…compare the technology policies of the two candidates. I did so this week for my Ziff-Davis blog. I was surprised to find that McCain is more activist in some areas than his opponent. They disagree totally on net neutrality.
In the first chapter of Secrets of Social Media Marketing, I write about Fiskars, the Finnish maker of fine cutting tools that uses a community of scrapbooking enthusiasts called Fiskateers to evangelize its products to specialty craft retailers. It’s a perfect example of how to use social media to create street-level awareness.
My wife, Dana, wasted no time in applying to become a Fiskateer, and last weekend she attended a gathering of her fellow crafters in central Massachusetts sponsored by Fiskars. What a bounty of gifts they received! Dana counted no less than 15 raffles for the 28 attendees. She won four of them and carted home about $500 worth of swag. To the left is a photo of the goodies.
Fiskars sent lead Fiskateer Kelly Jo as well as one of its “Fiskaneers,” which is what the company calls its engineers There was also a representative of Brains on Fire, the media agency that conceived of the community. Fiskaneer Doug chatted with the group about ideas for new products, yielding great insight from dedicated crafters. The attendees were treated to plenty of food and a trip to the nearby Yankee Candle superstore. The spent the rest of the afternoon crafting together.
Did Fiskars overdo it with the sheer quantity of stuff it gave away? I doubt it. These 28 women have already declared their allegiance to the brand, and giving them more incentive to promote Fiskars through their online and offline social networks can only help boost word-of-mouth marketing. The group has been designated “crafting ambassadors,” only it’s clear that the brand they favor is Fiskars. By harnessing their enthusiasm, Fiskars can extend the value of a few gifts to a much broader audience. The cost of goods for this exercise is cheap compared to the value of good cheer the participants will spread.
“An Arizona State survey was administered in September over the Web to all freshmen in the university’s campus residence halls; about 21 percent responded. Asked whether they use a social networking site, 93.2 percent said they do actively, 4 percent had in the past and 2.8 said never. For Facebook, the percentage of active users is 88.6, compared to 3.4 former users and 8.1 percent who said they have never used it.” Students also said they find Facebook more valuable for social than academic interactions, indicating that faculty could probably find more value in social networks.
SEO maven Russell Wright goes On the Record…Online with Eric Schwartzman
Eric Schwartzman calls this “possibly the most compelling interview” he’s ever done, and that’s saying something for a veteran of 140 podcasts. Wright goes into the finer points of search engine optimization, and some of the things he says are truly surprising. For example, targeting a bigger universe of keywords can actually be more effective than specializing. Dominating geographic search is drop-dead simple at the moment. Why link-baiting on del.icio.us may be a bad idea. Why Google Connect will change everything. How using terms that aren’t on your keyword list can benefit keyword visibility. There’s more in this fascinating 53-minute program
From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
John Kao believes the United States has an innovation crisis, and he’s calling on today’s corps of young technology professionals to sound the alarm.
Citing technology pioneer Vannevar Bush’s assertion more than 60 years ago that “A nation that loses its science and technology will lose control of its destiny,” Kao said the U.S. is in peril of becoming a technology laggard.
“The US public education system is veering further away from preparing kids for the world,” the author of Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back told the MIT Enterprise Forum early this month. “We spend more on education than any country in world, yet we’re between 24th and 29th in math performance.”
By contrast, Finland, a country that suffered a near economic collapse after the Soviet Union fell apart, today produces twice as many Ph.D.s per capita than the U.S. The Finns turned around their economy, in part, by creating a national design focused on science and technology education. As a result, “Two years ago, Finland was the number one competitive economy in the world, according to the World Economic Forum,” Kao said. “Its education system is rated the best in the world. People want to be teachers in Finland.”
We’ve heard this before, of course. In the late 1980s, Japan famously challenged the US for leadership in technology innovation with initiatives like the Fifth Generation Computer Project and a nationwide commitment to developing artificial intelligence. Those ambitious plans foundered, but Kao argues that this time is different.
Today, countries like Singapore and China are making technology innovation the centerpiece of a national strategy that’s backed by incentives, equipment and money. Singapore, for example, has set up the Biopolis, a $300 million biomedical research lab spread across a 10-acre campus. Singapore is allocating money to train expatriate scientists in other countries on the condition that they repay the government with six years of service. The country is also promising to remove the layers of bureaucracy and legal approvals that frustrate scientists in the U.S.
Singapore has convinced top researchers from MIT and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to pull up stakes and move to the tiny nation-state with financial incentives and promises of academic freedom.
This last point is a key difference between the national technology policies of today and the failed models of two decades ago. Thanks to the Internet and business globalization, countries now have the capacity to build very large local industries serving overseas customers. Kao told of a friend who’s building a global travel business for 1/10th of what it would have cost a decade ago. He farms out much of the development work overseas. “Countries want to ally with American intellectual capital,” he said.
Therein lies a challenge for US competitiveness. The United States has long been able to rely upon the global brain drain from other countries to fuel its innovation economy. Over half of the engineering Ph.D.s awarded in the U.S. now go to foreign-born students. Many of those people have traditionally settled in Silicon Valley or other technology-rich environments. But the lifestyle trade-offs aren’t as dramatic as they used to be. “Now there’s an Apple store and a Starbucks in Bangalore [India],“ Kao said.
With overseas economies offering tax havens, comfortable salaries, research grants and other perks to technology achievers, some countries that used to lose talent to the US have actually reversed the migration.
What can US technology professionals do? Well, on a purely selfish level there may be some attractive opportunities to pull up stakes and move overseas. Singapore, for example, has earmarked a half billion dollars to fund digital imagine research. But if you’re more interested in improving the domestic situation, then start by voting for candidates that have a vision and a plan for US technology competitiveness.
You can also out into the classroom and share your own experiences with tomorrow’s innovators. Many teachers would be glad for the help. In John Kao’s words, “Many people who teach math and science in U.S. publice schools are forced to do it.” In contrast, “In China, people with masters degrees in math willingly come in to teach in the schools.”
John Frost owns and edits The Disney Blog, one of the most popular Disney fan blogs on the Internet. While he’s an unabashed Disney enthusiast, his blog is a straight account of both the good and bad news related to the company he covers. The Disney Blog attracts about 100,000 monthly visitors, but it is not formally recognized as a media outlet by The Walt Disney Co.
John Frost
John will join me on a panel, along with Ben Popken of The Consumerist, next week at Nuance Communications’ Conversations 2008 conference in Orlando. I asked him a few questions about his blog and he generously provided these detailed answers.
Q: What value do you provide that mainstream media doesn’t?
A: I’m a subject matter expert, the voice of a peer, a shepherd to the community and, to some degree, an advocate.
Q: How is your content shaped by contributions from your readership?
A: Mainly through comments and emails. I get leads from readers and they let me know when I’ve stepped over the line.
Q: How do you believe interactions between customers and businesses are changing as a result of Web 2.0?
A: It flips the funnel. It changes the art of marketing to the art of listening and contributing. For Disney, however, they’re still just getting used to providing better tools for guests to make decisions.
Q: How do you avoid inaccuracies and to provide balance in your coverage? What are your practices for correcting mistakes?
A: Use reliable sources, always attribute, provide links to background as needed. Minor mistakes might just disappear, factual mistakes, when caught by readers, are acknowledged with an update to the post and quick notice that a change was made. Major mea culpas usually involve a new post that links to the old.
Q: What could the companies you cover do to made better use of customer feedback?
A: First, show us they’re listening. Have an online community manager and/or liaison who reaches out before feedback is even needed. Then, when feedback is received, you have the trust of the community to respond honestly, even if it’s only “I can’t answer right now, but we will find the answer and get back to you.” Then follow up.
I’m particularly impressed with companies that go out and search for feedback loops and attempt to deal with problems even before the consumer knows there is a problem. RSS feeds on various engines are a great help with this. If someone posts a complaint about all the weekday fireworks shows being canceled, be ready with an answer of alternate experiences for that evening.
Q: What frustrates you most about dealing with these corporations?
A: Faceless voice mail loops, help centers located overseas staffed with people who have no expert knowledge of the subject matter, the usual stuff.
In my case, each division has its own rules and contacts for material that my audience is interested in. Some still won’t deal with blogs, some are beginning to reach out. But our primary audiences are – and I use this term endearingly – the super geeks. They have different needs than the average consumer. PR may only release one photo and no concept art, no details on the background story or interviews with the creator. Mass media gets all that at the press junkets, but I’m not invited, nor can I afford to attend events like that. Why would I want to repost the press release that they can get anywhere?
Q: What could these companies do to put you out of business?
A: Hire me. They can’t put the fans out of business. There will always be a niche market for fan groups online and off. What they can do is feed our need to be brand defenders, not just brand critics.
Q: Blogging is a hard way to make a living. What motivates you to keep going?
A: I wish I was making a living at this. It pays the bills and helps with the costs involved in being a Disney fan. What keeps me going is the same thing that got me started: my passion for the subject matter.
Web ushers in age of ambient intimacy
Clive Thompson has a terrific feature in the International Herald Tribune about social networks and “ambient intimacy”, which is the phenomenon of sustaining relationships through casual awareness of what others are doing. Twitter and the Facebook News Feed are bringing new breadth to this concept, enabling people to glimpse others’ lives through occasional insights into their everyday activities. This intimacy becomes addictive. People who initially reject the News Feed as too intrusive or the constant stream of Twitter chatter as too overwhelming often find themselves drawn in to the point that monitoring the stream becomes addictive. There are also downsides to this phenomenon, in particular the lack of privacy and control over one’s own persona. The Internet was supposed to liberate people to reinvent themselves, but the arrival of tools that let anyone publish information about anyone else has actually done the opposite: it has given us less control over our own image.
While I Talked, People Twittered – Pistachio
Laura Fitton invited me to post an item from my newsletter about speaking to an audience that was Twittering about my presentation. The article I posted kicked off an interesting round of discussion about the pros and cons of real-time feedback. Check out the comments.
This service lets you create up to nine windows in a browser, each running a different Twitter query. It’s an interesting approach to bringing order to the wonderful chaos that is the tweetsphere.
Google Confirms RSS For Web Search Results
Search Engine Land confirms that Google will soon make search results available as RSS feeds. You’ll have to set up a Google Alert first, though. Standard Web search results won’t be RSS-able. Google is currently the only major search engine not offering RSS feeds of web search results.
Jenny Cisney, who’s got the nice title of Chief Blogger for Kodak.com, lists all the ways to contact the company via social media. And there are quite a few!
Journalism junkies have been closely watching the example of Digg.com to see if the wisdom of crowds really is better than the judgment of editors. According to David Chen, it isn’t. Writing on Mashable, Chen offers a detailed deconstruction of Digg’s recent decision to jettison some of its top users, apparently for trying to manipulate the system. The weeding-out process was positioned as a routine cleanup intended to eliminate abusers of the community adjudication process, but it was actually an acknowledgment that decision-making by the masses has serious flaws, Chen concludes.
It’s been common knowledge for a couple of years that the Digg model lent itself to manipulation by a small number of people. In fact, there’s evidence that up to half the stories on Digg’s enormously influential home page were contributed by just 100 users. By taking draconian action to ban members who had, in some cases, contributed hundreds of hours of effort to building the site, Digg is admitting that it has been unable to figure out an algorithmic solution to the abuse.
The problem isn’t in programs, but in people. Individuals can attain fame within the community by contributing stories that are ranked highly by other users. Active members discovered early on that by forming “friend” relationships with many others, they could enhance their performance and popularity. In other words, the more you voted for another member’s contributions, the more the other member voted for yours. As time went on, an elite corps grew more powerful, to the point that their contributions can achieve high visibility regardless of merit.
“In the years following its creation, Digg became less a democracy and more a republic, with a select few users responsible for the majority of front page stories,” Chen writes. Digg has tinkered with its settings to try to mitigate this factor, but some members responded by writing scripts that routed around the problem. It became a giant cat and mouse game that eventually forced Digg to insert human editors at some levels to arbitrate the process. So much for the wisdom of crowds.
Chen contends that the blockade may irreparably damage Digg’s reputation, although the site will continue to be a huge source of traffic for publishers who are lucky enough to be listed there. At the very least, the conundrum points out the limits of a purely democratic model of news judgment. Even successful sites like Wikipedia rely up a small cadre of elite editors to make most of the important decisions. People with significant experience in online communities agree that a very tiny percentage of members contribute the vast majority of content. It appears that editors, whether bubbled up from the community or appointed by management, are inevitably needed to maintain order
Should this be taken as a condemnation of the community journalism model and validation for the rule of editors? Absolutely not. As Wikipedia has demonstrated, armies of ordinary people can create a phenomenal information resource. However, leaving all decision-making to a group without providing rules or oversight invariably results in the ascendance of an elite. in the case of Wikipedia, that elite is self-regulating. In the case of Digg’s more juvenile crown, it’s a frat party.
I got a press release today from a PR pro whose client has an interesting story to tell.The company makes a security product that combines cellular and global positioning technologies to alert people when valuable items have moved beyond a specified location. This particular pitch told about a customer who had recovered an expensive motorcycle just 20 minutes after it was stolen, thanks to the clever technology.
I have a half-dozen blogs, including one that deals with location-awareness, and I thought this would be a nice item to mention.I searched for the headline on Google, but came up empty.So I contacted the PR person directly. He responded that the press release actually wasn’t posted online anywhere. “It’s a media alert that I distribute to generate press,” he said. “I was definitely not trying to get blog coverage.”
There are a few questionable assumptions in that statement, including the fact that 95 of the top 100 newspapers in America now have blogs. For the purposes of this newsletter, though, I want to address the importance of having a Web copy of anything you send out for media consumption.
The reason I searched for an online version of the press release was because Web publishing differs from print publishing in some fundamental ways. Look at any prolific blogger and you’ll see that their entries are full of hyperlinks. This practice may look strange to someone who doesn’t write principally for online consumption. Is the blogger being lazy by linking to source material instead of summarizing it?
Actually, quite the opposite is true. The comment-and-link approach leverages the strength of online media to minimize wasted time for the reader and while making the blogger more productive.
To understand this phenomenon, look at the way we used to publish. In the print world, journalists typically have to excerpt or summarize any material they reference because they have no choice. The only way to convey information is to include it in the story. This makes articles longer and creates more work for the reporter, who has to guess what source information is relevant. It also means that good information is more likely to be left on the cutting room floor.
Online, the dynamic is very different. By linking to source material, the writer minimizes the amount of background information that has to be summarized. If the reader wants that information, he or she can click through to the source document. There’s less time spent creating extraneous content and less time spent reading it.
This tactic is a core reason why some bloggers appear to be so prolific. Instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel, they can focus on the most relevant information. You need to understand this practice if you want to play fully in the online publishing world.
I personally maintain four blogs — paulgillin.com, joyofgeocaching.com, mediablather.com and newspaperdeathwatch.com – and manage to post to all of them frequently. I use comment-and-link combined with some clever online tools to keep the content up-to-date. For example, if I see something interesting online, I can easily bookmark it, type a brief summary or comment and save everything online. My bookmark service knows to gather up these entries every day and post them to my blog automatically (here’s an example of the result).My time expenditure is minimal and I focus only on the material that I think is most important. For audio or video content, there’s practically no other way to do this.
Marketers who want to incorporate online journalists into their communication plans need to understand this tactic and build it into their strategy.Link-and-comment isn’t a copout or a shortcut.It’s a tactic for minimizing waste. By posting every press release online, you not only make it easier for bloggers to reference the information, but you also make sure it’s you who tells the story and not some third party. Why would you have it any other way?
As for the press release I received earlier today, that company is out of luck. Had the press release been available online, I would have linked to it and recommended it to my readers. But reprint the whole thing? That’s just too much trouble.
Back in July, Quill Driver Books and I offered free galley copies of my new book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, to the first 250 people who applied. We also made downloads of the entire book available in PDF format to anyone who wanted one.
We quickly “sold out” of the free galleys. What surprised us, though, was the download demand. There were more than 5,200 downloads of the PDF in less than two months, or about 2o copies for each person who registered.
We’re thrilled, and now we’re asking for your help. We need your reviews: good, bad and indifferent. If you’ve read enough of Secrets to comment, please contribute your thoughts to Amazon and/or to the reviews section of the book website. All website comments will be posted verbatim. The more feedback the better. We made the free galley offer because we believe that honest opinion is the most powerful form of advertising. We hope you can help validate our confidence.
If you missed the window for the free PDF, please e-mail me and I’ll send you one.
From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
In a recent podcast interview on Tech Nation, Tim Sanders, author of Saving the World at Work, quotes a remarkable statistic: it’s been estimated that Google could save 750 megawatts of electricity every year by changing the color of its ubiquitous homepage from white to gray. That’s because monitors require more electricity to energize the brighter white phosphors.
The total cost savings of roughly $75,000 a year may not convince Google to overhaul its site design, but the statistic drives home the effect that economies of scale can have in computing.
There’s a lot of attention being paid to economies of scale these days as IT consumes a growing proportion of natural resources in the US. IT organizations are increasingly going to find themselves on the hot seat to go green not just because it’s the nice thing to do, but because it’s good sense for the bottom line.
Consider these facts:
The twin effects of spiraling energy costs and environmental hazards are creating a double whammy. Underutilized computers are consuming increasingly expensive energy and also taking a greater toll on the environment. In Europe, businesses are working under a new standard called the Restriction of Hazardous Substances directive, which limits the use of dangerous chemicals in computers. US businesses are keeping a close eye the directive, not only because it affects their European businesses but because they see it as a role model for similar legislation here.
Some very large businesses are beginning to make green computing part of the core corporate values. An article by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school tells of Bangalore-based IT services firm Wipro Technologies’ energy efficiency mandates. It tracks metrics like carbon dioxide emissions and paper consumption per employee and is outfitting workers with a new kind of energy-efficient workstation.
In the US, the most promising option is hosted or “cloud” computing. This takes advantage of the excess capacity that exists in giant data centers run by companies like Amazon and IBM. Why let that spare power go up in smoke if there are small businesses that can tap into it?
Increasingly, they are. On Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road venture capital foundry, technology entrepreneurs that propose to run their businesses on internal servers are referred to as having a “Hummer” strategy. In other words, they’re consuming far more power than they need to drive their computing environment. New software and services firms are bypassing captive data centers and opting to farm out everything to third parties. Technology entrepreneur John Landry recently told me that the cost of hosted computing is coming down so fast that it no longer makes sense for a new business to even consider investing in a captive data centers. In other words, it will never be cheaper to manage the infrastructure yourself.
In a consolidated hosting environment, every tenant benefits from the economies of scale provided by the host. What’s more, the arrangement shifts responsibility for technology recycling and disposal to a central entity that has a vested interest in best practices. As the cost of energy continues its inevitable rise and legislators stump for stronger regulation, the appeal of the cloud only grows.