Wikibon is a great idea

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David Vellante has some ideas about revolutionizing IT market research. A former senior vice president at research firm International Data Corp., Dave’s been running Barometrix, a successful startup focused on ROI measurement for several years. But here’s the new idea: a couple of months ago, Barometrix spun out Wikibon, a company that’s trying to apply wiki technology to market research.

The idea is to develop a rich research resource based upon contributions from knowledgeable people that are assembled and edited in a wiki. the first topic is information storage, but the goal is to apply this idea to other IT markets as well.

What makes this very Web 2.0-ish the idea of building a research product from content that is contributed for free. Research companies have always placed a premium on their ideas, and charged handsomely for it. Wikibon assumes that there are a lot of smart people out there who would be grateful just for the recognition. That is a fundamental Web 2.0: the assumption that good information doesn’t have to be expensive.

Dave’s competitors will no doubt hate this experiment, because they dislike anything that undermines their value proposition. But I think this is a heckuva good idea, and I’ll be eager to see how it turns out.

Author Jackie Huba on Citizen Marketers

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Citizen marketers: respect them, engage with them and make them your fans because they’re defining the message about your company and your products.

That was the message from Jackie Huba, co-author of Citizen Marketers and Church of the Customer Blog, who addressed the Social Media Cluster of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council this morning.

Jackie offered lots of examples of how individuals are influencing markets through blogs and online video. Here are my lightly edited notes from the meeting.

Who are citizen marketers? The content they create is actually branding for the companies they talk about. One reason we use this term “citizen” is that we see a link between this new media and the Bill of Rights. There’s a freedom to speak and a freedom to assemble.

Fernando Sosa and Thomas Hilditch of Chicago met at Second City because they were aspiring comedians. Their funky McNuggets video. “McDonald’s Nuggets by Fernando and Thomas” has been a viral hit. The funny thing about this was this was almost an accidental citizen marketer thing. They were going to perform one night and came up with this rap. The friends thought it was so funny that they recorded it, uploaded it and it got over 100,000 views. If you’re McDonald’s, that’s fabulous publicity.

Cell Block Tango is a homebrew video that’s had over four million views.

The MyBarackObama.com blog came out when Obama announced his presidential candidacy and 70,000 people signed up in a week. There are 2,400 self-selected groups but it was created by people, not the campaign.

Podcasting is another phenomenon that not taking off as quickly, but research is finding that heavy radio listeners are listening to traditional radio less. NPR gets over 2 million downloads a week. With podcasts, there can be comment around the content. Now people can collaborate around the content and have a discussion. You can’t do that with radio.

George Masters – in November, 2004 he was a vocational school teacher in Southern California but very interested in graphic animation tools. He created an animation about his iPod. Wired magazine picked it up and starting writing about a home-brewed iPod ad, saying it looked professional. The New York Times picked it up from there and then CNBC. It changed George’s life: he got an offer from a graphics animation firm and that’s what he does today.

Brian Finkelstein posted a video of a sleeping Comcast tech on YouTube and six days later, the Times picked it up. The Comcast tech was fired, but the big question for Comcast is why was the guy on hold for 90 minutes in the first place?. Go to Google today and type “Comcast technician” and the entire first results page is about the video.

Let the seller beware. If you have a bad product or service, the consumer has the microphone.

Mike Kaltschnee of HackingNetflix.com tried to get on Netflix’s press list and received a brush-off response, which he posted on his blog. When Netflix realized how influential he was, the company did a 180 and how treats him as it would a member of the mainstream media.

Jim Romanesco runs StarbucksGossip.com (subtitle: Monitoring American’s favorite drug dealer). He’s a Poynter institute journalist who does a lot of work at Starbucks. He’s actually scooping the media on some things. When Starbucks recently had some bad earnings, the company blamed it on new products that were increasing wait times. He posted about this and store managers began to contact him to say they had told the company eight months ago that this was going to happen.

Jackie spoke about a category of publishers she calls “the fanatics:”

SlaveToTarget.com is a blog by a 28-year-old mother all about Target. She writes about great new products and generates sales. People actually go out and buy the products that she recommends. Target ignores her. Why?

Rabid fans of the soft drink Surge launched a website called SaveSurge.org to try to rally support for a campaign to bring back Surge. They called themselves soda activists. They weren’t successful, but Coke did start to test a product called Vault. People were contacting the authors saying that Vault was a lot like Surge, so the group started VaultKicks.com to encourage Coke to go national. Coke eventually complied. Today, if you type “vault soda” in Google, nearly all of the links are to SaveSurge and VaultKicks fan sites.

There’s another category she calls “the facilitators:”

Paul Mullett runs mini2.com, a site for Cooper Mini enthusiasts. Last July, a mystery ad started running, inviting people to visit the site at midnight on a certain date. It turned out that BMW had given the site operators and a few other journalists a preview of the 2007 minis. At midnight, the site posted photos of the new mini to an enthusiastic crowd.

So who are these people?

We found that these people perceive these activities as “productive leisure.” For them, it’s a fun outlet to communicate with other people who love what they love. It’s a bridge from what they do in real life to their passion.

You might think that this is a lot of content. But there’s something we call the 1% rule: most of the content is created by only 1% of the visitors.

Microsoft’s Channel 9 is mostly created by people within Microsoft. They have 4.5 million visitors a month and only 11,000 contributors.

QuickBooks community has 100,000 monthly visitors but only 900 people who create any content.

It may be only 1%, but that 1% is very powerful.

How do you take advantage of this trend?

Reach out to your fans. Last week, TurboTax partnered with Vanilla Ice to get people to create raps about taxes. People are actually doing it!

Another successful example is Converse, which asked people to create videos about their Chucks sneakers and upload them to

conversegallery.com. They got 1,800 submissions and Web traffic rose 66%. Sales doubled in the months after the videos ran.

She cites the Chevy Apprentice campaign as an example of a viral campaign that didn’t work. Environmentalists hijacked the campaign and it spread into mainstream media. GM’s problem was that they didn’t reach out to people who loved the product. They just enabled people to be nasty. Reach out to your evangelists, the people who love what you do. Try the contest.

Invite co-creation. When Shakira’s latest album didn’t sell well, her record company took one of the songs – Hips Don’t Lie – and asked people on her fan site to contribute videos of themselves dancing to the song. They got thousands of submissions and the song became a hit. Was the video the reason? Probably not, but it was a great marketing campaign to use fans to be part of what was going on.

Create communities. Discovery Channel has a little-known division called Discovery Education that targets professional educators. You can download images and video to bring a PowerPoint to life. Teachers love it and Discovery Education has 70% market penetration in schools. But awareness among teachers was low. So Discovery Channel decided to invite educators to join a program – the Discovery Education Network – that gave teachers the opportunity to come to a program to learn more about how to educate with these tools.

Discovery also launched the Discovery Educator Network where anyone could register, get a blog, join a discussion group, exchange presentations and materials. They’re attracting people who love what they’re doing.

Q&A

Any comment on Viacom’s decision to sue YouTube/Google?

These clips are the new 30-second ads. CBS is one of the top channels on YouTube. Some big media companies get it and others don’t. CBS gets it.

There seems to be a total breakdown in use and abuse of a brand. What are the implications?

There are some rules that protect consumers from using brands, such as parodies. iPodMyBaby had to change their name to iPopMyBaby. If you go to my blog, you’ll find some brands who are sending cease-and-desist letters to fans. One movie company got the bloggers to actually take down a blog. It’s a confusing time right now.

How did you write a book with your significant other?

Ben has a journalism background and I have a marketing background, so it worked great. He did a lot of the background and I interviewed a lot of the citizen marketers.

What do you do if you’re a regulated company?

A lot of this hasn’t been sorted out. I was talking to a company last week whose lawyers were very concerned about starting a blog. One side argued that the blog was a personal opinion but others were saying it was company communications. There are a lot of CEO bloggers but can’t think of any in regulated industries.

How about ROI?

A lot of it has to do with word of mouth. Fred Reichheld has done a lot of work to say what percentage of a customer base would recommend the product to others. He comes up with a score he calls the net promoter score that measures the value of loyal customers. A lot of people are doing this just because they need to learn about it. I would measure subscribers to your content, people who want to hear about you every day.

How do you get the budget?

We’re seeing a lot of companies not budgeting for this. That’s one reason we see so much interest in contests; the money comes from the promotions budget. A lot of companies are discovering that the value of the campaigns is traffic to their websites.

What’s the next big thing?

I have no idea! How do you predict the next YouTube? All I can say is that the next big thing will relate to participation.

Why most viral video is stupid

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Bulldog Reporter‘s Daily Dog has an exceptionally thoughtful and well-informed article on the viral video craze that lambastes marketers for trying to add in viral buzz after a campaign has already been created. Author Andrew Foote’s point is that anything that doesn’t look genuine will be savaged by the community – and rightly so. He cites some excellent examples. If you’re a marketer trying to get a handle on the viral phenomenon, read it.

What We Can Learn From Web 2.0 Innovation

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

Few icons of the so-called Web 2.0 revolution are as visible – or as controversial – as Wikipedia.org. This massive (11th most popular site on the Internet, according to Alexa.com) collectively edited encyclopedia has been hailed as both a shining example of collective wisdom and a chaotic cesspool of half-truths and misinformation.

One thing is for sure: Wikipedia is a bold experiment in transparent product design, and its lessons shouldn’t be lost on business. Whether you like Wikipedia or not, you can’t deny that its open-development model is just one very visible example of changes that are sweeping business.

David Weinberger last week spoke of a remarkable irony about Wikipedia. In admitting to the shortcomings of its community-edited content model, the encyclopedia actually makes itself more credible. Weinberger is a co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto, a 1999 essay that is generally accepted as the Declaration of Independence for Web 2.0. In a keynote address to the New Communications Forum in Las Vegas, he praised the culture of transparency that pervades Wikipedia, open-source software and the emerging open-development paradigm.

Wikipedia’s flaws enhance its credibility because it is so open about them, he said. Every entry into Wikipedia – including changes to facts, grammar and punctuation – is logged and frequently commented upon in the accompanying documentation pages. These history logs can be epic; for example, more than 1,000 revisions have been made to the entry on Saddam Hussein just since the first of this year. But the result is a window on the product development process that attempts to obscure nothing. Any flaws are right out there for anyone else to find and correct.

Wikipedia “is more interested in informing us than speaking as the voice of God,” Weinberger said, referring to the opaque process by which traditional publishers create their products. You’ll never see error logs or disclaimers in a daily newspaper or printed encyclopedia, he noted, because to expose mistakes implies fallibility. However, “The attempt to be infallible drives out credibility.” Human beings instinctively relate to human foibles. An organization that exposes its weaknesses and seeks help is more credible that one that covers them up.

You don’t have to be a publisher to see wisdom in these words or the creative potential that interactive media can unlock. Not long ago, software developers built their products under a shroud of secrecy and non-disclosure documents. It was as if only a select few people in the inner circle had the wisdom to innovative.

Today, the new breed of software developers is learning that their “public beta” programs inspire customers to contribute useful suggestions to a process that is never ending and to create products that constantly improve. For example, Ambient Devices, a maker of what it calls “glanceable” information displays, publishes detailed technical specifications of its products online and invites customers to improve its products. The company will even tell you how to build its product from scratch without paying Ambient a dime.

This kind of openness is an early-stage trend being pioneered by the technology markets, but it’s not hard to see the idea spreading into other spheres. Who will be the first auto maker to create a beta program for a new line of cars by posting specs and asking for input? For that matter, why would anyone want to try to keep new products secret any more, when so much creative energy exists out in the field?

Businesses have all but lost the ability to keep secrets. Why not consider turning a problem into a virtue by inviting comments on your ideas? You might find it enhances your credibility.

Dan Rather underwhelms

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I didn’t expect much out of Dan Rather’s appearance at South by Southwest and so wasn’t very disappointed that it didn’t deliver. It was a missed opportunity, though. There was the chance to question Rather about all sorts of things that the audience cared about, including the relevance of mainstream media in market with millions of voices, the low public perception of the media in general, the future of citizen journalism and the relationship between social and new media.

Instead, the moderator, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, opened the one-hour session with a question about Rather’s confrontation with Richard Nixon more than 30 years ago. That was an event that I suspect scarcely 10% of the audience even remembers, much less cares about, and it got the session off to a bad start. The rest of the hour proceeded through a short series of relatively tame questions about the state of journalism, along with rambling answers by the newsman (this may not be the moderator’s fault; sometimes interview subjects put restrictions on topics they’ll address). Rather had some good messages for journalists, but they weren’t his audience. The issues that I believe the audience really cares about weren’t even raised until a brief Q&A.

The highlight was Rather’s pointed criticism of what he called “access journalism,” or a style of reporting that trades off aggressive reporting for access to inside sources. Journalists too often protect their sources in order to become part of the inner circle, he said, and political and business figures willingly exploit this weakness. He blamed this trend, in part, on the decline of media competition as media ownership consolidates and the increasing distance between news operations and their parent companies.

“Very often the source is using the reporter and the reporter is using the source, but when the source begins to believe that the reporter can be part of the team, that’s when things get dangerous,” he said.

Rather said that journalism needs a “spine transplant,” a return to its role as an independent advocacy for truth and disclosure. The role of the journalist is as a watchdog, he said. A watchdog barks when it suspects danger but doesn’t lie down or attack. It’s a warning system that keeps those in power on their toes.

“Do we still believe that the documents of government belong to the people and not the people in power?” he asked. “The president is not a descendant of the Sun God. This person is elected by the people and part of what [journalists are] expected to do is check on them.”

Rather’s message was a welcome call for a return to the values of Edward R. Murrow, whose name he invoked twice. But I think the audience was interested in hearing more about social media. Rather’s own knowledge deficit in that area – he didn’t mention YouTube or podcasts once and appeared awkward using “Google” as a verb – was painfully evident. As someone whose CBS career was arguably brought down by bloggers in the Rathergate incident, you’d think he would have more to say. But the question about Rathergate, like so many others, never came up.

Las Vegas as a standard for user design

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The best session I’ve attended so far at South by Southwest was also the shortest: a 25-minute presentation by interaction designer Dan Saffer called “Learning Interaction Design From Las Vegas.” Perhaps it’s because I just came from a visit to Las Vegas, but I found the analogy to America’s Sin City to be a strikingly appropriate as guidance for good design.

Citing Vegas’ remarkable success at appealing to its target audience, Saffer pointed to the Strip’s excellence at human factors design. “Vegas understands user experience,” he said, noting examples like carpet patterns that are designed to keep people within a building and ceiling painted like daytime sky in order to rob the visitor of a sense of time. He displayed a quotation – “Withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgment more sensitive” – to illustrate the need for designers to suspend the urge to create designs that meet their own standards of beauty in order to build products that people want to use.

Examples: the extravagant buffet lines in Vegas casinos like Champion League agen judi bola terpercaya appeal perfectly to the overweight middle-American tourists that are their best customers. Wedding chapels that announce themselves in bright incandescent lights may offend many people, but they do a great job of appealing to their target audience. And hotel complexes like Paris allow customers to experience France without the inconvenience of dealing with the French.

In particular, he dwelt on slot machines as examples of a near-perfect user interface. From type so large that it’s readable by the legally blind to the more than 400 sounds that some machines emit to the tactile feedback they provide, slot machines are finely tuned to give users a satisfying experience, on average, every six seconds. Which is why, he said, they’re a bigger business that the four largest fast-food chains combined.

Saffer’s playful jab at designers was to discard their upper-middle-class tastes and just design for their users. He said one reason MySpace is so popular is that it provides a Vegas-like experience for its customers. In aggregating so many functions in one place, it’s the online equivalent of a Vegas casino complex.

If you’ve worked with many designers – and I’ve known some very good ones – you know that their Achille’s heel is a tendency to design what’s elegant rather than what’s useful. Saffer’s message is something more designers should consider. I couldn’t agree with him more.