No Ars Poetica ever created poets. Creative writing classes rarely generate novelists. Do “how-to-write-a-post” recommendations work better? Yes, for posts that report industry messages (how to best sell a soap, promote or describe the latest and greatest products or trends, etc.) – i.e. when “blogging” is the expanded version of an annotated PowerPoint presentation, mini-tutorials, or downsized versions of journalistic articles. Yet, while commoditized blogging represents the quasi-totality of today’s blog production, there are auteur-blogs, just as there are auteur-films. It’s the case of Dave Winer’s Scripting News.
Now and then, we come across posts that have an authentic literary quality. For me, one of the most remarkable and consistent authors, year after year, is Dave Winer. Last November, as he was wishing “Happy Thanksgiving everybody!”, as most every year since 1994, he gave me the very single reason why I have always liked reading what he writes, almost regardless of his subject matter: “Me,” he says, “I’m a mystic about What It All Means.”
Dave Winer’s posts are always based on a personal experience (what he sees, what he programs, what he expects, etc.); however, and contrary to the self-centered manner of a number of tech gurus, his self-centricity is that of a cameraman providing the perspective from which he is reporting what he sees or feels, thus setting up the decor and lighting as he invites you to explore. Self-centricity is by no means egotism. Dave Winer has a sizeable ego, sure, but really no more than most good writers actually have. He stands his ground. He has opinions on things or people with which one may not necessarily agree. And so what? Do we agree with everything great artists do or say? When people focus on “what it all means,” they are unlikely to build unanimity, and the demystification process that governs the investigation of things around us can come across as either paranoid or enlightening depending on where you stand. This art-of-writing from a viewpoint is the essence of literature. Literature-grade blogging is no exception.
As Matt Mullenweg said in his selection of 10 blogs that make you think, Dave Winer’s writings make you “think.” What does this really mean? The best response comes from Winer himself in a remarkable note about Julia Child, whom he views as a “natural-born blogger,” even though she wrote before the blogging era: “A blogger isn’t just someone who uses blogging software, at least not to me. A blogger is someone who takes matters into his or her own hands. Someone who sees a problem that no one is trying to solve, one that desperately needs solving, that begs to be solved, and because the tools are so inexpensive that they no longer present a barrier, they are available to the heroic individual. As far as I can tell, Julia Child was just such a person. Blogging software didn’t exist when she was pioneering, but it seems that if it did she would have used it.” In the same piece, he also mentions that “The story of the nobility of blogging largely remains, imho, untold,” a statement with which I also agree. I see two intertwined reasons to this: It is still a new genre and identifying the intrinsic characteristics of a new genre is always difficult.
People have started to write the history of blogging recently. One of the most detailed books may be Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. The book (which I discussed in an earlier post) reads like an epic about the blogosphere’s first protagonists. However, it is possible that the premium granted to early adopters may have hindered the actual positioning of blogging into a fully-fledged literary genre – and this for two main reasons:
– First, because of an easy confusion between the means and the content. Lots of people were early adopters of typewriters and certainly gained temporary fame because of it. Obviously, very few, if any, delivered a text comparable to Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (the first typewritten manuscript according to historian Darryl Rehr).
– Secondly, because of the customary association of any new genre with existing categories. Just as video initially came across of the poor relative of cinema, “blogging” has come to designate the act of writing virtually anything on the Web, and a substitute for or alternative to personal diaries, industry reporting, or news or opinion columns. If the “the story of the nobility of blogging remains largely untold,” it’s also because it’s rarely perceived as a fully-fledged genre, as an art form of its own.
The story of the nobility of blogging will be hard to come by and may take some time. Just think how hard it is to write the story of the nobility of poetry, essay, or novel. But maybe it’s possible to start to create a blog anthology organized along two of the main characteristics, that, in my opinion, drive the intrinsic quality of a blog, regardless of the topic:
– Authored by a real person. Blogs can be close to the diary genre, with clear differences, however. As in a diary entry, a post reflects the true feeling of a person, yet, and contrary to most diaries, the purpose of a blog may not be to simply vent one’s feelings, but rather to express a deep emotional engagement in experiences that are also of value to others. When blogs appeared in the mid-nineties, I had the distinct impression that blogging was a reincarnation of what the Beat generation had brought to the world, the pulse of a/the world through the mind of a writer. That’s why I like Dave Winer’s notion of a blogger as “heroic individual.”
– A person in quest of his/her own authenticity and identity. Great bloggers have a recognizable style from a linguistic standpoint, some form of artistic idiosyncrasy, regardless of the topic, that is hard to isolate. It conveys the sense of uniqueness of a writer in the process of self-definition through his/her writing. Lots of people write interesting things, and write them well, but they do so as implicit or explicit spokespersons of a magazine, a company, or the brand that they represent (including their own brand). The vast majority of bloggers wants to or must be consistent with the image they project or want to project rather than with who they are as individuals, and are abstractions of themselves. Again, what they say may be remarkable, but they express themselves as expected by their public/audience. Louis L’Amour or Zane Grey may be extraordinary novelists in the Western fiction genre, but they do not necessarily incarnate the nobility of novel-writing as Steinbeck does.
Dave Winer has a unique place in the history of blogging, as both a major contributor to the most fundamental technologies for online publication and as a major writer himself (with close to a thousand contributions since 1994). The transparent interaction between the mind of the technologist and of the writer creating technology as part of his communication process (which, according to me, started as early as his days at LivingVideoText with its concept of idea processor) did shape the history of blogging, and made blogging the most pervasive literary genre in the history of the all means of expression. Dave Winer has accumulated all the possible kudos as “The father of modern-day content distribution,” blogging, podcasting and RSS. I would venture to say that he is also definitely a part of what is often called “experimental literature” in this country, i.e. when writers change given forms and invent a whole new style – think of Joyce, Borgès, Cortázar.
Warner Bros Studios in Burbank : This past summer my son Gage and I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank. Unlike the glitzy Universal Studios Tours, at Warner they put you in an electric golf cart and drive you around the studios like a star, not a tourist. The tour was excellent and showcased much of what has made Warner so successful as both a movie studio and a television production company. We were told of Jack Warner‘s famous words that “if it can’t be used on screen, we are not spending one nickel on it.” One of the administrative buildings was constructed to look like a motel, others were built as a series of “houses” on a typical suburban street. They have appeared in countless movies and TV programs.
While frugal, Warner was not afraid to spend money on stars, or new technology. He blended pragmatism and business sense with a willingness to take risks when needed. The studio pioneered the move to “talkies” and later color. Television was viewed not as a threat, but an opportunity – with television production ultimately becoming as important as film to the studio.
But, as is too often the case, the Warner family did a poor job of planning for the future ownership and management of their business – in a hasty deal Jack Warner sold a majority of the company in 1966 to new owners who proceeded to first demote him from studio President to Vice President and then “flipped” their ownership of the studio a year later for twice what they paid for it. The subsequent owners wanted to run the business themselves and forced Jack Warner into retirement.
Mergers and Acquisitions: Since then Warner has almost continuously been involved in a series of spectacular, strange, and in several cases, disastrous mergers and acquisitions. It is a miracle that the core business of the studio continues to be successful while there has been so much craziness going on around it. It can be argued that the AOL acquisition of Time Warner in 2000 is the largest failure of a merger in business history.
Yet, it is important to note that Warner viewed the internet as an opportunity early on, as it did with sound, color, and television previously. Strategically, Warner was on the right track. But, its execution was a disaster. Warner never figured out how to leverage its ability to deliver content with the distribution channel and early lead AOL gave them on the internet. I won’t bother with another postmortem of this mind bending failure but rather point out that Warner had already seen this movie before.
In 1976 Warner was interested in expanding into new markets and acquired Atari. The fledgling business of video games had much in common with movie and television production and Warner recognized this before any of the other studios. Both were in the entertainment business and both were fueled by “hits” generated by creative and uniquely talented people. Warner’s infusion of cash helped Atari successfully move from video arcade systems into the home with the launch of its 2600 game console. Atari dominated both the home video game market and the arcade business in 1976 and 1977. But it wasn’t long before Warner management clashed with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, ultimately firing him in 1978. Ironically, while Bushnell recognized the limited lifespan of both games and the hardware they were running on, Warner management chose to milk the existing offerings for all they would yield. While Atari did go on to release subsequent game consoles and even home computers, none ever achieved the success of the original 2600.
Meeting with Minoru Arakawa: By chance I had the opportunity two years ago to meet the fournder and former President of Nintendo of America who ran the company’s US operations from 1980 until 2002. I told him that I had closely followed Atari because one of my best friends had worked there and then. He opened up and told me about some of the history between Nintendo and Atari. Nintendo had been importing and selling the Magnavox home game system from the US and had also built and sold several single-game devices for home use when Atari launched the 2600 system. Nintendo recognized the power and elegance of the 2600 especially its ability to use plug in cartridges to play an unlimited number of games. Nintendo turned its attention to the arcade market and Nintendo America’s initial focus in the US was the development and sales of arcarde machines. With its arcade hit Donkey Kong in 1981, Nintendo discussed licensing the game to Atari for it to port to all of its home consoles and computers. But Atari management could not reach an agreement with Nintendo and the game was licensed to another console maker, Coleco. Coleco released a version for the Atari 2600, but would not publish a version for Atari’s newer and more powerful 5200.
Interestingly, the release of Donkey Kong in 1982 on the Atari 2600 was a big hit and likely extended the life of the seven year old console for another year or so.
In 1983 Nintendo released its first general purpose home game console in Japan. After a slow start in the Japanese market, Nintendo approached Atari about a strategic relationship. This time, Nintendo proposed that Atari would sell the Nintendo console in North America under the Atari name. Negotiations ensued, but agreement could not be reached. Atari management was distracted by an insider trading scandal and pressure from Warner over mounting losses. Nintendo decided to go it alone and ultimately launched their console in the US with great success in 1985, the same year Warner called it quits and sold its remaining interest in Atari to Japanese arcade company Namco after selling off the home console and computer business to Jack Tramiel a year earlier.
Once again, Warner recognized a strategic opportunity brought on by new technology, only to completely blow the chance of profiting from it over the long run. I still have the Atari 2600 that my parents bought for me in 1976 as well as the PacMan and Donkey Kong game cartridges that run on it. It continues to work and I have occasionally played the games on it with my son. But without a doubt Nintendo has captured far more of my video game money over the years than Warner ever did and continues to do so as we buy new games for our Wii.
Jack Warner was the visionary force behind the early success of Warner Brothers and it can be argued that the strongest part of today’s Time Warner is the very part of the company still operating according to his legacy – the movie and tv studio. The challenge is how a company can carry on successfully exploiting new technology and new markets once its original guiding force has retired. The leaders of Nintendo in Japan and the US both retired in 2002 but left the company in good hands as evidenced by the huge success of the Wii under the leadership of a new group of managers at Nintendo.
Mark Vernon
More about Mark Vernon: Palo Alto-born Mark Vernon is the President & Chief Operating Officer at Ridge Vineyards, one of the most remarkable vineyards in California – and maybe in the world. Did he have anything to do with technology? Yes. A Berkeley and MIT graduate in business, he was one of the most efficient VP of Sales and Marketing I ever had, because he loved and breathed technology (he was my VP of Sales and Marketing at ACIUS/4D before, becoming its President/CEO when I left the company. Then he became the CEO of a specialized graphics software company, IsoDraw which licensed technology to Adobe, before joining Ridge Vineyards in 1998.
I was at Back Bay Station, waiting for the train to NYC when I noticed a young guy with the Cluetrain Manifesto in his hands. I couldn’t resist asking him of he liked it. “It’s old, but it’s great,” he responded enthusiastically, adding that the authors should give it a new title: “Welcome to the Social Web.” “It would be a bestseller,” he concluded peremptorily. He didn’t ask me if I even knew about it. At least, I thought, he isn’t one of the numerous entrepreneurs to whom I have to explain that a ten-year old book can still be a must-read. The train entered the station and we parted ways.
I loved the book when it came out. A few things annoyed me back then, especially the rhetorical artifice of numbering the key messages after Luther’s 95 theses, a cultural reference that I knew from the history books, but was not part of my intellectual makeup. Why associate a fundamental societal evolution, I wondered, with a religious movement – however transformative it may have been? The idea sounded to me like a positioning trick that was ultimately weakening a powerful vision – I should say the strong “claim” that the Web is the property of the people. Incidentally, I forgot about my reticence when I later discovered John Dvorak’s scathing critique in PC Magazine, stating that it was “an odd vision of an idealistic human-oriented internetworked new world/new economy [marching] forward.” Dvorak wrote this in 2002, just before the emergence of the social networks that are now part of our lives: Friendster and Meetup were created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, and many others in 2003, and Facebook was to receive its first investment from Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal (June 2004). Sometimes even great minds miss the train, and yes, we are in a “human-oriented internetworked new world/new economy.” Maybe not quite the way the authors anticipated it, as they could not really factor in the notion of social networks, but it’s true that markets are conversations, and that even though not all conversations are markets, something that the Cluetrain Manifesto does not say, it’s also clear that conversations are the bedrock of multiple markets – providing this invaluable “data” that all the Web estancias want to leverage to better target customers.
As this young entrepreneur was telling me that the Cluetrain Manifesto should be renamed, I realized that I would like to have a sequel of sorts to that book, focusing on the economic rules that govern social living on the Internet from the user’s standpoint– in other terms, a “socialnomics.” Erik Qualman with Socialnomics, an interesting book about which I wrote a post in September, is actually one of the few authors who has tried to tackle the topic. People contribute to the Web, and get back a lot from it. Could they get more? Qualman shows “how customers [could] get paid for their search efforts,” comparing the current search model with a socialnomic model. A few companies have tried to look into this early on (especially All-Advantage, in 1999 and whose slogan was “Get Paid to Surf the Web”). The most recent and prominent is Microsoft, by offering its Live Search Cashback in 2008 and its Bing model this year. As people feed search engines, a real fast and cheap – even free – Internet to users should also be on the table: that’s what Google is doing by subsidizing free wireless network access in 47 airports until January 15. But why not longer and everywhere? No matter how loud we claim to live in a world of free and how passionately pundits try to forget about the wallet of the average Joe, Web usage remains costly – yet, all the Web estancias do need the average Joes to keep on searching, bookmarking, surfing and talking!
In her book, The New How, Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy, published by O’Reilly, Nilofer Merchant addresses a difficult topic: the common discrepancy between what is called “strategy” in the one hand, and what is labeled “execution,” on the other. In between, you have what she calls the “air sandwich.” The gap is not new whatsoever. Most companies reproduce a multi-millenarian dichotomy between the people who think in the stratosphere and the rest of the humans, bound to deal with the day-to-day weather in the troposphere. Too bad, because that’s what is killing them from the inside! This book offers an extensive description of a devastating disease – but even better, a solid methodology to stop it.
Most strategies are doomed to fail from the start because of how they were formed. They are positioned as visions disconnected from implementation considerations – and therefore foster adhoc measures and improvisation. By erring on the side of the “vision,” modern “strategists” have moved away from what military leaders of the past (no way to avoid the etymology of “strategy”) never failed to take into account: building a strategy is all about coordinating soldiers/teams that are fully committed and responsible, interrelating actions and operations as well as anticipating potential problems and making adjustments – and “All this needs to happen before execution,” Nilofer emphasizes. That’s what strategy creation means, regardless of the domain. While Nilofer keeps away from any military analogy (always hastily associated with an antiquated “command and control” organizational schema), she still offers a revealing definition of the word strategy: ” simply put,” she writes, “a strategy is a way to win.”
The book shows how to rebuild and realign the connective pieces and synergies that drive successful businesses, i.e.:
How people can engage with one another and create value together.
How collaborative planning must rely on an efficient framework.
How small acts rather than big announcements transform company cultures for the best.
“Incorporating collaboration into the company’s dynamic” is not a pompous motto that comes from the top and fades away as you get lower into the hierarchy, but each employee’s personal responsibility: “Think about your work not in terms of what you do, but in terms of the role you play. Your role is not just your title, but includes sets of behaviors, tools, and approaches to create value for and with your organization.” By becoming aware of their roles, people are able to create strategies collaboratively and move faster towards creating meaningful business solutions and improving business performance. The book provides a detailed methodology for collaborative efficiency, the Collaborative strategy process framework, with a thorough description of each of the phases and practical recommendations within each phase. Beware the politically correctkumbayas, and learn about Nilofer’s colorful phrases such as “MurderBoarding,” i.e. “the art of killing off even worthy ideas,” for It’s not just the weak ideas that get killed; good options or ideas at the wrong time also need to go.”
Each page has a show and tell feel that will prod you to want to enact the “new how” and evolve. You may be inclined to brag about your innumerable “personal accomplishments.” But are you really a leader, able to “facilitate as much as you decide, catalyze as much as you act, and coach as much as you direct?” Maybe not… This book explains how you can transform yourself into a collaborative leader capable of making things happen within your organization. Leadership within a company entails employeeship – the “Medarbetarskap” of the Swedes. “Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy” relies upon the ability of individuals to rethink their personal development: this book gives the practical recommendations that enable employees to reinvent themselves and find purpose at work.
A must read. A very serious book with a lot of humor. Abundant and excellent illustrations by business cartoonist Hugh MacLeod! Here is one of my favorites:
I had lunch with Dominique Gibert earlier this week at one of my favorite Parisian haunts, the Brasserie Lipp, Boulevard Saint-Germain.
Dominique is the founder of Diateino, the French publisher of Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Reality Check as well as of Seth Godin’s Tribes, three books that I translated for her. She had asked Guy to help her find the “best translator” for The Art of the Start. Guy having known me for a long time (we co-founded ACIUS – now 4D – in 1987), I was to be the designee. Writing books had been my favorite occupation until I started 4D in France, but sometimes Friendship oblige, and although I had the hectic schedule of running a company in full swing (Brixlogic), I agreed to undertake my first translation as a night-and-week-end activity.
What you “lose in translation” is made up for by what you actually gain: Dominique’s style on the phone (I only met her in person after the book was actually published) was a big part in my decision. She loved the book for the right reasons. She had attended the Stanford Professional Publishing Course and Guy Kawasaki had presented The Art of the Start. Of course, this was a “wow” experience for her, and when I asked her what impressed her the most about Guy, she responded that it was the ability of “a unique personality to deliver a truly universal message.” She was speaking of a dear friend in terms that resonated with me. She was not telling me “Guy is Guy,” a tautological statement that I have sometimes heard from clueless groupies or self-declared thought-leaders. Instead, she was positioning in just a few words Guy’s “competitive advantage” against the dozens of regular Joe’s who go at great lengths to be special and only end up spinning their personal idiosyncrasies. On top of that, I liked the fact that immediately after the speech, she had bought the book, read it and was advocating for its translation for a valid reason. She told me something around the following lines: “I understand English reasonably well. I believe I can say that I understood everything, except, maybe, for a few idioms or jokes here and there, but I also believe that even if many French entrepreneurs understand English, they can’t own the message as well in a foreign language as they would if they could read it in French. There is a difference between ‘understanding’ the words and being able to really ‘feel’ what they mean.” She was so right! We are so accustomed to think that many things are “lost in translation” that we often forget what we may also miss when reading a text in a foreign language: we don’t memorize quite as much or as easily as in our native tongue; it takes us more time to extrapolate from what we read, connect the dots, adapt the message to our daily environment and eventually act upon that message. Yes, understanding a message is one thing, being able to live it is a whole different story.
Entrepreneurship, a business and a cause: Making the decision to acquire the rights of The Art of the Start was an entrepreneurial act in itself. Dominique had been a legal analyst and consultant for twenty years, as well as the CEO of a legal publishing company when she decided to create a company to publish the books that she wanted to read. She already had a few titles in her catalogue, including a bestseller, Les Techniques du Succès (available in China and India), but “it so happened,” she said, “that The Art of the Start was something I needed as an entrepreneur myself. And I couldn’t possibly be the only person with such a need. Sure, there were a lot of books ‘made in France’ about creating a company, but there was nothing, similar to The Art of the Start– or to Reality Check. We have good books here, but somehow the entrepreneurship spirit is often missing or all the reasons why you can be enthusiastic about starting a business seem to be crushed by piles of warnings and explanations about French regulations, and tons academic recommendations.” Guy’s books are straightforward and uplifting. Dominique was well aware that she might face some challenge promoting an American book in a country inclined to wonder if words from the Silicon Valley could truly be heard in Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux or Brest – in short, in a country that invented the word “entrepreneur” in the 18th century, yet also fathered Chauvin, a soldier in the Napoleon’s “Grande Armée,” whose existence is associated to the word “chauvinism.”
Dominique did win her fight and Kawasaki’s books have become the vademecums of thousands and thousands of French entrepreneurs who realize that they have the same dreams and the same needs as any entrepreneur anywhere in the world. Entrepreneurship is Dominique’s cause and helping others her goal – and because of her, I end up looking at translating a few great books as a way to give back to the country where I was born.
If you read French, take a look at Diateino’s interesting catalogue: http://www.diateino.com. If you do not read French, are a francophile or want to make a lovely gift, Diateino published a book in English Say Chic to Say it in French (published in the United States by Simon and Schuster).
“Most Fortune 100 Companies Don’t Get Twitter” – this statement referring a study published on Mashable intrigued me enough to write this article. This study was conducted by Weber Shandwick and presented a report on how well Fortune 100 companies use Twitter. The stats led to conclude that a majority of these companies have yet to come up with a consistent methodology to leverage Twitter to its fullest. For example: Fortune 100 Twitter Accounts: 540; Fortune 100 companies on Twitter : 73; Followers:50% had less than 500; Activity / Frequency: 76% posted fewer than 500 tweets; Inactivity: 15% were placeholder / inactive accounts.
Twitter offers a clear opportunity for companies to convert their employees into evangelists. While this is true, there is huge amount of risk involved, if resources are not managed using systematic and coherent processes. This alone may explain why many companies still do not have an active Twitter account.
To efficiently use Twitter, companies need a centralized platform that provides complete visibility and accountability into the performance, be it of individual resources, functions, or the strategies that have been adopted. At the same time, the platform must allow for easy collaboration, increased productivity and result-orientation in team settings.
Twitter is a simple communication channel. And the strategies that making effective use of Twitter should be straightforward. Instead of jumping into execution, if companies adopt the simple framework of Plan -> Execute -> Learn -> Optimize, then not only can effectiveness be measured, but the knowledge gathered throughout the process can also be used for repeatable success.
PLAN: Companies need to determine the purpose of being on Twitter, and define Campaigns that communicate this purpose to their followers. There should be clear plan on:
1. Campaign definitions;
2. Start and end dates of a campaign;
3. Goals and expected returns from each campaign.
If the purpose is to create brand awareness, a company can create campaigns to send out product updates, webinar announcements and industry news. A campaign should have a related goal that can be measured. In this example, for product updates campaigns, the goals could be to maximize exposure, which can be measured through retweet information. Or for a webinar announcement campaign, the goal could be to increase visits to the registration page, and this can be measured through click-through rates on the URLs that drive traffic to website.
Once, campaigns are identified and goals are set, a company is ready for an effective execution strategy.
EXECUTE: Companies should use solutions that allow them to execute strategies tied closely to the plan. Execution becomes focused and result-oriented, when there is a plan in place and goal in view.
A good execution strategy should allow for the creation of different variations of the messages that bring them close to their goals. For example, if the goal for a campaign is get more traffic to the website, then it is key to share your content with the URL to your website more frequently, and at times when there is more traffic. Companies should use a solution that provides answers to the following questions before and after any execution:
1. What channels to use?
2. Should the message be tweaked for different channels?
3. What is the right frequency of updates?
4. Do day/time matter and differ depending on the channel?
5. What is the right content?
Campaign-based execution should be flexible, and modifiable as there is new learning about the campaign.
LEARN: There are facts, and then there are insights. A good solution should not only provide good visibility into stats but, also actionable insights. For example, a solution should provide the following insights based of just the clicked-through data:
1. Average click-through per post, for the campaign (so, you can compare two campaigns);
2. Most and least popular posts in the campaign (so, you see why?);
3. HeatMap of the best day and time of the day for a campaign (like, Monday 2-4 pm);
4. Channel wise distribution, and demography information.
And, instead of returning a list when monitoring keywords about brand or a product, a good solution should provide the following insights:
1. Who are the Influencers or Amplifiers?
2. Who are the Promoters or Detractors?
3. What is the Net Promoter Score?
4. What is the context and sentiment?
Actionable insights are important as they allow for redefining the campaign goals, and also modify execution strategy.
OPTIMIZE: The most important question that should get answered is “Is my twitter strategy working?” As a result of your campaigns, you may have received a large number of followers, or got significant exposure. But, you need to verify if these are relevant to your business. If they are, you have the winning strategy. If not, use the feedback to identify the gaps, tweak your campaigns and redefine your campaign goals.
With the right strategy and execution plan, companies can indeed brace themselves for a steady growth in their business via social media. Companies should not be “Twueless”, a word that Guy Kawasaki coined in his take on the study, but rational (“objective”) using a simple strategy that works. And ask this question more often than not: “Is my company effectively using Twitter? “
Amita Paul
Amita is the founder/CEO of ObjectiveMarketer, which is an integrated platform with the above principles inherent in its design. It is a centralized solution that allows enterprises to implement strategies via campaigns. The product features several innovative solutions for marketers to engage with their audience with elaborate landing pages, and polls integration with the tweets. The architecture of the product allows for multi-tenant participation, with the whole idea of “work less, work effective”.
Alain Calefas, Serenity Valleyfounder, with Michel Serres at DBF, a networking organization for French entrepreneurs, on November 2, 2009. That day, Alain Calefas was interviewed by Jean-Louis Gassée (who co-founded DBF in 1994).
Alain Calefas graduated from the French Ecole Polytechnique, arguably one of the most elitist schools in Europe. To get in, you have to excel academically – period. But when you combine intellectual acumen and a desire to live life to the hilt, you have Alain Calefas. His first passion was Marine Engineering, so from Paris, he went to Berkeley – and fell so much in love with Northern California that he stayed… To accommodate this passion as quickly as possible, he decided to manage two “boulangeries,” a fairly novel idea at the time (in the mid-eighties, the Valley was not nearly as sophisticated as it is today in the food department). But granted, the enterprise wasn’t really scalable. So, reason winning over passion, Alain went back to Europe where he headed innovation and strategic investments at Rhône-Poulenc for four years. “A great experience,” he says, yet frustrating at times. No matter how hard large corporations may try, the truth of the matter is that you can’t generate inventors by simply asking people to become ones.” But you can always reinvent yourself and that’s what Alain did at a time he was on track for prestigious corporate positions.
So Alain went back to the sea and, finally, ended up on the firm land, discovering as many did in the early nineties the complex rubble of the ex-Soviet Union as well as the places of his ancestors, realizing through rich personal experiences that whatever you do, what matters is the quality of the relationship that you build with people. In fact, “I really understood that despite my natural bent towards science and high-tech, people are what mattered the most to me.” So when he came back to Paris, he created a variety of businesses that went well, bars, restaurants, and even a clothing store. Living in Paris again, though, made him miss his favorite place: Northern California – and he moved back in 1997. High tech was booming, but this time, what he wanted most was a place to settle and he bought 65 acres in Pescadero, which he transformed into a spectacular botanical garden and one of the most remarkable places you can imagine to host events (from business retreats to weddings) just on Silicon Valley’s doorstep: Serenity Valley.
Business retreats often take us to great resorts, yet sometimes so far away from home that they often feel like just another business trip. Worse, these places are sometimes so abstractly international, with the same types of lithographs on the walls, the same style of furniture, the same manicured patches of garden that nobody looks at, that nothing stimulates the brain. So business retreats are just business as usual, or the nicest entertaining events a “unique” experience that clones the previous one and foreshadows the next. Oppositely, Serenity Valleyis a phenomenal expanse of nature where ecological balance means what it is, an ever-changing dynamics that fosters the ability for people to rebuild and reinvent themselves, without straining themselves. The ability to breathe is sometimes the first step to be able to think!
Incidentally also, when your host has traveled the world, is an amazing connoisseur in food, wines and art, it’s an out-of-this-world experience to just be next door.
About two weeks ago, everybody was talking about the amazing discovery that a painting catalogued as German, early 19th century, by Christie’s in 1998 and offered for $19,000 was an unknown Leonardo da Vinci worth a fortune. How can the experts be now so sure? “Start with instinct, then try a multispectral scanner (from Lumiere Technology), said Timothy Clifford in Time Online. Read this great story as well as the report by Lumiere Technology. And also look at the painting – with Zoomorama (a product that l quite often use on this blog).
The truth of the matter is that over a year ago, Zoomorama published the painting, not yet certified, as a “Profile di Bella Principessa” (Profile of the Beautiful Princess), courtesy of Jean Penicaut, CEO Lumiere Technology, who wanted to show the world the quality of this painting in 80M pixels.
I will dedicate a post to Zoomorama over the next few weeks. It’s not for rare pieces of art only. It’s for anybody who wants to convey a reality-like look-and-feel to any picture – and any item for sale on the Web.
salesforce (with a lowercase as was the mania at the turn of the century) is, of course, a major industry success, but also the symbol of a timely, intelligent strategy adjustment at a time of crisis and craziness, the dot.com bust. Great ideas and products that are useful to people always manage to weather bad storms. Sure, Marc Benioff, the CEO founder of the company must have freaked out at the 2001 meltdown, but he lost neither his cool nor his faith on his “End of software” motto (a striking way to impose the then novel software as a service — SaaS — model). His obstinacy paid off: The company went public in June 2004. “Yeah,” as the song goes, “there’s a big blue sky waiting just behind the clouds.”
Not all entrepreneurs have Marc’s chutzpah, but his 111 recommendations to entrepreneurs will all be extremely precious to anyone. Sure, you may not dispatch a commando unit on bicycle to circle the Los Angeles Convention Center at a Microsoft launch event and instead settle for less spectacular tactics, but the message is clear: if you are an underdog, you can’t be too subtle either, and you have to find a way to force the big guys into adopting your message. Regardless of who they are. Frankly, when Tom Siebel from Siebel Systems started to talk about software-as-a-service after he acquired Upshot, most of us smiled at the recollection that only two years before, Siebel had been repeating that SaaS was the type of stuff for dot.com kids. “Don’t fear competition: welcome it and leverage it,” Marc concludes – provided, though, that you keep it under tight control.
And you do so by maintaining an all-out high energy level. High energy (sometimes high voltage) is the tone of the book. It has a lot to do with Marc’s personal style. But guess what? Low-energy doesn’t work. So find what your own high-energy level can be, and make sure that your employees and your customers turn into fervent evangelists of the company anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, enjoy dozens of great anecdotes. (Well, Hawaiian shirts aren’t necessarily the hottest tickets in Ireland.)
There is one section of the book I especially like: The Corporate Philanthropy Playbook. This section is a must read for entrepreneurs of for-profit companies, of course, but also for any executive director of any foundation who does not want a foundation to stagnate or simply “survive”: “Innovative nonprofits have historically achieved true sustainability by embracing a revenue-generating business model.”
Great book. Very well worded (no siliconite verbiage), co-authored with an excellent writer, Carlye Adler.
Earlier this week, I had the privilege of delivering an introductory speech for a great product, ObjectiveMarketer, in front of remarkable executives and CIOs from the European Institutions hosted by Cisco Systems. It’s always a challenge to speak to an extraordinarily knowledgeable audience that is well versed in both technologies and trends, but it is also a rewarding experience. Below is a summary of my presentation.
I focused on the fact that social media are the very essence of the Internet, and in many ways, its revenge. The expression “Social Media” was coined by Chris Shipley fairly recently, in 2004 (BlogOn 2004), when she announced a conference designed to explore the rising business opportunities in blogging and social networking to be held in July at Berkeley’s Haas Business School. Blogging that had started in the mid-1990’s was blooming left and right, and social networks were becoming the talk of the town. Friendster and Meetup had been created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, and many others in 2003, and Facebook (albeit still unknown) was to receive its first investment of US$500,000 from Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal (June 2004). As we all know, since that time, the number of social networks has increased considerably. There are hundreds of them. The short list of the major ones provided by Wikipedia includes about 160 sites. When you add up the number of members of the seven biggest social networks, you easily pass the one billion users. The number of social networks users is way higher than the number of Internet users (approximately 1.67 billion people worldwide), which is not surprising as each individual can have several social network personas.
While such massive emergence of social networks comes right after the dotcom bust, it’s by no means a comparable phenomenon. It’s the expression of what Internet was from day one, a place where people wanted to express themselves whose voices were somewhat hijacked by the dotcom hysteria — and only waiting to break loose. In short, social media as we know them today are the revenge of the Internet.
Social networking was the raison d’être of the Internet – and actually predated it. In the early eighties, multiple efforts to optimize the interconnection of computer networks (initially started by RAND Corporation in the fifties to facilitate cooperation between its research teams in Pennsylvania and California) came to fruition, and the need to unify communication protocols led to the adoption of TCP/IP in 1982 — along with the definition of the word “Internet.” However, Internet or not, technology-enabled interconnections of geographically dispersed people had already started to expand beyond research organizations, reaching sundry university groups. The first real structured social networks appeared with the first NewsGroups: Usenet was conceived in 1979 by two students from Duke University. Discussion groups multiplied: in 1981, Ira Fuchs created BITNET (acronym of “Because It’s Time Network”) for liberal arts professors, and by 1984, it was connecting over 150 campuses. In 1986, Eric Thomas, then a student at l’Ecole centrale de Paris, invented LISTSERV, an automated mailing list manager that enabled users to join a list without the need for human administration; this introduced the concept of a list owner.
Throughout the eighties, services proliferated. User forums sprang left and right on CompuServe, and in the course of the nineties, everybody progressively adopted the Word Wide Web, a system of interlinked documents using TCP/IP, that Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Cailliau had set up in 1989/1990 to enable researchers at the CERN to share information. The increase of Internet users expanded and modernized the concept of NewsGroups. That’s the key to the success of companies such as eGroups, started in 1997: eGroups had 18 millions users when they were acquired by Yahoo! in August 2000 and integrated within Yahoo! Groups — itself launched in 1998. The eGroups phenomenon prefaced the explosion of social networks that we know today. The Internet is “the human voice rediscovered,” as The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual summarized ten years ago. The renewed interest in Social Media is the opportunity to re-read another important book, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary where Eric Raymond expanded on his remarks at the Linux Kongress in Würzburg in 1997. These two books are echoed and updated in multiple interesting recent books, such as Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, and Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business (1).
Social media are not a fad. Nobody will ever stop billions of voices. The July 2009 Ruder Finn Intent Index (1) provides interesting statistics: 76% of Internet users go online to discuss. When, on the other hand, you see that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and that only 14% trust advertisements, it’s clear that we have entered an era that will mandate a radical transformation of the way companies do business. While the majority of companies still cling to a top-down communication model with their potential customers, consumers trust the opinion of their extended families, their networks. Therefore companies now have to start learning how to reach the heart and mind of an increasingly hard-to-categorize “consumer,” an individual whose identity is spread across multiple personas. The rules are changing. We are quickly moving away from a world where access to companies by people is filtered by marketing departments and PR, to a world where this access is filtered by social networks. As a result, companies face serious challenges.
Twelve years ago IT departments didn’t want to hear about transactional websites. Therefore, e-commerce ended up in the lap of marketing departments. Today, social networks challenge marketers. They have to find qualified social media professionals to help out, which may not be easy when departments are stuck with antiquated criteria. They may hire consultants, but even the best consultants on the planet will have limited impact if corporate habits don’t change at the same time: the reality is that social media mandates that it becomes part of the company’s culture to empower and trust employees (how could unhappy employees safely converse with customers?). Marketing must start inside; every employee must turn into a potential evangelist. This may give a few headaches to traditional marketers, but the example of a few forward-thinking companies shows that the current trend is irreversible.
To scale their efforts, these companies need novel supportive technologies. Currently, numerous personal productivity tools are available. We are starting to see a few enterprise products capable of “listening to” customers. Yet, what is also critically needed is the ability to structure the way to talk to customers, as well as to measure the relevancy and the impact of the way you address them. This is precisely what ObjectiveMarketer, founded by Amita Paul, was designed to do. I am happy to work with her as an advisor — along with a friend of mine, Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of the most extraordinary online magazine rack, Alltop. Amita presented ObjectiveMarketer and I can only encourage you to try this remarkable product! (3)
No Ars Poetica ever created poets. Creative writing classes rarely generate novelists. Do “how-to-write-a-post” recommendations work better? Yes, for posts that report industry messages (how to best sell a soap, promote or describe the latest and greatest products or trends, etc.) – i.e. when “blogging” is the expanded version of an annotated PowerPoint presentation, mini-tutorials, or downsized versions of journalistic articles. Yet, while commoditized blogging represents the quasi-totality of today’s blog production, there are auteur-blogs, just as there are auteur-films. It’s the case of Dave Winer’s Scripting News.
Warner Bros Studios
In 1976 Warner was interested in expanding into new markets and acquired Atari. The fledgling business of video games had much in common with movie and television production and Warner recognized this before any of the other studios. Both were in the entertainment business and both were fueled by “hits” generated by creative and uniquely talented people. Warner’s infusion of cash helped Atari successfully move from video arcade systems into the home with the launch of its 2600 game console. Atari dominated both the home video game market and the arcade business in 1976 and 1977. But it wasn’t long before Warner management clashed with Atari founder 
In 1983 Nintendo released its first general purpose home game console in Japan. After a slow start in the Japanese market, Nintendo approached Atari about a strategic relationship. This time, Nintendo proposed that Atari would sell the Nintendo console in North America under the Atari name. Negotiations ensued, but agreement could not be reached. Atari management was distracted by an insider trading scandal and pressure from Warner over mounting losses. Nintendo decided to go it alone and ultimately launched their console in the US with great success in 1985, the same year Warner called it quits and sold its remaining interest in Atari to Japanese arcade company Namco after selling off the home console and computer business to 
I was at Back Bay Station, waiting for the train to NYC when I noticed a young guy with the 
In her book, 
Most strategies are doomed to fail from the start because of how they were formed. They are positioned as visions disconnected from implementation considerations – and therefore foster adhoc measures and improvisation. By erring on the side of the “vision,” modern “strategists” have moved away from what military leaders of the past (no way to avoid the etymology of “strategy”) never failed to take into account: building a strategy is all about coordinating soldiers/teams that are fully committed and responsible, interrelating actions and operations as well as anticipating potential problems and making adjustments – and “All this needs to happen before execution,” Nilofer emphasizes. That’s what strategy creation means, regardless of the domain. While Nilofer keeps away from any military analogy (always hastily associated with an antiquated “command and control” organizational schema), she still offers a revealing definition of the word strategy: ” simply put,” she writes, “a strategy is a way to win.” 
“Incorporating collaboration into the company’s dynamic” is not a pompous motto that comes from the top and fades away as you get lower into the hierarchy, but each employee’s personal responsibility: “Think about your work not in terms of what you do, but in terms of the role you play. Your role is not just your title, but includes sets of behaviors, tools, and approaches to create value for and with your organization.” By becoming aware of their roles, people are able to create strategies collaboratively and move faster towards creating meaningful business solutions and improving business performance. The book provides a detailed methodology for collaborative efficiency, the Collaborative strategy process framework, with a thorough description of each of the phases and practical recommendations within each phase. Beware the politically correct kumbayas, and learn about Nilofer’s colorful phrases such as “MurderBoarding,” i.e. “the art of killing off even worthy ideas,” for It’s not just the weak ideas that get killed; good options or ideas at the wrong time also need to go.”
Each page has a show and tell feel that will prod you to want to enact the “new how” and evolve. You may be inclined to brag about your innumerable “personal accomplishments.” But are you really a leader, able to “facilitate as much as you decide, catalyze as much as you act, and coach as much as you direct?” Maybe not… This book explains how you can transform yourself into a collaborative leader capable of making things happen within your organization. Leadership within a company entails employeeship – the “Medarbetarskap” of the Swedes. “Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy” relies upon the ability of individuals to rethink their personal development: this book gives the practical recommendations that enable employees to reinvent themselves and find purpose at work.
So Alain went back to the sea and, finally, ended up on the firm land, discovering as many did in the early nineties the complex rubble of the ex-Soviet Union as well as the places of his ancestors, realizing through rich personal experiences that whatever you do, what matters is the quality of the relationship that you build with people. In fact, “I really understood that despite my natural bent towards science and high-tech, people are what mattered the most to me.” So when he came back to Paris, he created a variety of businesses that went well, bars, restaurants, and even a clothing store. Living in Paris again, though, made him miss his favorite place: Northern California – and he moved back in 1997. High tech was booming, but this time, what he wanted most was a place to settle and he bought 65 acres in Pescadero, which he transformed into a spectacular botanical garden and one of the most remarkable places you can imagine to host events (from business retreats to weddings) just on Silicon Valley’s doorstep: 
Business retreats often take us to great resorts, yet sometimes so far away from home that they often feel like just another business trip. Worse, these places are sometimes so abstractly international, with the same types of lithographs on the walls, the same style of furniture, the same manicured patches of garden that nobody looks at, that nothing stimulates the brain. So business retreats are just business as usual, or the nicest entertaining events a “unique” experience that clones the previous one and foreshadows the next. Oppositely, 
About two weeks ago, everybody was talking about the amazing discovery that a painting catalogued as German, early 19th century, by Christie’s in 1998 and offered for $19,000 was an unknown Leonardo da Vinci worth a fortune. How can the experts be now so sure? “Start with instinct, then try a multispectral scanner (from 
