Emergence Marketing: August 2005 Archives

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August 27, 2005

links for 2005-08-27

raving lunacy: Cookies touched my Privates

The story about what people do with cookies

(tags: cookies advertising)

August 26, 2005

Light blogging ahead...

I am going on vacation untill after Labor Day.
I may sneak in a few web visits, but it will be occasionally.

Launch a Web 2.0 company

There is a great post on "This is going to be big" about launching a web 2.0 company (thanks Hylton for the pointer).

Some of the 10 steps to be successful are great:

solve the smallest problem still worth solving
get a responsive and chatty audience
launch stuff every day
don't hold users against their will
be mindnumbingly simple
get people hooked on free
don't waste your money on marketing
don't overfund
no one sucks

The don't waste money on marketing and the don't overfund are especially ringing true for me. So many companies are talking about raising money, but when you ask what they would do differently with the money - they don't have a good answer.

This is the wave where you can have one man bands host millions of users every month (true story). And if you believe Business Week (here - requires registration) - the web 2.0 companies so far have been built on $60M of venture money vs. $19.9B for the wave 1.0.

It's a fun time to be around - that is for sure.

[Technorati Tags: web 2.0 startup vc funding]

Chinese Government to get involved with online gaming

In a move that seems motivated by addiction concerns, the Chinese Government is planning to introduce "fatigue regulations" on October 1st (here at Terra Nova)

[Technorati Tags: online gaming]

links for 2005-08-26

Magazine Cover

Cool tool to let you create a magazine cover with Flickr photos

(tags: content flickr tool tools)

August 25, 2005

Interesting - consumer generated Intelligence

Jigsaw provides sales people with intelligence information about executives in companies. You either pay $25/mo for the service or you upload 25 names with contact information (via Business 2.0).

I wonder how nobody thought of this before. This is a cool service, although it does bring up the issue of privacy...

What else could be consumer generated? Market intelligence?

[Technorati Tags: market intelligence contact database sales leads]

August 24, 2005

[off topic] Negative long term effects of government spending priorities

There is a great article on the BBC about our government's anti-science policies and the possible future implications of those policies - quoting Vint Cerf as saying "that's a recipe for irrelevance and decline."

This goes hand in hand with our failing educational policies - leading to the number of people that graduate with engineering and science degrees in this country to be totally out of whack compared to upcoming Asian countries like China and India (here from Business Week). Inventor Dean Kamen has been trying to do something about this for years through his non-profit First!

In the mean time, and according to the NYT (needs subscription), we will be spending over 1 trillion dollars on our wars (already we have spent $258B)...that is more than $11K per family!

Does this make sense? Don't we have certain obligations to the next generations?

And then I have my son who just showed me this great Green Day Video (if you need another format go to their site and click on video)

...what should I tell him?

[Technorati Tags: war education science]

More on call centers

Johnnie Moore picks up the conversation on customer service centers - arguing that companies like Orange actually do invest "a lot of effort into their customer service department to make it efficient", but that what seems to be missing is "a bit of humanity and flexibility."

I actually agree with that - companies do invest in their customer service centers. The problem, as Johnnie Moore indirectly alludes to, is that they run them as cost centers and measure their success based on aggregate customer satisfaction metrics. They do not treat them as another sales and marketing outlet - which they should, and where every conversation is important. Or at least where the importance of certain conversations are based on things that are different than how they prioritize them now.

[Technorati Tags: customer service customer support loyalty]

August 23, 2005

Interesting "story" marketplace

This morning I came across this interesting open source PR project - called StoryAngle - via prSPEAK.com (disclosure - I consulted with those guys on their new media strategy).

It looks like a marketplace that attempts to bring together PR professionals and journalists. They are looking for input before formally launching the site.

[Technorati Tags: marketplace public relations pr]

email newsletters no longer work

According to MarketingSherpa, the opening rate of email newsletters has plummeted by 10 points in the last year (here - free for 3 weeks or so).

The main reasons seem to be a combination of spam filters and reader boredom. The fix? Switch to irregular email broadcasts.

[Technorati Tags: email newsletter email marketing email]

Dell finally responds

According to Online Media Daily, it sounds like Dell finally decided to take the blogosphere seriously (here). In the article, a Dell spokesperson says that they started the new program it a month ago. Too bad they did not talk about it a month ago - a lot of damage has been piled on in that time.

When a crisis hits you in the Blogosphere, response time is of the essence. In this new era companies should all have revised crisis management plans!

[Technorati Tags: customer service dell crisis management]

Teens and traffic accidents

If you have a teenager/tween - show them this movie (> 5MB! - via adrants).

It is a short movie, captured with a cell phone by friends who are having a good time. One of the teens steps in the street while goofing off and without looking - and gets run over.

According to this web site, traffic is the single biggest cause of accidental death for 12-16 year olds in the UK.

[Technorati Tags: teens safety accidents]

links for 2005-08-23

The Tail That Wags the Blog

Funny article in the Washington Post about blogs

(tags: blog blogging humor)

August 22, 2005

Interesting new info on Technorati (at least for me)

Molly E. Holzschlag over at Molly.com has an interesting post on Technorati based on a visit she made with their technical folks (via what's next blog).

It's a very good post - talking about recent system problems, but most importantly about the effectiveness in search of using technorati tags.

[Technorati Tags: technorati tagging tags]

When your customers stay with you until you screw up

I have been reading a few stories of disgruntled long time phone customers who are switching companies because of one screw-up (here for a Verizon story, here for an Orange story). I can absolutely relate with that as I have done it twice in the last 10 years or so.

It is also in-line with what happened to me this morning. I have been a loyal service customer of a local Ford dealership for years. Actually I bought my last car there as well. Yesterday, on my way back from our weekend trip, I noticed a high pitch noise coming from my engine when I was driving fast. So this morning I call my garage. The (obnoxious) scheduler told me that they have nothing available until next week. The problem is that I am going on vacation next week and that I do not want my car to break down when away and relaxing. I begged the woman to check for a spot for me, reminding her how much money I had spent on them over the years, but to no avail. In the past I would have tried to escalate the discussion and talk to a manager - but I didn't. I called another Ford dealer - got into a phone answering machine hell and hung up. Then I called another one and got connected to a very friendly man who said that he would be able to squeeze me in on Wednesday.

Guess what? If those guys are any good, I will continue to go to them until they screw up.

I suspect that this is true for many customer relationships - and not just in the phone service or car service industries. If you don't screw up, they will stay with you. Printers, computers, and cameras all fall into that category to a certain extend. People will research their first buy, but after that, a majority of them will keep buying from the same company until that company screws up. Dell, HP, Canon...all have a significant portion of their customer base that are loyal because it's easy to buy from the same company over and over again.

If this is true, and I am convinced that it is, then why do companies spend so little attention to the quality of their service department? And why does marketing not step in and demand control over the quality of that post sale relationship?

This sounds like easy money to me...

[Technorati Tags: customer service customer support loyalty]

August 20, 2005

Nicotine patch hotline with no ex smokers

A friend of ours just told us this hilarious story of when she tried to quit smoking. She used the help of nicotine patches. As indicated on the warning label as a potential side-effect, she started having very vivid dreams. After 4 days of putting up with that, and being exhausted, she called the hotline for help. She was so afraid that without the patch she would relapse. When she reached the hotline desk, they just told her that she should stop using it. She really wanted to talk to someone that had firsthand experience with what she was going through, but found out that nobody on the help desk was an ex-smoker or an ex patch user.

This is like having the AA hotline staffed with people who never drunk before, let alone had a problem with it...

Sometimes you got to wonder where the common sense is in large corporate decision making processes.

[Technorati Tags: help desk hotline support]

links for 2005-08-20

MediaPost Publications - Jeff Jarvis vs. Dell: Blogger's Complaint Becomes Viral Nightmare - 08/19/2005

The Dell negative viral buzz

(tags: buzz dell)

August 19, 2005

More on acceptable online social conduct

Following up on a comment that Jeff Clavier posted on Yann's explanatory comment (see previous post to get the context), he actually developed his ideas further in a great new post on how to balance confidentiality with disclosure.

On a funny note - I now get my wife and friends asking me not to posts stuff...pretty soon we'll need NDA's for friends and family.

[Technorati Tags: social conduct social etiquette social architecture]

Changing social behaviors and the enabling tools

There is an interesting tempest in a teapot brewing that apparently started with a comment posted by Yann from OpenBC on my post about some LinkedIn upgrades which I thought were great.

I had interpreted the comment as spam and could not really understand how a GM for a competing service could imagine that he would enhance traffic to his social networking service with such “anonymous” practices.

Knowing that some of the marketing practices in this field are…let’s say “interesting” (see what Spoke did on Ross Mayfield’s blog a long time ago) I found it noteworthy enough to create a new post about it – which Jeff Clavier picked up in one of his LinkedIn reviews. At that point I thought that was the end of that.

Then came a post from Loic yesterday – a LinkedIn angel – in which he described how he had asked LinkedIn to remove all linkages and endorsements between him and Yann – all of which seemed to have been created based on very “weak links.”

Yann kicked into gear and posted some explanatory comments on my site, offered to do a Skype call with me (which I hope will happen sometimes soon – I am always up for a good discussion), and apparently reached Loic in person, who subsequently deleted his post (he explains the reasons why on Neville’s post on the subject).

Enough history…

What is fascinating in this whole exchange is that we are in the midst of an emerging new social code of conduct. While much of the online social etiquette is similar to that of the face-to-face world (i.e., criticize the ideas, not the people presenting the ideas), we are in need of many new acceptable social codes of conduct. Think of “de-friending” in the Livejournal community, the ability to reject someone’s request to network without making it personal, or de-endorsing as Loic did, just to mention a few.

As part of enabling this new emerging social code of conduct, the underlying social architecture will also have to adapt (disclosure – we are running a social architecture symposium in November – more on that later) - how people manage their identity, attention schemas, rating and ranking schemas, etc.

It will be fascinating to watch how all this plays out…

[Technorati Tags: social conduct social etiquette social architecture]

Comcast screwing up

An irate Comcast customer service rep changes the name of a problem customer to "bitch dog". The next month, that shows up in the mail on the customer's statement. I don't think you need much more detail to imagine what happens next (here - from Church of the customer).

[Technorati Tags: customer service comcast]

August 18, 2005

BlogBridge ships version 2.0

Disclosure: as many of you know, I have been an unpaid adviser to the BlogBridge open source project for a long time, and I am good friends with Pito.

That being said, you may still think that I sound like a commercial when I talk about BlogBridge - but as a power-user, I really do love the app.

I have been playing with many of the new BlogBridge 2.0 features as part of their weekly build program, and I advised on designing some - so I am very familiar with how they work.

The smartfeed feature is one that I use all the time now. I use it to create smartfeeds based on the Technorati, Feedster, Pubsub, and Findory services. But I also started being a big user of the smartfeeds where the system culls your own feeds to create a new synthetic feed based on posts that contain keywords of interest.

When I am busy and I just want to quickly scan what's out there, I just check my "marketing" and "PR" feed, or perhaps my "advertising" or my "blogging" feed and in a few minutes I can scan everything related to those topics written in the now more than 300 feeds that I subscribe to - very powerful. As I am refining my keyword filters, those feeds are getting better and better - to the point where I may want to republish some of them and share them with others...but that is 3.0 stuff...coming soon!

...of course, that brings up the whole legal issue related to remixing. Robin - I thought about your suggestion on that, and I like it - just do it and let's change the system by braking the rules!

[Technorati Tags: rss reader blogbridge remix]

links for 2005-08-18

deviantART: where ART meets application!

(tags: photo stockphoto webdesign)
Article Distribution. Complete. Extensive. Quick. Article Marketer

Syndication site

(tags: marketing syndication)
MercuryNews.com | 08/17/2005 | Duo's search engine scours 'hidden' sites

Reaching the dark side of the web

(tags: darkweb)

August 17, 2005

What global executives think about technology and innovation

McKinsey finished a survey during which they interviewed 9,600 businesses. They surveyed both technology executives (CIO, CTO), and their business counterparts (here - requires subscription).

The findings are interesting:

79% of technology execs see technological innovation as a critical global trend and a profit driver, while only 71% of their business counterparts believe that.
80%-90% of IT budgets go to IT operations and maintenance -with the rest allocated to projects to improve overall business performance
53% of tech execs cite the ability to innovate as the most important capability for growth - with innovation around current products as the most important action - 43% and 25% respectively for their business counterparts
The roles are reversed when it comes to developing new products - 19% of the tech execs see that as the second most important action while 22% of their business counterparts see that
43% of tech execs see automating business processes as a way to achieve greater operating efficiency, while only 29% of the business execs share that opinion

I am surprised that the numbers are not higher. If you believe the Product Development Management Association's or Prof. Cooper's Product Development Institute's numbers that 50% of revenues and 40% of profits come from new products, and that 75% of all new products fail - then you'd expect execs to rate new product innovation actions way higher than they did.

[Technorati Tags: innovation new product development]

August 16, 2005

The anti-model ad - maybe not

Nike has come up with an interesting ad - my butt is big (via business 2.0 blog).

It's interesting to see that advertisers are moving away from the anorexic looking models to more real life models (another is Dove - as mentioned in the same B2.0 blog post).

I assume that means that buyers relate better with people that look like them as opposed to people that they may aspire to look like...not sure...but works for me.

[Technorati Tags: model nike]

Feedster comes out with top 500 list

Scott Rafer over at Feedster announced their first Feedster Top 500.

Some interesting points:

It's based on the most inbound links over time - as I said before I think that is a better indication of reputation. Technorati only counting links from the home page gives you an indication of current popularity - not reputation over time.
They editorialized some blogs out of the list - including most that did not have their own domain name - that is a bit odd.
They are only planning on updating the list once a month - since it's a historical index, that works for me.

[Technorati Tags: reputation feedster top 500]

Yikes - gen-x generation turns 40

Time flies - I remember the Gen-X generation being in their teens and early twenties.

Now the oldest ones are turning 40 (here).

[Technorati Tags: gen-x psychographics]

11% of blog readers read rss feeds

That's what Nielsen says (here - via Micro Persuasion). The interesting part is that 5% read it through a client and 6% through a web-based site - confirming the roughly 50/50 split that Jupiter reported earlier this year.

[Technorati Tags: rss readers blogs]

links for 2005-08-16

The Business Experiment - Home

Interesting open source startup network

(tags: startup opensource)

August 15, 2005

This is an unbelievable story

Check out the Cindy Sheehan blogpulse chart vs. the President (from BlogPulse). I knew from the minute I heard that she had set up camp there that this one would take a life of its own - this is truly a fascinating buzz diffusion story.

And if you care and wonder what you can do to help - see David Weinberger's (a fiend) post on what you can do.

[Technorati Tags: buzz word of mouth]

Tagging goes mainstream

I guess you can say that when a dating service starts using tags to tag people (here - via Tech crunch)

It is a hoot to look at popular and unpopular tags...

[Technorati Tags: tagging tags]

Using virtual networking tools -

Renee Blodgett has a great post on how she uses LinkedIn. She also talks about the awkwardness of turning down people who ask for introductions and suggests that people should not take 'rejections' personally.

It is interesting to see how virtual worlds sometimes call for new behaviors. There are indeed a variety of reasons why you might reject someones request - bad timing, not knowing the person well enough, feeling like you are abusing the social capital you have with the person that someone wants to get introduced to, etc. And turning down someone for many of those reasons is not a personal reflection of what you think about that person - although sometimes that may happen also.

I would also join her in asking people not to abuse the system - it is indeed a valuable tool!

[Technorati Tags: social networking linkedin]

links for 2005-08-15

Data Mining: Rumour Mull

Interesting analysis of the Technorati takeover rumour

(tags: diffusion rumour)

August 14, 2005

Incompetence must be a job requirement at Bruegger's

I already wrote about how impressed I am with the Starbucks service. Well now I am increasingly convinced that the Starbucks in my town has found a way to have Bruegger's hire every single person that fails the Starbucks interview...

Today, just like yesterday, and like about one in three or four times I go there, they ran out of plain bagels. It's the same people managing the place for years - so it's not like they are missing some history to develop a semi-predictable supply and demand process. Yesterday it also took me 10 minutes to pay - with only two people in front of me. All because they decided to argue with a little old lady that she could only use one coupon at a time. She wasn't even trying to use two coupons on one item - she had two items and wanted to use a coupon for each item. And then there is the constant slowness in everything they do...I have waited 5 minutes to get served with 4 of them in the store and only one of me. They just happened to have been "assigned" to other tasks while the manager was out back.

It blows my mind that chains like that do not realize that their employees are the company/brand to me. If it weren't for my son liking their bagels (plain), I would never go back to any of their stores...

Hire well - and train your people to use some common sense - it's well worth it! In the retail business you cannot build a brand based on good quality products only. The product that I am buying is the whole buying experience.

Thankfully, after this frustrating buying experience, I crossed the hall to go buy my Starbucks coffee, and those guys instantaneously put a smile on my face.

[Technorati Tags: customer service bruegger's]

Are you an early adopter?

EDS' Next Big Thing Blog has a funny post on how to spot early adopters...

You never ask for directions, have your home page set to Google and install software without reading your manual - you're in.

You think bluetooth is some dental disease - you're out!

[Technorati Tags: early adopter innovation]

links for 2005-08-14

» Software for jerks | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

jerk-o-meter from mit

(tags: telephone)
Adrants » President Bush Sells Pizza in New Zealand

ad campaign based on anti-american feelings

(tags: advertising)
FeedCatch - RSS archiver by FeedShake.com

Archive rrs feeds forever

(tags: rss)

August 13, 2005

Organizational innovation

Karim Lakhani has a great post on open source community-based organizations and their ability to force dramatic changes in the commercial world.

[Technorati Tags: open source innovation]

When you are too far out there...

I have many friends that have no clue what I am doing nor what I am talking about. In many ways, I kind of enjoy it, as it forces me to talk about (and keep up with) other more mundane topics than tagging, social networking, blogging, wikis and marketing.

This morning was just one of those moments when I was reminded what it means to be too much out there...(and I realize that I am probably dating myself by exposing this).

Last night I finally found some time to play around with last-fm - a social networking based music site. I instantly fell in love with it, downloaded the plug-ins and started playing with it. Being impatient as I am I let my iTunes play all night - trying to reach that magic 300 tunes when they will start recommending songs to me and start streaming my personal radio station.

So late this morning, I checked the site, and it showed that I had played 270 tunes. I said to my wife, who was nearby, and with whom I had shared my excitement about this site last night (even though she did not get as excited as me about my ability to "tag" my songs and things like that) - 270 songs, 30 more to go!

She: you're not too concerned about privacy, are you?
Me: it's not like I have to be embarrassed about the songs I listen to, plus if people want to find me, I am all over the web...
She: yeah, but this is something real "personal" about you...
Me: look, this is about "social" - how can you leverage the "social" aspects of things and be invisible?
She: WHO are you trying to get "social" with?
Me: NOBODY - you don't get it - it's the aggregation of profiles that will cause "the computer" to make music recommendations to me...
She (mumbling): my husband is trying to be social with a computer...
Me: [blank]...then bursting out in laughs...

What is currently happening out there is truly fascinating, but sometimes we have to pause and remember that the market adoption curve for new inventions can take much longer than expected...

[Technorati Tags: music innovation]

links for 2005-08-13

Wired News: Even Geeks Need a Breather

Tech burnout - when hit take a break

(tags: tech burnout)
Last.fm

Social music listening/sharing

(tags: socialsoftware socialnetwork tag tags tagging social sharing)

August 12, 2005

Bumvertising

This is too funny - this guy is paying bums for advertising space in Seattle (from Agenda Inc.)

[Technorati Tags: advertising innovation]

Professorial pontifications on the future of Skype

The latest edition of Knowlege@Warton features some enlightening comments in an article entitled The Hype Over Skype: Can It Go The Distance. What I found enlightening, and a bit distressing, was how late to the party these supposed "experts" are and how "late majority" their thinking is. For example, marketing professor Barbra Kahn had this profound insight about Skype: "It's funny the way things grow. Skype just crept along and now there's this explosion." Hmmm, obviously the professor is unaware of the classic S-curve that describes adoption of an innovation over time. But no wonder; the professor admits that before commenting on Skype she had only been a user for the past two weeks. But already she has told 6 friends about it. Could that word-of-mouth sharing of enthusiasm explain the explosion of users, which is now heading toward 150 million worldwide?

Perhaps I have been unfair picking on professor Kahn, but all of the faculty quoted in the article come across as deer caught in the headlights. Referring to a service with over 140 million downloads and 40 million active users as a product with a "cult" following is a bit naive. Business professor Gerald Faulhaber weighs in with this observation: "While Skype has gotten significant press coverage, it still remains a techie delight that makes PC-to-PC calls. Whether it can make the leap to the big leagues will depend on shedding its image as primarily a geek thing." From my own experience with Skype and the people I know who use it, this has gone well beyond a geek thing. I hapeen to agre with professor Kevin Werbach who says, "Skype is an under-appreciated phenomenon in telecommunications." And his use of the word "phenomenon" is key. Let's not get sidetracked by looking at Skype as a product, but rather as an early glimpse into how we will be able to decouple the way we communicate from the devices and infrastructure that do the communicating. As I mentioned in a previous post, Rupert Murdoch thinks this glimpse into the future is worth $3 billion.

links for 2005-08-12

Wired 13.08: POSTS

getting booted from super exclusive community aSmallworld

(tags: community socialnetwork)

August 11, 2005

Podcasting and blogging now mainstream?

Now that Adam Curry received $8.85M in VC funding for his Podshow and that even Donald Trump started blogging - does that make it all mainstream? (read about both in Frank Barnako's Marketwatch newsletter)

[Technorati Tags: podcasting blogging]

Discounted trip to the moon

According to Wired, the company that pioneered commercial space travel by sending people up to the international space station is planning to send people to the moon - price $100M.

Pretty cool...I bet you they advertise on aSmallWorld...

[Technorati Tags: space toursim moon]

August 10, 2005

48% of NYT.com registered users are influentials....

A new Roper survey (via PR meets WWW) found that almost 50% of the NYT.com registered users are influentials. That compares to 10% in the general population and 15% of the online crowd in general.

[Technorati Tags: influentials NYT]

August 9, 2005

Podcasting trends...

According to Forrester Research analyst Ted Schadler: "I would expect a flurry of podcasted material of all kinds, but then a slow tail off," he said, "leaving only the most valuable podcasted material left. (here)"

I don't buy that. I think that podcast trends will mimic what happened to blogs - a majority of them will appeal to "long tail" audiences - 150 or less listeners.

[Technorati Tags: blogs podcast podcasting]

New ComScore study on bahaviors of the Blogosphere

Comscore Networks recently released a report titled "Behaviors of the Blogospher: Understanding the Size, Composition and Activities of Weblog Readers" (here (pdf) - via Red Herring).

Interesting findings include:

50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. population

Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in that period, and four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each

Of 400 of the biggest blogs observed, segmented by seven (nonexclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women

Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections

Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online

The distribution curve of unique visitors vs. number of blogs is, as can be expected, a classic power curve - with a majority of blogs having fewer than 100 readers.

[Technorati Tags: blogs blog readers market research]

Fraudulent store-returns - a $16B market - and growing!

This week's issue of Business Week has an interesting article on fraud in store-returns (here - requires subscription).

They say that the fraud in 2003 amounted to $16B - up 23% from 2002 - talk about a growth market!

Stories range from people returning bricks instead of a DVD player, others buying your unexpired receipts for $10, and then shoplifting the goods prior to return - a practice called "shoplisting".

I thought RFID was going to solve all those problems - but there was no mention of RFID in the article...

[Technorati Tags: shoplifting shoplisting rfid]

links for 2005-08-09

Top 10 buzzwords - CNET.com

funny...

(tags: technology buzzwords)

August 8, 2005

Fast Company Blogjam on Innovation.

There are many great posts on innovation over at Fast Company's Blogjam. Like this one, where Jim Canterucci ponders whether innovation can both be top down or bottoms up.

Personally I believe that you need both. Obviously you cannot have innovation without innovative people in your company, but you could put a ton of innovative people in many companies and never have an innovation come out of it.

A minimum requirement for organizations to become truly innovative is to let their innovators connect and network across company boundaries and hierarchies. The problem is that hierarchies, layers of middle management, corporate cultures, and employee procedures are often time standing in the way of innovative people being able to turn organizations into innovative organizations.

New top management teams with a mandate to turn companies into innovative organizations may find that changing cultures in short order may be virtually impossible without braking a lot of glass - like getting rid of many intermediate layers.

Fortunately, and with some of the new web technologies (blogs, wikis, tagging, social networking tools, etc.) companies that want to change fast can do so by creating virtual networks of people that bypass the traditional company boundaries and hierarchies, and where if necessary, new rules of engagement may apply. For fairly large companies where it may take a long time to change adverse innovation cultures and practices, that may be the only way to go - creating a new parallel workplace. Of course, your physical organization could continue to stifle innovation - and you have to keep a watchful eye on that. But the advantage of moving the new rules into a parallel digital workplace is that it's transparent.

[Technorati Tags: innovation corporate cultures fast company]

August 6, 2005

Some people just don't get it!

Yesterday someone commented on post I wrote awhile back on some new and exciting LinkedIn features. I closed my posts wondering how much those new features would cost...

So in his comment this guy starts out by giving me prices and then suggests that I switch to Openbc or soflow - and signs the post with a link to his profile on soflow - where you need to be a member to view it (duh...I must be missing something in this scheme). It peaked my interest enough to check him on LinkedIn and there I find out that he is the country manager for openbc in France...

I guess this guy forgot blogging rule #1 - be transparent!

And I think he is also missing a whole bunch of marketing rules - does openbc really think that they will increase membership by having their country manager spam blogs? Did I say country manager?

Oh well...enough calories wasted on this one...

[Technorati Tags: linkedin openbc soflow spam]

links for 2005-08-06

FutureWire - futurism and emerging technology: Supernova: Before and After

really cool...

August 5, 2005

Steven Vincent - a journalist and a hero

I was shocked when I heard the news that Steven Vincent - who wrote a great piece in the Sunday New York Times on how the English soldiers are in effect participants in the creation of a totally corrupt and extremist government in Basra - was murdered by the very people he criticized. It is too bad that not enough people realize how critically important it is for democracies to have people like that - willing to put their lives on the line in the search for truth.

Visit his blog, and buy his last book - that's what I did.

[Technorati Tags: investigative journalism Steven Johnson]

links for 2005-08-05

Record Any Skype Call To MP3: Skylook Is Here - Robin Good's Latest News

(tags: skype mp3)
Software Agents Can Help Time-Stressed Teams

Research from Pen U

(tags: AI agents)
Information scent: helping people find the content they want

KM paper on coming up with better navigation options

(tags: usability search)

August 4, 2005

Brand Autopsy launches Discount Detox Center

Using the recent flip flop on extending the employee discounts for everyone by GM as a sad example of discount OD, brand autopsy announced today their Discount Detox Center...The stated goal is:

"The goal of the Brand Autopsy Discount Detox Center is to rid businesses of toxins accumulated by rampant abuse of discounting pricing strategies. The first step of discount detox is immediate withdrawal from any and all discounting activities. Once a business has stopped using discounts, fiscal and behavioral withdrawal symptoms may follow."

Very funny - but so true. It is too bad that companies forget history way too quickly. There are so many case studies on the devastating effects of discount OD!

[Technorati Tags: discounts GM]

What will a blog do for my business?

John Jantsch over at Business Blog Consulting gets that question often and answers it on his blog - basically saying: "little to nothing". His main reasoning is that most people will put up a blog, post a few times and then stop - wondering why it did not work.

Ok - I buy that. But when I get the question - and I get it often as well - I tend to answer it differently.

The main benefits from using a blog in business - if you do it right - are:

A blog lets you disintermediate the conversations with your audiences. That is especially interesting for companies that have niche products or for smaller announcements. You are no longer limited to reaching people through mainstream media and you can actually start conversations with the "long tail". The funny thing is that while doing all that you will also be able to improve your relationships with mainstream media folks - as they read blogs as a source of information.

The second benefit - again, if you do it right - is that a corporate blog will let you increase the frequency of communications with your audiences. Bloggging will also give you increased "Google-juice" - which potentially could increase the size of your audiences. This is especially important for those companies where many buyers find their products through search.
Another benefit of course is that a blog puts a human face on your company - look what Scoble did to Microsoft
The biggest benefits may not even be in the areas of marketing communications and PR but in product innovation - getting the right customer requirements by engaging more of them in conversations - and customer service.

I did not make those things up. Many people much brighter than me have written about all those things long before me. But since I get that question often, I thought it would be worthwhile to post here. And again, none of those benefits will be achieved if you do not do it right!

[Technorati Tags: blog corporate blogging corporate blog pr]

links for 2005-08-04

Feed Digest : Mix, convert, and syndicate RSS and Atom feeds

Cool tool to remix feeds and publish to a blog

(tags: blog syndication tool feed)
The Community Engine Blog: Microformats in Business — Structuring Content for Search & Collaboration

Business proposition for microformats (allowing human and machine readability on one page)

(tags: tag tagging microformats)
Keyword Intelligence, keyword suggestion for search marketing campaigns

Keyword selection package

(tags: keyword sem)
Smart Mobs: Media Streams Metadata Exchange

Long tail production

(tags: remix media)

August 3, 2005

This is what I meant - Dell did not get it!

Shel over at Naked conversations writes about how he's been happy with his Dell and never had any problem with it - but will nevertheless never buy one again.

That is exactly how I felt when I saw all the fallout.

[Technorati Tags: dell customer service brand reputation]

80,000 new blogs a day

That is what David Siffry from Technorati says in his latest "State of the Blogosphere" report.

Other noteworthy numbers include the fact that they track almost twice the number of blogs then they did in March and 55% of all blogs are active.

Wow...

[Technorati Tags: blogs blogosphere]

August 2, 2005

Another top 10 list for what marketers will do in the next 10 years

This time for internet marketing from Larry Chase (via Sacred Cow Dung).

Pay per call rings in - a step further than per click

Emergence Marketing

Thoughts on marketing, innovation, social networking, new products and the impact of technology on all those thingies

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