Daily Reading 08/11/2008

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  • Ten years of email – David Strom

    Google’s Gmail service just passed the 7G-byte threshold, meaning that’s how much email storage users get for free (it’s unlimited on Yahoo Mail). David Strom, once co-authored a book about e-mail, marvels at how far we’ve come in just 10 years. It wasn’t that long ago that most e-mail packages were proprietary and the industry haggled over standards, he remembers. Today, it’s accepted that all e-mail is Internet-based and this has helped embed this tool quickly into the fabric of our everydays lives. Now if only someone would do something about security.

    tags: daily_reading

Report Examines Changing Influence Patterns Created by Social Media

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The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the understanding and application of new media research, has just released a report that I helped develop, and I hope you’ll check it out. It’s free.

“New Media, New Influencers and Implications for Public Relations” features detailed findings of a survey of communications and marketing professionals focused on changing patterns of influence that are resulting from social media and other new communications technologies. The survey is interesting, but I think you’ll find the case studies of the American Red Cross, Blendtec, The Coca-Cola Company, Emerson Process Management, the Mayo Clinic, MARC Research, Quicken Loans, and the Seattle Union Gospel Mission particularly compelling. Each of these organizations is using different social media in different ways and each is achieving notable results.

I was personally lucky to interview George Wright, the marketer behind the Blendtec viral video phenomenon, and blogger Merrill Dubrow, CEO of MARC Research. Both were great interviews.

You can download a PDF for free or purchase a hard copy through the SNCR bookstore.

Nominate Yourself and Your Clients for a Social Media Award

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Just three days left to take advantage of discount pricing to submit your entries for the Society of New Communications Research’s (SNCR) Excellence in New Communications Awards.

Details are below, but this is basically a good way to get your new-media accomplishments in front of a group of thought leaders and to get an important third-party endorsement for your great work. Jen McClure continues to cultivate an organization that is committed to guiding and advocating for adoption of social media without becoming beholden to a lot of commercial interests. SNCR gets better every year.

By the way, its annual Symposium & Awards Gala is coming up Nov. 13 & 14 in Cambridge, MA. If you want to rub elbows with some of the top journalism, marketing and PR bloggers, this is the place to do it. At $395 for the symposium, it’s a good deal.

Full disclosure: I’m a SNCR Research Fellow, which means I do volunteer work for and donate money to this fine organization.

Details from the awards page:

These awards honor corporations, governmental and nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, media outlets, and individuals who are innovating the use of social media, mobile media, online communities and virtual worlds and collaborative technologies in the areas of business, media, and professional communications, including advertising, marketing, public relations and corporate communications, as well as entertainment, education, politics, and social initiatives.

Awards are granted in six divisions:

  • Corporate
  • Government
  • Media
  • Nonprofit/NGO
  • Academic
  • Technology Innovation (for vendors)

There are seven categories:

  • Online Reputation Management
  • Behind the Firewall
  • Blogger Relations
  • External Communications & Communities
  • New Media Creation
  • Collaboration & Co-creation
  • Mobile Media.

It costs $49 to submit. More details here.

Packaged Innovation

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

Can you bottle innovation?  Conventional wisdom says no; innovation comes from inspiration backed by knowledge.  It can’t be packaged or automated.

However, a Boston-based company is challenging the conventional wisdom. Innovation Machines has developed technology that applies a semantic search engine to the task of mining possibilities for innovative new materials and procedures.

If the phrase “semantic search” means nothing to you, join the club.  I got a telephone briefing on Innovative Machines’ technology and couldn’t quite figure out what it did.  So I stopped in for a visit and got one of the more impressive demos I’ve seen in recent years.

I’m a veteran of thousands of demos, and so have learned to be skeptical, but this was interesting stuff.  Innovative Machines’ customer list would indicate that the company is on to something.

Semantic search involves mining text documents not only for terms but for relationships between terms. Most search engines can’t do this. They can deliver some insight by finding words in close proximity to each other, but they don’t establish a clear relationship.

For example, if you search for “smoking” and “cancer” on Google, the results indicate there’s a relationship between the two, but the search engine won’t explicitly define that relationship. Semantic search goes a step further. It’s intended to deliver a small number of results but with terms that are specifically related to each other. For example, a semantic search engine might infer from its search that smoking and cancer are related and return documents that explain that relationship.

The semantic engine is at the core of what Goldfire does. A host of other features are wrapped around that, including a project workbench and a database of scientific and patent literature.  The demo I saw showed one example of how innovation can be guided, if not packaged.

Suppose your company makes packaged food and you want to figure out a way to substitute artificial sweetener for sugar.  Engineers can use the workbench to deconstruct ingredients in the current product and then test the substitution of various artificial sweeteners.  Goldfire’s scientific database understands the characteristics of alternative ingredients, such as texture, taste, heat tolerance and chemical interactions.  A researcher could model the impact of substituting different artificial sweeteners and determine which ones are good candidates for a new recipe.  By querying on the attributes of potential substitutes, engineers could also discover new ingredients they hadn’t thought of.

The patent database comes into play when attempting to innovate on existing intellectual property.  For example, an automotive engineer could deconstruct the components of a patented turbocharger and test the impact of substituting different metal alloys.  This could lead to an improved design that doesn’t infringe on existing patents.  In fact, Invention Machine says this re-engineering of existing patents is one of the most popular applications of its product.

Goldfire isn’t a simple product and to use.  Customers typically go through several days of training and setup to customize the software to their industry.  It also isn’t cheap; installations run in the six figures. For the kinds of problems Goldfire is meant to solve, however, these costs aren’t surprising.

Goldfire is a difficult product to describe, but an easy one to understand once you see it in action.  The company provides several podcasts and videocasts that demonstrate how customers are applying the technology.  This isn’t innovation in a bottle, but it’s a pretty good start.

Incidentally, I have no financial interest in the company or its product. I just think this is a technology that deserves more attention.

Daily Reading 08/05/2008

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  • The worst SEO mistake you can make

    Brandt Dainow has some interesting insight on why search engines don’t like dynamic content management systems (CMS). He says SEO consultants need to be brought in before a site is launched. Repairing the wreckage wrought by a bad CMS can be nearly impossible, he says.

    tags: Search, daily_reading

  • Microsoft backs open source work

    Microsoft continues to extend a tentative olive branch to the open-source community, investing $100,000 to become a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation and promising to open some of its communications protocols to developer scrutiny.

    tags: daily_reading, open_source, Microsoft

  • Top 10 social media misconceptions

    Noah Elkin offers some useful tips for creating and measuring social media campaigns.

    tags: daily_reading, metrics, social_media

  • Microsoft sees end of Windows era

    Microsoft has launched a research project to develop a successor to Windows that isn’t tied to a single machine. But whether Microsoft can make money from an operating system that isn’t tied to a single computer is an open question. Microsoft may have no choice, though. Users of the future will increasingly be mobile and promiscuous about the hardware they use.

    tags: daily_reading

Gettysburg Tours Are a History Bargain

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About six years ago I stopped by Gettysburg, PA with my son for a half day while on a trip to nearby Baltimore. I’ve wanted to go back ever since. Gettysburg is like no other historical attraction I’ve ever visited. The National Park Service has maintained the site and battlefields in a condition that mirrors almost perfectly their state on July 1, 1863, when the pivotal battle of the Civil War began.

This week I got a chance to go back with the luxury of some time for exploration. A full day at Gettysburg still doesn’t do the place justice, but I discovered the history bargain of a lifetime: the private guides provided by the Park Service.

For just $55, you can hire an expert to accompany you in your car for a two-hour tour of the battlefield. After that, you can return at your own pace, armed with the wisdom your guide has imparted. With group bus tours running $26/person, this service pays for itself quickly. Our guide was Mike (left, explaining cannon ballistics for my kids), one of about 150 contractors who work in this capacity, and his knowledge was voluminous. There was barely a question we could throw at him that he didn’t answer.

The great thing about tour guides is that they’re unique. You can take the same tour with two different guides and learn entirely different things. The last time I toured Gettysburg, we had a group tour guide who was an expert at describing the scene on the battlefield. Mike was great at defining military strategy, and we couldn’t have had a better setting for his expertise.

Standing in a wooded area, looking across an open field, we could almost see the Confederate troops advancing on Cemetery Ridge for the fateful Pickett’s Charge, the tactic that nearly turned the war in the south’s favor but ultimately forced Lee into retreat. The great thing about Gettysburg is that the entire six-mile battlefield is spread before you. You can survey the scene almost exactly as the generals did before the battle.

Mike told us how authorized tour guides have to leap tall buildings to gain NPS approval. He said he had to finish in the top 10 of roughly 200 people who took a written exam, then submit to an oral test and finally a tour of the battlefield with experts who fired all sorts of trivia and trick questions at him. All this so he could earn $25/hour giving tours (I tipped him a well-deserved $20). That is dedication. And the Park Service has no shortage of applicants for these jobs.

I also recommend the Eisenhower house tour. My knowledge of our 34th President was minuscule, and the self-guided 90-minute tour of his final home in Gettysburg gave me new respect and admiration for him. The Park Service guides punctuated the visit with bits of wisdom and skillfully answered all questions without being intrusive.

Daily Reading 08/04/2008

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Help Us Eat Our Own Dog Food

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Many years ago in the days BI (before Internet), I worked at a publisher that was installing a new client/server-based publishing production system. Since the publication was all about information technology, we got the great idea to write about our own experiences moving to the new software. The first couple of published articles went well, but then problems began to occur.

It turned out that the reference customers the software vendor had give us weren’t actual customers but rather test sites. We were, in fact, the only live customer. The software was riddled with bugs and the interface to our previous production system was atrocious. For months, reporters and editors worked with both a terminal and a PC on their desks because the new system was so unreliable. The project, which was originally scheduled to last six months, dragged on more than three times that long.

This presented an interesting problem for our little experiment in transparency. The project was a disaster and the vendor, which had initially been enthusiastic about the idea, was now pleading with us not to document the problems we were experiencing. We continued with the diary, but as internal political pressures mounted, we toned down our coverage considerably. The extent of the disaster was never fully revealed.

This time, we don’t have that option.

Announcing Project Dogfood, an experiment in community website development. This is an innovative idea from a fast-moving company named CrossTech Media, which produces a new conference called New Marketing Summit. I’ll be co-anchoring this event Oct. 14 and 15 at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, MA along with bestselling author David Meerman Scott and social media superstar Chris Brogan.

The event’s website is currently standard brochureware, but CrossTech isn’t the kind of company to stick with the basic. The company got its start building conference registration systems and the technology-driven team had a brainstorm. Let’s transform a series of flat HTML pages into a vibrant social media foundry. And let’s ask the community for help.

Project Dogfood’s name is a nod to that venerable tech industry phrase, “Eating our own dog food.” It means companies should run themselves on the software they build for customers. As the site develops with input from the community, it will become the foundation for future New Marketing Summits. People who register for the events will be able to continue their conversations and relationships long after the curtain has rung down on the last speaker.

So go register! Tell us which topics you’d like to see and features you’d like us to include. And sign up for the New Marketing Summit while you’re at it.

Unlike my previous experiment in transparency, this one doesn’t have the option of backing out. You’ll see a social network take shape before your eyes. And if we fall on our faces a couple of times, you’ll see that, too. This is Web 2.0, after all!