From the category archives:

tech business

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.

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.

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.

How Anyone Can Beat Facebook

July 6, 2010 · 15 comments in Social Media,tech business

There's lots of speculation going around that Google Me will threaten Facebook. I have my doubts, because Google continues to be among the least social companies and that makes it hard to be a leader in a marketplace where you do not really participate.

The truth is that I am rooting for Google. In fact, I root for anyone who goes up against Facebook. Why? Because Facebook continues to break the agreements it makes with users when they sign on and because Facebook's uppermost management demonstrates continuing disdain for user privacy in service to the direct marketers it considers to be its real customers.

When I write about Facebook, as I so often do, many people agree with me and other suggest I get a clue. Facebook has 500 million users, I am reminded. People don't seem to care about these issues, I am told. Get a clue, I am advised.

It's funny. In my lifetime, I have witnessed so many companies displaced from absolutely dominant market positions into something considerably less than that. IBM actually owned the brand "PC," and conventional wisdom declared you just didn't get fired for selecting IBM Computers. In the 90s, Microsoft took over, and resistance to it, everyone heard, was futile. Now they are struggling to remain important. In automobiles, General Motors was so strong that it's CEO could declare that what's good for GM is good for the country. Now we the country wants GM to succeed because we own a significant piece of it.

The thing about dominant positions is that sooner or later they recede. Perhaps they could be sustained indefinitely, accept for the fact that invariably the dominant players get smug, and that complacence turns muscle into girth. That smugness makes them think they can decide what their customers want, rather than their customers should decide what the companies should make.

That brings us back to Facebook, a company that made it to world-dominator in record time. It is young and strong and so very, very confident in itself and its future. It is still growing.

It has already forgotten the power of its users. And because its users do not pay, Facebook never seems to regard them as customers.

And in this fact, there is a huge market opportunity. It's one that Google may focus onto, or one that a couple of kids in a garage or spare bedroom may glom onto.

To beat Facebook, just offer everything Facebook offers, just like Salesforce.com does with Chatter, which pretty much looks like Facebook, as do a great many enterprise community sites.

Just change one rule: make absolutely clear that your loyalty is to the customer, not the marketer. That you will honor any user agreements ever signed. You will always, ALWAYS put the user first.

You will not displace Facebook overnight. It will take a few years. You will have very humble beginnings, but the barriers to entry are quite low and the promises very high. And as sure as the day follows the night, you will overtake Facebook.

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.

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.

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.

Ads I could like

June 9, 2010 · 0 comments in Social Media,tech business

I grew up in an age where some of the most creative and brilliant people in the world went into advertising. It was evidence in the memorable excellence in ads that came out in the 50s. Ad agencies also started using psychologists and assorted behavioral experts to understand what will motivate us to buy things.

In an earlier era David Sarnoff pioneered NBC TV with a vision of bringing opera and classical music to the masses. He hired one of the most prominent symphony orchestra conductors to lead the NBC orchestra. But around the corner, the guys at CBS went to a more banal level. They tried to make people laugh and in between chuckles they crammed more and more ads.

The ads got more frequent and less creative. As people started to turn away from them, the ads grew more persistent and louder and more intrusive. The value proposition of the ad industry moved away from being charming and clever to just cramming the message into people's foreheads.

Before he abandoned his dream, Sarnoff saw NBC actual present opera. But the masses didn't watch. They were over on CBS watching Jack Benny joke about being cheap while selling Phillip Morris cigarettes.

There are those who accuse me of being anti-advertising. They say that if a company provides "free" content on the web as other companies provided it on TV in earlier times, then people like me should sit down and shut up and let the sites like Facebook do whatever they need to do to be compensated for the service they provide.

Well, unlike TV, on Facebook, people provide the content. So I tend to think that people should therefore either share in the compensation generated by ads that surround the content or AT LEAST give people some say in how that advertising is presented.

Two online companies I know are taking highly intelligent approaches to advertising and user information: Google, which has proven that you can be wildly successful with understated contextual advertising and Twitter, which is showing some commendable sensitivity as it injects advertising into its traditional ad-free neighborhoods.

It seems to me that there are many ways to use my data that would get me to welcome advertising. For example, when I travel, I would love to get offers on places to stay or dine. When I need a new washer-dryer, I'm eager to get ads on great deals from retailers near me. If I'm looking for a used car, I'd love to have people & dealers make offers to me.

There are two essential components to these ads:

(1)I generate my own data. When I want advertisers to know about me, I want to decide what they get told. Any third-party vendor will be motivated by criteria that goes beyond my personal need. Only I have my best interests at heart in such a situation.

(2) I can stop them whenever I want. Once I buy a washing machine, I do not wish to have appliance vendors offering me refrigerators and room air conditioners for the rest of my natural life.

These thoughts are not entirely my own. Doc Searls, a former ad exec, turned social media guru is probably the driving thinker in this area. Rick Segal with whom I traveled extensively a few years back has also shaped my thinking.

I seems these thought trains are clue-filled. They are realistic and technologically not difficult. I think there are tons of dollars to be made. Social media exploded in recent times because people wanted to have a say. A blog comment was preferable to shouting at your TV set.

Now it's time for people to have a say in ads that are put in front of them and they should have a say when those ads stop, or so it seems to me.

Why should you care about Facebook privacy?

June 8, 2010 · 0 comments in Social Media,tech business

The issue of personal privacy and the Internet is not new; nor did it start when Facebook began to unilaterally change it's terms of agreement rules with more than 400 million people.

Back in 2001, Oracle's inimitable Larry Ellison stated flatly, "the privacy you are concerned with is largely an illusion." Over the decade, the case for Ellison's point of view keeps getting stronger with Facebook policies being the 400 million-pound gorilla.

So privacy is just an illusion on the internet and people should just live with it. There are many cases where a service provider sharing your personal data can be very helpful. If you are vacationing in Hawaii, for example, vendors can offer you deals on meals and cruises, because they know where you are. Of course, a neighborhood burglar near where you live, might also access data saying when you are out of town.

There's many examples that are more scary. A photo of your beautiful child can get linked with her name and the name of the school she attends. I for one am not willing to shrug away situations like that because some would have us accept privacy as an illusion.

I write all this because I am the featured question asker this week on Ideas Project, the ongoing Nokia pulse taker. My question is: "Based on recent Facebook controversies, what worries you about your Internet privacy?"

We've received about a dozen responses so far, some of them very balanced and thoughtful, others who basically feel that fools like me should get over the aging illusion of personal privacy on the Internet.

Whatever your view, I would love for you to visit the IdeasProject site and share your answers. If you don't want to register your name [I certainly understand] then just follow IdeasProject on Twitter and tweet your answer.

I get to pick my favorite answer. If it's yours, then the folks at Nokia will send you a phone. But, of course, you'll have to give them your address.

Did Gizmodo impact the iPhone Launch?

June 7, 2010 · 4 comments in Social Media,tech business

This is one of those times when I don't have an answer to suggest to my question.

As you already know, Apple Computer officially announced its new G4, to be called the iPhone HD. It also confirmed that Gizmodo paid Brian Hogan to obtain and reviewed a questionably obtained advance version.

Just about everything Gizmodo reported in advance was true. Steve Jobs did a good job of launching anyway and there were several features and key points that we didn't know.

In either case, I want one. I want one no less or more because of Gizmodo's scoop.

So my question--the one I cannot answer--is:

"What difference did Gizmodo's scoop make to Apple Computer?"

Did Gizmodo's scoop hurt old-version iPhone sales prior to today's announcement?
There may have been less electricity in today's WWDC news conference but will today's announcement have less impact on Apple in the marketplace?

The issue really brings to a head the two current and divergent schools of thought on product launches in this post social media era. One is the traditional command and control approach, where a company jealously guards all information related to a new product until a designated moment in time. Apple is a prime example of a company that prefers a command and control launch and they have been very successful for more than 25 years launching in this fashion.

Other companies have moved into a softer style of launching new products,letting customers--and potential competitors-see what you are doing before your product is complete; letting people play with your products and tell you what they like as well as what needs improvement.

Google probably created the "forever beta," where a product just gets put up on the internet where new versions and refinements keep getting updated.

This approach tends to blur the line between customers and companies. It creates a new kind of collaboration.

But most of the great successes involve software, not hardware. We have yet to see a phone, or PC or automobile brought to market in beta for people to collaborate on.

So, what do you thing. Is the era of command and control still necessary? What damage did Gizmodo actually do to the iPhone? Is command and control still the best way to launch devices and hardware?

What do you think?

Apple bans Gizmodo from wwdc

June 6, 2010 · 4 comments in Social Media,tech business

As I mentioned last week, I had wanted to write a book about the Apple-Gizmodo incident, and have abandoned it for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, it was not a book about the foibles and travels of a phone from a beer garden to a product reviewer's home.

It was more about a free press and recognizing that online providers of news-related content are press as well. It was going to look at the world we've entered where each of us is press--at one time or another. It was going to look at the complexity of a free press when all people are part-time press.

This morning, I tweeted that Apple has banned Gizmodo from attending it Worldwide Developer's Conference, where the company is likely to debut the Phone G4, some six weeks after Gizmodo scooped the company.

No one seemed to find this strange or unfortunate. One smug Canadian gentleman felt that companies should have the power to ban press the "misbehave."

I shudder at thinking like that. If a free press needs to behave, then it is not free at all. The job of a free press is to get the story that a company, a government or another official company spokesman is trying to stop the public from knowing.

It is the duty of a free press, if you ask me, to occasionally embarrass the sources of news. The press has certain privileges so that they can do precisely that and so that the public can get at truths that certain powers would prefer to keep screened from public scrutiny.

Gizmodo is not the most lovable of organizations. It behave with a certain irreverence. It will pay off an informant even when its most bitter journalistic rivals decline.

I may not like the organization and I am not big on paid informants, although my own government seems to use them to gather intelligence.

But Gizmodo is a legitimate news organization. The public is served by it. And when one company gets to deny it access, because they are involved in a legal head-butt, then in my opinion free press is pushed back a step.

When no one seems to fin it disturbing than free press gets pushed back by yet another step, at least it seems that way to me. It is a shorter route than you think from banning Gizmodo from a trade show to banning Fox News from a While House News Conference or a field press member being prevented from covering a war atrocity somewhere.

Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Step Down

June 3, 2010 · 74 comments in Social Media,tech business

Dear Mark,

First off, my congratulations. The company--and team--you have created are very likely to be remembered as the most important--and successful--new company of this decade.

You have taken Facebook from fraternity row at a few elite campuses to everywhere. Facebook has more users than America has citizens. Being on Facebook today is more important than being in the Yellow Pages was a generation ago.

You have ignored courtships and advice to be acquired. You have gone it essentially alone and you have succeeded wildly.

Mark, I think you would be wise if at this point, you took a few of the billions you are entitled to and went home, or maybe kicked yourself upstairs to become Facebook chairman and chief visionary officer or one of those titles.

I say this not just for the good of your own reputation, but for the good of your advertisers and assorted business associates. It is for the good of your investors, your employees and certainly for the group you seem to overlook when formulating business strategies: your users.

Perhaps, you think that because we users don't pay for your Facebook service, then our wishes and our rights, such as choices over our own privacy settings can be disdained or even abused.

That is not the case, as Google and Twitter, two other free services will tell you, the best way to build an ENDURING franchise is to do right by your customers above all else.

Mark, I emphasize "enduring" because Facebook has not yet reached that status. As big and successful as it has become, there is still a danger that tens of millions of your customers will wake up one morning to discover something newer and shinier and more fun.

Because Facebook has treated us so badly, there is still the possibility that we can just turn and walk away. Tech history is filled with former champions such as IBM and Microsoft who were pretty damned sure their customers would find it too difficult to abandon them, only to wake up one morning to find themselves abandoned by millions of formerly "owned" customers.

Mark, I have seen you speak a few times and candidly, I have hoped that as your company has grown so would you as it's leading representative. Being interviewed at D8, on the same dais as top leaguers like Steve Jobs is a huge opportunity for you to state your company's case on issues that seem to disturb most people interacting with Facebook.

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are topnotch interviewers, but they were also your hosts. They asked tough questions in a nice way. You had to know those questions were coming. On your level, you should have smart people in the back room asking you those same questions.

Mark, watch the above video. You swung and missed at every important question. Often, you just answered different question than the ones being asked, and Mark you did yourself and your company no good. I would say you did yourself some damage.

Mark, the tech industry has a long history of young entrepreneurs who were challenged to grow as fast as the companies they had created. Some succeeded and are still at the helms of their corporate ships. Others did not and wisely stepped down to allow firmer hands to guide the ship.

It is time for you to do exactly that, Mark. You will be remembered as a brilliant founder. You will have planted seeds to a mighty tree that will live on.

Think about it.

Facebook Likes and the Future of Advertising

April 29, 2010 · 5 comments in Social Media,tech business

A couple of days ago I wrote about why I don't like the Facebook Likes strategy. It surprises me that a few of the responses charge me as "someone who just doesn't like advertising, as Mario put it in a comment submitted to that post.

We'll get to that in a minute. But if I was not sufficiently clear a few days ago, let me summarize. My objection is that Facebook is deciding what its users should decide about revealing their preferences. I am not alone. Four US Senators have expressed the same concern, have had their staff sit down with Facebook executives . They are now considering legislation to stop Facebook from doing precisely what I was complaining about.

I would probably take a less strident approach to Facebook's actions if the company simply let users opt in to the Likes system rather than force them to opt out and make it difficult for most of us to even find that opt out option.

Mario, however, since you ask, I do not much care for most advertising. Ironic, because I grew up in an era known as the Golden Age of Advertsing. Some of the most creative and scientific minds in the West went into advertising. They created a multitude of visual, musical and prosaic content that reonates in my mind today.

That was then and this is now. Most everyone I know--including some in the ad business--considers most ads to be intrusive crap. We create devices to bypass ads on television. We build filters in our minds to block messages from penetrating our foreheads.

From a consumer viewpoint ads are something to be usually avoided. From a company perspective they have become an increasingly expensive and inefficient way to try to reach customer and prospects. This is one of the many reasons that social media has exploded.

In that explosion almost all traditional institutions have felt waves of disruption and they have started to change--some rapidly, others more slowly.

The ad industry has been among the slowest institutions to adapt to the inevitable change. Doc Searls, co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto and the former head of an ad agency has done some pioneer thinking on this subject and has many ideas that lead to some interesting scenarios for advertising on demand.

More recently Twitter announced an advertising program where sponsored tweets will get scrapped if users do not retweet them. This may or may not succeed wildly, but Twitter is to be commended for its transparent approach and sensitivity to users in this effort.

I do not sense much sensitivty among Facebook executives.

Of course Google is the established leader in creating non-intrusive, effective contextual ads. Very few people object to them and Google has become among the most financially healthy of all companies using them.

I have previously said that to accomplish what it is doing, Google's knowledge of what we see frightens me. The current decision-makers for the most part seem to really try to adhere to a "do no evil" policy. There are no examples of abusing user data at Google. Someday, others will be the decision makers at Google and what happens then is another story.

Now Facebook wants to have the same access to what we like and what we watch and what we read or listen to on the Internet and based on recent performance those guys scare the Hell out of me.

← Previous Entries

tech business

Who’s dishonest, the hackers or AT&T?

Dear iPad. I apologize for the Ugly Puppy Line

Shel Israel

Pages

Search

Categories

Monthly Archives

Credits