How Will Computers Serve Us in 2020?

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Paul

Live-blogging from the IBM Watson University Symposium at Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management. Additional coverage is on the Smarter Planet Blog. .

Panel discussion: What Can Technology Do Today, and in 2020?

Moderator: Andrew McAfee – MIT Sloan, CDB

Panelists: Alfred Spector, Google; Rodney Brooks, MIT, Heartland Robotics, David Ferrucci,IBM

: Alfred Spector, Google

Spector: We focused in computer science for many years on solving problems where accuracy and repeatability was critical. You can’t charge a credit card with 98% probability. We’re now focusing on problems where precision is less important. Google search results don’t have to be 100% accurate, so it can focus on a bigger problem set.

When I started in computer science, It was either a mathematical or an engineering discipline. What has changed is that the field is now highly empirical because of all of that data and learning from it. We would never have thought in the early days of AI how to get 4 million chess players to train a computer. You can do that today.

The Next Big ThingThis is one in a series of posts that explore people and technologies that are enabling small companies to innovate. The series is underwritten by IBM Midsize Business, but the content is entirely my own.

Brooks: Here at MIT, all students take machine learning because it’s that important.

McAfee: Was there a turning point when you decided the time was right to take these empirical approaches?

Brooks: It was in the 90s. The Web gave us the data sets.

Ferrucci: Watson was learning over heuristic information. Plowing through all those possibilities through sheer trial and error was too big. You have to combine inductive and deductive reasoning.

Brooks: It’s easy to get a plane to fly from Boston to Los Angeles. What’s hard is to get a robot to reach into my pocket and retrieve my keys.

McAfee: Why does the physical world present such challenges?

Brooks: In engineering, you have to set up control loops and you can’t afford for them to be unstable. Once a plane is in the air, the boundaries of differential equations don’t change that much. But when reaching into my pocket, the boundaries are changing every few milliseconds.

McAfee: The things that 2-year-old humans can do machines find very difficult, and the things that computers can do humans find very difficult.

Rodney Brooks, MIT

Brooks: One thing we have to solve is the the object recognition capabilities of a two-year-old child. A child knows what a pen or a glass of water is. There is progress here, but it’s mainly in narrow sub-fields. Google cars are an example of that. They understand enough of road conditions that they can drive pretty well.

Spector: We’re looking to attack everything that breaks down barriers to communication. Example: With Google Translate, we eventually want to get to every language.

Another is how to infer descriptions from items that lack them. How do you infer a description from an image? We’re at the point where if you ask for pictures of the Eiffel Tower, we’re pretty good at delivering that.

A third thing is to make sure that information is available always from every corpus, whether it’s your personal information, information in books or information that’s on the Web. We want to break down those barriers while also preserving property rights. How many times have you searched for something and you can’t find it? I turns out it’s in a place where you weren’t looking. When you combine that with instantaneity of access, you can be on the street and communicate with someone standing next to you in the right language and the right context. You can go to a new city where you’ve never been before and enjoy that city no matter where it is.

McAfee: You think in five years I’ll be able to go to Croatia and interact comfortably with the locals?

Spector: Yes.

Brooks: We think manufacturing is disappearing from the US, but in reality there is still $2 trillion in manufacturing in the US. What we’ve done is go after the high end. We have to find things to manufacture that the Chinese can’t. What this has led to is manufacturing jobs getting higher tech. If we can build robotic tools that help people, we can get incredible productivity. The PC didn’t get rid of office workers did; it made them do things differently. We have to do that with robots.

We can take jobs back from China but they won’t be the same jobs. That doesn’t mean people have to be engineers to work. Instead of a factory worker doing a repetitive task, he can supervise a team of robots doing repetitive tasks.

My favorite example is automobiles. We’ve made them incredibly sophisticated but ordinary people can still drive.

Spector: It’s machines and humans working together to build things we couldn’t build separately. At Google, we learn how to spell from the spelling mistakes of our users.

Ferrucci: This notion that the collaboration between the health care team, the patient and the computer can result in a more effective diagnostic system as well as one that produces more options. Everyone is well informed about the problems, the possibilities and why. I think we’re capable of doing that today much better than we did in the past. This involves exploiting the knowledge that humans use to communicate with each other already. This gets you as a patient more involved in making better decisions faster. It’s collaborating better with the experts.

McAfee: Don’t we need to shrink the caregiver team to improve the productivity of the system?

Ferrucci: The way you make the system more productive is to make people healthier. Does that involve a smaller team? I don’t know, but I do know you get there by focusing on the right thing, which is the health of the patient.

Andrew McAfee, MIT Sloan

McAfee: If you could wave a wand and get either much faster computers, much bigger body of data or a bunch more Ph.D.’s on your team, which would you want?

Brooks: Robotics isn’t limited by the speed of computers. We’ve got plenty of data, although maybe not the right data. Smart Ph.D.’s are good, but you’ve got to orient them in the right direction. The IBM Watson team changed the culture to direct a group of Ph.D.s the right way. I think we’d be better off if universities were smaller and did more basic research that companies like IBM would never do.

Spector: When many of us in industry go to the universities, we’ve often surprised that the research isn’t bolder. Perhaps that has to do with faculty reward issues. We envision that there’s going to be need for vastly more computation. I’m sure Google data centers will continue to grow. If you stay anywhere near Moore’s law, these numbers will become gigantic. The issues will relate to efficiency: Using the minimum amount of power and delivering maximum sustainability.

With respect to people, there’s a tremendous amount of innovation that needs to be done. Deep learning is a way to iteratively learn more from the results of what you’ve already learned. Language processing is a way to do that. We learn from the results of what we do. Finally, data is going to continue to grow. We bought a company with a product called Freebase where people are creating data by putting semantic variables together. Just learning the road conditions in New York from what commuters and telling us is crowdsourced data, and that’s enormously useful.

David Ferrucci, IBM Research

Ferrucci: We need all three, but in order, it’s researchers, data, machines. Parallel is processing is important, but it’s less important than smart people.

McAfee: Do computers ultimately threaten us?

Brooks: The machines are going to get better, but for the foreseeable future we’ll evolve faster. There’s a lot of work going on in the area of putting machines into the bodies of people. I think we’re going to be merging and coupling machines to our bodies. A hundred years from now? Who the hell knows?

Spector: There will be more instantaneity, faster information. We can embrace that, like we did central heating, or reject it. I think we’re on a mostly positive track.

Audience question: What’s the next grand challenge?

Ferrucci: I think the more important thing is to continue to pursue projects that further the cause of human-computer cooperation. We tend to go off after new projects that require entirely different architectures, and that hurts us. I’d rather we focus on extending and generalizing architectures we’ve established and focus on applying it to new problems.

Brooks: I’d like to see us focus on the four big problems we need to solve.

Visual object recognition of a 2-year-old
The spoken language capabilities of a four-year-old
The manual dexterity of a six-year-old. Tying shoelaces is a huge machine problem
The social understanding of an eight-year-old child.

Know Thy Customer

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Paul

In his book, The New Know, Thornton May makes a case for data analysis becoming the next frontier of corporate evolution. Having spent the past 15 years getting their transaction systems in place, businesses will now turn their attention to making sense of the massive amounts of data they are collecting. The result will be a transformation of corporate productivity fueled by deep insights into customer needs. Business analysts will become the new rock stars of the organization.

This is one in a series of posts that explore people and technologies that are enabling small companies to innovate. The series is underwritten by IBM, but the content is entirely my own.

May is a futurist who is executive director and Dean of the IT Leadership Academy. A popular speaker, he is known for combining deep insights with a stand-up comic’s delivery and a gift for storytelling. His writing has appeared in the Harvard Business Review; Financial Times; The Wall Street Journal and many other academic and business journals.

I caught up with him to talk about The New Know.

I was struck by how well researched your book was, with lots of real-life examples.

Not only am I talking about The New Know, the whole thing was a new know for me. It was ethnographic study of what people are doing in this space. Analytics is the business reengineering of the mid-90s. All of the major service firms are moving into this space in a big way, but not many people have a good definition of it.

I created a new acronym: FODDRS. That forecasting, operations research, data mining, data integration, reporting and statistics. Those have traditionally been six disparate disciplines, but you need the totality of them today.

Why did you set out to celebrate analysts?

We’ve come through the Bataan Death March, which is enterprise software. Everyone in the global 2000 has burned in through a painful process their enterprise transaction systems. So they have their systems of records in place and now and now people asking what do we do with all this data? Let’s analyze it. In 2010, the analyst is to the value creation dance what the CIO was in the 80s and 90s: unloved, misunderstood but poised to play a major role in the future.

Will new tools make analytics accessible to the common business person in the same way that spreadsheets made forecasting, accessible?

We are living in a much less tolerant society. You don’t need analytics if you’re always guessing right, but the minute you guess wrong, you’re going to be held accountable for how you made that decision and what you knew when you made that decision. We’ve created a whole class of people who are willing to forensically spank you if you’ve made decisions wrong.

Is this a generational issue?

I think the next generation of leaders is going to be not only aware of analytics but also masters of it. The next real social issue we deal with as a nation is executive compensation, and the only way you can justify the pay levels of these guys is to become more analytical. The people who simply guess are being found out.

Can you think of any recent examples where an executive has been pilloried for making bad examples based upon not analyzing data?

[Former BP CEO Tony Hayward] is a classic point. There is a presumption on the part of regulators and customers that senior executives understand what the key processes of the organization are and what their operational health is. At BP, that was not the case. We’re living in a complex society and the ticking bomb is not understanding how operations work.

But operations and organizations are getting more complex. Can one person know it all?

You can’t know it all but you can have processes for knowing. It’s OODA loops: observe, orient, decide and act. It’s not artificial intelligence but augmented intelligence. We’ll be delivering to the human actor the appropriate dashboard or operational reality at the right time.

We’re going to have to rethink and reinvest in our entire technology infrastructure. Our infrastructure was built to do transactions, not to manage information.

What will the new infrastructure look like?

For example, Partners Healthcare is looking at what outcomes they want to have happen at that point of care, then they design systems to deliver information to the front lines right when it’s needed.

We haven’t had to do this before. We used to be in the Soviet system where people were grateful for what we put on the shelf. It used to be product-centric vs. customer-centric. I will create this product and you will buy it.” Now the customer is saying “Here’s what I want and you build it for me.”

There are 360 million Americans today. Speaking analytically, that is a trivial database. You can actually know every one of those individuals.

At what point does this become creepy? Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that Google has a lot more data than it ever uses because it would be creepy if they did use it.

Information management becomes a species survival trait. Where it doesn’t become creepy is where people extract utility and value from their information management ecosystem. Kaiser Permanente has shown that you will live longer if you have mastery of your health care data. It’s not creepy that way.

Historically, we’ve been living in California where nobody knows how to park a car, but they know how to do valet. We don’t know how to park our data and how to take care of it. In K-12 we’re going to be teaching kids how to manage their information. I see kids graduating from high school seven years from now getting the equivalent of the top information security credential of today.

Do you think hoarding information rather than sharing it is basic human trait?

I think that’s an acquired trait during the information age. Today, the more information you share, the more powerful you are. This is why Apple had trouble early on. They are a closed system and this is why RIM and Android are going to be able to catch up catch up. An open system will always outperform a closed system.

Another thing is that people now know who is hoarding information. It’s like being the Amish on steroids; If you’re not behaving appropriately in the group, you are shunned. And that is having some social consequences like teen suicides, because there aren’t a lot of places to hide. We are at the big bang of social, economic, political and evolutionary change.

The technology we now have in the portfolio today is so amazingly powerful and it works. People with technology imagination, who can dream of creating value with technology now have the tools to do that.

The old think was that information overload is a problem. We’ve got to change our thinking. Having all this information available to us is not a bug; it’s a feature. Speaking realistically, there is nothing we cannot know. So an organization can now say, “What do I want to know about my customer?” We can create that.

The other day [Intel CEO] Paul Otellini was being interviewed by Charlie Rose and was asked what is going to be obsolete next and he said “ignorance.” We have migrated to a point in our society where it is no longer socially acceptable to be ignorant.

At companies that do this well, how is the organization different?

One thing is they celebrate curiosity, they ask “What if?” and they tend to have more porous boundaries. And they realize there are different kinds of smart in the enterprise. They conduct experiments. We’re migrating into this scientific age of business where you can launch a product prototype and let people react to it and fix it almost instantaneously. Michael Schrage says we should all become the chief experiments officer.

But most companies don’t operate that way. The culture punishes failure.

We’re migrating away from that. Every company is trying to realize that it’s not really a failure; it’s learning. Even organizations that are traditionally viewed as hidebound, like the U.S. military, treat every mission As an analytical exercise. They analyze what they learned and what they have to change. And not only does a particular unit learn, but they all learn from that. Those learnings from the field work their ways into the curriculums at the service academies within two to three weeks. That’s unheard of in academia.

Doesn’t this challenge our hierarchies?

You’re coming closer to getting organizations and humans within them to almost be on the same metabolic rate. The industrial discipline of coming to work at a certain time is an unnatural act. We’re migrating to a world in which we can now learn together. The organizations that will succeed are those that have an unambiguous reason for being. Kaiser Permanente’s is to improve health, the U.S. military’s is to keep people alive. People who exist just to sell more in this quarter will be lost. People have to have a North Star to come back to. The criteria for experiments has to be to advance the mission.

You quote Clayton Christiansen at some length. He has demonstrated that companies that listen too closely to their customers and don’t realize that the business environment has changed can kill themselves. Is there a risk of listening too closely to your customers?

Tom Davenport has pointed out that airplanes today have amazing avionics, but the pilots will tell you it’s still a good idea to look out the window now and then.

The organizational question is: Can you create an organization that people are excited about engaging with? GM is a very switched-on organization now. They are very excited about analytics. If you look at the traditionally underperforming members of the New York Stock Exchange who are now bringing in the analytical firepower of an Accenture or a SAS, you should buy their stock because you’re going to see a material improvement in performance within six to nine months.

There is so much waste in the enterprise today. People don’t know what’s going on in their enterprise. We reengineered in 1995 and then stopped. The whole term “process” has disappeared from the vocabulary. You’re going to see process mining, where people are mining their processes and optimizing them. And you’re going to make some serious money.

Look at what Gary Loveman did at Harrah’s, what the Boston Red Sox did: data tied to real mission delivers value. This may be what really excites children to get sharper in math.

Will this bring us out of this economic malaise?

Oh, yes. We still have 90% employment. The economy is unbalanced, but there are parts of the economy that are red-hot. We have to redo the US infrastructure, migrate to clean fuels, improve the quality of healthcare; there will be enough work to go around, but people will have to be smart to do it. If I was a young individual coming out of school, I would be studying analytics right now. The Master of Statistical Analysis will be the new MBA. It will be the ticket to success over the next 20 years.

We’ve also got to change our approach to education. A lot of kids went to school to show how smart they were, so they stayed away from things that were hard. We may go back to the Greek concept of people becoming better and more well-rounded citizens.

People say we’re no longer manufacturing in America. We’re actually manufacturing more than you can believe, but we’re so good at it that there aren’t as many jobs anymore. Where we dropped the ball was not reinvesting in their human beings. Corporations used to have training and development programs and sadly, those disappeared. There’s a whole generation in corporate America who have never been to a corporate training program. Training not disappear in the U.S. military, which is why ex-military people make such great employees. People are now doing it themselves with online education courses. I believe that retraining will be a major part of our economy.

Social Marketing Wisdom from the Insurance Industry – Really

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Paul

I was privileged to be on a panel with some outstanding social media practitioners from the insurance industry at the 2011 Social Media Conference for Financial Services put on by LOMA LIMRA this morning. Financial services firms – and insurance companies in general – are often seen as boring, but what these companies are doing within the confines of a heavily regulated business is anything but that. Farmers Insurance for example, hasn’t accumulated 2.3 million Facebook likes by boring people. Another example is One Sure Insurance which is one of my favorite ones. Car insurance is very important, but if you need business insurance then go to RhinoSure.co.uk.

I actually think insurance is a fascinating business, I even have the best motor trade insurance available for my car. It involves taking calculated risks about the unexpected. Insurance companies need to know a lot about the world around us, because their business deals with so many variables, from accidents to earthquakes to the chance of being hit by a meteor. This morning’s audience of about 100 social media practitioners truly believe in the value of new platforms to reach their customers, although they have understandable concerns about the many regulations that govern what they can say.

Here are some notes I took away from the three speakers on my panel.

Gregg Weiss (@greggweiss) of New York Life says the company’s social media content strategy is driven by constantly asking, “What can we do that isn’t about life insurance?” This was a theme that was borne out in every presentation: It’s not about the company but about what motivates customers.

A sampling of what New York Life has done:

Partnered with the NFL on a “protection index” of pro football teams;
Created the New York Life Game of Life in partnership with Hasbro. The goal was to get people talking about financial stability and have a chance to win the popular board game;
Hosted a Twitter chat about Halloween safety.

New York Life has carefully cultivated more than 100,000 likes on Facebook. “We believe 60% of our Facebook fans are prospects,” Weiss said.

His best story actually had nothing to do with insurance but everything to do with using social marketing to build loyalty and word-of-mouth awareness.

He told of buying a coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts: milk, no sugar. But when he got to the office, he found the beverage was loaded with sugar. “I couldn’t drink it.” He tweeted his dissatisfaction. Within two minutes he had a reply tweet from the head of corporate communications at Dunkin’. She asked for a phone call, during which she apologized and offered a gift card, which arrived in the mail two days later. “I tweeted about Dunkin’ Donuts’ great response,” he said. “It was a huge win for them. “

His advice to social media marketers: “Think big. Everyone in this room has the power to change things at your company. That’s incredibly empowering.”

Quotable: “The VP of Social Media at New York Life is the hundreds of thousands of people who have online relationships with us.”

And finally, “Seek a higher purpose. I hope someday to hear a story of a kid who got to go to college because a parent bought a life insurance policy from us.”

Kelly Thul (@kellythul), State Farm.

State Farm got started in social media when it set up a blog to find New Orleans-area employees and agents who couldn’t be located after Hurricane Katrina. “Within 24 hours, that blog was key to our locating ever agent and employee,” Thul said. Today, State Farm is all over Facebook, with pages for the corporation, careers, Latino customers, the Bayou Classic football event and an innovative youth-oriented forum called State Farm Nation (right), where people can “discuss life’s challenges and opportunities, connect with others facing life-shaping decisions [and] find helpful tips and information.” With 1.3 million likes, it’s doing pretty well.

The insurance company’s YouTube channel has had more than five million views, many for its TV commercials. The ads have spawned parodies, but Thul says the company is pretty sanguine about them. “If people care enough to have a bit of fun with you, that’s OK, as long as it isn’t brutal,” he said.

State Farm evaluates social media opportunities using four criteria:

Relevance to business strategy;
Role clarity: who is responsible for talking and responding;
Measurement criteria;
Activating platforms.

These four criteria provide a framework for making a rapid and relevant decision about new platforms and opportunities like Google Plus.

Words of wisdom: “People want to be heard. If they believe you’re listening to them, they’ll like you a little more.”

Theresa Kaskey (@TheresaKaskey), Director of Brand Management and Strategy at the John Hancock Financial Network, joined the company without any plans to get involved in social media. John Hancock had no social media strategy at time. Today, it’s 80% of what she does. There’s been a long education and adoption process, but company management is buying in, she said. John Hancock recently launched its first blog, Build4Success, and it’s posted nearly 40 videos on YouTube. Unlike the other two speakers on the panel, who speak primarily to consumers, John Hancock Financial Network’s audience is financial advisers.

YouTube has been one of its early successes. “We created more than 80% of our launch content in one day,” Kaskey said. “We had a meeting of our advisers and brought them into a room one by one to talk about how they delight their customers.” It’s been a low-cost, high-return recruiting success.

Words of widom: A key element of successful social media programs is “It’s not about us.”

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 and a good supplement program from healthyusa.co, 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, most of them get a quote from the right insurance company without asking for opinions, plus they all know the importance of always checking the worksite safety recommendations. 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, even a Critical Ops download for PC. 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=”https://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=”https://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=”https://gillin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Meeker_Smartphones.png”><img class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-2432″ title=”Meeker_Smartphones” src=”https://gillin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Meeker_Smartphones.png” alt=”Smart Phone Growth” width=”500″ /></a>
Google’s Eric Schmidt <a href=”https://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=”https://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=”https://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=”https://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=”https://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=”https://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=”https://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=”https://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=”https://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=”https://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=”https://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=”https://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=”https://stevenberlinjohnson.typepad.com/about.html”>Steven Berlin Johnson</a> gave a <a href=”https://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=”https://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.

paulgillin.com

Social Media and the Open Enterprise

Category Archives: innovation