How Groupon Could REALLY Break the Mold

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Paul

Groupon remained silent the second day after its offensive ad campaign ran on the Super Bowl. The Wall Street Journal quotes spokeswoman Julie Mossler as saying “we don’t really have anything else to say,” meaning that the defensive statement by founder Andrew Mason on the company blog on Monday would have to stand on its own.

Groupon is donating up to $100,000 to each of four charities whose causes were cited in the company’s ad campaign. That’s $400,000 (tax-deductible) against a Super Bowl Ad budget of at least $9 million, and that’s not counting all the media buys since then. So if Groupon has spent (conservatively) $10 million on media buys since Sunday and given $400,000 in matching donations to the causes it exploited, then its licensing costs amount to 4% of the total spend. Pretty good deal if you ask me. For a company that just raised $950 million in financing, it’s not even a rounding error.

Groupon likes to think of itself as working against the grain, so what if it REALLY broke the mold by challenging the model that has advertisers throwing absurd amounts of money at the TV networks for a football game every February? What if Groupon announced that it wouldn’t buy any Super Bowl advertising but would instead donate the $9 million ad budget as matching funds to those four charities? What if it further challenged the other big Super Bowl sponsors like GM, Coca-Cola and Annheuser-Busch to do the same? Do you think Groupon could get the same impact giving money to rainforests and Tibet as it got by sending the money to Rupert Murdoch?

I’m not sure, but it seems an interesting idea to explore, at least for an outfit that presents itself as a rule-breaker. How about breaking the rules of the world’s largest commercial stunt in the name of the environment and human rights while also challenging others in your community to do the same? Could it possibly have the same impact?

I’d sure like to see someone try it.

Social Marketing Hangover

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Paul

I was recently quoted on Internetnews.com making the following prediction:

“Look for marketing’s love affair with social media to give way in 2011 to the sobering reality that a Facebook fan page and Twitter account don’t solve problems of poor products or positioning. Stories of social media failures will become more frequent as practitioners realize that customer conversations are time-consuming to maintain and that peer conversations present as many problems as they do opportunities.”

A few of my more passionate social marketing friends contacted me and asked politely if I had lost my mind or something for issuing such a gloomy and pessimistic forecast at precisely the hour of social media’s triumph. I responded that no slight was intended. On the contrary, I think the hangover stage is necessary and healthy if social media is to achieve its realistic potential for change.

Anyone who’s watched technology for a while is familiar with the lifecycle of innovation. There’s a period of exuberance, followed by the cold reality that the new tool won’t shorten the work week or lead to permanent weight loss. Gartner famously labeled this blue period the “trough of disillusionment,” which is a perfect term for it.

Some technologies never exit this down cycle (handwriting recognition) and some dwell in purgatory for many years before finding their niche (tablets). Many return to achieve their potential after time and other technology advancements help them along (PCs, the Internet) and a precious few continue rocketing up the adoption curve without any slowdown whatsoever (smart phones).

Social media marketing can never match the hype that has been heaped on it for the last three years, so it must go through a correction stage. The discipline will be better for the experience, but only after a lot of business people realize the ugly reality that this stuff is really difficult.

Blaming the Tools

The souring of marketer attitudes toward social media first became evident to me last spring when I worked on a survey for B-to-B magazine that found that nearly half of 400 marketers surveyed were disappointed with the results they were getting from Twitter. A little further exploration revealed that those expressing the greatest disappointment were using Twitter for business less than once a week. That’s like blaming your lawnmower for making your lawn ugly when you only cut the grass every other month.

I’ve recently noticed that the questions marketers ask me have changed. A year ago, people wanted to know how to start social media campaigns. Now they want to know how to rescue the floundering campaigns they already have. Disillusionment is starting to set in.

As poorly conceived or badly executed social marketing campaigns begin to take their toll, people will naturally blame the tools. That’s an instinctive self-protection reflex. Over the past year marketers have decorated their websites like Christmas trees with Twitter and Facebook logos. Now some of them are wondering why Santa hasn’t appeared. Unfortunately, even Santa requires you to first spend a year being good.

While I don’t believe the popular attitude toward social media marketing is going to turn overwhelmingly sour, we will begin to see marketers pulling in their guns this year for three major reasons:

Lack of executive support. A lot of C-suite types never believed social media was all that big a deal in the first place, so they made half-hearted investments with unrealistic goals. Most of these initiatives will fail. Executives can then say “I told you so” until the market forces their hand.

Lack of patience. Social marketing is unlike traditional marketing in some pretty fundamental ways. Traditional marketing is campaign-oriented: Put a message in the field and then sort through the surge of leads and responses that come in. Social marketing is about building relationships over time. Like a good diet, you don’t see much progress in the early going, but you notice big changes a year later. It takes patience to get there. Patience is becoming a pretty precious commodity.

Lack of understanding. I’ve talked to several companies recently that have information-rich community websites that are going nowhere. These companies have got half of the equation right: They’re producing solid content. What they don’t understand is the relationship side of the equation. They’re approaching social marketing like they approach conventional marketing: Blast out a message and hope that people respond. That was hard to do even three years ago and it’s almost impossible today. A much more effective strategy is to reach out to the people who already have the audience’s attention and get them engaged. One-to-one relationship-building is not a traditional marketing strength, but it must become one.

So Now What?

The social media landscape is vastly more crowded today than it was a year or two ago. The time when a clever blogger could amass an audience of 30,000 loyalists in a year has passed. People’s attention spans are shorter than ever and their willingness to find information is giving way to the expectation that information will find them.

Effective social marketing campaigns require commitment, patience and constant innovation. They also must be backed by an organizational commitment to creating delightful customer experiences. In many cases, the best group to run social campaigns is the customer service organization because they already understand one-to-one relationships. However, marketing usually carries the ball and turf wars prevent them from working cooperatively with other groups.

Social marketing is hard. It requires treating an audience as a collection of individuals rather than a demographic clump. Building relationships takes time and a tolerance for frustration. There are many blind alleys and few big scores. Success comes from building community one brick at a time.

Avaya’s Paul Dunay (left) said it best in a recent webcast. “We treat every customer as if he or she could bring down our company.” The key word in that sentence is “we.” Social marketing requires everyone in the company to embrace the idea of customers as individuals. Not everyone is up to the task just yet.

The End of ‘Social Media’

Posted on December 16, 2010 by Paul

Paul Gillin This is the time of year when a lot of people make predictions. I’ll resist that urge, though, and instead present a plea: Let’s make 2011 the year we stop talking about “social media.”

It’s not that social media is no longer important. On the contrary, there’s almost no media today that isn’t social. The problem with much of the discussion is that it’s been focused on tools, and tools are far less interesting than what people do with them. Now that everyone knows the basics of Facebook and Twitter, things start to get interesting.

January 1 marks the beginning of a new decade, and it’s worth reminding ourselves of how much changed in the decade just completed. Ten years ago, almost no one had heard of Google, there was no online video and consumer ratings were unknown. We used cell phones primarily for voice calls and content management systems less functional than WordPress cost a half million dollars.

In early 2004 Technorati counted about a million blogs on the Internet and Facebook was just getting off the ground. Seven years, 200 million blogs, nearly 600 million Facebook members and a few billion YouTube videos later the information landscape has been completely transformed. Stunning.

We have achieved a goal Bill Gates coined 20 years ago called “information at your fingertips.” Want to know who said “There’s a sucker born every minute?” Tap, tap, click and you’re there (it wasn’t P.T. Barnum, BTW). Interested in the film history of the movie star you’re watching? IMDB has an app for that.

This new reality of instant information access will transform our economy and our culture fundamentally*. It’s already beginning. A friend who runs an auto dealership tells me that customers today typically know more about the cars they want to buy than his own salespeople do. Some now come into the showroom knowing precisely what other people have paid for cars at his dealership within the last couple of months. Think of how that changes his business. And what’s happening in auto sales will happen in every single industry.

Over the next few years we will learn to take for granted that advice from people just like us is available whenever we need it, and the tools to deliver this information will get much better. This will change the way we make decisions, and that will change nearly everything else. Companies that don’t provide significant value will struggle to survive. Weak products will disappear quickly from the market and advertising won’t be able to save them. Our range of options for buying and selling products and services will expand by orders of magnitude thanks to global connectivity.

Businesses will need to empower all their employees with much more information and education because customer will no longer tolerate “I’ll have to speak to my supervisor.” Organizations will flatten and fragment because vertical hierarchies move too slowly. Corporations will divest non-strategic businesses because slimmer profit margins won’t support them.

In short, we’re all going to become a lot more efficient at doing what we do. This will cause a lot of pain in the short term; one of the reasons we’re in a “jobless recovery” right now is that businesses are learning to do more with less. In the end, these changes will be no less dramatic than those brought about by the Industrial Revolution; only this revolution will take a couple of decades instead of a couple of centuries to complete.

Much of this change will be brought about by a few elegantly simple tools: Ethernet, the Internet Protocol, hypertext, RSS, HTML and a handful of others. See what happens when people apply innovation to the tools they use?

*Books I read this year that do an exceptional job of sketching out the post-social media world include The Hyper-Social Organization by Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran, Open Leadership by Charlene Li and Do It Wrong Quickly by Mike Moran. The best book I’ve ever read on media transformation is The Chaos Scenario by Bob Garfield. It’s also funny as hell.

Eloqua’s Innovative Blog Tree

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Paul

Big graphics are a recent trend and a great way to attract attention. People love to share images that creatively display information in formats that make data easier to visualize. Wikibon.org did this to great effect this summer, presenting data storage growth in terms of iPads stacked on the playing field at Wembley Stadium. According to founder Dave Vellante, the graphic hit Digg.com and traffic exploded. For not a lot of money (you can outsource the design overseas), the community got attention it couldn’t buy with thousands of dollars worth of list rentals.

Eloqua has just released an infographic depicting the social media landscape as a tree with expertise clustered on topical branches. This one has a twist. According to Eloqua content director Joe Chernov:

Our vision is to make this graphic as interactive as possible. To that end, if you don’t agree with the placement of your “leaf” on the tree, just “Like” Eloqua on Facebook and tag yourself on the limb upon which you feel you belong. (We are also urging bloggers who are not present on the “tree” to tag themselves as well.) We’ll revisit the image and make appropriate changes.

I’m flattered to be included on one of the branches, but there’s no reason you can’t add yourself. Just follow Joe’s directions and join the foliage!

Five Lessons From the Web 2.0 Summit

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Paul

I had a chance to attend the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco and hear from some of the business leaders of the new Internet, including the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Twitter. Here are five key insights I took away.

1. Make Marketing a Service to Customers - I didn’t write down who said this, but the comment stuck with me long after the conference was over. The traditional role of marketing has been to create an image or deliver a message. Service had little to do with it. But in the new world of tuned-out customers, the only way to get make an impression is to be helpful, entertaining or memorable. This is one reason we’re seeing a race by B2B marketers in particular to give away tactics and information that were once their source of competitive advantage. It’s the only way to get prospects to pay attention. Marketers need to ask themselves a new question: “How can I help?”

2. You Need a Mobile Strategy, and Faster Than You Probably Thought. Forrester Research now predicts that smart phones will be the dominant Internet access device in the US within three years. Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley sees smart phone shipments surpassing PCs in 2012 (Here’s the video of her terrific presentation). In countries like China, the PC was never even much of a factor. The speed at which this shift is occurring is breathtaking. Smart phones have eclipsed all other electronic devices in their rate of adoption (see chart below).

Google’s Eric Schmidt made an interesting point: smart phones are actually more useful than PCs because they know more about the user, including location, and can deliver a more personal level of utility.

This doesn’t mean PCs are going away. Rather, the plunging price of flat-panel displays will make PCs more of a dashboard for a user’s business and entertainment needs. However, the browser will be only one of several ways people will access the Internet.

On the smart phone, that access will be by applications. Apple opened the iPhone to developers only three years ago, and already more than a half-million apps have been delivered. Other platforms are just ramping up their own app ecosystems.

There is a huge free-for-all coming in mobile apps, and nearly every business needs to be thinking about how to participate. Consider item 1 above. How can you use a mobile app to provide service to the customer? Whether it’s a coupon, shopping tip, reference source, comparison engine or something else, you’ll need to address the needs of this rapidly growing mobile audience.

3. Social Is the Killer App. While you’re pondering question 2, consider this one. Mark Zuckerberg was poised and mature in a nearly one-hour interview with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly. The Facebook founder acknowledged that great power carries great responsibility and pledged to be more responsive to the privacy concerns of members.

One memorable point he made is that “social” is a powerful feature of software. Several Facebook applications, like photo albums, were functionally weak in their early versions but were a huge hit with members because they were easily shareable, he noted. This is an important point to remember. Loading up on features quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns. Adding the ability to share, reuse, mash up and comment creates a whole different level of value.

BTW, Zuckerberg reminded me of a young Bill Gates in looks, mannerisms and the clarity with which he sees complex issues. Like Gates, he has an uncanny ability to find a logical path to a decision or point of view. It will be interesting to watch his star rise.

4. Simulations Are A Powerful Incentive To Engage. Did you know that 320 million people have played a Zynga game and that the company now employs 1,300 people? Have you ever even heard of Zynga? If you’re a B2B marketer, you probably haven’t, but I’ll bet your kids have. Farmville is a mega-hit on Facebook and Zynga has nine other social gaming applications based on classic games like poker and Battleship. Founder Mark Pincus said the company has peak usage of more than three million concurrent users. Yow.

Why should you care? Because simulation games are not only a great way to learn but also an excellent tool for modeling business processes. Consider Cisco’s myPlanNet, a game that challenges players to build a business as the CEO of an Internet service provider. It has racked up more than 75,000 Facebook fans and 50,000 downloads for what is essentially a B2B training and marketing tool. Check out the wall posts on Facebook. It’s not the usual gaming trash talk. Players are learning how the Internet works.

IBM recently released CityOne, a game that simulates sustainable urban planning. These are tools that put real problem-solving scenarios in a gaming context and they are having enormous success. Can a sim fit in with your digital marketing plan?

5. Everything on the Web. Steven Berlin Johnson gave a brief but provocative talk about the rate of change in publishing. “For the first time in 20 years, the link and the URL are losing market share,” he said, noting that there is no standardized way to link to the page of a digital book.

Johnson proposed an idea he called “Web redundancy:” Every digital content asset should have a corresponding linkable version. “Unless [publishers] embrace Web redundancy as a strategy, all those extraordinary words will continue to live in the remote continents of the unlinkable,” he said.

I was reminded of all the press releases I continue to receive by e-mail that have no online corollaries. This is old-media thinking. Why ask the reporter to rewrite your words when it’s simpler to link to them? Why forego the search engine optimization benefits of an inbound referral, especially when tweets and links are the means by which people increasingly publish information?

This year’s Web 2.0 Summit was streamed in its entirety. The conference, which is in its seventh year, is a great way to tap into the trends that will define the next 12 months. If you can’t fork over the $4,200 (and thanks to John Battelle and my friends at Procter & Gamble, I didn’t have to), it’s worth tuning in to the YouTube archive or watching the streamed coverage from next year’s event.

I had a chance to attend the recent <a href=”http://www.web2summit.com/web2010/”>Web 2.0 Summit</a> in San Francisco and hear from of the business leaders of the new Internet, including the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Twitter. Here are five key insights I took away.

1. Make Marketing a Service to Customers - I didn’t write down who said this, but the comment stuck with me long after the conference was over. The traditional role of marketing has been to create an image or deliver a message. Service had little to do with it. But in the new world of tuned-out customers, the only way to get make an impression is to be helpful, entertaining or memorable. This is one reason we’re seeing a race by B2B marketers in particular to give away tactics and information that were once their source of competitive advantage. It’s the only way to get prospects to pay attention. Marketers need to ask themselves a new question: “How can I help?”

2. You Need a Mobile Strategy, and Faster Than You Probably Thought. Forrester Research now predicts that smart phones will be the dominant Internet access device in the US within three years. Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley sees smart phone shipments surpassing PCs in 2012 (<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yL9yrttESI”>Here’s the video of her terrific presentation</a>). In countries like China, the PC was never even much of a factor. The speed at which this shift is occurring is breathtaking. Smart phones have eclipsed all other electronic devices in their rate of adoption (see chart below).
<a href=”http://gillin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Meeker_Smartphones.png”><img class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-2432″ title=”Meeker_Smartphones” src=”http://gillin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Meeker_Smartphones.png” alt=”Smart Phone Growth” width=”500″ /></a>
Google’s Eric Schmidt <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKOWK2dR4Dg&p=2737D508F656CCF8″>made an interesting point</a>: smart phones are actually more useful than PCs because they know more about the user, including location, and can deliver a more personal level of utility.

<a href=”http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4087/5186226125_66e1323508.jpg”><img class=”alignright” style=”margin-left: 9px; margin-right: 9px;” title=”Mark Zuckerberg at Web 2.0 Summit” src=”http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4087/5186226125_66e1323508.jpg” alt=”Mark Zuckerberg at Web 2.0 Summit” width=”299″ height=”199″ /></a>3. Social Is the Killer App. While you’re pondering question 2, consider this one. Mark Zuckerberg was poised and mature in a <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRUOl03nZIc&p=2737D508F656CCF8″>nearly one-hour interview with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly</a>. The Facebook founder acknowledged that great power carries great responsibility and pledged to be more responsive to the privacy concerns of members.

4. Simulations Are A Powerful Incentive To Engage. Did you know that 320 million people have played a <a href=”http://www.zynga.com/”>Zynga</a> game and that the company now employs 1,300 people? Have you ever even heard of Zynga? If you’re a B2B marketer, you probably haven’t, but I’ll bet your kids have. <a href=”http://www.farmville.com/”>Farmville</a> is a mega-hit on Facebook and Zynga has nine other social gaming applications based on classic games like poker and Battleship. <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81F1qSOq3cs&p=2737D508F656CCF8″>Founder Mark Pincus said the company has peak usage of more than three million concurrent users</a>. Yow.

Why should you care? Because simulation games are not only a great way to learn but also an excellent tool for modeling business processes. Consider <a href=”http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/sp/myplannet/index.html”>Cisco’s myPlanNet</a>, a game that challenges players to build a business as the CEO of an Internet service provider. It has racked up <a href=”http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cisco-myPlanNet/153538644090″>more than 75,000 Facebook</a> fans and 50,000 downloads for what is essentially a B2B training and marketing tool. Check out the wall posts on Facebook. It’s not the usual gaming trash talk. Players are learning how the Internet works.

IBM recently released <a href=”http://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/cityone/index.html”>CityOne</a>, a game that simulates sustainable urban planning. These are tools that put real problem-solving scenarios in a gaming context and they are having enormous success. Can a sim fit in with your digital marketing plan?

<a href=”http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4131/5181217508_9e1c9f2be7.jpg”><img class=”alignleft” style=”margin-left: 9px; margin-right: 9px;” title=”Steven Berlin Johnson at Web 2.0 Summit” src=”http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4131/5181217508_9e1c9f2be7.jpg” alt=”Steven Berlin Johnson at Web 2.0 Summit” width=”250″ /></a>5. Everything on the Web. <a href=”http://stevenberlinjohnson.typepad.com/about.html”>Steven Berlin Johnson</a> gave a <a href=”http://www.web2summit.com/web2010/public/schedule/detail/15397″>brief but stimulating talk</a> about the rate of change in publishing. “The the first time in 20 years, the link and the URL are losing market share,” he said, noting that there is no standardized way to link to the page of a digital book.

This year’s Web 2.0 Summit was streamed in its entirety. The conference, which is in its seventh year, is a great way to tap into the trends that will define the next 12 months. If you can’t fork over the $4,200 (and thanks to John Battelle and my friends at Procter & Gamble, I didn’t have to), it’s worth tuning in to <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/user/OreillyMedia”>the YouTube archive</a> or watching the streamed coverage from next year’s event.

Age of the Tablet Has Begun

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Paul

I tend to be a skeptic about new technology, probably a consequence of 25 years of seeing cool demos of products that never worked very well in real life. I tend to be a late adopter, too. I only got on the smart phone bandwagon a year ago after Apple had already shipped 100 million of them. I was also blasé about the iPad when it was announced in January. In my only tweet on the subject, I called it a “big iPhone.”

But after spending three days at a conference in San Francisco this week watching and talking to iPad users, I’m now convinced that tablets will all but displace laptops within the next few years. In short, tablets are built for what people want to do with a portable device, while laptops are essentially scaled-down desktop PCs. We’ve carried them for 20 years because they were what we thought portable computers should be. Now we know better.

By “tablet,” I don’t mean “iPad.” Samsung just released the first Android tablet and we can expect many more to follow. We can also expect special-purpose devices like the Amazon Kindle to become more feature-rich over time. The difference between these devices and PCs is that they are designed specifically with the needs of the mobile user in mind. Laptops and the early versions of Windows tablets (the machines have been around for a decade), never were.

Travel-Ready

As I sat in the outlet-deprived seats at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, I scanned the rows of iPad owners with envy. My Toshiba laptop gets less than two hours of battery life on its stingiest setting. It takes three minutes to start and its eight-pound mass is awkward, hot and uncomfortable.

In contrast, the iPad’s battery life is conservatively rated at 10 hours. It starts in seconds and can easily be held with one hand or cradled in the nook of your arm. Apps start and switched quickly. It can be flipped vertically for book reading or horizontally for Web browsing. People say reading books and periodicals with Kindle and Nook apps on the iPad is nearly as good as reading on a Kindle or a Nook.

There has been no innovation in laptops in more than a decade. Hardware makers have mainly crammed their devices full of storage and memory to the point of excess. My laptop has 300GB of disk storage. What the heck am I going to do with that?

Tablets use fast, lightweight flash storage, which is why they start so quickly. Sure, there’s a lot less capacity, but how much do you really need for a couple of days on the road? I don’t have to carry all nine seasons of “24” in my briefcase.

The primary advantage laptops is the keyboard, and even iPad fanatics will tell you that typing on a screen is neither as fast nor as tactile as using a keyboard. However, external wireless keyboards and voice recognition will quickly resolve tablets’ shortcomings in these areas.

A decade from now, a new generation of youngsters will think it funny to hear daddy tell about how he used to skulk around airports looking for power outlets. We’ll probably think it’s pretty funny, too.

Oppenheimer & Co. forecast this week that shipments of tablets will soar grow from 15 million units this year to more than 115 million in 2014. Oppenheimer knows what I learned in San Francisco this week. The laptop has had a long a fruitful run, but it’s time for that 1980s technology to wind down. There’s a new king in town.

My Favorite Productivity Apps – Multimedia & Web

Posted on November 8, 2010 by Paul

Continuing on my post from two weeks ago about my favorite PC productivity tools, here’s another list of goodies. Most are free, all are bargains.

Photo/video

We are all our own artists and layout editors these days, and with my crummy graphic design skills, I need all the help I can get.

I use a lot of video in presentations, and have always gotten good performance from the free Foxreal YouTube FLV Downloader. It works with a lot more sites than just YouTube and cleanly downloads Flash video. I then convert the downloads to a format that PowerPoint can understand, such as WMV, using the terrific iWisoft Free Video Converter. You used to have to pay 50 bucks for this kind of functionality. Another good option for downloading videos in the Firefox browser is the DownloadHelper plug-in.

A very cool option I’ve recently discovered is CacheViewer. You can use it to download a video when all other means fail. It works by retrieving the stored video from your memory cache. It doesn’t always find what you’re looking for, but it’s a good tool of last resort. Just be aware that there are often copyright restrictions on these works that limit what you can do with them.

For video editing, call me simple, but Windows Live Movie Maker does a pretty good job of meeting my very basic needs.

I keep my photo library in Picasa, which has terrific features for organizing and tagging images. Its “I Feel Lucky” option instantly fixes lighting and contrast problems. You can even create collages like the one I use for my Twitter page background.

For photo editing, though, I like Zoner PhotoStudio. It’s fast and it includes editing features that I haven’t seen anywhere outside of PhotoShop. Most people don’t touch more than 10% of the features of Photoshop, anyway. What a waste. They could get Zoner for free.

Zoner Photo Studio screen shot

For a cheap and easy bit of artwork, a screen grab often suffices. Snagit is a great tool for this purpose, but it costs $50. A free alternative that has nearly as many features is PicPick. It’s worth having for the image editor alone, which is kind of Windows Paint on steroids.

Audio

I’ve recorded several hundred podcasts over the last five years and have settled on a few basic tools that always work. I record phone calls using Skype and MX Skype Recorder. There are cheaper options than MX, but this $15 utility has one nice feature that I haven’t found anywhere else: it records both sides of the conversation on separate tracks in the high-quality WAV format. That’s a godsend when you are piecing together a conversation and want to eliminate such irritations as background noise from one track.

For sound editing, I haven’t found better than the popular open-source Audacity. It does nearly everything I need it to do, and where it doesn’t, I use Doug Kaye’s terrific Levelator to automagically normalize sound levels. I’ll also put in a plug for ClickRepair, a tool written by a retired Australian IT manager ostensibly to restore old LP recordings. It’s bailed me out more than once when mysterious noises infected my podcast recordings. It has saved me the $40 license fee many times over.

Audacity screen shot

Internet

I consult lots of websites on a regular basis, of course, but there are a few that have special utility to my daily work style. Tweetdeck for Twitter is one. Another is Diigo, a social bookmarking service, I discovered about three years ago that has been my favorite ever since. Like Delicious, Diigo makes it easy to bookmark a website with one click. It’s got a couple of very useful features that Delicious doesn’t have however. You can highlight and annotate pages and choose to have those comments to appear only to you or to everyone who has the Diigo plug-in (see below). You can also take a snapshot (essentially a cached image) of a page, which is useful for content that goes behind firewalls after a few days. The site has recently added the capability to bookmark images, too, although that feature is limited in the free edition.

Another useful service that I initially dismissed when I saw a year ago is dlvr.it, an RSS syndication service. Dlvr.it monitors any RSS feed you specify and automatically posts items to social media accounts such as Twitter and Facebook. I have dlvr.it monitoring all of my blogs as well as several delicious and Diigo feeds. When Dana or I post a new entry on Joy of Geocaching, for example, the headline and link automatically post to the Joy of Geocaching twitter account and then my personal Twitter account automatically retweets @joyofgeocaching. You can also schedule and gate the number of messages that go out at any given time, attach tracking codes and monitor results.

I also have all my most important feeds organized into Google Reader. You really come to appreciate RSS readers when you have a lot of topics to monitor. For one project I’m working on now, I need to track activity on nearly 200 blogs and news sites according to different topics they cover. Reader saves hours weekly compared to “surfing.” You can also export categories of feeds and display them on a website, as I do with the “Media Sites” list in the right-hand sidebar on Newspaper Death Watch. That list is easily generated by Google Reader, and it changes whenever the feed list changes.

My Favorite Productivity Apps – Part One

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Paul

When I look back at my own output over the last four years – four books, 190 articles, nearly 1,000 blog entries, 300 podcasts, more than 50 webcasts and a busy speaking/training schedule – I marvel at the role that cheap and free technology has played in making me more productive.

A lot of our productivity used to be robbed by little things: finding stuff, organizing it and getting it into a useful form. Thanks to new tools, much of that is now automated.

I constantly experiment with new software, and over the years I’ve come to rely upon a handful of stalwarts that I use every day. Over the next couple of issues, I’ll run down the list and tell you why I value these tools. I also hope you’ll share your favorites as comments so we can all become more productive. All of these run on Windows (I had a Mac for a couple of years but just couldn’t make the mental shift) and most are free. None cost more than $50.

The Desktop Basics

Dragon NaturallySpeaking – I’ve praised this speech recognition program so frequently that it deserves a place in the Gillin Hall of Fame by now. Simply stated, I write at least twice as much with Dragon as without it. I also believe Dragon has made me a better writer by enabling my work to have a more conversational tone. The retail price is $200, but you can find perfectly good older versions for as little as $30 online. Even at the higher price, it’s a good value.

Google Office – Despite Gmail’s erratic performance, the flexibility of web-based mail can’t be beat. I can access and search my entire mail archive from any computer or from my Android phone. Google continually innovates on this platform. One of my favorite new features is the ability to create a Google document directly from an e-mail. The keyboard shortcuts save a load of time. I just wish they’d create one that’s analogous to Word’s <Ctrl-K>.

For collaboration, Google Docs is a godsend. My last two books have been written with co-authors, and Docs enabled us to share and edit each other’s work without the nightmare of version control. Feature-wise, the apps don’t hold a candle to Microsoft Office, but the collaborative convenience is often worth the trade-off. Microsoft’s Office Web Apps are supposed to integrate better with Office, but I haven’t put them through their paces yet.

Tungle – This scheduling application, which debuted at South by Southwest early this year, makes it easy for people to suggest meeting times and book appointments without an endless game of e-mail volleyball. You can click a link in my signature line and book a meeting at your convenience. Integrates well with popular calendars.

Notepad++ – I wrote about this little open source beauty back in August. Notepad++ is a text editor for programmers, and it is blisteringly fast at crunching through large volumes of text. Our WYSIWYG world plays havoc with Web content management systems, which choke on each other’s formatting commands. I can dump HTML code into Notepad ++ and clean it up with a few quick search-and-replace operations. When I was slammed by a WordPress virus earlier this year, I used Notepad++ to purge hundreds of files of rogue code in a few seconds.

AVG Free – I’ve tried a lot of antimalware utilities, but I keep coming back to this unobtrusive yet effective security suite. I haven’t had a problem with computer security in three years (other than on my websites, which are a completely different story), and that’s what counts.

7-Zip – When PKWare began charging for WinZip a few years ago, I switched to this open source file compression utility. It supports most of the popular formats as well as its own hi density algorithm. The 256-bit encryption is a plus when you want to keep your work from prying eyes.

Roboform – I paid the $30 for this password manager several years ago, so I haven’t experimented with the crop of new entrants. These tools store your passwords, personal contact information and bank/credit card data in one place, making it easy to log into websites and to fill out online registration forms. Here’s a link to some alternatives, including open source tools.

PDF-XChange Lite – I’m forgetful, so I like to highlight and annotate documents when they’re in front of me. Adobe’s $200 Acrobat X is overkill for my needs. PDF-XChange Lite makes it easy to mark up PDFs so I can remember later why I kept them.

FileZilla – When you run a lot of websites (I tend five actively) you need to be This is an open source FTP program that is fast and easy to use. I transfer a lot of large audio and video files, and FileZilla handles the task smoothly in the background.

Next issue, I’ll look at some essential multimedia tools as well as Web-based utilities. Let me also put in a plug for my podcast partner David Strom, who is a much savvier technologist than I, and whose reviews and recommendations are a goldmine of wisdom.

I’m Just a Sucker for Believe It or Not!

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Paul

I have been a hopeless Believe It or Not! addict since the age of 10. I’m so glad to see they’re keeping up with the times. I couldn’t find a static version of this e-mail pitch, so thought I’d share. pg
Technomazing! Unbelievable technology tales are featured in the new book from Ripley’s Believe It or Not! called Enter If You Dare! The book is an annual collection of unusual, unbelievable and amazing stories from around the world.

Enter If You Dare Some of the book’s incredible tales of science and technology:

Eye Tech – pg. 222: Filmmaker Rob Spence from Toronto, Canada, has developed a camera to replace the eye that he lost as a child. Rob began working with engineer Kostos Grammatis to create the “Eyeborg,” and is now the proud owner of a wireless bionic eye made with one of the smallest digital cameras in the world, which is capable of recording and transmitting video directly from his eye socket.

Onion Power – pg. 223: To save electricity, some people have started powering up their MP3 players with onions. How? Soak it in an energy drink and then stick a USB cable into it – and by doing that they can charge their iPod for an hour.

Liquid Vision – pg. 223: Professor Josh Silver of England’s Oxford University has invented inexpensive, fluid-filled eyeglasses that can be adjusted to anyone’s vision needs. The lenses contain circular sacs filled with fluid that are connected to a small syringe to increase or reduce the amount of fluid, thus altering the power of the lens.

Mechanical Insect – pg. 223: Scientists at Japan’s Tokyo University are creating a range of insect-machine hybrids by rebuilding their brains and programming them to carry out specific tasks. Already they have rewritten the brain circuit of a male Silkmoth to react to light instead of odor.

Steel Velcro – pg. 225: German scientists have developed a steel version of Velcro that is strong enough to support buildings. Using the same hook-and-loop fastening system as Velcro, Metaklett can bear loads of around 3.6 tons per sq ft (35 tonnes per sq m) at temperatures as high as 1,472°F (800°C).

Spy Tooth - pg. 226: The U.K.’s James Auger has devised a new concept in secret communication- an audio tooth implant. A surgeon implants a device into your tooth, the data is retrieved from a cell phone, radio or computer and the vibration resonates through your jawbone to you inner earbone, meaning that only you can hear the information.

Bionic Fingers – pg. 226: A company from Scotland has invented bionic fingers, which enable people with missing digits to pick up a glass, hold cutlery and even write. The $75,000-fingers are directly controlled by the brain and can write and grip, thanks to a special sensor that allows them to detect when they have closed around an object.

Warning Suit – pg. 229: To make people aware of the threat of skin cancer, a Canadian company has designed a two-piece bathing suit that changes color to warn women when the sun’s rays are too strong. The bikini is held together with pale decorative beads that turn dark purple if the UV rays reach dangerous levels.

Fatal Sting – pg. 228: Microscopic nanobees, made from perfluorocarbon – a material made from artificial blood – have been used by scientists at a university in St. Louis, Missouri, to kill cancer tumors by stinging them.

Emotional Robot – pg. 223: Scientists at Waseda University in Japan have developed a robot that can express seven different human emotions. The Emotional Humanoid Robot, named Kobian, uses motors to move its lips, eyelids and eyebrows into various positions and can also strike a range of poses to back up its expressions.

Robot Teacher – pg. 223: Children at a school in Tokyo, Japan, had a new teacher in 2009 – a robot called Saya. Beneath a humanlike face, Saya has a system of 18 motors that work like muscles to give her face expressions including surprise, fear, anger, happiness and sadness. She has a vocabulary of 700 words, has the ability to speak in any language and is programmed to respond to words and questions.

Illuminated Dress – pg. 222: British fashion student George Davis has designed a dress that lights up when the wearer’s cell phone rings. The right shoulder of the dress, which is connected to the phone by wireless technology, has translucent white scales that move and light up.

Please let me know if you would like to pursue any stories in the book or a story on the book itself. Images are available, as well as interviews with people from Ripley’s or people featured in the book.

The book cover, as well as several pages and individual images, can be downloaded at http://www.ripleybooks.com/newsroom.

Millennials: Coming Soon to a Cubicle Near You

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Paul

This weekend I’ll pack my daughter off to college, so as a little celebration, I took her and a friend to a Six Flags amusement park this week. As we drove west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, I took the opportunity to eavesdrop on the conversation in the back seat, affording me one of my too-rare glimpses into the world of Millennials.

During the 75-minute drive, I listened to the girls talk excitedly about the people they would soon meet in person for the first time. They already knew many of them, of course. Thanks to Facebook, they had been building connections with future classmates since the late spring. When today’s students arrive on campus, they already know dozens of others.

My daughter, Alice, had already “spoken” to her future roommate several times. I use the term figuratively because Alice hates to talk on the telephone, as do most of her friends. By “speak”, she means text messages, instant messaging sessions, wall posts and maybe a few webcam interactions. For today’s teens, interaction with friends is multi-channel and multimedia.

Media Everywhere

I actually shouldn’t say Alice hates talking on the phone. She just can’t fathom doing nothing but talking. Her favorite context for conversation these days is a massively multi-player game, where friends can slay dragons and battle wizards while chatting about the same things their parents talked about: music, school and romance.

Much has changed there as well. Thanks to MySpace pages and BitTorrent, Millennials have constant and immediate access to the latest music and video. They like the top artists, of course, but along with Lady Gaga (left) they favor an assortment of bands I’ve never heard of that cater to eclectic tastes. When I was their age, I learned of new artists from cassette tapes passed back and forth between friends. Today, a link in an instant message does the same thing, and Apple’s Genius and Pandora make the process programmatic.

Relationships? Well, after listening to two teenagers talk for an hour, it dawned on me that there were people they felt very strongly about whom they had actually never met. One of Alice’s best friends lives in Texas. Their relationship was already well established last year long before they met each other for the first time.

It’s not unusual to hear terms like “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” applied to virtual relationships. Nor is it surprising to hear of relationships ending in novel ways. Two years ago, I listened in as a group of Alice’s classmates spoke of a friend who had just ended a romance. Everyone in the group knew the news except the guy who had been dumped. He hadn’t read the message yet.

Sound strange? A survey of teens this year by textPlus found that 30% percent said they’ve broken up with someone or been dumped via text message. Call it passive aggressive or wimpy or whatever you want; it’s the way things are.

Coming To Your Town

And so they head off to college, and in four years they will enter a workplace that understands little about their values and systems. They will encounter managers who believe that Facebook is a productivity drain and who would rather employees spend an hour in traffic jams each day than get work done from home.

They will have their first brush with cover-your-ass thinking and will sit in meetings that waste hours of time so that everyone in the room can be “in the loop.”

They will encounter rigid, top-down hierarchies in which risk is avoided and decisions are unchallenged. They will find mid-level managers who hoard information out of fear that sharing will threaten their job security.

They will wonder how anything gets done in environments like these and they will gravitate toward those companies that discard tradition. They’re young, confident and coming to your town. Are you ready?

paulgillin.com

Social Media and the Open Enterprise

Category Archives: innovation