From the category archives:

Social Media

Toyota, Apple, Google & End Userism

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

In the past weeks, I’ve been critical of Toyota, Apple and Google. Not only are these companies who I’ve traditionally respected, but I have used many of their products and I have done so for a great many years.

I expect I will continue to do so.

These are also companies who have a lot of loyal users, some of them passionately so.

I admit, that my recent blog post in which I called the Apple iPad and Google Buzz a pair of “ugly puppies,” was a bit over the top. My confession was that I stumbled accross the photo and could not resist using it. OIt inspired the headline.

But I stick to my key point, which is that I believe both these products will fail and they will do so in part because the companies only used traditional marketing and product development strategies to introduce them. They did not use social media to collaborate with customers. They have been sending messages rather than joining conversations or so it seems to me.

It is time for both these companies to rethink how they develop and introduce products.

If you look at the comments I received, you can tell that my post was not well-received. While most comments were respectful, Jean-Paul commented that I seemed to resemble the ugly puppy more than did the iPad. A couple of folk argued that because I was not the target demographic. it was arrogant of me to pan the products. My not being the demographic is not the issue. The issue is that there does not seem to be any mainstream demographic for the product.

Toyota is an entirely different story. I have been following the company’s foibles on Twitter, where people have accused me of speaking out through some sort of loyalty to Detroit, despite the fact that I have been driving Japanese cars since 1973, five of them Toyota products.

The fact is that I don’t care what the nation of origin is on products. Most products these days are the result of multinational collaborations. What I favor is good products. That means they need to be enjoyable or useful. They need to be a good value and above everything else, they need to be safe.

There is mounting–but inconclusive–evidence that Toyota has known for some time that a significant number of the products they shipped had faulty brakes or sticky accelerators. I have trusted Toyota to make products that my wife, daughters and I can drive safely. That trust is essential to the brand.

If Toyota did this, I have written, it is a breach of trust with it’s customers. Some people think that I am gloating that a Japanese company has Detroit style headaches. I am not.

Others think the whole thing should be blamed on dumb customers. When I wrote about a 61-year-old driver whose Prius accelerator stuck, taking him to speeds of 94 mph, Jake Gint tweeted to me, “I just don’t buy that ‘runaway’ does not equal ‘driver error.’ If you do not know how to stop a car, don’t drive.”

Jake has one way to look at this issue. I have another. I believe that users have a right to expect quality products and to demand better. This is where social media comes in. Now we can talk about user problems. We can coach each other and we can warn each other.

A great many companies are listening, listening very closely to what we say on blogs , on Twitter, in Facebook and on YouTube videos. It is making a difference.

Yet some leading companies seem to be happy with the old ways. Hell, the old ways have made them leading companies.

As for me, I am more loyal to users than I am any company. I am more loyal to voters than I am any government. I very often praise companies for doing the right thing, but I reserve the right to shout when I believe companies, governments and other institutions are not acting with the user’s well-being in mind.

So if that makes me look to some like an arrogant ugly puppy, it’s okay. I think the the little guy is kind of cute.

Why Universal Translation is a Holy Grail

March 7, 2010 · 6 comments in Blurring Boundaries, Social Media

[Tower of Babel. From Logoi.com]

A while back, my friend David Feng tweeted in Chinese that he was tweeting while riding under Beijing in a subway car.

I used Google Translate to see if I could figure out what he said. It came out something like “I’m using my digits on myself with a bird in the Beijing belly,” and he and I had a good laugh

I remembered that this morning I saw a few tweets with my name in them. Two were in Chinese and one in Arabic. I used Google Translate to try to read in English what was written in these two languages that I don’t speak.

The results were downright goofy and I have not a clue what had been written about me. I complained about it on Twitter and immediately a few people jumped to the defense of Google Translate and the Tweetdeck translation plug in. Mike Chelan, argued that these plug ins are “a decent start.”

He’s right. They are a decent start. In some cases, particularly the Romance languages of French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as German, the reults are pretty good. You can almost always get the gist of what was said, even if you often lose certain nuances, such as irony, sarcasm and humor.

But in other cases, Asian and Middle Eastern languages, the translations make very often make no sense whatsoever.

In fact, the problem is that computers don’t have any common sense. They have no feel for emotional or poetic flourishes. They trample on slang and metaphors and it is extremely difficult, it would seem to me, to be able to break these barriers, without having humans intervene in translation.

And humans are just not a very economic solution to the shortcomings of machine translation. I think it will remain a major challenge to get beyond the “decent start” we have made.

To me, this is an extremely important issue in social media. Translation is one of the great unresolved barriers.

Ultimately, my dream is for me to be able to post words in my own natural language, with the slang I use and the humor I sometimes try to infuse. Then you can read it in whatever your language is. You can respond using your language and I will then see it in my own.

This universal translation could allow people everywhere to talk with people everywhere. That direct human-to-human mode of conversation would not only be good for business and education, it wouyld also be good for world peace, or so it seems to me.

My hope is that somehow we can get beyond a “decent start,” as Mike called it.

Apple, Google & their ugly puppies

March 6, 2010 · 16 comments in Miscellaneous, Social Media

It is very early in the game but it seems to me that both Apple iPad and Google Buzz are ugly puppies. No matter how cute the marketers try to make them look, people just aren’t going to want to cozy up and play with them.

You’d think that these two brilliant product companies would know better. I did. expected more out of an Apple slate and Google’s first real foray into social networking. I’ve even tried to love–or even like- Buzz and the iPad but I don’t.

These are companies whose design teams have understood product simplicity and elegance. They have found demand where conventional wisdom assumed there was none. Yet here they are dragging these ugly puppies to market and they are going to wind up with pee on their feet.

The horridly named iPad seems to me to be no more than a jumbo iPhone, except it doesn’t fit in your pocket and it’s not that good for talking. It’s good for visually impaired people I’m told, but I can see no other compelling use for it. I’ve asked people on Twitter their views and their is little love and less lust for it.

Google Buzz has an appropriate name. Buzz is the last thing that you hear before getting stung and that is what is about to happen to Google with this intrusive first serious foray into social networking.

This product adds nothing to an already crowded market. Those of us who use Gmail and other Google products have no choice to see it because Google has inserted it on our products and makes it nearly impossible to remove.

I can find no consumer need for Buzz. It duplicates functionality in an already crowded market. I suspect its primary purpose was not technical inspiration but a desire for Google to open a new advertising channel.

Why did these two mistakes happen? How could they have been prevented?

Well, they happened in part because success causes arrogance. Development teams start thinking, “Hey we’re Apple. People love our products.” So they develop an unlovable product and figure brand and marketing will push it into the marketplace.

But instead of market acceptance, these two mistakes are going to put big zits on the face of the Apple and Google brands.

They could ave been very easily prevented by having the companies join the conversations of social media just like other companies have done. As cool as Google and Apple seem to be, they are among the most traditional of marketing companies.

If they used social media to ask customers then listen and respond, then expensive mistakes like these would happen less often.

Yeah, yeah, I know. They are public companies and they cannot talk about future products that can impact revenue. The workaround are abundant and so are the case studies.

The bottom line is you can ask people what they think. You can say, if we engineer a puppy that looks like the one above, would you take it home with you.

People will tell you.

The Age of Face-to-Forehead

March 2, 2010 · 3 comments in Personal & off-the-wall, Social Media

I had fun last week at the Brainfood Store Digital Festival in Dublin, Ire. My talk went pretty well and while I was up on the dais, I realized I was seeing the faces of most attendees.

In Ireland, people at digital conferences, for the most part are not live tweeting or blogging. They are not checking email or texting to any great degree. They are sitting and listening for the most part. When you speak to such an audience, you see their eyes, their smiles and frowns. You know when they are on your side or not. You can see them either nod or nod off.

This is in striking contrast to many of my talks in the US, which have become face-to-forehead experiences. Here, digital conference speakers only see fleeting glances of many audience participants.

This has started me thinking a lot about screens. It has dawned on me how much of our lives are now being spent staring into screens, television monitors, cell phones, computers and so on.

As we have turned our backs on TV, others have wrangled to put them in front of us anyhow. I was in a Boston cab recently that had a TV on the back of the front seat. There was no on/off switch so I had to watch. The same during many of my hours waiting for planes or in bars.

In Las Vegas, where digital screens continue to replace neon on the fabled strip, I’m told some toilet stalls now have digital billboards on the backs of doors.

But that’s the involuntary perfusion. The voluntary is astounding. It seems that wherever I go, whoever I’m with, one of us is on a device that has a screen.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a big believer in the miracle of connected devices. Each of them is a portal into the rest of the world. I could not live without them nor would I want to.

But with almost all great innovations there are unintended consequences. With the greatest of gains, we often suffer losses. I’ve been wondering lately if digital connectivity is costing us a certain human connectivity.

There remains nothing quite like a face-to-face meeting.I hope there never will be. Screens are portals but so are human eyes.

I’ve been trying for the past few days to dedicate one hour daily to not looking into screens. Just one hour. And it has proven a little more difficult than I thought.

I’ve just started, but so far, one hour’s abstinance has cost me nothing: no business, no communications, no news, no enlightenment. What I have discovered is that I have become addicted to screens, and I’m pretty certain that is not a good thing.

Think about it.

Having to Pay for It

March 2, 2010 · 4 comments in Social Media

A long, long time ago, when the online world was new and small and driven by idealistic developers, someone came up with the idea that giving online content away for free was a good thing.

The idea, at first, was to get popular with freeware, then after people appreciated the value of your original content, you could introduce a premium version and then you could charge.

For the most part, it didn’t turn out that way. So many people produced so much quality content–content which almost always overlapped with other sources — that it seemed unlikely that anyone could charge for anything at all.

This had happened before. Radio and television produced content that people liked. Instead of paying it a sponsorship model was developed and for a few online content providers this has worked quite well. But those providers are at the very top of the pyramid. They either have sufficient users to comply with the mass media models of broadcast media, or they have such a unique service such as search, that everyone is going to use it.

Traditional organizations found their old ways disrupted and have now universally migrated online. Some, like the Christian Science Monitor, once an acclaimed international newspaper now exist only online. Others, like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have feet in both the online and offline worlds, although in time I imagine the cost for printing on paper will vastly eclipse the subscription, add revenue and demand to justify paper.

The Journal has maintained a subscription model for online that has been universally scorned. When its curmudgeonly owner argued that Google should share some of its ad revenues with content sources, it was vehemently chastised.

More recently, the NY Times, probably the #1 online news source worldwide, announced it was changing it’s model to one that closely resembles what the Journal is doing. People in Twitterville jokingly bid the Times goodbye, saying that they could get their content elsewhere.

Likewise, Forrester Research has recently announced its erstwhile free analyst bloggers were being corralled and herded behind a corporate firewall, much to dismay and jeers by those who currently enjoy the content for free.

Perhaps all three of these semi-paid models will fail as has the earlier belief that they could survive on ad revenues alone. But ad revenues are not enough, and people get paid to research, write and edit this content. Much of it is not just original but it is valuable.

Then there are us bloggers. We are but a sliver of the problem for traditional media, but it has become a painful sliver. Worse we have started to feel the same pain. It has been noted several times recently that some of the most popular bloggers, such as Robert Scoble post a lot less these days than they used to. Steve Rubel, once the most popular of all PR bloggers has quit altogether as have several other formerly prominent bloggers. I do not enjoy the levels levels of popularity, but I too, blog less.

We bloggers talk about all the other social tools we use such as Twitter and so on. But the truth is that we too have to make a living and very, very few of us have figured out how to make a living at researching, writing and editing long and often complex content.

Some of us make some revenue because of our blogs, but not enough to justify what is probably more than a million blog words a piece for Scoble, Rubel and me.

My guess is that if independent bloggers cannot find better ways to monetize the practice, then these types of blogs are destined to atrophy and perhaps die altogether.

It comes down to this. People who invest time to produce something of value have historically been compensated for it and social media and online content have broken old models without replacing them with new modern ones.

I don’t endorse what the Times, Journal and Forrester are doing. I doubt that these attempts will succeed. But I do sympathize with them. Scoble, Rubel and I have done just fine because of our starts in blogging, but the assumption that we have lessened or abandoned or activities because of other social media activities is only a part of what I think has happened.

Of course, I have no solutions to offer. But I hope someone does. A model based on not compensating those who produce valuable material cannot endure for very long.

BlurNotes: IBM’s Adam Christiensen

February 21, 2010 · 0 comments in Blurring Boundaries, Social Media

[NOTE: BlurNotes are interview notes for my new book Blurring Boundaries which reports on Enterprise Online Communities. Your feedback helps me decide what to use in the book.]

Adam Christensen is part of IBM’s corporate communications team, based in Armonk, NY. His job is overwhelmingly focused on the company’s considerable social media activities. I interviewed him for Twitterville, where I learned IBM has more employees tweeting than any other company. I also learned back then, that much of IBM’s social media focus is to tighten communications between it’s 400,000 employees in over 200 countries as well as with existing partners and customers.

IBM’s online communities continues along those lines as well, I’ve learned. I turned to Adam mostly to get a sense of how its numerous communities got started.

In 1993, Lou Gerstner, career executive took over at IBM, then the world’s largest technology company. The place was a mess. IBM had made mistakes that backfired including an attempt to slow the migration of large businesses from mainframes to personal computers. When IBM got serious about the new, smaller PCs, they tried to make them behave like little mainframes. This opened a huge window of opportunity for smaller, more agile competitors such as Microsoft on the software side and Dell Computer on the hardware side.

This was during an era of corporate takeovers. Investors and analysts both expected–almost demanded– that Gerstner downsize: Sell off huge chunks of the the company, slash employees and every possible cost and make amputated-consolidated nee entity profitable above all things.

Gerstner listened to the conventional wisdom. Then he ignored it. He made minor cutbacks but kept most of IBM’s diverse components intact. He worked to keep the most talented people. He declared the IBM’s whole had greater value than the sum of it’s parts.

IBM has still had a stormy road.And over the last 17 years it has sold or shut down many of its diverse components as it has moved more into consulting services and out of software applications and hardware.

Had Gerstner listened to conventional wisdom, it would have wound up being a mainframe company, and about as relevant as Honeywell, DEC and other companies that clung to big iron strategies.

By 1997, it was clear he had called the right shot. But IBM remained a lumbering giant. It had cut down to from 400,000 to 200,000 employees but they were strewn all over the world. Some employees had never met their bosses face-to-face. These employees were serving partners and customers in over 200 countries with combined employees of over 10 million people.

Gerstner mandated the company, “Go to the edge,” Christensen told me. Decision making, information and collaboration stop flowing into a bottle neck at corporate headquarters.

This mandate drove the company out of manufacturing and application software and into services where it is now the world leader. It also made IBM, the first company to build a social media- based enterprise online community back in 1999.

Called DeveloperWorks, as the name implies it is for IBM’s software developer community. IBM is among the leading enterprise platform providers. Any third-party developers wishing to build on the platform belongs to DeveloperWorks. Every company seems to have started with a focus on developers and like others, it was an outgrowth of online forums which went all the way back to the middle 1980s.

There are about 187,000 members to DeveloperWorks, about two-thirds are from outside the company. It’s growing evenly at the rate of about 10,000 more developers every calendar quarter.

IBM has an extensive community of networks, some for partners, other for customers, university affiliates and a few just for employees. They’ve all learned from the success of DeveloperWorks.

Among the key lessons: self management, make it easy to find the experts and make it easy for members to identify and communicate with the individual that they find most important, Adam told me.

I asked Adam about the business value. He noted that IBM stopped building software applications for its own platform in 2002. “We are more dependent than our competitors on independent developers and DeveloperWorks is at the very center of its strategy.

Another issue is community connection with IBM’s ecosystem. I’m learning that this loosely defined term to described the interaction between companies, customers and partners are inextricably connected with communities.

Blurring Boundaries’ 4 Questions

February 16, 2010 · 3 comments in Blurring Boundaries, Social Media

I have created a self-imposed deadline of this Friday to finish my Blurring Boundaries book proposal and send off to my agent, Danielle Svetcoff who will undoubtedly ask some tough and challenging questions. That’s how she helps me write better books.

Meanwhile, I’ve developed four tough questions of my own that the book will try to answer. It may take all 80,000 words to address them:

1. Where’s the ROI in social media?

Social media in business is about ten years old. Any business advocate of a social media program has heard this question, and chance are likely, was frustrated in trying to answer it.

But at the end of the day, all business is about financial issues. The question, as toug as it is to be answered, needs to be answered. I am not absolutely certain that I will show a direct corellation between social media and the bottom line.

But I have a decent amount of evidence that shows big companies like IBM, Intuit and SAP are making money because of social media. If there is no clear bottom line equation, there is a great deal of evidence that big businesses are making money at the top line through the conversational technologies.

The business value case has become irrefutable, or so it seems to me.

2. If businesses are supposed to relinquish command and control what is it’s new role?

Social media champions have spent a decade telling managers, lawyers and marketing departments to let go of presumed command and control. Fine, but if companies are to host and manage social media, including large online communities, just what is their new role?

Surely they are not supposed to just sit on the sidelines or go fetch the coffee. Blurring Boundaries will report on how several companies have replaced themselves from the center of social media programs with their customers.

They have not done so, out of a sense of altruism. It has proven to be a smart and financially rewarding business tactic.

3. Where does social media go on the org chart?

Most enterprise social media programs began a skunkworks–little experiments–that were allowed to take hold outside labyrinthine enterprise bureaucracies.

Now they are reaching critical mass. Some online enterprise communities have millions of users. It has become time for social media workgroups to get integrated back into the enterprise organization, where it will have to conform to enterprise practices and systems , just like HR, ot IT or marketing.

Inside many companies today, there is heated debate as to where social media belongs in the organization. Whoever runs SM will shape SM. If it is marketing, than marketing social media may flourish at the expense of recruiting, or IT.

Blurring Boundaries will argue the case for a social media department–not answering to marketing or any other department–but equal to it, with it’s own budget and measurable quarterly goals to attain.

4. If social media gets braided into the enterprise, who does it change the enterprise and how does that enterprise change social media?

Predictions are always a little dangerous because guesswork is involved, but I see the use of social media in business as becoming an everyday practice, as about unique or newsworthy as using a telephone.

Social media is at the end of a disruptive period and just now entering an Era of Normalization, where people will stop talking about the new conversational tools and just start using them to do their jobs with the same diversity as they use email.

A good chunk of this book will examine five companies: IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. But I am looking for stories from companies of over 1000 employees that will help me answer these questions for readers of my book.

If you have a suggestion, please email me.

BlurNotes: Sean O’Driscoll, MS MVP & Ugly Babies

February 10, 2010 · 7 comments in Blurring Boundaries, Social Media

[Sean O'Driscoll [l] with unidentifiable beer-drinking blogger. Photo by Jim Storer]

[NOTE: I am interviewing people for my new book Blurring Boundaries, about enterprise online communities. While I hope to report on many communities. I plan to go into particular depth with five companies: IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.]

Sean O’Driscoll is co-founder and of Ant’s Eye View, a Seattle-based consulting firm that helps large companies with the strategic and planning aspects of social customer engagement. He was at Microsoft for 15 years, where he is best-remembered for developing MVP [Most Valuable Professionals] a small, highly active network comprised of Microsoft’s most passionate product users.

MVP goes back to 1992, predating both Sean and social media. It was started by people in Microsoft’s support organization to reward product champions. They used the conversational technologies of the time, CompuServe and Usenet newsgroups.

When Sean took the reigns in 2002, Microsoft was facing an unprecedented challenge, not from a competing software company, but from a groundswell movement in the developer community. It was called open source and it would soon permanently disrupt the packaged software industry.

Sean was a member of the Microsoft strategic team designated to explore solutions.

He spent a month studying Linux online communities.Like Microsoft’s they were mostly centered around technology and support issues. Like Microsoft, question got answered usually promptly and well.

But he noticed a “radical disparity in customer return rates.” In Microsoft spaces, people came, got what they wanted and left. In open sources spaces, people kept coming back. They stuck around and shared information, ideas and anecdotes.

In Sean’s view, return rates were indicative of community health. “On the whole Linux communities were substantially healthier than on Microsoft spaces,:” when measured by return rate, Sean concluded.

This led him to his Ugly Baby Principal.

If you happen to be an American Idol TV show fan, you probably already know that from time-to-time, the show features, as Sean put it, ” a whole lot of singers who really suck. Some of them know they really suck, but don’t care.” They love to sing. But, a significant percent of these bad singers don’t know they really suck.”

If you ask them, many would say that their parents had always told them they could sing.

That, Sean observed, is because parents will overlook dramatic faults in their kids.

He felt this was what Microsoft was on product functionality and engineering was missing about the Linux groundswell.

“We simply didn’t understand that the Linux community was fired up not on product aspects but on emotions. They didn’t care if their kid was ugly, it was their baby and everything it did was beautiful,” he said. “We were trying to compete on functionality, not realizing open source popularity was emotional.”

This was not something that Microsoft could easily combat. “We couldn’t change our culture. We were a mind company not a heart company,” he told me, and the Linux movement was heart-based

The best Microsoft could do was to tap into fans of Microsoft technology. Sean sought out and recruited 300 of the company’s most passionate users. It’s important to note that their passion–and loyalty was not for the Microsoft. They are not company evangelists and at times they have actually been among Redmond’s harshest critics.

Their loyalty is to the technology and to the people who use it. The are users themselves and it seems to be their nature to want to help other users. They are motivated by recognition, not rewards such as points or tee shirts.

“The fact that MVPs are extremely helpful to Microsoft as a company is just a lucky side effect,” Sean said. Not only do MVPs provide superior tech support to other users, they provide an extremely high-quality of feedback on design, features and functions and they do it dynamically all the time.

The MVP social network is not a replacement for phone-based support, which is live, has one-on-one dynamics and hold the hands of the most frustrated end users.

But web-based MVP support has a very special asset. It is public. Other see the support being given. They see people helping people. In phone support the only time you seem to hear about incidents are the disasters, not the successes.

The fact remains, however, that at the end of the day cultures are more difficult to change than products and market strategies. Microsoft is a culture built on engineering. It makes products designed by committees.

It simply cannot replicate the emotions and passions that lovers of ugly babies generate.

MVP, at least, has allowed Microsoft at least to understand the value of passionate users and community sharing . Not only that but MVPs have probably helped Microsoft refine and improve the products they bring to market.

Since Sean left, MVP has grown to 4000 users worldwide. What remains to be seen is if the community can scale to 50,000 to 60,000 users and if it does, will Microsoft turn itself inside out so that communities of passionate users will change the companies process of making products, policies and programs that least will get more people to love their ugly babies.

Defining the term ‘Social Media’

January 19, 2010 · 0 comments in Social Media

In February 2006, Chris Shipley, then executive producer of the DEMO conferences delivered an important keynote address. In it, she defined the term ’social media.’ At the time there was conclusion between it and Web 2.0.

Simultaneously, there was a new generation of online conversational tools that included, blogs, wikis, video and photo sharing. Shipley’s definition was simple and clear:

“Social media were spaces on the web where people could hold public conversations.”

I thought it was a great definition for a fast-emerging category of tools that needed their own taxonomy. I wrote and spoke about the term as often as I could. I still do.

So very much has happened since then; so many millions of people have come to social media spaces to share a wide array of conversational elements. The topics are is varied as what gets discussed in email or on the phone.

Lately, I’ve noticed a new level of confusion. Social Media’s definition is getting narrowed down to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and a few other public platforms. Recently, someone who should know better told me that enterprise online communities are not really social media. Earlier today, I go a similar comment on Twitter.

Of course they are. They are public conversations. Large numbers of people can join in on a topic. They make geography less of a barrier to information and ideas.

My consistent view is that people keep confusing a set of interactive communications tools with apps. The answer to the questions of how you use Twitter is “however you want.”

That answer changes only slightly when the question becomes, “how do you use SAP’s community networks. There the answers is, “in any way that is relevant and appropriate to the overall community.”

There is so much these days, which gets clouded by layers of complexity. To my way of thinking social media’s definition is quite simple and has not changed since it first came into use.

I hope it remains that way.

Social Media

Shel Israel

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