down onto spreadsheet numbers. It involves engagement, conversation, education, word of mouth, corporate and personal branding and so much more.

These things are layered with nuance and subjective judgment calls.

I have been called anti-measurement, but that is not the case. My argument is that there is great danger in measuring the wrong things. And what you measure shapes how you use social media moving forward.

All business practices need to be measured, evaluated, challenged and refined. Ultimately they are about money, but measuring against ROI is often the wrong number. Most marketing is measured on acquire new business, not shaving the cost of goods sold down to achieve profitability.

My argument that measurement tools are too primitive has eroded away. Over the past couple of years, the tools have gotten a lot better and the people who use them seem to have become a lot wiser on figuring out just what to measure when they evaluate a social media practice.

The other day, my friend Jeremiah Owyang, a partner in Altimeter Group, posted a blog that forecast something called Social Analytics was an important and emerging trend.

I had not previously heard the term, so I'm guessing many of you haven't either. In a tweeted conversation Jeremiah defined the term as, "the practice of being able to understand customers & predict them using data from the social web."

That's an "aha" moment for me. He's working on a report, but just the thought of social analytics captures to me the challenge and the goal of what should be measurable in social media.

I am not yet convinced that these tools exist today. Perhaps, Jeremiah's report will show that a significant start has been made in that direction. I don't know. I hope so.

If you can understand how I feel about your company, based on my conversation with you. If you determine that there are others like me, than you as a marketer, product developer, customer support professional can adjust course. You can make your products and services more to my liking--if I am relevant to you.

You will be able to do it faster, cheaper and with greater precision, if social analytics fulfills the promise that Jeremiah makes for the emerging category.

Not quite normalized just yet

June 27, 2010 · 8 comments in Social Media,tech business

My last post argued that social media is now at the end of a period of great disruption and is now entering a longer, quieter period of normalization. I need to emphasize that we are talking about the world's organizations, and there is a long, long tail.

While some companies such as Dell Computer, SAP and Intuit are at the very beginning of transitioning into normalization, there are some companies who have just started to dabble in social media. For some, it may be too late and they may not make the transition from a successful Broadcast Era company into an even more successful Conversational Era company.

In some parts of the world, and in many large niches, social media has just begun and it is far from normal just yet. Sometimes something happens in the marketplace that accelerates social media. Dell, SAP and Intuit had strategic challenges and social media has helped them accelerate solutions. Although these challenges have not yet been resolved, social media has unarguably played very favorable roles in resolving them.

It seems that to get a large organization fully immersed in social media, they very often need to face problems, problems that are best resolved by interacting to customers, by listening and responding to their problems.

Three companies that have not been overly immersed in social media historically probably felt they did not need it. Apple Computer has long been the world's favorite tech company. It's scrappy. It has been an underdog and it's products have been way cooler than competitive offerings.

But lately, the company has made moves that feel more like schoolyard bully than scrappy underdog. And having its charismatic CEO read and answer cherry-picked emails just may not be enough, as competitive products get closer to even with Apple offerings.

Apple may soon find a need to use social media for more conversations with its constituents.

The same with Toyota, a company that until recently did not need social media in the ways that General Motors and Ford Motors have need it--and successfully used it to rebuild user trust.

Toyota is already active in social media. But it has elected to use advertising, not Twitter, for its main response to user safety concerns.

I think five years from today, both Apple and Toyota will use social media more and traditional marketing less to address customer and market concerns. Either that that or they will find themselves eclipsed by companies they comfortably outpace today.

But what about BP? Could social media help them? Well, there are certain things social cannot do and the apparent combination of callousness and carelessness cannot be fixed by sounding warm and fuzzy on a blog.

But if BP were active in social media, they would at least be able to demonstrate that they are listening to a world united against them in horror and anger. And perhaps they would at least be sensitive enough to get their CEO to skip week end yacht races.

I do believe that we are at a flex point that makes it easier for the likes of Apple, Toyota and BP. Instead of breaking the new that Dell, SAP, Intuit and so many other companies broke, they can simply follow the trail blazed by others and get there faster.

That's what I meant yesterday when I said good ideas are being replaced by redundant best practices. That's what happens in normalization periods. These things take time.

Social Media is at the Flex Point

June 26, 2010 · 17 comments in Social Media,tech business

It seems to me that social media is at the very end of it's beginning phase. This period goes back at least a decade, but when it comes to business, the action really started in late 2005.

It has been a messy, noisy, distracting and divisive period. Nearly every institution has been changed by social media as it sped across the first four phases of the Kuber-Ross Model and has now pretty much entered into acceptance.

It's no longer a question of should social media be used for business, but HOW it will be used.

This is as it should be and it has followed a path that other technologies have taken as they moved from leading edge to mainstream. For some of us, we greet this flex point with ambivalence and even sorrow. We are ending and action-packed, dramatic phase and entering a longer, steadier phase of normalization.

Businesses are getting more comfortable with social media. Original ideas are evolving into best practices. Social media has become scalable and it is most certainly sustainable. We are learning how to measure myriad goals that social media can fulfill.

People are starting to talk less about the tools themselves and more about the business at hand. In short, social media is becoming a mere tool set and in the coming years conferences and conversations--and books--that gush euphorically about social media virtues will be about as popular as a conference on the benefits of faxing.

This phase will be longer and change will be slower.  Using social media in your work will be just an everyday activity that you do to get your job done. Today's popular tools will continue to be refined or replaced. People like me will end up searching for a new next best thing.

The age of disruption and excitement is coming to an end. The age of normality and significant, producing, prolonged business value has begun. That's what was supposed to happen all along or so it seems to me.

Online Communities & The Living Enterprise

June 22, 2010 · 2 comments in Living Enterprise,Social Media,tech business

I spent a good part of the last year researching books that I've decided not to write. One of them had more titles than Lady Gaga has controversial moves. But I kind of liked "The Living Enterprise."

The Living Enterprise looked at really big companies like IBM, SAP, Intuit, Microsoft and Oracle to see how these companies are using social media, and how they are integrating, measuring and scaling social media programs into their everyday businesses.

Most of my research centered on IBM, SAP and Intuit and what I saw at each of these large and established companies surprised and impressed me. While each of these very large entities are highly active on the public platforms that get so much attention: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and so on, the really big action takes place in their hosted online communities.

Each of these three companies began by building communities for the most technical of their employees, partners and customers. It began small scale and the focus was on the customer's needs rather than the hosting enterprise's agenda. Each became the living heart of the conversation, of ideas, of news of resolving support issues. Te value to the company is that they were hosts to a place their customers increasingly could not live without.

The companies set rules of conduct, invested in hosting and community platforms. Each company soon discovered that the conversation had moved beyond their tech sectors, spilling in every possible direction, so they each built another community, and another, and another and they made it easy for members of one community to talk with another.

They became massive in memberships. IBM's developerWorks is probably the grand daddy of all enterprise social networks. It has eight million members and is growing at the rate of 1000 per day. In all IBM has 20 million community network users.

These communities look and feel very much like the tools that you use and popular end user venues. But the talk is more seriously focused on the business at hand. You're unlikely to every see a report of a celebrity sighting or a review of what was had for lunch.

But if you have a problem with a product, you're likely to get accurate help in minutes rather than days. If you have an idea of how to make a product better, you can chat in public with a product developer. If you are a second tier player, competing with a Tier One, you can get recognition of your abilties on a community network faster than you could on, say Facebook.

Each of these companies have no problems measuring the return on their investments. Each says they are making revenue and profits, perhaps not a lot right now, but it is growing.

More than that, these communities are at the very heart of what is emerging as a new kind of corporation, one who uses community collaboration to blur the boundaries that have traditionally constrained companies, customers and partners.

The three groups are discovering they are on the same side, sharing the same goals and needs. When one member profits, so do others. When one is suffering so are others.

I see the new enterprise as a living enterprise and I see these communities as the pumping heart that has put life where it did not previously exist.

The secret to winning an editor’s heart

June 21, 2010 · 6 comments in Public Relations,Social Media,tech business

I was a newspaper reporter and editor for 12 years. Then I was a PR guy for more than 25. In the last five years I did a lot of writing about social media. I interviewed over 425 people and have been pitched a few thousand times.. Simultaneously, because a couple of books I wrote did well, I've been interviewed a few hundred times.

In short, I have been a pitcher, a pitch, an interviewer and an interviewee. I know a lot about what happens between a seeker of news and a source of news. I can't rant about how most PR people don't get it, but chances are you already know that--except if you are one of those PR folk who don't get it.

There is one way to get an editor to be favorably disposed to writing about you from a positive perspective. It doesn't involve sizzle or buzz. It doesn't matter whether they are print or online. It doesn't matter if contact is made by email, Twitter or an old fashioned phone conversation.

Just one rule:

Read his or her stuff.

It simply amazes me how so many people are oblivious to something so obvious. Editors and reports, bloggers and even tweeters want to be read. None of them are foolish enough to be producing the content in direct sear of wealth.

They want to be recognized and respected.

So before you contact an editor, or sit down to be interviewed by one, I strongly advised you read the most recent dozen items that person has written. Then go to Google or Bing and search the most prominent pieces she or he has written.

When you talk with the editor, start by talking about their recent writing, rather than your attempt to claim fame.

There are other things you'll need to get coverage, like a good story, relevant to that editor's audience. But if you know who the editor is what her hot buttons are and what they cover the most often you will be off to outstanding start.

Trust me on this. If you don't, then I stongly advise you to ask an editor, blogger or reporter.

How I keep my Tweet Stream Fresh

June 19, 2010 · 10 comments in Personal & off-the-wall,Twitterville

Every few days, someone I follow on Twitter complains that everything on Twitter is the "same old, same old..." as my friend CC Chapman put it this morning.

What CC and others tend to forget about Twitter is that each of us creates our own unique stream by the people we choose to follow. They become our newspaper, giving us news, views, commentary and diversion.

Over time our interests change. Our friends change. Our business strategies change. There are people you have followed for years in your stream who have posted nothing in recent times that seems to be of interest or value to you.

It's not that Twitter is getting old and stodgy. The problem is your stream has gone stale. The solution is simple. Dump a whole lot of people you follow ad replace them with new voices, who have new thoughts taking you to new places.

In my view people pay too much attention to who and how many people follow them and far too little attention to who they follow.It's not just the quality, quantity is also a factor.

I am a news junkie and follow many topics. I prefer a thick newspaper and so I follow people all over the world. I find that I can follow 1800 at one time. Keep in mind that all 1800 never post simultaneously, so the content I review is very manageable.

But when I add on more than 1800, it get cumbersome. Like a bad newspaper, I find myself reading too much that is not relevant or amusing to me.

So I start cutting. If someone posts a tweet that just doesn't interest me, I visit their stream and see what they generally are talking about. If it is uninteresting, I simply stop following. It is not personal. It is more like an editor chopping copy from a report who just didn't hit the right news story at the right time.

Now and then, I offend someone. I regret this. But who I follow is important and selfish. It is not an issue of relationships--although it can impact relationships. It is an issue of information and how I can keep Twitter fresh and relevant as time goes on.

Where does Social Media belong on the Org Chart?

June 18, 2010 · 10 comments in Social Media,tech business

A few days ago, I wrote about the emerging enterprise battles between departments over who should control social media. I talked about the irony of how a few years ago, most enterprise social media programs and teams were parts of skunkworks projects just five short years ago. Now the very departments who disdained social media is now competing to own it.

A skunkworks project, is usually a small, low budget experimental endeavor. Big companies usually have several of them going on at once. They get to move fast because they are not subject to the labyrinthine processes that encumber most traditional enterprise programs. CEOs like skunkworks projects because they demonstrate vision at low cost and lower risk. Most skunkworks programs die.

Some, actually become a product, a service or a technology. The issue is that when this happens and permanence is added to what had been independent and ad hoc, it graduates from skunkworks and gets integrated into the mainstream corporation, where the formerly agile group suddenly have reports and quarterly goals to fulfill.

Social media in recent times has proven its worth. Measure is getting pretty accurate and companies are finally figuring out just what it is they want to measure in social media.

In fact for marketing, communications, human resources, customer support, product development, social media is proving to be a sustainable, scalable, low-cost impact tool set.

Suddenly everybody wants to run it.

My friend KD Paine likes to say, "we become what we measure." This may be true, but social media, I think becomes who does the measuring.

In short, if an enterprise community, for example, becomes part of marketing, then it will be measured by marketing criteria. The social media program will become better and better at achieving marketing goals.

Simultaneously, the same community, will become worse and worse, at helping product development, recruiting and customer support, because those will be downplayed by a marketing-driven community.

Well, why not just divvy it up? Let marketing have a piece and product development have a piece and so forth. Problem with that is this is not convenient to the customers, and one irrefutable fact is that social communities that put customer needs in front of company needs are the most successful.

Personally, I think this is an over-worked issue. I;ll explain that in a moment. But currently, I am learning this is an enterprise social media issue upon which managers are getting overly worked up.

Social media, it seems to me, is not an app. Nor is it a channel, or an outreach program. It is a communications tool set. The tools are not what is vital to the emerging modern enterprise. The communications is.

I think social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter should be used ad hoc by whoever needs them to get her or his  job done. The tools do not need to be measured quite as much as some people would have you think; the performance of the employee using them needs to be evaluated. Is the job getting done.

Where it gets muddy, is in the new enterprise communities Some of them, like IBM's have more than 8 million users all over the world. They are producing content, sharing information and otherwise serving as an intangible global marketplace.

Companies start these communities. They invest significantly in the technology to host, communicate, store, design, establish and enforce community standards and rules. That's many millions of dollars. The return is far, far greater.

But the return--and the value--isn't just to the hosting company it is to the community of customers. Altimeter estimates that SAP's network of communities is worth nearly $90 b, with only a slivver of that going to SAP itself. The real value to SAP is these communities are so valuable that customers will never want to leave.

So where do these communities fit in? Each company seems to be answering that question differently. How it works out over the next few years is to me one of the most interesting and strategically important questions that social media proponents face.

To tell you the truth, if I were running an enterprise community, I try to stay sequestered inside a stealthy skunkworks program for as long as possible.

Apple, Gizmodo & Free Press

June 16, 2010 · 3 comments in Braided Journalism,Politics,Social Media

Shortly before I decided to put book-writing aside and return to consulting, I very seriously thought of writing a book called iPhoneGate.  While the book would walk through the often unexciting saga of Gizmodo publishing unauthorized advance information on the iPhone4, I had bigger issues in mind.

First above all, was the issue of free press in the Information Age. Democracies are partly called that because it has a free press We expect a certain category of professionals to dig and bypass official government declarations and the utterances of company spokespeople to find other facts and perceptions of the truth.

History has found this to be a worthwhile protection because it has often led to freedom being protected and officials being fingered as rascals.

But the press itself has long been filled with lazy, slovenly, inaccurate bums, characterizing themselves as journalists as they report on aliens impregnating celebrities. James T Calender, who described his form of journalism as "scandal-mongering" was hired by Thomas Jefferson to assassinate the character of John Adams. William Randolph Hearst, spearheaded the Spanish-American War to sell newspapers.

So the press has never been this noble institution, of great and impartial minds who dug and risked personal freedom and safety to shed sunlight on the darkest of facts. The Woodwards and Bernsteins some of us came of age idolizing; the freelance reports on the My Lai Massacre by an unknown freelancer named Seymour Hersh, or even the remarkably well-informed essays of modern pamphleteer Izzy Stone were exceptions to what everyday reporters shoveled out during a period some people now call the Golden Age of Journalism.

In fact, throughout the history of the profession we call journalism, most of what was published was universally and indisputably crap.

That would all be beside the point. Except we are now entering a new and very complicated era. Our definition of what is the press is changing. The content is moving. The filtering systems are forever altered.

Gizmodo is part of the Gawker publishing group. Gawker likes to shock it's readers. Among its online publications is an indisputable piece of porn garbage. Everything that they have ever written about me has been unkind.

So, I am not the Gawker gang's best friend. But I believe that their rights are a gate between you, me and erosion of the freedoms that we share.

People point to this as a reason why Gizmodo should not be considered press. They talk of how the Gawker group caused a stunt, to make all CES HDTV screens go dark, allegedly because they were angry about having been scooped by a rival.

But iPhoneGate is not about Gizmodo quality. It is not about professionals acting like low-rent pranksters. It's not even about the ethical questions of paying to get a story, a practice that the New York Tines says it has sometimes used.

It is about the fact that freedom is supposed to be agnostic. Free religion is supposed to respect even those groups that you and I find offensive. Free speech protects the right to publish words and picture that we find repulsive.

It is about defending the rights of people who swim far below the ethical level where you will find Gizmodo scurrying around.

There are many unanswered questions in the iPhoneGate issue. What was Apple's role in the action of a law enforcement team they advise? What evidence did they have that the Gizmodo video could or would do immeasurable damage? If Apple already had the wayward iPhone back in it's possession and police knew who had taken it, just what evidence were police looking for? Are police still investigating? How long can they keep Jason Chen's computer equipment in a locked evidence room?

Other questions, you might consider are your rights and mine helped or hurt when Apple gets to ban a press member from a news conference, because they do not like their behavior? If Steve Jobs can do that to Gizmodo, why can't Barack Obama do that to Fox News, or for that matter, the BBC to most of the media in the world.

This is all been complicated enough. But it is more complicated now than it has ever been because media is migrating to the Web and it is more difficult than it has ever been to define who is a journalist and who is not.

No law enforcement official challenges Gizmodo is press. But what about you and me? Tom Foremski, the ex Financial Times Reporter who now writes Silicon Valley Watch keeps talking about every company being a media company. Well, that would mean that every employee is a journalist. For that matter, every customer who adds content to a compan site is too.

Where does it end? Des it end at all? Who among us is not protected by the same Shield Laws that protect Gizmodo and the New York Times/ Is that a good thing or bad?

Damned if I know.

Story Telling vs. 10,000 Years of PowerPoint

June 16, 2010 · 6 comments in Miscellaneous

Sometimes I call myself a social media story teller. I often get advised that this is a weak position, that I should organize my presentation like big time analysts do it with lots of numbers and graphs or like recent MBAs do it, where the key points of a presentation are called, "key points."

I disagree. I find story telling to be powerful, memorable and effective. I find charts flashed on a screen to be puzzling and often forgettable. Sometimes talking points work, but often they are either redundant or forgettable cliches.

Sometimes, I open my talks by mentioning that back in 1987, I was the PR guy who gave the world PowerPoint. I pause,  then say,"forgive me." It always gets a laugh.

I do use PowerPoint, but mostly I just put up a photo of a person that I'm telling you about. If it's a marketing audience, then I may add a page of "takeaways" on my last slide. But I know the audience won't take away those closing bullet points.

They'll take away the stories of people whose faces I showed them. They will have certain key points that stay in their memory, even if I did not make those points, and those words never appeared in bullet point fashion.

Hopefully, one of my stories will contain information or insights that is useful or interesting to audience members and will help them adjust course where they work. I find telling stories let's people get inspired. I'm certain that demonstrating what I know does not.

Marketers today really have two courses to take in talking to customers. It doesn't matter if those customers are business people or consumers. The can make claims and deliver talking points, or they can tell stories.

Stories work in traditional marketing forms such as advertising and PR and they most certainly work in new marketing forms such as blogs and video.

It is something in our nature as humans that makes us lovers of stories. Story-telling is how we remember our ancestors. It probably goes all the way back to caves.

When Org and Morb came back from the hunt and the tribe held a great feast. At the end our hunters used grunts and gesture to tell the story of their adventure. Maybe they enhanced their effort by drawing little pictures with sticks in the dirt.

The next morning, while they slept, perhaps another member of the tribe, one not as adept at hunting, went to the wall of the cave, and using blood and berries, drew pictures on the cave that told the story of the great hunt.

This was story telling, but it was also--in some ways--the beginning of the marketing of that tribe continuity. It was the beginning of making representations that led to a common knowledge and it was an early dot on a continuum that gives us TV and YouTube.

Can you picture how it would have gone, if that first story teller had drawn bullet points to explain how the project was planned, executed and the return on investment along with lessons learned? Can you imagine a world, whose history is shaped by 10,000 years of PowerPoint.

Social Media Departmental Wars

June 15, 2010 · 1 comment in Social Media,tech business

My friend Jeremiah Owyang just tweeted a short while ago how, as an Altimeter Group partner, he often gets called into companies to settle territorial dispute wars on who owns social media.

I find great irony in this, mixed with some humor and sprinkled heavily with amazement at how far and how fast social media has emerged to importance in the enterprise.

Just over five years ago, there was no place for social media in most enterprises. The enterprise, evangelists like me were told, was for serious business, not celebrity siting or lunch menu reports.

Then, social media skunkworks projects were formed. These were under-funded, under-staffed experiments in social media that allowed CEOs to show the company had vision during presentations.

But some of those little skunkworks experiments have exploded. At SAP, for example, the company's network of communities under Mark Yoltin, now has more than two million customers, partners and employees involved. It is where things happen first for at least a half dozen enterprise departments.

Over at Intuit, the company has used social media to transform its position from from a financial productivity software company into the best-known small business community.

Today, most enterprises see that social media are an extremely important strategic component of their overall business. Social media tools are used by marketing, communications, product development, human resources, and even sales.

The tools of social media, like telephones and email, do not make sense being owned by any one department. They can be used in diverse ways by diverse work groups to get their jobs done better and faster. And along the way, they make customers, partners and employees happier and often more passionate about their work.

Who’s dishonest, the hackers or AT&T?

June 14, 2010 · 6 comments in tech business

It seems the Gawker group is becoming the receptacle for ill-gotten goods on Apple products. First was the iPhone4 prototype and it's strange journey from a beer garden bar stool to a Gizmodo editor's home office.

More recently, a hacker group turned over 114,000 iPad owner email addresses to Gizmodo sister publication Valleywag. What we have heard from AT&T is that "malicious" hackers went to great lengths to scrape the AT&T web site to gather this data.

However, a spokesperson for Goatse Security, the group that did the hacking, told Computerworld today there was neither malice nor scraping. The group had warned about a security breach as early as March 28. Apple responded by patching it on Safari for the desktop but AT&T did nothing.

So Goatse went into AT&T's site, using an automated script, or "bot," and an AT&T website feature designed to speed up log in. It seems the group acted to illustrate that AT&T was ignoring the breech they had pointed out more than two months ago.

We can argue about the ethics of Goatse. But to me that is not the point. The point is AT&T's lack of ethics. They did nothing on first alert. Then when they got hacked they screeched about the evil Goatse rather than user vulnerability.

Yes, they actually remembered to apologize to customers. But at no point have they done or said anything that shows in the future the carrier will go through major efforts to ensure their system is secure. At no point, do they mention that next time they will take less than 75 days to respond to a security breach.

Because next time, the hacker may decide to deliver user data to an organization that makes Gawker publications look like a humanitarian organization.

Dear iPad. I apologize for the Ugly Puppy Line

June 12, 2010 · 0 comments in Personal & off-the-wall,tech business

On March 6, I wrote a piece seriously challenging the market viability of two products from two extremely successful companies: Google Buzz and the iPad. I was in one of caffeinated states and went so far as to call these two products "ugly puppies."

Absolutely no one disagreed with me on Google Buzz, and now just three months later, the product still exists, but would more appropriately be called "Buzzless."

On the other hand, a great number of people took me on regarding the not-yet-launched iPad. Some, avid lovers of all things Apple got downright angry about my prediction.

It turns out they were right and I was wrong. The iPad is about the most successful new computer product of all times. It has already sold over two million. People who have them love them, people who don't have one want one.

That includes me. I suffer from a deep sense of iPad envy.

So, this is in form of an apology. iPad, I should never have called you an ugly puppy. You are a creature with an unprecedented pedigree and I am sorry if I hurt your feelings.

On the other hand, I was right about Buzz. The folks at Google should keep in mind that buzz is the last thing you hear before you get stung.

And as for me, one out of two isn't all that bad, if you ask me.

Less writing. More consulting.

June 10, 2010 · 5 comments in Personal & off-the-wall,Social Media

I have spent most of my adult life consulting companies on issues connected with communications. This stopped about five years ago when Naked Conversations came out.

Instead of being the guy in the back of the room, I was suddenly onstage, being interviewed and enjoying a level of credibility that you just can't get when you are a communications consultant.

But on the fame-fortune continuum, I have done far better in becoming known than becoming wealthy. For the past few weeks, while recovering from heart bypass surgery, I've had the chance to think about this.

My wife has been wonderful in supporting me as I've bopped all over North America, Europe and occasionally to Asia as an author-speaker. But if the surgery had not been as remarkably successful as it was, Paula would not be left sufficiently well-provided for and that is unfair to her.

More than that, I miss working with companies.  I miss being in the backroom and helping to figure out how social media and communications can help customers, partners and companies get closer together, build better products and cut silly marketing costs.

Effective immediately, I am going back to consulting. I am tabling book-writing for a while and reducing the number of speaking engagements that I accept.

I've just started telling people I know about it this week, so my specific services are a work-in-progress, these are the areas I'm offering for now:

  • Explaining social media to senior management  and working on strategy.
  • Mentoring mid-level and coaching on tactics.
  • Running workshops
  • Writing
  • Integrating traditional and social communications programs.
  • Serving as a social media "voice" for a large company in an ongoing capacity. Long term this may be my top preference.

This list is subject to expand whenever a good idea comes my way.

Please keep me in mind if anything suitable comes up. Email works fine.

Remembering the Iran Election

June 10, 2010 · 0 comments in Personal & off-the-wall,Politics,Social Media

[Neda is killed on a Tehran St., June 14, 2009. Photographer unnamed.]

This Saturday will mark the first anniversary of the controversial Iran presidential election. To me it commemorates one moment of great injustice in a world filled with such injustices. But it is perhaps the best known of such moments since China rolled tanks over its own people at Tienanmen Square in 1989.

That is because it is social media's finest moment. It was a moment where social media, particularly Twitter and YouTube showed that it can unify people and bring truth forward even when determined powers will kill, torture and imprison to suppress such truth.

On Twitter, we changed our avatars to Iranian green and we listed our locations as Iran to make it more difficult for Iranian authorities to find and abuse those who were conveying information and video such as the murder of Neda Agha-Solton, the 27-year-old student gunned down by a government sniper on a roof.

Until June 12, 2009,  Social media has not been present before when such atrocities have occurred.The government of Iran was perfectly capable of keeping paragraphs out of newspapers and footage such as the one above away from the professional newsman's lens.

Governments, like the one they have in Iran  can kick out the free press; but they cannot silence people anymore. The people on the streets understood modern technology better than the bully with shields and batons and motorcycles.

The truth got out and the world saw it was ugly.

But unfortunately, the truth did not set the people of Iran free. They remain very much unfree.

So looking back one year later, what was actually gained, other than people began to understand that social media could be used effectively for subjects of greater importance than "Six Tips on Maximizing Your SEO Results?"

In fact a great deal was accomplished. First, in Iran traditional press, hamstrung by government finally understood the power of citizen-generated social media as a legitimate news source and has begun to braid what the feet on the street can add to official government-and-company story versions.

Second, oppressive governments everywhere now understand that like it or not they are being watched. This does not mean, they will suddenly stop abuse their citizens, but it does mean they will think twice before they do it because --even in Iran--world opinion matters.

Third, and here I am guessing, Iran's stature as world leader of Islamic fundamental revolution was dealt a serious blow. Young Muslims everywhere got to see how young Muslims are treated in Iran and just maybe stopped to wonder if such governments were causes worth dying for. This may not be true, but I like to think it is.

What gives me great sorrow is that the people of Iran did not win this time. They are still oppressed and abused. Their leadership is ostracizing a country and sending it backwards in quality of life for its citizens.

Because of social media so much can be said. So much awareness can be raised. So much truth can penetrate censorship barriers. But it is still a weak counterbalance against police with guns, stansions and torture chambers.

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