TinkerX

I used to really like the Encyclopedia Britannica. By “used to,” I mean of course, “before Wikipedia.” It’s a fine reference work, and I never had anything against it until they, and others, started getting smarmissimus about how Wikipedia sucks because it’s written by people who aren’t on the staff of an encyclopedia. And how kids shouldn’t be citing it as a resource. Etc. etc.

Now… I don’t want to get into a fight about Wikipedia. I don’t care if you like it or not or have issues with it. This is not an opinion piece. The fact of the matter is, Wikipedia gets waaaay more hits than Britannica. Maybe it’s because Wikipedia is free. Maybe it’s because it has lots more articles. Maybe it’s because people like to think that anybody (themselves included) is smart enough to help somebody else out with a reference question.

Maybe it’s all about elves and pixies. Repeat: I don’t care. From a marketing and sales perspective, yelping about how your customers are dumb because they choose a competitor is, well… dumb.  Britannica could hop about, get red in the face, and produce volumes of statistics about how it’s better. If users don’t have a compelling reason to go there, they’ll go somewhere else.

What Britannica *should* have been doing is figuring out a way to get more people into their space. Which they now have, with a very clever little program called Britannica WebShare. Basically, if you write a blog or publish on the Web in any way, you can apply for a free year of access to the entire online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and link to the full articles there.

That’s clever. Very clever. My readers now have an ancillary benefit from my blogging relationship with EB. If you’re a regular ol’ person with no subscription to EB (it costs $70/year normally), and you look up “Wikipedia,” you get this:

Wikipedia:  free, Internet-based encyclopaedia operating under an open-source management style. It is overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia uses a collaborative software known as wiki that facilitates the creation and development of articles. The English-language version of Wikipedia began in 2001. It had more than one million articles by March 2006 and more…

Wikipedia… (75 of 754 words)

But if you go to that same article from a link on my blog, even if you don’t have a subscription, you can see the whole thing.

Yep. All 754 words. You’re welcome.

Very, very smart. They have turned chunks of their content into advertising for the whole, and enlisted the help of people who build the Web to engage in that advertising. They get links and good marketing, I (and my readers) get full text articles.

This is a good thing to think about in a general way — how can other content owners release some subset of what they create/own in ways that promote an economic model that makes sense for them?

PS: If you’re interested in the full text of any particular Britannica article, let me know and I’ll work it into a blog post  

Ars Technica has a recent post featuring a study where “distractions” are blamed for US $650 billion a year in lost productivity in the United States. Intel’s Nathan Zeldes is quoted as saying,”…the impact of information overload on each knowledge worker at up to eight hours a week.” Ars also links to an earlier report from Pew (I heart Pew). In that study, 10% of Americans are described as, “Connected but Hassled,” in that they, “have invested in a lot of technology, but they find the connectivity intrusive and information something of a burden.” Another 11% are “Indifferent,” who “despite having either cell phones or online access… use ICTs [information and communication technologes] only intermittently and find connectivity annoying.”

I remember back when I worked in the cellular industry, and one of my co-workers once got really, really pissed at a friend who took every opportunity to tell him (and me, when we were together) how much his cell service sucked. It wasn’t just the occasional complaint; this guy seemed to regard my buddy as the blotter for all his wireless woes.

So my friend eventually got fed up and said, “Look. If the service sucks so bad, next time you’re stranded by the side of the road with a flat tire, or you’re out of gas, or if you need to order a pizza from your car… try opening your window and hanging your head out and hollering. No matter how bad your cell service sucks, and how annoying you find the phone, I bet that living without it would bug you even more.”

Now, to be fair, this was in 1995 or so, when dropped calls and bad connections were pretty prevalent. But my friend had a point; if you don’t like it, lump it. I feel like a lot of the anti-connectivity sentiment stems from folks who either haven’t read their manuals, or haven’t really thought about what it would be like without their “distractions.”

Do I find the technology distracting? Not at all. Not ever. Nope. Why? Because the tech is a tool. I can put it down. I can use an alternative. I can find a way to do things differently or more efficiently if I want. But saying that “connectivity” itself is annoying is a bit disingenuous, I think. Or, it’s people being rude to technology, in order to spare the feelings of actual people. Which is fine, in the specific. I’d much rather have a good relationship with my family than my gadgets. But in the aggregate, it may be a bit hypocritical.

Why? Because when you are annoyed at “connectivity,” or pissed at being “distracted,” it’s not really the tools that are troubling you, is it? It’s the folks on the other end of the pipe. If you get 300 emails a day, it’s not because your email service hates you and is trying to make you slit your wrists. It’s because you’ve got some hundreds of people, departments, companies, etc. who have included you in conversations that you don’t necessarily value.

Early on in the Age of Email, I had a boss who instituted, and insisted upon, a “no email while on vacation” rule. Whenever anyone in our group took at least a week off, he required us to remove them from emails, cc., etc. “If you need something, wait until they get back and call them. Odds are the issue will be resolved by then anyway.”

He wasn’t just shielding the vacationer from a ton of emails when he/she got back; he believed that cc:ing folks on email when there was no chance of them answering in a reasonable time was, simply, bad business. It gave the sender, and other recipients, a false sense that Mr. NotHere was somehow “in the loop,” when the reality was exactly opposite.

That’s the kind of rule you need in your life if you find connectivity to be an irritant; manage the voices, not the tubes.  Make sure your friends, family and coworkers understand your priorities, and how/when you can (and can’t) be reached.

It’s only a distraction if it’s not wanted. And the technology just makes both wanted and unwanted communication easier.

Amazon has posted a video demo for its new eReader, the Kindle.

This has real potential. First of all, the device itself doesn’t look like hell. The early shots of the prototype looked… clunky. The one in the video, and in the Amazon store, though, seems OK. Some of the buttons and the keyboard still look a bit odd compared to standard UI stuff… but maybe (benefit of the doubt alert) its related to power savings, hardiness of the unit, whatever. It looks a bit geeky, but, then again, it is.

Features that make me wish it was cheaper than  $400:

• Free wireless hook-up. Yup. Amazon is eating the cost of cellular-network delivery (not Wi-Fi). So you just turn the thing on, connect to the Kindle store (and various other Web related destinations), browse for books, magazines, newspapers, etc. and buy ‘em.
• Automatic updating of subscriptions (magazines, newspapers, blogs, etc.)
• Email personal docs to the reader (MS Word, etc.)… for 10-cents per doc (I think).
• Click-through to definitions, Wikipedia entries and other reference sources
• Note-taking, book-marking, high-lighting, text/section clipping features
• Listen to MP3s and eAudiobooks (have to be uploaded via USB)
• Can hold 200-ish books

I already wrote about how I’ve been reading eBooks on my Palm/PocketPC for years. And so, for me, it will probably be awhile until I get one of these things (ie, until it costs waaaay less than a mobile computer that I need anyway for work, wireless phone, wireless web, etc.). So, for now, this falls under "really cool luxury." 

My guess is that (like Apple with the iPhone), in time, when more publishers are on board, the Kindle will come down in price, subsidized by Amazonian subsidies based on usage. It is, however, the first dedicated eBook reader I’d put on my Christmas list.

Buy it here

Interesting discussion going on over at Terra Nova about the idea of academic tenure vs. business acumen.

The idea that a tenured professor is necessarily a good teacher is as laughable as the idea that a VP is necessarily good at managing people. In many cases in both academia and the business world, the skills necessary for advancement are often be quite separate from the skills necessary for mastery.

I had great English professors at Cornell; I went there specifically because the undergrad writing program was widely praised as one of the best in the country. The profs could write (many were widely published novelists, writers for the screen, poets, etc.) and could teach. In some of my other classes… not so much. I remember specifically a _______ professor who was hired for publishing cred, but who may have been the worst teacher I’ve ever known. Friends of mine in the major said that it was a total coup to have gotten this prof… but I dropped the class because her pedagogical technique consisted of asking questions, nodding while you answered, and then slamming you for being totally wrong. This was in a Freshman intro course, which should be a place to get kids interested in a subject, not a forum for constant haranguing.

On the flip side, I’ve known people in business who are great teachers. Some have had actual classroom experience, some are just gifted.

The problem is (and may always be) that rigid authority isn’t particularly good at the margins. And the margins are often where the most interesting work takes place.

I teach history of advertising (and have taught marketing) as an adjunct professor at the Columbus College of Art and Design (www.ccad.edu), one of the best fine arts colleges in the country. They specifically design their overall curricula to bring in business people from a variety of related industries in order to broaden the exposure of the students to people "not like them;" ie, not artists.

I am by no means an artist. I write and do some decent layout… but these kids are truly talented artists. Why should CCAD hire a non-artist, non-teacher to come in and yap and them? Why should my course be required for students in the advertising major? Because I look a lot like what their bosses will look like. They will do better having spent some time around a budget-conscious, client-side, results-focused project manager type goon.

Which brings me to my actual point: good organizations (in both academia and business) need to think about the *overall* goals more, in addition to the specific requirements of a particular position.

If you’re teaching game design and have a faculty of 12 and none of them have industry experience… hmmm… might be a bit unbalanced on the academic side. If you’re a business and you have nobody on your staff with some higher larnin’… you probably aren’t going to push some interesting envelopes.

The margins where disparate areas touch are often the most fertile for creativity. If you only have one kind of person in your gang, you ain’t got no margins. Diversify to succeed. 

According to this ZDNet story, Microsoft is going to release MS Works as a free or ad-supported program or service or something. Not too clear on the details.

That’s "release" as in, "Release the sick deer back into the wild where it can become part of the circle of life… as dinner for a mountain lion."

My poor father has used the bass-ackwards, clapped-up, nasty word processor part of MS Works for, like, 20 years. Or it seems like that. To the kid in charge of technical services for the family. I want to put the guy back on Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS, ’cause at least that program worked and didn’t eat so much of his memory that he couldn’t run his screen-saver without going Blue Death. 

I have a definition of a user of a free or (god love ‘em for trying) ad-supported version of MS Works: a sap who’s never heard of Google Docs or Open Office.

Fairness Note: I don’t mind MS Word. The new 2007 version does some cool stuff. But MS Works should be allowed to drift off into the ocean on a chunk of ice to be with its ancestors.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly wrote about a Bill Higgins post called "The Uncanny Valley of User Interface Design."

The metaphor Higgins brings to the table to help explicate his point is that of "The Uncanny Valley," which Higgins explains well. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the basic idea is that we feel more and more empathy towards robots (or non-human characters, such as animated cartoons or video game avatars), as they begin to express more human features. At some point, though — the edge of the Uncanny Valley — they become too lifelike for comfort, but not lifelike enough to really fool us. Something is missing. Their appearance strikes us as just… wrong. Odd. Uncanny.

Higgins goes on to cite two films that are often used as examples of having fallen into this valley;  The Polar Express and Final Fantasy. I’ve seen both films, and I agree (especially in the case of The Polar Express… it just ain’t right for some reason).

It’s a well-thought-out article that has, as its main premise, the idea that the user interface for a piece of software should:

"…remain consistent with the environment in which our software runs. In more concrete terms: a Windows application should look and feel like a Windows application, a Mac application should look and feel like a Mac application, and a web application should look and feel like a web application."

So, the metaphor here, linking software UI to robotics/animation, is that we want something to not behave and/or appear to be too strangely like something else, while not actually being exactly like it. His main point is that Web aps that try to look like desktop aps, and vice versa, aren’t really doing anybody any favors.

Though well written and supported with a couple good examples, I disagree with the premise, and I think the metaphor is badly chosen. 

Metaphor first. We all expect people to look like people because, for the most part, people look like people. There is an instant — some biologists/anthropologists argue, innate — connectivity at birth between newborns and human faces. We respond to smiles. We track eye movements. We can, without any training, mimic facial expressions. We are hard-wired, at least emotionally, and probably chemically/biologically, to know the human face better than almost any other object in the world. When you work with human faces — as an artist, cartoonist, director, animator — you are dealing with one of the most sensitive and universal inputs/outputs available.

What does a "link" look like, biologically speaking? Or a block-quote, menu bar, button, etc. Yes, there are conventions… which change. Yes, currently a Windows ap looks different than a Mac or Linux ap or a Web ap. And if you gave me a program that looked 90% like Microsoft Word — one of the most succesful and widely used programs on the planet — but then had a couple fundamental features that were radically different… I’d probably have some issues with it. At least from a learning perspective, possibly from an adoption one as well.

Unless those differences were really cool and easily grasped.

Time and time again, I’ve used new software that broke some existing UI rule or convention… and surprised me pleasantly. When done well. I will agree with Higgins that purposefully making an ap look like what it’s not in order to glean some kind of borrowed brand shine is a bad idea. The plethora of "Web 2.0-y" glowing buttons, 3D tabs and various shiny bits, when applied to standard interface elements is, frankly, goofy.

Some might argue that much of this 2.0-look is an attempt to make Web aps look more like their desktop counterparts. In many cases, I expect that is the case. Design in everything follows trends. Designers often work for clients who don’t understand the underlying design reasons, but can keep their eye on trends and popular elements and who want their little slice of the Web to look "cool like that link I sent you the other day. Make it cool like that." It doesn’t matter that the site design being changed is one with a standard home page and six children, and the one being emulated is a robust, interactive, social application with all kinds of moving parts. "I want it to look cool like that" is, I think, as major an influencer of UI design as it is of fashion in any industry.

All that being said, however… I have real problems with the idea that UI needs to "look like" what it used to look like, or "should" look like at some level that, according to this metaphor, is emotionally equatable to that of the human face.

Higgins gives as an example, Zimbra, and compares it to Gmail. He says: 

"To me, Zimbra doesn’t in any way resemble my mental model of a web application; it resembles Microsoft Outlook… On the other hand Gmail, which is also an Ajax-based email application, almost exactly matches my mental model of how a web application should look and feel… I prefer [Gmail b]ecause over the past twelve years, my mind has developed a very specific model of how a web application should look and feel, and because Gmail aligns to this model, I can immediately use it and it feels natural to me."

Here’s my problem with that. For me, "email" is the "human face" of this metaphor, rather than the development/deployment platform. Users (like myself) who have spent 12 years in corpoate environments with various versions of MS Outlook would find Zimbra much more "natural" than Gmail. I have a Gmail account, and don’t use it much, partly because I find the UI to be so much different than MS Outlook, which is patched directly into my cerebral cortex for about four hours a day.

For Higgins, humanity is found in the platform. For me, it’s found (in this case) in the tool interface. He thinks a Web ap should look like a Web ap. I think that email should look like email… and, for me, that means Outlook. I’m not saying I’m right — but that different definitions of "natural" in a software design context need to be considered. In the end, what works is natural. It’s not turtles all the way down for UI development; we can actually do things as businesspeople and managers to see if our users respond well to various changes.

We only have one model (though billions of examples, obviously) of the human face. It is uncanny, indeed, when a replication of it gets close… but not quite close enough. In software interface design, I’m not sure that there is a universal model. And, if there is one, that it would be at the platform level. MS Word, Photoshop, TrueSpace, World of Warcraft… I run all of these on Windows XP. If they are all examples of what should "feel natural" for a Windows ap, then our anthropomorphic uncanny valley would be filled not with proto-human forms… but with lions, tigers and bears.

Turns out I have something in common with the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Zaslow: we’ve both been plagiarized…

If you haven’t heard, CBS News’ Katie Couric recently did a “Katie’s Notebook” piece, performed in the first person [”I still remember when I first got my library card…’] that, it turns out, was written by her producer.

Surprise, surprise. Katie’s stuff isn’t written by her.

Whoops. Turns more out, Katie’s producer, Melissa McNamara, didn’t even write it (bizarre twin plagiarism angle… oh dear). I’ve read about 15 different takes on the whole matter, and kinda like Slate’s tone/angle the best.

That’s the story. Fine. But here’s what none of the things I’ve read so far have offered… Something that you’ll get right here, only at TinkerX — the inside scoop (first person, written by me, not my producer) on what it’s like to be plagiarized.
I used to consult full-time. Now I do it a bit on the side (yes, my boss knows; I’m not that dumb… about that.) While consulting full-time, I wrote lots of articles and got lots of essays posted just about anywhere I could to get my name/email/URL out there. I did it in order to generate business, establish “my personal brand,” and get good SEO for my blog and company Web site. So… long story short, lots of Andy Havens’ marketing crud on the Web.

About two years ago, I get a call from a guy I’ve never met. But he knew me from some of my legal marketing articles. How cool. He recalled my particular (peculiar?) brand of wit and wisdom. He specifically recalled a piece I wrote for my good buddy Larry Bodine at the LawMarketing Portal back in 2004, about a year prior to his calling me.

He wanted to know if I was aware that another fellow was using this material, almost word-for-word, in his hand-outs at a professional marketing seminar.

Gulp. No. I was not.

My reader faxed me the materials. Yup. Almost exactly the same stuff. In fact, it even had the same cheesy clip-art that Larry pasted into the story (Hi, Larry!).

I contacted the fellow. I told him what I’d discovered and asked him what was up. He told me… that the piece had been put together by one of his subordinates.

It had his name on it. The name of his marketing firm was his name. The presentation at the gig where my reader had found the piece was given by this guy, and it was his name on the program. He explained that his workers “assembled” lots of his marketing material (hand-outs, fliers, Powerpoints) for him.

Then he assured me that the fellow in question would be fired. That he (the owner) took this sort of thing very seriously and had a zero-tolerance policy about plagiarism, and that I could rest assured that it wouldn’t happen again.

I told him that what happened between him and his staff was his business. I just wanted to be sure that anything I’d written was attributed to me.

He, again, made the point about firing the subordinate. He said something about him being “a relatively new guy.”

Again, I said, “That’s up to you. It’s your company. How you handle it internally is your business. I just want your word, since it’s your name on my work, that this won’t happen again.”

He, again, told me that the person in question would be fired.

He didn’t get my point. I said, “I don’t need you to do that. I need you to tell me you will be responsible for making sure this doesn’t happen.” He agreed to that, still not getting it, I think, and we never spoke again.

I hung up the phone feeling very, very shaken.

Why? Because one of two things had happened.

1) He lied to me. Which, if I had to bet money, I’d bet on. For a whole string of reasons that I can get into based on the professional services marketing industry, how we come up with stuff, what we let our “people” do for us, etc. etc. But that’s my gut. I don’t think there was “a new guy.” I think it was a put-on to get me to go away.

2) He told the truth, and fired some kid who’d made a mistake. A bad mistake, yeah. And a mistake that, frankly, isn’t one where firing is an inappropriate reaction. But I think that, on some level, if somebody on my staff had done something like that… I would have blamed myself a bit more than this guy seemed to. And if my name was on something like that…
I’d take it a lot more seriously than Katie et CBS al seem to be doing.

The date on which that post went up on the CBS blog page now reads:

Correction: The April 4 Notebook was based on a “Moving On” column by Jeffrey Zaslow that ran in The Wall Street Journal on March 15 with the headline, “Of the Places You’ll Go, Is the Library Still One of Them?” Much of the material in the Notebook came from Mr. Zaslow, and we should have acknowledged that at the top of our piece. We offer our sincere apologies for the omission.

We “apologize for omitting… ” Err… Yah. McNamara (bio still live on CBS site… interesting) was fired for “omitting.” Sins of omission. That’s kinda funny. Where I come from, we call plagiarism “stealing.” Which is a sin of “commission.” You know… walk into a store, take something, leave without paying. Oh. I guess that’s kind of an omission. Never mind…

Here’s the thing: the (maybe) kid that lifted my essay, and/or his boss… that’s pretty minor stuff. One of the reasons I didn’t make a stink is that my “personal brand” has a good dollop of live-and-let-live. I’m a peaceable guy. The piece was a fun little deal that, I hope, sent a few readers to my site/blog. Making a big stink would’ve been more trouble than it was worth.

And yet… and yet… I really, really wish that the dude had said, “What can I do, personally, to make this up to you? Can I send you an Omaha steak? Or make a contribution to a charity in your name? Can I put a mention of your services into my next seminar kit?” Nope. Nothing.

And who is he? Some small-time, Kinko’s-materials consultant like me. But to make it good, he should have offered something.

But… Who is Katie? She’s the $15 million spokes-face on one of the Big Three evening news shows. News. Not fashion. Not punditry. Not opinion. News. You know… that thing with journalism and facts and stuff.

Katie’s post clearly made it seem as if she wrote it. The op-ed “feel” of a story that starts with, “I still remember…” is unmistakably intended to leverage her $15 million-ness into getting us to pay attention to what is, frankly, a pretty lame, puffy piece.

So if Katie didn’t write it, but felt OK about using it glommed onto her image/ego to begin with, and then was (as far as the public is concerned) the face of the company that did the plagiarizing… what should we expect from that organization?

Right. Fire the producer. Not the one worth $60,000/day. Not the face we trust (who apparently doesn’t read the WSJ). Not the one who clearly doesn’t write her own notebook/blog, even when it’s in the first person. Not the one who didn’t take any responsibility for plagiarism, but who had “Editors” apologize for “omissions.”

Is this what Katie wanted for her career? Regardless of the plagiarism… is this what she signed up for? To be part of a news team that writes her “personal thoughts” and then covers for her to an extent that is, frankly, grotesque? Is her own sense of what she brings to this enterprise so withered that she can’t even sign her name to the apology?

Quit, Katie. Just quit. Not because you’re really responsible for the plagiarism. I don’t think you are, nor do I think you should be fired. The ding-dongs in charge at CBS are even less in control and less worthy of it than are you. But in the immediate aftermath of this situation, nobody’s first response was, “Yoiks! These words came out of Katie’s mouth… she should be the one to apologize!”

That they didn’t — that you didn’t — is bad. Real bad. Prove to all the kids in my History of Advertising class, and all the junior copywriters out there, that the Top Dog cares about this. That in the age of easy, Internet Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V, the people we turn to to make sense out of our lives are ones who take that responsibility seriously. That when we turn on the TV to watch somebody talk about war, government, education, health and all kinds of other issues… those issues mean something when applied to her own field.
All I wanted, when somebody stole the words out’n my mouth (er… page), was for the guy in charge to take responsibility. His version of that was to fire the kid who did the lifting. That didn’t cut it for me, and I don’t think it cuts it for Katie.

The $15 million bucks stop somewhere. And it ain’t on the desk of a junior producer.

So, Katie… Make a point about responsibility and theft. Quit in protest over how poorly CBS has handled this situation.

And, since that won’t ever happen, how about you just personally sign your “mea” to the editorial “culpa”?
[Note: I will almost never be this smarmy (mean, call it what you will) again on this blog. I don’t like the tone I’ve chosen, and am *this* close to not publishing the post. But I really, really hate plagiarism and really, really don’t like it when crap like this doesn’t get taken seriously enough by the people in charge. For those of you who prefer my usual, light-hearted, pseudo-intellectual side… it will resume shortly. My apologies for being more churlish than I really rather prefer.]

This is a rant. And I haven’t done one of those in this space in awhile. If you don’t want to read a good, old fashioned, flame-on rant, and would just like a quick laugh, try out the Nietzsche Family Circus Mash-Up. Hysterical. For those of you inclined to stay on-board for the ride, here we go…

Happy Valentine’s Day from Target.

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP! BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!!!

BEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

(pause)

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

I’m not even sure "BEEEEEEEEP!" is the right phonetic representation for the noise in question. Poing? Boitch? Doong? Boooop? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Hard to tell through the blood build-up behind my eyes. Hard to concentrate when the fight-or-flight reflex has kicked in. Hard to remember when the retail-joy impulse that decades of "shop-is-love" American consumerism has bred into me has fled. A lifetime of social, big-box, mall interactions and happy-happy buying glee has been pushed out of my cerebral cortex by a noise that sounds like the Chuck E. Cheez version of the sound a hospital monitor makes when something wrong… something VERY VERY WRONG is happening to the patient in Room 209.

My God… MY GOD!!! What is happening? Why are they making that noise?

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

At first I thought is was localized, behind the new displays of Ninetendo Wiis. For a moment, I even thought the noise was coming from a Wii, and was maybe some weird, loud, Japanistic auditory approximation of  "Pain-of-Loss." That would make sense. OK. Game pain. I can live with that. But no… it was coming from a wall or a pillar or something.

We’ve just had a "snow emergency" here in Central Ohio. Level 3 in some counties. In Boston (where I’m from) or Buffalo (my wife) or Ithaca (where I went to school) the volume of snow we’ve had would count as "light to moderate." Here it is worthy of writing on stone tablets. And so, for a moment, when the noise came back…

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

I thought, Maybe the snow has done something to the nice Target store… Maybe there is an emergency here? Maybe somebody has slipped and fell on ice and they need the… the… most able Target-person to go and… do the emergency thing. Whatever.

It was that loud a noise. It triggered the, "Where’s the fire?" response.

I’d stopped by Target on my way home from work to get two things: a Lego kit for my son (his Valentine’s Day gift) and some milk. A quick stop. And I like shopping at Target. It’s well lit. It’s clean. It’s well laid-out. You can get seasonal stuff, cards, a few food items, clothes, best-selling books, videos, games and…

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!
BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

Sweet mother of pearl!!! The noise went off again! This time I was up in the toy aisle and trying to find the right Lego kit, and it started hammering right next to me. Wow. It was loud. Really loud. I’d been in the big, main aisle before. Cruising along at finding-my-sector speed. Now I was in careful-hunting-mode. Leaning in close. Examining package details. Retail graze. And directly next to the post-thingy with the speaker up in its posty groin.

Now… I’m not a noise hater. I like loud music. I don’t mind big cities, traffic noise, airports, children playing, trains, concerts, action movies or Robin Williams. Noise is fine. And I’ve been accused on plenty of occasions of being a loud bastard myself. What I mean to say is that I do not require quiet, nor am I repulsed by simple loudness.

But as I grabbed my Lego kit and headed through Men’s Wear towards (whatever they call) Food, the brazen peal let loose again…

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

And I felt the beginnings of madness. Seriously. This was dentist drill pitched noise. And at a volume that drove any thoughts other than, "Escape!" out of my head. This is the noise they should generate in buildings when there’s a gas leak or a bomb threat to make sure that kids aren’t hiding in the broom closet.

I did not linger.

I got my 2% and headed directly for check-out and, while waiting, asked a clerk who was working on a nearby end-cap:

"What on earth is that horrible noise I keep hearing? The ‘beep! beep! beep!’ thing? Is there some kind of emergency or something?"

Reply: "No. That’s just our phone system."

I was stunned. The phone? THE PHONE? THE FRIGGIN’ PHONE???!!! Having the phone "ring" with a noise that loud and piercing and terrible is the equivalent of "pointing" at someone with a flare gun in order to single them out in a crowd.

"Uh," I asked… "Why is the phone so insanely loud and annoying?"

Answer, punchline and cause of rant: "Because when it’s any less annoying, we don’t answer it."

I replied, "You may want to rethink that particular retail philosophy. Driving customers out of your store with the equivalent of audio napalm because you can’t train employees to answer a reasonable, human-level tone is arguably insane."

He nodded and said, "We hate it, too."

There you go. It sucks for everybody. So it must be OK.

Last time I checked, I pay about a 7% premium to shop at Target as opposed to some other big-box stores. I’ve gladly paid it in the past because I like their selection, service, lay-out, lighting, cleanliness and general ambiance. I say this, though. If I go back and get hit by that air-horn phone-from-hell again… I’m taking my business back across the street to Meijers, even though shopping there always makes me feel… well… a little sticky.

The social story thusfar…

This is the third in a series of posts about social networking/software, intended to put the current… er… enthusiasm… about making everything "social" into some kind of perspective, and to begin to assign some kinds of business and/or marketing terms and thoughts to the various processes and parts of social platforms.

The first two posts dealt with how we might measure the relative social value of various systems. It took me two posts to do it, since I use this space to think out loud, but with your kind patience, I came up with the following definitions:

So "Share of Participation" might be seen as the social equivalent of "Share of Wallet," but measured in time, number of "units" of participation (entries, comments, etc.). And "Social Share" might then be an equivalent of "Mind Share" or "Market Share." The first measures how much of an individual or group’s "social capital" is spent on a particular social network. The second measures how much of an entire, desired audience that network has captured. These are two very different numbers, their difference is incredibly important, and we’ll get to that later in this post.

I’ve been commenting recently on Raph Koster’s site on variousness related to his upcoming Areae… game? VW? Cyberverse? Who knows…  When I mentioned I was working on a blog post about the next issue in my series — social functions vs. features — Allen Sligar suggested that "social transaction" was a good synonym for "social feature." I like the term… but I think it’s now a third thing I have to think about, rather than a synonym for one of the two I already had in my head. So here’s where I am now:

1. Social Function = doing something for the purpose of "being social." IE, a dating site; the "MM" in "MMORPG." Communications technology per se. IM, email, etc. These have "social functions" at their core. You cannot "do" these things without "being social."

2. Social Feature = a benefit provided to users of the system that is only made possible through exposure to group-level actions. For example, Wikipedia and del.icio.us. The Wikipedia is made possible by the efforts of many thousands of writers and editors. It enables "social creation" of the material, but does not require "social use" of it. A reader of a Wikipedia entry benefits from the social nature of how the entries are created, but is not involved in social interactions himself, per se. Similarly, all the tagging data that is entered into del.icio.us is part of a social system, but using it is not a social function.

3. Social Transaction (thanks, Allen, for the brain-spark) = I think, the exchange of social value, through a social feature of some kind. When I award you a Digg or, on eBay, a positive review… that’s a "social transaction." I think that social transactions can modify and enable, improve and validate social features… but I’m not sure they’re required for them. When I use a Wikipedia entry or browse through a couple hundred Flickr photos, I’m reaping the benefit of social features, but not engaging in a social transaction.

For a time, when I was thinking about these two (now three) things, I had it in my head that there was/were some "many-to-many" and "many-to-one" differences going on here; i.e., that "social functions" were primarily one-to-one and that social features enabled many-to-many interactions. But I’m not sure about that anymore. The social functions of many sites/services seem, now, to be many-to-many. There are poetry groups at MySpace numbering in the tens-of-thousands. They facilitate a social function. And the tagging features of del.icio.us, while entered in a many-to-many scale, can be realized on a one-to-one basis, for sure. So I don’t think it’s a numbers game.

What I do think, though, is that the difference between feature and function will end up relating back to the difference between share of participation vs. social share. I think that systems that have, at their hearts, some level of social function are more likely to aggregate a long-term, low-churn share of participation. While those that rely solely on social features may have a large social share… but it may not be particularly loyal.

What am I talking about. It’s the difference between "audience" and "tribe," and it can be very, very tricky to figure out.

Let’s take, for example, MySpace vs. World of Warcraft . Both have huge social share. Millions of people are doing "social things" on both. There’s no arguing about that. But let’s look at the differences in features vs. functions.

• MySpace: Social features = blogging (page building), email, groups, forums, classifieds.
• WoW: Social features = chat, IM, grouping, guild features

On the surface, it would seem that MySpace is "more social" than WoW. And, in fact, you can play WoW as a solo game, so it need not be social at all. But if you do play WoW in group or guild mode, or for the PvP experience, it has, at its heart, a "WoW specific social function," whereas MySpace does not.

I don’t mean that each of the individual features of MySpace cannot fulfill social functions for individuals and groups… but those functions are ones that are easily portable. On WoW, however, that’s not the case. If you and I are enjoying a game of WoW, but become irritated by some feature of it (say, the graphics) and want to "take our game elsewhere," we are basically hosed. You can’t play WoW anywhere else. All the social features of the game are at the service of the social function: to play in a shared, fictional RPG experience.

On MySpace, on the other hand, almost all the experiences are transferable, and pretty dang easily. If a group of any size were to become disenchanted with any of its features, the functions would transfer. How long, for example, would it take to set up a blog, group, forum or classified for your MySpace group on another platform?

This is all leading to the last term I’m going to coin in this piece: social brand.

Just like there is brand in any part of marketing or advertising, I’m increasingly convinced that various social networking systems will have a social brand that presents to users a proposition based on the intersection of social features and functions. But where a traditional brand is something that is controlled by marketing departments and ad agencies, the social brand of a platform will be, to a degree, at the mercy of the users…

Except inasmuch as the developers of the system can understand the relationships of the features and functions (and transactions) they present to users, and the balance of how they are valued. Social functions are centralized and presented as definitional — either by the creators or, over time, by the will of the users. Social features are used horizontally and are the ways in which aggregate value is accrued to the system.  Things to keep in mind, therefore, when developing a social networking system and trying to develop long-term social brand:

• Are there ways to reinforce social functions in each feature/transaction?
• If the use of a feature is easily replicable elsewhere, can I brand it somehow?
• Are my users loyal to the aggregate, unique social function of my service, or to a set of features?
• If I’m seeking to increase share of participation, should I be increasing services or looking to deepen my root social function?
• If I’m seeking to increase social share, do I need parity with competitors in social features? Or a unique social function proposition?
• Why haven’t I hired one or more people to do nothing but manage these issues?

These are all very weird questions. We are talking about sites/services that rely on the interactions and content and data and information provided by users to create the value for the customers. Yeah, I know "user created content" is all over the place in the media and being discussed as such. Thing is, I don’t see a whole lot of talk about how to manage these "users" more as employees or as products/services themselves.

Because… if the value your service is providing derives from work done  by users, you need to think of that work as an operational center. And you need to think of the people doing that work the same way you would a contractor, employee or  (insulting!) piece of equipment. It’s not just "kinda neat" that they do stuff on your site that provides value. It’s core to the biz.

We need to talk about this stuff more.

The social story thusfar…

This is the third in a series of posts about social networking/software, intended to put the current… er… enthusiasm… about making everything "social" into some kind of perspective, and to begin to assign some kinds of business and/or marketing terms and thoughts to the various processes and parts of social platforms.

The first two posts dealt with how we might measure the relative social value of various systems. It took me two posts to do it, since I use this space to think out loud, but with your kind patience, I came up with the following definitions:

So "Share of Participation" might be seen as the social equivalent of "Share of Wallet," but measured in time, number of "units" of participation (entries, comments, etc.). And "Social Share" might then be an equivalent of "Mind Share" or "Market Share." The first measures how much of an individual or group’s "social capital" is spent on a particular social network. The second measures how much of an entire, desired audience that network has captured. These are two very different measurements, their differences are incredibly important, and we’ll get to that later in this post.

How & what vs. why

People get strategy and tactics mixed up all the time. They also get vision and mission mixed up. I’ve heard the two terms used interchangeably. I’ve always thought that "vision" makes sense as the "higher" of the two, as what you see or are looking to achieve — your vision — doesn’t change based on what you do, but your mission(s) — what you do — can change over time. Missions change more often than visions, so they should be lower on the totem pole of organizational chatter. But as long as you know what you mean… fine. That’s what I’m talking about. Higher vs. lower.

The "higher level" stuff is almost always concerned with strategy, and strategy is almost always concerned with "why" you are doing what you’re doing as opposed to "what and how" things get done. That’s because until you know the reason(s) why you (or your boss or your board or your customers) want to do something, it is almost always harder to formulate a decent plan for doing what and how. Why is that? Because there can be many, many different reasons for doing the same thing.

Witness lipstick. It’s the "what" answer to a "how" question: "How do we make somebody’s lips very, very red artificially?" With lipstick. Bingo. Quesion answered. Super. So… what are you going on about there, Mr. H?

Well, what I’m going on about is the difference between a feature and a function. Lipstick does, in fact, make lips very red. But if you are a woman looking to buy lipstick to make your lips red to look all sexified for your date… that’s a much different function for red lips than that of a circus clown. Same feature, different function. One can argue that clowns probably use some other kind of make-up entirely; not lipstick at all. At which point I say again, "Bingo." You’ve now narrowed your "feature" even further. It’s not just about red lips anymore, is it? It’s probably about the adhesive properties of the unguents involved or something. What do I know from lipstick? But my point is, for the one feature description, "Make lips red," there are several higher level functions that are radically different.

It gets much more complex when features and functions overlap. And when they aren’t well understood. And don’t have a history. When media are new and everybody is jumping all overthemselves to get in on a game that seems very exciting because all those crazy kids are setting up MySpace pages and downloading YouTube videos and using the Wikipedia to research their homework because it’s all so dang social… well, you need to stop and understand whether the social aspects of what they are doing are features or functions of those networks.

To put it another way: is any particular platform social in nature, or does it simply utilize social abilities to perform tasks? Or both? And, if it is social in nature… is it uniquely social? Is it creating specific social content, or easily replicable interaction? And, at this point, we’re back to ways in which we might utilize measurements like share of participation and social share.

Social features: Wikipedia rules

If you don’t know what Wikipedia is, and somehow you’ve found my little blog… that’s just sad. That’s like some weird kinda reverse Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing. But, be that as it may, Wikipedia is one of the best examples of a software platform that utilizes social aspects of computing almost completely as features… but is almost entirely devoid of a social function, except as an implicit byproduct for some of its authors/editors.

Most people who use Wikipedia come in contact with it as users; searchers for information. When you do that, you have no social interaction with article authors whatsoever. You are consuming information. Period. End of story, no social nuttin’. The whole Wikipedia might have been, as far as you know or care, written by one really smart dude, a computer, or a giant robot squid from the future. The social tools put into place — the social features of a wiki — are used in order to enable the writing and editing of articles on the site. The function of Wikipedia is to provide those articles to its readers.

If there are any social functions of the Wikipedia, they are, essentially, serendipitous; accident. You and I might "meet" while editing the same article, discover each other’s email address, correspond (probably not entirely on Wikipedia, but that could happen…), fall in love, etc. etc. I’m sure that a few deep, meaningful relationships have, indeed, formed across the pages and links of Wikipedia.

Then again, I’m sure that deep, meaningful relationships have formed between mail carriers and folks on their routes. But the social aspects of mail delivery were not, and will not ever be part of the raison d’etre of the US Postal Service, FedEx or UPS. It happens. But it’s not part of the "vision."

Social function: eHarmony connects

Meeting, dating and marriage are about as social as you can get. The relationship site eHarmony.com is all about matching folks up with that "perfect someone." I have no idea if it’s any good. They have good ads. But I’ve spent some time goofing around on their site looking at their system, and I can tell you one thing — their Web site and tools are not social, although their service and reason for being is entirely so. Many of the individual tools/features we associate with socialness and Web 2.0 — wiki-like functionality, tagging, user-creativity tools, individual home pages, Java/AJAX-enabled aps — are entirely absent from eHarmony’s site. Its feature-set doesn’t include many social tools. But its function is 100% social — to establish a social relationship between its users where one did not exist before they joined and used the service.

Social this vs. that? Why should we care?

About half the companies with any kind of serious truck on the Web are monkeying about with social-this and social-that. Yahoo! may pay $1 billion for Facebook. Google just paid $900 million to be the search pal at MySpace. Lots of companies are adding tagging and user profile features to sites. Hundreds of sites today offer either a few social features, or are overwhelmingly social in function, or have utilized social features to the point where they would not function without them (Wikipedia).

This is all part of the Web 2.0 phenom. User created content. Groups of folks connecting with like minds. Virtual worlds and MMOs. All of which is grand. But from a business and marketing perspective, you gots to know what you’re looking to accomplish (goals), what you’re willing to do to get there (resources), and how exactly you’re going to make the trip (tools at your disposal). Being confused about any of these things will put you in a world of loss.

For example… if you think that adding some social features to your company’s Web site will create community and make your customers into a big tribe of hand-holding advocates for your products and services… well… probably not. At this point, tagging, user pages, etc. are becoming de riggeur. Within a few years, not having those features on your site will be like not having a search box. In this case, playing into the "social game" may be a good idea, but don’t get your expectations up to high. You’re adding features to your pre-existing products/services. You’re not enabling folks to find their dream spouses.

On the flip side… if you have a service that is truly social in function, like eHarmony.com, be very, very careful about tacking on social features. Why? Because you may be enabling people to cut out the middle-man: you. What happens, for example, to the match-maker when the users become the match-makers? Well… er… Right. That’s what happens. Bye-bye. It doesn’t strike me as dumb in any way that eHarmony’s site isn’t very social. They’re selling social. Giving it away in the site features wouldn’t be very smrt.

I’m not saying there ain’t good ways to combine the two; I’m just saying that you need to understand the difference. Know what you’re selling vs. what is the value-add and what is the loss-leader. Know how social features might truly benefit your customers vs. just being a distraction. Keep an eye on when the socialness of your site may be allowing for interactions that are truly helpful — uncovering new cross-selling ops, for example — vs. when you may be enabling competitors to set up shop in your own backyard.

Social networking is good. Yes. I think so. But it is also very powerful. And that means it can bite the hands that feed it if not implemented carefully.

I’m changing my mind. Go figure.

I’ve been thinking about my definition of "Social Share" for the last two weeks or so. What I put down in my last post:

Social Share: the relative importance of participation in a group to a member of that group — or association of one group to another group — as measured by activities that involve resources or influence.

is still something that really resonates well in my great, huge haid. But I’m changing what I call it. Yes, I know… changing the new term right away is a bad idea. But I don’t get that many readers, and it’s only two weeks, so calm down. I’ll get it right this time, and then call the nice people at the OED.

Compared to various economic terms, the above definition seems more akin to "share of wallet" to me; that is, how much of a person or company’s total finances are spent on a partiular resource or brand. So if, in 1970, companies spent 10% of their operating expenses on IT infrastucture, but in 2000, they spent 15%, we’d say that IT infrastructure experienced a "50% growth in share-of-wallet." Therefore, with slight changes only…

Share of Participation: the relative value of participation in a particular type or brand of social activity by an individual or a group as measured by resource or influence.

 I, myself, regard "influence" to be a measureable resource… but I don’t think that that is a widely held belief. So I’m putting it in there explicity. Share of Participation, therefore, measures the personal side of the equation, which is what I was trying to get at — how important a particular social activity or tool is to an individual or group.

What, then of "Social Share?" That should have been the "market lookin’ at itself" measurement from the get-go. My bad. Because "market share," in economic terms, looks at how much of the market "belongs" to a particular brand or segment, not the other way around; object focus, not subject focus. So here we go.

Social Share: how much of the total participation in social activities of a desired audience is aggregated to a particular brand or segment.

There we go. All better.

But, clearly, I have not been long-winded enough yet today. Nor have I given an example (which the teacher in me says I must). Nor have I explained why it’s important to have two terms. Sooo….

Lorcan Dempsey is the VP of Research and Chief Strategist for OCLC, where I work. In a recent blog entry, he discusses some of the implications of which photo sharing sites are most popular and used by MySpace (and, I would make the implication, other social sites). The blog report — Hitwise Intelligence — he sites uses the term "market share" and measures this in terms of site visits and hits to the various photo sharing sites.

The particular report entry talks about how Photobucket basically kicks Flickr’s bahooky in terms of marketshare (again, measured in hits… which we assume will translate into ad revenue). Graph looks like:

Some of the comments on the report make part of the point I’m about to — that there is a qualitative difference between a site for hosting your media files (such as Photobucket) and a site that is for the storing, tagging, organizing, and sharing of "photographs;" i.e., Flickr. The basic point being that Flickr is a more "social" site — a destination — and Photobucket is a "pass through" kind of utility thingamabob platform where you put up photos, anime, illustrations, movies, etc., that will actually "live" on your blog, site, MySpace space, etc.

You can guess what’s coming, right?

Using my new terminology, what I would argue is that although Photobucket has a greater market share, Flickr may have greater Social Share to the entire photo sharing community/sector, and, in the case of individual users, may occupy a much greater Share of Participation on a case-by-case basis. I have no idea if this is true, can’t measure it, and won’t defend it… but it makes for a good "vacuum example."

What does this mean and who cares? Well, as I said below, in the "old, old days," nobody cared much about "mind share." Market share was the only real measure of worth. How much of the dollars being spent came to your product or segment? Now, in fact, we are so used to treating mind share as a stand-in for market share — we grok that "mind" leads to "market" — that we assume it’s true. In the above example, for instance, the folks at Hitwise are using Website hits as a measure of market share. Well…. technically, "market share" is only concerned with sales. Not traffic. The number of people who comes into your store, looks into your window, sees your ad, reads your flyer, visits your counter, remembers your name… all that stuff is something that can be used to measure mind share, and can be assumed/hoped to lead to market share. See? We "feel" that the two are inextricably linked.

But they ain’t necessarily. There are all kinds of products (Mac anyone?) that have much greater mind share than marketshare. And who have dormant mind share that eventually (iPod) translates into market share in another way. And other examples of products (Levis) that for years, didn’t have anywhere near as much mind share in terms of buzz, but who were in the constant top spots in market share. Quiet leaders.

So there is often, but not always, a connection between mind share and market share. What about Social Share and Share of Participation? My argument is that businesses and organizations looking to make their sites/offerings "social" should be considering the same kinds of connections between the "social qualities" of what they’re doing and the end results they are looking for. In the photo sharing example given, as a marketing guy, for instance, I’d ask these questions beyond the "hit stats" that show market (ahem… mind) share:

• How many items do individual users on average store on each site?
• How often do users add new materials?
• How many comments are left? Aggregate and per item?
• What is the average length of tenure of users?
• What is the ratio of paid users to free accounts?
• Is the API open and mashable?
• What kind of PR does the site get? Is the service itself being "socialized?"
• How many users are using advanced features? Mashing the API?
• How many new accounts come from referrals vs. advertising?
• How much traffic is from other social sites vs. more "static" usage?

Measuring this stuff would not be easy, no. But going bankrupt isn’t easy either. If the whole point of Everything 2.0 is that "socialness with provide the engine of continued growth/value" for the next phase of the Web economy, then we need to be discussing socialness in business terms that relate sensibly to the ones we already have. Terms that I made up in the shower.

The marketing world is littered with cases of flash-in-the-pan stories of products that were "Hot! Hot! Hot!" in the public mind for a day, week or month… but inevitably cost their users, employees and shareholders lots of money. Using mind share in an overbalanced way to gague the value of a property can be foolish. Similarly, simply saying something is "2.0" or "social" without a framework in which to evaluate "how social" it is, or whether or not those particular social aspects make it a good long-term competitor is also foolish. Maybe having some terms with which to start the discussion will be helpful.

OK. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to coin a new term. If it’s not exactly the right one, somebody can come up with a better one, but I’ve started to need it and I can’t find another one that means exactly what I’m trying to say.

Social share: the relative importance of participation in a group to a member of that group — or association of one group to another group — as measured by activities that involve resources or influence.

OK. I know it sounds a little pointy-headed and beardy, but I wanted to get a couple things in there for a reason. Let’s run down the parts, and then I’ll go into my thinking as to why we need this term.

Explain the definition

• It’s got to be relative importance because I firmly believe that both people and organizations only have a certain amount of "social share" to manage. You cannot belong to an infinite number of groups. You cannot have 312 "best friends." You cannot have 78 favorite foods. Blogs with blogrolls that list more than 30 or so recommended blogs or sites to visit… I just ignore. Especially when they’re not categorized. That’s linkspam, kids. I don’t want to know your Top 200 picks of what movie I should rent tonight. I want 10 choices, tops.  So, when we’re measuring what social groups have the most influence on me, it’s got to add up to 100%. When someone new comes along and pulls you one way… you’re pulled away from something else.

• It’s got to be about participation. That’s the differentiator between the whole "2.0" overkill and "old school" communications. If you are reading a blog, you are not part of the group. You’re part of the audience. If you are commenting regularly… you’re a part. If you buy from Amazon, not. If you write reviews… yes. If you read the Wikipedia, not. If you edit it, yes. A bystander is not a member.

• It can be about a person’s role in one group, or about how a group decides to interact with another group. Social networking is often about "networks of networks." And that is about some critical mass of members making a "social share" conclusion about the group-effects of the benefit of association with another group. That is to say, "Our group will do better as a group if we stop hanging out with Group A, and start hanging out with Group B." You might still decide to associate personally with Group A — your personal social share may involve them — but the group social share may have a different weight.

• The participation noted above has to consume or create resources or influence for it to be a genuine indicator of social share, I believe. If you just log onto a bulletin board and fire off a hot, fiery rant once in awhile, five minutes here or there in your "spare time," that’s not really consuming any of your real resources, and it’s not creating any influence, probably not convincing anyone of anything, etc. Just because an act of participation is social, doesn’t mean it creates social share for others, or qualifies as consuming social share for you. I may go to a carnival once a year… That may qualify as a "social" activity, because I do it with other people. But it is probably almost 100% entertainment related. If it does not influence how I will do anything else (besides whether or not I will attend next year’s carnival), it’s not a measureable social share activity.

Explain why we need the term

Because the whole root of Everybody’s-Gone-Ga-Ga-2.0 is that Everything 2.0 on Web 2.0 is Wicked Social 2.0. It’s all "two way." The Web originally "did stuff at you." Then it let you "do stuff." Now it lets us "do stuff together." We’ve been empowered to join hands, sing kumbaya and get jiggy wid-it. We can blog, comment on blogs, multi-blog, group blog, mososo, mash-up, link, tag, group tag, group find and all kinds of stuff that involve being parts of groups and interacting with those groups on some level. Which is great. Call it "Post Modern Tribalism" or whatever. It’s fun to join groups, it’s fun to be with other people (virtually or in real life), it’s fun to leverage our knowledge in a community of peers, it’s fun to "be around" like-minded (or contraray) folks. There are many, many reasons why social software is good stuff.

But if it’s good, we need ways of evaluating how good. And we need some language to talk about why we’re doing this stuff, and not just because "it’s good." In marketing, that which is not measured is not repeatable and is probably based on luck, family connections or the whims of Japanese schoolgirls. If you failed and you don’t know why, you have learned nothing, and you’re not just a failure, but a moron. If you know why you failed, you at least have gained knowledge. If you succeeded and you don’t know why, you’re a success, but you’re still a moron, because it’s not reproducible.

So… Social! Social! Social! Let’s build six-degrees-of-separation for everyone! Let’s make everything group-able! Let’s let everybody drive the bus!

OK. Fine. Answer me the question, "Why?" And then answer me the questions about how you’re going to measure how social your service is. And how social it is compared to other similar services? And is it more social from a qualitative or quantitative standpoint? Does it have lots of members who spend no time? Or a smaller customer base who are fanatically loyal and spend 2 hours a day? Or is it lots of people and lots of time… but no influence. And no money spent. And what’s the end goal of the whole she-bang-a-bang anyway? Are you driving advertising revneue? Trying to influence other product sales? Market share? Mind share? What activities do you want this group to engage in? What influence do you want them to create?

In short… what the heck are you up to?

Where’s the bathroom, Kevin Costner?

"If you build it, they will come…" That’s what the mysterious voice said in "Field of Dreams." A neat movie. I liked it a bunch. But at the end, when you see that whole line of cars all queued up to experience the mystery and drama of the baseball field in the middle of the corn… my only thought was, "Where are they going to go to the bathroom?" Once you get to a social destination… what do you do there?

I regularly comment on a couple of blogs, the purpose of which is clearly just… to be blogs. One of them, Terra Nova, a blog about MMOs and virtual worlds, has no advertising, no commercial links, no nuthin’. It’s a space for discussion about online games and VWs. Period. Fantastico. From a social share standpoint, you’d have to factor that into your calculations when evaluating my participation in various groups. "Andy is spending a decent amount of time in an area that generates no commercial effects." That’s like, from an entertainment market share analysis standpoint, watching the same movie on VHS over-and-over. Or, from the point-of-view of the cola companies, drinking tap water. Some chunk of my social share is being "wasted" by that evaluation.

I’m not saying that’s a "correct" viewpoint. Just that you have to consider it. If another venue in the MMO/VW sphere wanted a chunk of my social share — i.e., wanted me to join in their discussion group, wiki, blog, etc. — they’d probably have to drag some of it over from Terra Nova. If they wanted to do it for commercial reasons, they’d need to evaluate what I bring to the table. Am I willing to pay directly for a membership? Am I going to contribute to click-through advertising revenue? Is my influence as a contributing member great enough to bring in others who will have more economic value than I posess, or even offset any economic drain I make on the system? In short, is my social share worthwhile? Is it valuable to them?

Let’s have an example, eh?

OK.  Robert Scoble worked, until very recently, for Microsoft. He was a blog evangelist and people read his blog for a couple reasons. One, he’s an interesting guy on his own, and had some fun, smart things to say about technology, blogging, communications, openness, etc.. Two, he worked for Microsoft and had a very human, not-too-high-and-mighty-voice, and we’re fascinated by that. Put those together, and lots of people enjoyed a more flesh-and-blood peek into the Death Star. That peek was chiefly through his blog. So Scoble was blogging, in a way, about what he was blogging about. It was a meta meme. And those can be very powerful. And he got lots of comments of the blog from people both inside and outside "the loop" of the tecnocracy. His blog had, for quite a few people — some of them important — some measurable degree of social share. The fact that Microsoft "let" (and perhaps encouraged) him to do the blog made it even more social and intriguing.

Now… Scoble is doing something else. Queston? How much of Scoble’s social share depended on the Microsoft connection? Or, more accurately, depended on it being active. He will always, of course, be an ex-Microsofty. But will the folks who liked to be interviewed by him, comment on his blog, link to it, be linked-to by him, etc., like it as much now that he’s with a Silicon Valley start-up? More importantly, regardless of how much they "like it," will they continue to actually participate in the Scoble network per se? His new employer is certainly hoping so…

Because that’s the whole differentiator between old-school, advertising-heavy, one-way, mainstream media and word-of-mouth, social, networked, empowered, epitomized-by-blogs "2.0" thing: participation. And if that’s the horse that you’re going to ride into the ring, that’s the one you’ve got to be ready to ride out on.

What I mean is you can’t make the claim that the "special thing" about all this Web 2.0 stuff is its participatory nature when you’re trying to sell all the new cool Flash, AJAX, Ruby on Rails stuff to your investors… but then bail on it when the numbers don’t show up. The equation has to equal out.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m a huge fan of this whole thing. I just don’t want the enormous potential and value of social networking and many of the possible benefits to go the way of Pets.com and the rest of the Dot Bomb.

Very short conclusion

So… when you’re thinking about social software and building networks of users, think about social share the same way you would market share, incremental market share, share of voice, mind share and share of wallet. As one part of a business equation. Not as something to do "just because it’s good." If you build it, they might come. But if they end up peeing in your cornfield and leaving… what was the point again?

I get asked about branding more than a little. Since I do it for a living sometimes, have taught it more than once and have written and published articles on the subject, I don’t mind getting asked. And while I feel like I know enough to talk and write on the subject with some authority, it is always a tricky and somewhat… fuzzy topic.

It’s a soft science. You can’t always say, "Do this-and-such and you’ll get great results from your brand."

But, like many things, while it may be hard to define, sometimes a good example is truly better than a bad attempt at description.

Philips Norelco has a new product called the Bodygroom. It’s an electric razor for men. And since it’s called the "Bodygroom," you can figure out that it’s not for our beards.

So… you want to launch a brand for a new beauty product geared to remove unwanted hair primarily from men’s backs, underarms, chests and

 

Fine. You’ve got a brand development choice when it comes to promoting the thing. You can take the "high road." You can go all doctor this and health that. You can be very 1950’s in terms of the tone. You could even go techno-zingo and show the "razor-in-space" thing while it cuts through 3D zoomarooma virtual hair in some kind of orbit over something that might be an asteroid… or something. Or… something.

Or you can do what Philips did and put up a fantastic site that is funny as hell and will, A) be mad-viral and have everyone and their bruddah emailing each uddah saying, "You gotta check this out (which is how I heard about it, of course); and, B) hit the nail on the head in terms of what the brand should really be.

Whom am I to say what the brand of men’s beauty products "should be?"

Come on. It’s an electric razor for shaving hair off your

and   

Even for guys who actually take body hair grooming seriously, they’re going to pretend not to. Tongue-in-cheek funny is dead-on-perfect for this brand, and the site pulls it off splendidly. It’s not slapstick, it’s not over-the-top rude… it’s just, damned funny. And it’s unexpectedly funny. And it’s even a little smartly funny while being smart-ass funny. And you just don’t expect a big ol’ 19th century comp’ny like Philips (with Santa on the Norelco razor) to "get it" and be that funny. Which makes it even that much better.

I applaud the marketing. Three thumbs up. Way up.

Good post at Librarian in Black on the perils of Ego Centric Presentations.

First of all… love the <rant>, </rant> tags. I am going to steal that outright and not give credit. Sorry. I’m in marketing, and that’s what we do. 

Most presenters aren’t professional speakers, teachers, actors, jugglers, entertainers, magicians, etc. They don’t know the #1 rule about performing, which Sarah has stated very well here in terms of a conference context — the audience is the most important person in the room, not the chuckle-head on stage. No offense to the chuckle-head, said role having been one I’ve played a couple hundred times. Often, in retrospect, not as well as I’d've liked/hoped to.

Sometimes it’s because of nervousness, usually it’s lack of experience or training. In only a very few cases, IMO, it’s lack of talent or ego-centrism. Most people who get up in front of a group of people really *DO* want to help that group understand something and go away informed or enlightened or amused or entertained or some combination thereof. But because they haven’t been trained in how to sell their ideas (which is what Sarah is asking for, essentially), they merely present. Which is what they’ve been conditioned to do by many things, including the very verb that describes what they’ve been asked to do: "presentation."

A "presentation" is very, very passive. "Here’s my stuff." Thump. You put it on a table or a screen and there it is. "Selling," with all it’s negative connotations when done wrong or in a sleezy manner, is highly active when done well and appropriately. It is a relationship model activity. It relies on knowledge of your audience and a desire to affect a change in their behavior, not just in their state-of-mind. At the end of a sales process, you want your customer to have done something differently, to have made a "buy" decision.

To all "presenters" out there, I challenge you to think about your next presentation in this way — are you asking your audience to buy something? Are you asking them to take an action? Are you expecting a change in behavior based on the materials you’ve provided? If the answer is "no" to all of those questions, you’re not really making a meaningful presentation. You’re telling a story. The best you can hope for is to be entertaining.

The art of good salesmanship is a career in and of itself. So taking you from a flat, static "presentation" to a great, interactive, action-oriented "sales pitch" style is not a one blog post. But there’s one thing you can do to shift your attitude in that direction better than any other single action — listen.

One of the ballsiest moves I ever saw at a conference was when the presenter started his routine with the Q&A. He said (approximately), "The rest of my talk doesn’t matter if I don’t answer your questions on this subject. So rather than give 10 or 15 minutes out of the hour to your questions, let’s start with them. If we use up the whole hour on a good discussion, that’s way better than listening to me prattle on for 45 minutes." He took a few questions (about 5), the answers to which lasted about 20 minutes. During the course of his presentation, then, he was able to skim some slides very quickly, as he’d already gone over them in the "pre-Q&A," and he was also able to personalize
the presentation at several points by referring to questions people had asked. It spiced up the whole thing very nicely. And he still left another 15 minutes at the end for more questions. It took guts… but good selling does.

This is a good topic. I may come back to it later in more depth.

Recap: So… in part one we established that, over time, value (which is another way of saying wealth) often moves "up the chain" from the individual to the group. And that, as systems become more complex, value begins to accrue at the group level more efficiently than at the individual level. EG, it’s easier for a nation to fix interstate highway systems for everyone than it is for you to fix just the four miles you drive everyday to work.

In part deux, we talked about how "meta" activities are necessary in order for this glomming of value to take place. You need to have enough wealth (in the form of excess food) to allow "meta farmers" (planners, civil engineers, potters, builders, architects, mathmeticians… even if you call them priests) the chance to develop even better methods of developing excess food. Virtuous cycle.

We are now, I believe, in a phase of economic and intellectual history I refer to as The Age of Content. I won’t go into great detail on that theory. You can read a bunch more of my thoughts on this subject in an essay I wrote if you like. It’s geared mainly toward marketing, but it makes the main point that needs to be made here: right now, content is king. We’ve moved from real estate as the main source of wealth, to "stuff," to the transporation of stuff, to energy and communications… to… content. I’ll pull one short section from the essay to define and give examples.

Content is: Information that is manipulated, arranged, categorized, crafted, and tweaked in order to provoke in participants a sense of value received from original, created meaning. Examples include:

• News: all kinds, depending on what you value
• Sports: both the playing of sports and the viewing and the news of it
• Music: lyrics, songs, arrangements, covers, concerts, recordings
• Art: all kinds; from the fine arts to industrial design to advertising to performance
• Opinion: essays, letters to the editor
• Spectacle: the circus, reality TV, game shows, magic, politics
• Stories: dramatic or comedic, on film, in books and plays or on TV
• Character: the details and actions of personalities in fiction or the public eye
• Consultative services: doctors, lawyers, accountants, lobbyists, publicists, marketers
• Research: all sciences, hard and soft
• New technology: the development of new products and services based on research
• Metadata: the services that connect users to content and vice-versa

That’s my own definition. And I get a lot of crap about it, but that’s OK. I’m sticking to my guns. We can argue that definition some other day. For now, please just accept that content is important and that producing it is a great way to make lots of money.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at a report from the Online Publishers Association that says that consumers spent $987 million for online content in the first half of 2005.  That’d be about $2 billion for the whole year. Just for online content. And that doesn’t count the online content they outright didn’t pay for and that had no economic intent (fun, free, fabulous blogs like this), the online content (advertising and editorial) that drove consciously drove offline purchasing behavior, the freely available online content (entertainment) that housed advertising and the freely available online content (entertainment samples) that drove offline purchase of like media.

Content is huge. Content is mind food. When less than 1% of the people are needed to feed the rest of us, what do we do with all that time and energy? And when we finally have cheap (relatively) computing and communications? When the cost of those efforts (content efforts) is dramatically less (and has fallen dramatically quicker) than costs in other areas of recreation and infrastucture improvement like transportation and packaging improvements?

Put it this way — if you could put 10 "units of effort" into a "content solution" for raising profits for your company, or 10 of those same units into a non-content solution… which do you think would be more likely to pay higher dividends these days? Look at the list above…  Suppose you want (like many companies) to make more money. Content-related efforts might include:

• PR: generating news and buzz; blogging
• Marketing: new, funky campaigns; better brand strategy
• Knowledge management: understanding your customer-supplier chain better
• Training: Getting better at your key strengths

All of these efforts rely on the creation or consumption of content. And no matter what your product or service, they will (if done well) leverage your efforts with little regard for geographic barriers. Which is neat. Let’s contrast that to non-content (more "worldly," I guess… traditional? I don’t have a good word for "non-content") business improvement efforts:

• Shave time off a business process or time-to-market
• Buy more of something to get scale savings
• Open additional outlets in order to reach more customers

You get the point. "Real world stuff." Yes, these things are hugely important. And, yes, you’ll often need to do them. But if you have a choice… if you can beat the other guy on content… take that route 100% of the time. Why?

Because you can then leverage that benefit across any number of "real world" factors. The reverse does not necessarily hold true.

And — content creation is often less replicable than "meat world" benefits. You can’t copyright speed-to-market. You can’t trademark scale savings. You can copyright and trademark your content creations.

And — content is almost infintely replicable in scale. If an ad works well in one market, it often will in others (not always, but often). If a book sells well in print, you may be able to make a movie, a game, etc.

So… content is king. What’s that got to do with Open Source?

Well, content is to our current age as corn and beef were to the time when 97% of us worked in agriculture. Those things (meta ag) which allowed all the farmers to improve crop yields brought benefits to society as a whole, and allowed for the vast improvements in wealth creation we’ve seen since then. They allowed intellectual capital to be freed up; moving from behind a plow to behind books, to behind computers.

Now, in the Age of Content, those efforts that move us, collectively, from behind the technology to in front of audiences will be the most valuable. From "futzers with software" to "reachers of minds." From manipulators of mice to creators of content.

And the Open Source movement enables that to happen in two very important ways that don’t in more, fixed, "capitalistic" systems.

First, the creation of whatever "Open Source" stuff itself is, inherently and explicitly, more creative than doing things in a more closed environment. So the Open Source content itself (whether software, music, writing… whatever) will be more creative, by definition.

Second, Open Source allows for more participants to progress up the "value chain" of content creation at a lower cost of entry. This is the "content equivalent" of being able to use an iron plow… for free. Of being told about crop rotation. Of being given access to engineering plans for irrigation. You get it.

Now… As my friend David Leslie recently reminded me in an email on this subject –  TANSTAAFL. "There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." That is, "free" software isn’t really "free." Somebody pays. Obviously, the authors pay in time and effort, sometimes in money. If their choice is to release the fruits of their work for recompense other than those pecuniary… that’s their choice. But they have, indeed paid.

End-users pay, too. In many cases, there are hidden costs associated with the widespread use of Open Source content that are not, at first apparent to those users. The two most often sited by opponents of Open Source are support and ongoing maintentance. That is, when you adopt an Open Source solution, how are you going to take care of it, and will it be around for the long run?

The good answer — as in so many complex topics, there is no "right" answer — is one of balance. This argument is very like the ones I mentioned earlier between conservatives and liberals about where to draw the line between "too much government" and  "not enough social service."

In the case of Open Source, it is a question — I believe — of balancing goals vs. risks. Which is, at its heart, a question that businesses (and, to a less formal extent) individuals make when choosing any solution.

For example, if you are a brain surgeon, I would not necessarily recommend an Open Source piece of software that is absolutely key for the delivery of your service at the dramatic moments of incision. That operation (pun intended) is absolutely vital (still intended) to what you do for a living and any "fuzziness" in the program could mean death for your patient, and real trouble for you in terms of excess paperwork and guilt.

On the other hand… if you’re a brain surgeon, how about Open Source for your blogging software? Or for software to help you track your family tree? Or for your word processing and spreadsheeting? Or even for keeping your small practice’s appointments and bills? Ask youself (Dr. Brainsurgeon), "What are the potential risks of using this Open Source solution, vs. the gains of not paying for it… "

The bigger your application, the more carefully you need to weigh the balance.

Another example from my life. I manage a team of eight designers, writers, translators and project manager type folks. For us, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, etc. are incredibly important tools. So are (to a lesser extent) the Microsoft Office Suite of applications. I would sooner cut off my left hand than ask my crew to give up Photoshop. Photoshop is God. There are a few very decent Open Source alternatives out there (that I mentioned in the first part of this post), that are great for students, small businesses, individuals just getting started in design, etc. etc. That’s their choice, on their "balance line." But for a decent sized design shop that lives and dies by the JPG… give me Photoshop or give me death.

Now… Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice 2.0? My gang is probably also the "hardest hitters" of Word and Powerpoint. We do some funkyanna hoo-hah in Word in order to make "customziable" stuff for the field. And we do lotsa lotsa Powerpoint work. But if our VP of finance told us that the comp’ny could save $XXX,XXX every year by switching to OpenOffice, and we think that we can get just as good service, and any problems will have to be taken in stride because of the savings and blah blah blah…. you know what? I could probably live with that.

But I’m not an Excel freak. And I don’t know that there isn’t somebody in Research or Planning or Finance itself for whom the idea of moving from Excel elicits the same kind of cold-sweat fear that the thought of losing Photoshop does for me. They might have a different balance point for their value judgement of benefit vs. risk.

But… and this is a big but.. (I like bit buts, and I cannot lie…) the huge question still remains