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Who will save us? | 02/08/2010
Shared by EASTeam
Amen, allelujah & pass the potatoes pleez! AGREEEEEED!!
Who will save book publishing?
What will save the newspapers?
What means 'save'?
If by save you mean, "what will keep things just as they are?" then the answer is nothing will. It's over.
If by save you mean, "who will keep the jobs of the pressmen and the delivery guys and the squadrons of accountants and box makers and transshippers and bookstore buyers and assistant editors and coffee boys," then the answer is still nothing will. Not the Kindle, not the iPad, not an act of Congress.
We need to get past this idea of saving, because the status quo is leaving the building, and quickly. Not just in print of course, but in your industry too.
If you want to know who will save the joy of reading something funny, or the leverage of acting on fresh news or the importance of allowing yourself to be changed by something in a book, then don't worry. It doesn't need saving. In fact, this is the moment when we can figure out how to increase those benefits by a factor of ten, precisely because we don't have to spend a lot of resources on the saving part.
Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.
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Frightened, clueless or uninformed? | 02/08/2010
In the face of significant change and opportunity, people are often one of the three. If you're going to be of assistance, it helps to know which one.
Uninformed people need information and insight in order to figure out what to do next. They are approaching the problem with optimism and calm, but they need to be taught. Uninformed is not a pejorative term, it's a temporary state.
Clueless people don't know what to do and they don't know that they don't know what to do. They don't know the right questions to ask. Giving them instructions is insufficient. First, they need to be sold on what the platform even looks like.
And frightened people will resist any help you can give them, and they will blame you for the stress the change is causing. Scared people like to shoot the messenger. Duck.
The worst kind of frightened person is one with power. Someone in a mob of other frightened people, someone with a gun, someone who is the CEO. When confronted with a scared CEO, time to run. Before someone can change, they have to learn, and before they learn, they have to cease being scared.
One reason so many big ideas come from small organizations is that there is far less fear of change at the top. One mistake board members and shareholders make is that they reward the scared but hyper-confident CEO, instead of calling him on the carpet as he rages at change.
When I first encountered surfing, I was scared of it. It looks cool, but an old guy like me can get hurt. A patient instructor allayed my fears until I was willing to get started. When you first start out, the things you think are important are actually irrelevant, and it's the stuff you don't know is important that gets you thrown into the ocean. Finally, and only then, was I smart enough to actually learn.
I'm bad at surfing now, but at least I know why.
Comfort the frightened, coach the clueless and teach the uninformed.
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The least I could do | 02/07/2010
One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. That's actually what they spent most of my time at business school teaching me.
No sense putting more on that pizza, sending more staff to that event, answering the phone in fewer rings... what's the point? No sense being kind, looking people in the eye, being open or welcoming or grateful. Doing the least acceptable amount is the way to maximize short term profit.
Of course, there's a different strategy, a crazy alternative that seems to work: do the most you can do instead of the least.
Radically overdeliver.
Turns out that this is a cheap and effective marketing technique.
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Open or Closed: What's the Best Path for Mobile Augmented Reality? | 02/05/2010
Shared by EASTeam
Is it ready for prime time? They removed the iPhone App for crashes... Fingers crossed!
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've discussed the use of third party APIs when building an integrated online product, highlighting the disadvantages such a decision could entail. One topic on the flip side of that is the question of whether providing an open public API versus a closed private one is in your product's best interest. Massively viral services like Twitter have rapidly expanded their capabilities and brand awareness by releasing an open API for third party developers to build on, but for companies in fledgeling industries, like mobile augmented reality, the API decision isn't as clear.
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Along with Mobilizy's Wikitude World Browser, Amsterdam-based company Layar was one of the first mobile AR browsers to market and has since become one of the strongest players in the space. Layar allows users to view geo-tagged points-of-interest (POI) in a 3D "heads-up" display using their mobile phone's camera. We've covered Layar's evolution since its debut last June and eventual launch on Android devices two months later. Since then Layar has released an iPhone version of their application, but due to random crashes the company has temporarily pulled it from the App Store until they can work out the bugs.
Layar has quickly become of the most popular mobile AR browsing applications across the globe thanks to its impressive set of features, but the company's choice to provide an open API may have been the decision which fueled them to success. Companies that wish to jump on the augmented reality bandwagon have several choices for getting their content on Layar quickly and easily. Layar provides documentation on its website for how to use and interpret their API, but those looking for an easier method of geo-data input can use any of a number of third party tools. Thanks in no small part to tools like buildAR, Muzar and Winvolve, Layar's database of geo-data has rapidly expanded to include over 300 content layers including anything from restaurants to Twitter results, to even the locations of nearby heart defibrillators.
On the opposite end the spectrum, the accrossair browser, a similar mobile AR browser available on the iPhone, has decided to keep its API private and helps with the input of geo-data themselves for companies that wish to participate on their platform. Instead of allowing anyone to upload location data onto their platform, acrossair has reached out to corporations like McDonalds and FedEx to provide them with their own POIs in their browser. The one disadvantage this places on their product is a significantly lower number of POI sets that a user can access. With just over a dozen different options, acrossair has a fraction of the curated POI sets that Layar does. Founder Chetan Damani says that while their closed API certainly limits the amount of data on their browser, it enhances the overall stability of the browser - a factor which may play heavily for the company as they expand beyond the iPhone to Android and Symbian devices.
"We are keeping [the API] closed right now because we will be in a period of evolution and multiple iteration," Damani told ReadWriteWeb. "We want to move to Android, and we want to make sure that the APIs are the right APIs and that they won't limit our development. We only get one opportunity to get this right."
Damani and acrossair are playing it safe until they are able to expand their presence to more platforms before opening their API - a step Damani says they do plan on taking. When acrossair moves their browser to Android, Symbian and possibly even Windows Mobile devices, having a closed API will make the transition much smoother. Opening the API after they set up shop on each mobile OS will be a lot easier without loads of independently developed geo-data on their system.
So is it better to limit one's API early on for the sake of stability while simultaneously hampering the possible reach of one's product? The acrossair browser seems to be taking that chance, while Layar, on the other hand, is welcoming third party developers with open arms. However, acrossair has one thing going for them that Layar currently doesn't - a working iPhone application.
How much of a role Layar's open API played in the demise of their iPhone application is unknown, but all that could be moot when Layar relaunches on the iPhone "by the end of February". However, if augmented reality is the supposed "future of web browsing" as some believe it to be, having closed browsing platforms is not a viable long-term solution.
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Guitar Hero CEO Rosensweig Trades In His Axe | 02/03/2010
Shared by EASTeam
If this isnt FERTILE DIRT for growing a company, dont know what is! :) #in
New office, same job. After just 10 months as president and CEO of Activision Blizzard's Guitar Hero division, former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig is packing up shop and relocating to online textbook rental startup Chegg where he will hold the same title. Chegg claims to have saved students over $140 million on textbooks by offering their "Netflix style" rent by mail service.
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Chegg has quickly grown to become one of the leading online textbook rental company, along with competitor BookRenter.com. According to an article in the New York Times, the company claims to have rented over 2 million books on 6,400 college campuses, and just last November, the company closed over $100 million in debt and series D funding.
In an interview with the Times yesterday, Rosensweig said Chegg has an excellent business model and that the company "did as much business in January 2010 as in all of 2009." Chegg expressed their excitement to see Rosensweig join the the team yesterday on their blog.
"We've been growing at an exceptional rate, so we needed a world class leader that has the business experience and passion for the consumer to take us to the next phase," the company writes. "Dan is definitely that person."
Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the New York Times.
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Goals Determine Use of Social Media | 02/03/2010
If you work in marketing at any company, it’s expected that your efforts will eventually turn to the ability to be creative or how to leverage new marketing methods. So what do you do when your stakeholders ask you to put together a plan for new media marketing methods?
Inevitably (with all the buzz about social media right now in the industry) social media is a big, white elephant that is sitting at the room. And he’s staring at you.
But how do you know where to start when it comes to utilizing social media in your efforts? How do you decide which tools are right for your organization? Or, a stakeholder will mention that they want to put together a Facebook marketing plan. How do you know what to do when you face this issue?
I see these questions a lot. It is no surprise that many new media and social media marketing efforts have been viewed as not worthwhile endeavors.
Why is that? The answer to this is simple, but often overlooked. I even see the answers to these questions being overlooked by agencies who claim to specialize is social media.
Social media will be looked at as the answer to new marketing efforts rather than a means to spread a message.
The answer to this decision is not based on the tools, but based on the goals. It is not the tool or the channel that must be known in order to produce results with social media. It is the goals.
If you do not first know your goals, you will spend your time searching for that needle in the haystack. You will dig and dig, but you will not find it.
So, if you are deciding how to use Facebook to help your marketing efforts, STOP. Take a step back. First, determine your goals.
After you determine your goals, you will either see more clearly how to use Facebook to aid with your marketing efforts, or you will see that Facebook may not be the answer.
I was chatting with Duncan Alney of Firebelly Marketing today. We found ourselves entrenched in a conversation that dealt specifically with this issue.
Is it your goal to generate a specific number of page views? Is it your goal to bring more people into your hair salon? Is it your goal to sell cheeseburgers?
Management of expectations is important. Specific goals should be noted as possible and not possible through social media marketing efforts. (This is a conversation for another day, so I will try to not dwell on it too much.) Your service must be worth buying in order for people to buy it. Social media is not the be-all-end-all. It is only part of the answer if, and only if, it can be integrated into a marketing plan with a role of attempting to achieve a specific goal. For example, social media may assist to bring people into your hair salon, but if you suck at hair cuts, people will not come back. I digress.
It is also important to realize that any one specific social media service, such as Twitter, is not the answer to your social media efforts just because it is popular. Yes, audiences may exist within certain social media sites, but what is it that you want them to do?
If you are faced with a marketing consultant who tells you that Twitter is the answer to all marketing or that everyone should be on Twitter, walk the other way. This is nonsense. The same goes for marketers who tell you that it is important to come up with a “Facebook Strategy” or a “Twitter Strategy.” Does the marketing consultant know your goals? If the answer is “Yes,” Twitter may actually be a portion of your social media strategy, but only if it fits with helping to achieve your goals.
If you take anything from this post, please let it be that you must first determine your goals before determining if and how to use social media. Without goals, efforts are blind, and so are the results.
I spoke with Charlene Li, Founder of Altimer Group, about some of these topics on the Web Trends show. Following is the the video of our conversation.
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The Most Painful Social Media Metric | 02/03/2010
There has been a lot of recent discussion on metrics for social media, and I think it’s a healthy discussion to have. Amber Naslund has a great series on some of the metrics that matter, and K.D. Paine’s PR Measurement blog is also a really smart place to get an education on the subject. Often, the issues that people are having with social media metrics have nothing to do with the social media part–it’s a basic understanding of metrics, period.
Most of the work on this topic centers around two dimensions: the stuff you did, and the results you got. Easy peasy. But, there is another dimension to social media measurement that often gets overlooked. It gets overlooked, because it’s often a painful admission–opportunity cost. Any time you spend marketing has two costs–what it cost you to do the thing, and what you could have made doing some other thing. It’s the first thing you learn in economics, but it’s also the first thing you forget in business, because in business, as in poker and the stock market, we tend to forget the “bad beats” and artificially inflate the wins.
I’ll give you an example. My company, Edison Research, is a small, highly effective unit. We pulled off the largest single-day research study in history–the 2008 Election Exit Polls–with a full-time staff of about 25 people. We don’t really have a sales or marketing arm, per se–most of the “marketing” I do is squeezed in around client projects, so my time is definitely a finite resource. Yours is, too, so you’ll understand this story all too well.
I recently wrapped up a marketing/thought leadership initiative for the company that had a social media component. If I measured the stuff I did against the returns I got, it did OK. A bunch of people tweeted about it, a bunch more visited our site, and a bunch of trade publications covered the effort. Measured. But–and it is a very big but–I spent about 30 hours of my time, and another 40 hours or so of our staff’s time on this. Thousands of dollars, yes, and also time that could have been spent on other initiatives. I did a little post mortem on the project this week, and decided that it would have been cheaper for me to just mail everyone on our prospective client list a check for a hundred bucks and hope for the best. For the handful of prospects I really hoped to land from the effort, it would have been cheaper to hand-deliver those checks.
I’m being facetious, but only a little. The amount of time I spent on this initiative has a definite dollar cost, and those dollars could have been spent on a full-page ad in a relevant trade magazine, or an event sponsorship, or banner ads. You need to measure all of these things–because you need to know not only what the ROI of a social media initiative is, you need to know if the “I” could have been spent better, elsewhere.
Many of you engage in social media because it’s cost effective. Maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t–your mileage can and will vary with each initiative. But it is important that as your capital permits, you hold social media initiatives to the same standards you would hold any other marketing, PR or sales initiative. To do otherwise is to sell yourself short by failing to adequately value your time. The choices are easy when all you can “afford” to do is social media. But as you grow, you have to be able to look at social media with a clear eye, and a realistic sense of social media’s opportunity cost. Often–and I am convinced of this–it is well worth that cost. But never forget the bad beats.
This blog post took some of my time. If I consider my value–both to my company and my family–I can combine my actual salary with an aspirational, potentially inflated sense of self-worth and ballpark the cost of this post at $100. Should I have paid someone else $50 to write it instead? Those are the types of questions you should challenge yourself with, every day.
I’ve just had a bad beat, but I had the systems in place to measure that honestly, adapt my approach, and regroup for the next round. Here’s what I know:
Fail fast.
Spin lots of plates, but start them one at a time.
Measure your time, honestly.
Measure the value of your time, fairly but aspirationally.
The past is a sunk cost.
Do better. Move on.
The Most Painful Social Media Metric is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!
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Hunters and Farmers | 02/03/2010
10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.
Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.
It's not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn't make a lot of sense.
A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you'd need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser--for a while--if it's urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don't ask him to change gears instantly.
Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers... and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles--she's hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago... she's farming.
Both groups are worthy, both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I'm not sure if there's a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people's personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).
Some ways to think about this:
- George Clooney (in Up in the Air) and James Bond are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out.
- Farmers don't dislike technology. They dislike failure. Technology that works is a boon.
- Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site, farmers like Facebook.
- When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to internal sales management, be prepared for failure.
- Farmers prefer productive meetings, hunters want to simply try stuff and see what happens.
- Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Mark Cuban is a hunter.
- Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to avoid epic failure.
- Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all too often, the booths are staffed with farmers.
- The last hundred years of our economy favored smart farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the persistent hunters able to stick with it for the long haul.
- A hunter will often buy something merely because it is difficult to acquire.
- One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it takes a hunter to get the investment and a farmer to patiently make the business work.
- A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer group to be sure a purchase is riskless.
Who are you hiring? Competing against? Teaching?
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Free inspiration and insight | 02/02/2010
The Lemonade movie is so professional, engaging and inspiring that you've probably already seen it. If not, here it is.
Todd Sattersten has written a free ebook about pricing that's well worth the time it takes to review. It will change the way you think about pricing.
And if you can, take a look at this poetry video from Gabrielle Bouliane. She left us a very powerful message before she left. It might change your life. (Thanks Paul).
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Modern procrastination | 02/01/2010
The lizard brain adores a deadline that slips, an item that doesn't ship and most of all, busywork.
These represent safety, because if you don't challenge the status quo, you can't be made fun of, can't fail, can't be laughed at. And so the resistance looks for ways to appear busy while not actually doing anything.
I'd like to posit that for idea workers, misusing Twitter, Facebook and various forms of digital networking are the ultimate expression of procrastination. You can be busy, very busy, forever. The more you do, the longer the queue gets. The bigger your circle, the more connections are available.
Laziness in a white collar job has nothing to do with avoiding hard
physical labor. “Who wants to help me move this box!” Instead, it has
to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual
labor.
"Honey, how was your day?"
"Oh, I was busy, incredibly busy."
"I get that you were busy. But did you do anything important?"
Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn't mean mattered.
When the resistance pushes you to do the quick reaction, the instant message, the 'ping-are-you-still-there', perhaps it pays to push in precisely the opposite direction. Perhaps it's time for the blank sheet of paper, the cancellation of a long-time money loser, the difficult conversation, the creative breakthrough...
Or you could check your email.
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