Books related to social media marketing keep coming out. The truth is that even if Internet and social media marketing aren’t new, the information needs for marketing managers are huge: the more they read, the faster they will get the immersion feel enabling them to move from a tactical use of social media to a strategic management of social media campaigns.
Not all books are equally valuable, though. Count Facebook Marketing an hour a day by Chris Treadaway (@ctreada) and Mari Smith (@MariSmith) among the great ones. Unpretentious and practical, it takes you by the hand and shows you how Facebook can work for you, as an individual with a personal practice, or as a social “editor-in-chief” for your company. Even if you believe that you already “know” a lot, read this book as it’s quite possible that you might not yet be taking full advantage of what you “know.”
The first chapter is one of the simplest and best written short history of Internet Marketing I have seen in a while; it summarizes how customer targeting is quickly evolving towards building up coherent sets of motivated and intention-driven social commerce addressees, and takes you to the second chapter on what Facebook is: a platform that brings people to real or virtual places or stores based on who they are, what they like, or what they are looking for. In other words, people who have described themselves in their own terms. Based on this understanding of the potential of Facebook as a sales and marketing platform, you are able to define your “social media product,” because “the social media presence is, in effect, an interactive online product.” Promoting or positioning this “product” requires a structured view of your social media project, so start with the beginning: Create a campaign. Facebook Marketing is one of the few books reminding you of this simple, yet critical concept of “campaign”: it’s what kicks off the entire work process and your operational plan.
Chapters 4 to 7 take you through a month-by-month (as well as week-by-week and day-by-day) planning and execution plan. This is yet another real plus of this book: the authors are hands-on practitioners sincerely willing to transfer their own experience and turn you into empowered, rather than dogmatic, professionals. Because measurable success will not come overnight. It’s the result of an iterative process composed of a collection of adjustments, experiments, and reassessments. “Remember,” the authors warn, “these projects involve a lot of trials and errors.” So, generally speaking, no matter how convinced you may be that you are cutting edge, always temper your own expectations, don’t over-promise, and measure impact and results like crazy.
The last three chapters offer a variety of tips and advice – from leveraging Facebook apps to picking up the right people and vendors – and invite you to remain on the look out. Facebook has quickly become a marketing power-kingdom. Continued learning will be part of your continued success. Incidentally, keep abreast with the authors’ sites and wisdom.
Note: The authors mention a few software products at the end of the book, including ObjectiveMarketer, a company for which I am a Board Member. The platform specifically focuses on the end-to-end management of social media campaigns- from the planning stage across a team to the distribution across multiple media channels, all the way to the analytics evaluating the effectiveness of messages.
Diateino, the French publisher of Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Reality Check as well as and Seth Godin’s Tribes, will release the French translation of Seth Godin’s Linchpin on May 2o. This time, I was not the translator, but I wrote a preface that is available on the Diateino blog. Here below is the English translation of my text.
Seth Godin has written a dozen books within the last ten years, that read like epistles of sorts – short conversational treatises in which he urges company founders, managers, and marketers in simple terms to create and promote out-of-the-ordinary products, to select their targets insightfully, turn strangers into friends and friends into customers. Book after book, his message has become more personal, more humanist. This has lead to Linchpin, which the author said in an interview in Anvers is his last book. Even more than in Tribes, his tone is that of an exhortation, and in the “last word” conclusion of the book, he sounds like a facilitator for a conversation where the Buddhist prajña meets Kabbalistic balance. “The result of getting back in touch with our pre-commercial selves will actually create a post-commercial world that feeds us, enriches us, and gives us the stability we’ve been seeking for so long.”
“Is it really the ‘last word’ of one of the biggest marketing gurus?” you might ask, “and is it what marketing is about?” Yes it is. For there are two types of marketing:
1) Mass marketing that harps prosaic messages for insignificant products offered to ordinary people, and for which schools train legions of average students whose personal goal is to do what they are told to do and then get back home, put on their slippers and watch TV.
2) Inspired marketing that addresses early adopters, plugged-in folks, geeks, and enthusiasts, and that tells stories about products or people you feel like discovering and events in which you want to participate.
Mass marketing doesn’t inspire. But inspired marketing can generate massive success. That’s the case of Seth Godin himself, actually. His blog is one of the most read marketing blogs in the world. Several million people have bought or downloaded one or more of his books. If you have never heard him in public, just go to YouTube and click on any video. Even a non-English-speaker will immediately get a feel of what an inspired marketer is about: someone who emboldens you to act, whatever you had in mind to do – buy or sell a product, or invite your neighbors to join a fundraising for a sick child. Inspired marketing is transformational; it makes you find out about new things and new people – as well as find about your own self. It urges you to ask yourself the right questions, as unsettling as they may be, such as, for instance: “Am I indispensable?”
This book is for people who want to be more than “faceless cog[s] in the machinery of capitalism” (the “factory”), as well as executives who understand that they need more than “two teams” (”management and labor”) to make an impact on people’s lives, those who intend to create “a third team, composed of “linchpins.” That is, a group of people who, through their leadership and their drive, “can invent, connect, create and make things happen.” “Linchpins are the essential blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations. They don’t bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.” As was the case of Tribes, this book sits in between several genres: it’s a socio-political pamphlet, a manifesto for individual and interpersonal development, and a call for a new workplace.
The book starts with a reference to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations that focuses on the division of labor. Yes, “what factory owners want is an available set of compliant, low-paid, replaceable cogs to run their efficient machines.” But “great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.” So unlock the genius in you. Interact with people, because you can’t be a linchpin alone in your corner. Inspire. Be pragmatic with artistry, and invent new rules that will make you succeed, and with you, the colleagues and the companies that leverage your talent.
Linchpinis for those whose aspirations can be invigorated, who want to rebuild a sort of personal unity and express a positive energy through a job they like or a cause in which they believe. If you want to be a linchpin, if you are a linchpin, if you can firmly say that you are indispensable, if dozens, thousands are like you, people wanting to connect to make things happen, if you are one of the linchpins within a generalized insurrection of talents… what will happen? The end of pointless “factories.”
Seth Godin‘s contagious optimism and fervent iconoclasm remind me of one of the most fascinating assailant of the concept of factory, the Russian Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), who similarly invited his contemporaries to read again The Wealth of Nations‘ first chapter, in his Fields, Factories and Workshops. Their ultimate goal is quite similar: revive the artist in you, or something of “the artist who formerly found aesthetic enjoyment in the work of his hands,” but was replaced by a “human slave of an iron slave.” Both advocate novel “integral education” to help reshape a different future. This future varies based on any thinker’s present. In our time, the future will be designed by the change agents that Seth Godin calls the “linchpins,” because they will build a world where “dignity, humanity, and generosity” intersect.
This book is not a theorist’s work. It’s the book of a man who calls for action without cluttering your brain with literary references. Don’t get it wrong, though! This is also the book of an extraordinarily cultivated author, who has obviously read and analyzed with a modern perspective the masterpieces he mentions in his remarkable bibliography.
Less than a year ago, it was all about conversations. Now, the word “conversation” is used with a pinch of salt. People finally admit that Twitter is more of a broadcast channel, as was clear from the extensive analysis (What is Twitter, as Social Networks or a News Media?) provided by Korean researchers, Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon at the World Wide Web (WWW) in Raleigh NC at the end of April – a study that has been reported by multiple publications since then. At the end of last week, I had an informal meeting with a newly formed social media group in which one man, the skeptic of the gang, had seen the report and asked somewhat provocatively to his colleagues: “What comes next, now that “conversation” is not what we should focus on?”
“You focus on social media itself, and what you want to accomplish,” was my response. “Conversations” may happen, but it’s only one aspect (not the most scalable one) of a broader program, the art of engaging – a much more relevant word that Brian Solis quite conveniently pushed towards the lime-lights with his book Engage! (See my post about it in March).
Engaging encompasses multiple levels and forms of direct or indirect interactions with customers, as well as the ability to facilitate communication of customers among themselves without your direct, heavy-handed participation (more often than not, it’s a better way to really know what’s wrong with your product, what people expect, what they love or hate about you). Twitter is only one of multiple means by which to connect with customers – and it does make sense to take advantage of the fact that it is a broadcast architecture. You can broadcast more often, and, leveraging the talents of a larger number of employees, you can broadcast more human messages. The point is to know what you want to say, whom you empower to tweet and how you train your people to express in their own words what the company’s mission is about, and how well they evangelize customers by expressing something they themselves believe in. So, the more you broadcast, the better! Then, leveraging social media means managing all campaigns end-to-end to know at all times which messages resonate best, and identify your most effective messengers within and without. If what you have to say as a company is interesting, your internal buzz agents will enable their followers to carry out the good word. Why do you think Twitter is doing well on good causes messages? Because good causes create good messages.
In the eighties, IT folks and executives had qualms about providing desktop computers to their employees – the idea of empowering them boiled down to relinquishing command and control. Yet, the world didn’t stop turning. The accelerated rise of social media poses a similar problem, albeit much larger by an order of magnitude, because this time employees and customers didn’t ask anybody for the permission to show their power. So, either you try to fight it (with virtually no chance of winning), or you realize that you too can leverage social media, understand what Open leadership is about, and “how social technology can transform the way you lead,” in just the same way people understood how social media technology would enable them to stand up in your face.
The book “is about how leaders must let go to gain more,” “open leadership” being defined as “having the confidence and the humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals.” The task is not easy, and Charlene is well aware that calls from various management experts for leaders to remodel their management styles for the last fifty years “have gone largely unanswered.” Why does she feel she can succeed while so many have been preaching in the desert?
I see two main reasons why this book has a much higher chance of impact.
1) The context: “Giving up control is inevitable.”
While many books on management have characterized the traits and mindset of open leaders along similar lines as Charlene does throughout her book, the reasons for people to change are structurally different. For the last fifty years, these reasons had somewhat of a normative undertone, ranging from becoming a more charismatic person to preparing for an undefined future. Today, the future is here, and command and control executives had better move quickly because the world where sharing, relationships, conversations, and higher levels of transparency are becoming prominent paradigms, is slipping under their feet. In short, addressing self-preservation instincts in people could be more efficient than exhorting them to greatness.
2) A measured and pragmatic approach: Open leadership through “Open-driven objectives”
No matter how convinced one may be that social media technologies will revolutionize the planet, each business is local, with its own spots of both inertia and vitality. One of the best aspects of the book is the clear acknowledgment that there are many degrees between open-door and closed-door leadership policies. This is often a fairly natural stand for a consultant to take, but harder to express positively in a book. Charlene remarkably sidesteps the problem by offering relevant examples, looking at the scope of benefits from the point of view of the various stakeholders, and establishing the checklist of any open strategy. While expounding on a correlation (although not a causality) between deep, broad engagement and financial performance, and presenting a compelling case for “new metrics for new relationships” instead compartmentalized ROI calculations, she is well aware that “each company will have a different sized sandbox, depending on how open it wants to be,” and proposes tailored and incremental approaches accordingly. But listen: “if companies like Johnson & Johnson and Wells Fargo, who are in highly regulated industries, can have an open engagement with their audiences, you can too.”
It is obvious that openness transforms organizations, and multiple success stories attest to that. Yet, “the new rules of relationship created by the advent of social technologies require that you develop new skills and behaviors that accentuate and support your own individual leadership style.” Change can’t happen overnight, so there is nothing wrong with having “start small” as a mantra, and making a few mistakes. But start! Open-mindedness is the first step to open leadership, anyway.
… And read Open Leadership. This will be one of your reference books, for sure. The book will be available on May 24. Incidentally, also read Groundswell published by the same author, published in 2008.
The purpose of Social Media Metrics, subtitled “How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment,” by Jim Sterne is not to convince companies about the importance of social media: “If you’re still not sure whether social media is important or is important to your company, save this book for later.” I’d love every company to read this statement as a litotes of sorts and realize that understanding what social media metrics is about is precisely an excellent pathway to understanding how important social media is. And there is a lot to do there! Jason Falls from Social Media Today reports interesting findings from a survey by City bank asking 550 small business owners across America about Internet and social media use for their companies: 81 percent don’t use social media! It’s hard to believe that these companies exclusively address people that live only offline when 71% of the total population is online (according to a recent eMarketer report). It’s safer to assume that many businesses have been deterred by the noise around social media, preventing them from understanding that the purpose of getting involved in social media is to build up metrics-driven marketing campaigns. To make a long story short: yes, this book addresses any business owner or marketer and gives them reasons to buy into social media.
The book starts with the 100 ways to measure social media in November 2009 by David Berkowitz, and once you know that, you must identify your goals and define the KPIs that indicate how efficiently such goals are met – and get inspired by Katie Delahaye Paine‘s measurement standards. When your goals are clear, you want to get attention and know if your message is reaching the right people, and the nature and the scope of their influence (that Jim Sterne designates through a neologism “influencity”. Ultimately you want to identify your actual amplifiers, i.e. the people who expand the impact of your message, making sure they stay engaged – and sit high on the “engagement food chain.” However, winning people’s hearts and minds also requires a real and continuous commitment from marketers to listen methodically, as recommended by Jeremiah Owyang in his Eight Stages of Listening, participating in the conversation and eventually anticipating followers’ expectations, and by doing so, driving and accelerating favorable business outcomes. Now convince your boss or your colleagues, and do so by showing to them that social media is not a touchy-feely story, but an end-to-end metrics-driven process!
What I like about the book:
– It’s an action-oriented framework with minimal blah blah.
– Jim Sterne doesn’t try to reinvent it all, and refers oecumenically (and relevantly) to a variety of authors, consultants, and practitioners.
Although the book offers an appendix of important resources, marketers who are new to social media metrics would benefit from a summary bibliography and linkography.
The title of the book is coined after the French national anthem “Allons enfants de la patrie” (“Arise, children of the Fatherland’). Good title for the French market, as the song, initially the marching tune of a local regiment, was adopted instantly by the Parisian crowd who was to remove the King of France from his throne a few days later (August 1792). The message was local and became global. Today, any local message is global at the same time: a gunshot in Iran resounds throughout the world.
This book is a relevant analysis of the impact of Internet for politicians: The Web is not “virtual society.” It is the space where the people of the real world live and express themselves. As a result, Christophe Ginisty invites elected representatives in Occidental democracies to start to better represent people by listening to them more carefully – and not try to play their political game as usual. While the Internet has helped elect various leaders in the recent years, the premium given to early political adopters is quickly disappearing, and the Internet society – the actual civil society – will demand that they are accountable.
Tom Foremski, the editor/publisher of SiliconValleyWatcher, has been reporting on the business of Silicon Valley for US and global newspapers and magazines since 1984 and focuses on an important topic: Why “Every Company Needs To Become A Media Company.” To use his striking summary, “EC=MC is the the transformative equation for business.” Hard to disagree! Traditional media is in jeopardy and companies will have to control their own future by setting up their own communication channels and a consistent social media strategy. Podcasts, videos, blogging, and micro-blogging are inexpensive means by which companies can get their messages out. But how will you rise above the noise? Creating a media department and selecting social media management systems (SMMS) are important first steps, but they are not sufficient by themselves. The key questions for companies will be: what message(s) do we want to communicate and who will be empowered to create these messages?
Theses questions are at the forefront of a few forward-thinking companies, and some of them have created extensive guidelines and digital IQ Programs. A great example of this is Intel, whose initiatives are very well described in Engage!, a recent book by Brian Solis. The reason for the success of the Intel program is a strong company culture, a long tradition of employee empowerment, and a strong network of satisfied users, developers, and customers. In other words, Intel did not just take on the opportunity of the social media trend overnight while starting from nowhere.
There is still a premium granted to early adopters of social media, and many companies still benefit from the additional publicity provided to them by social media gurus, analysts or paid digital ambassadors echoing their initiatives (basically like the press used to). However, the future will be far more complex. To rise above the noise – and get to be heard of the public – companies will not simply have to be fluent in social media, they will have to work hard at ensuring that what they say is synched with what they are, and that what comes across above the surface is consistent with lies underneath. The public, i.e. an enormous mass of individuals, will become the actual umpires of the game. As a result, a social media strategy compels companies to address the following:
1) Company Values. What messages does the company want to convey? Does its vision inspire and energize all the employees? Followers are not going to repeat marketing slogans just because they were cooked in a social media department. Followers want to relate to the people they follow – if not, they are passive followers of no bigger interest than all the names that already sit in corporate databases. If you mean nothing to people, people turn to your competitors.
2) Employee Empowerment. Today, you may have 15 or 20 people tweeting in your social media department. That’s fine. Yet, any solid marketing starts from within. The real scalability of social media departments requires that they ensure that employees from all departments are capable of representing the company meaningfully. This entails a whole different way of hiring people, training new employees, checking or building up their writing skills. Remember, engineers with a passion for what they do are ten times more eloquent (and more credible) than marketing folks (who usually can’t even demo what they talk about).
3) Customer Evangelists. It’s fine to pay digital ambassadors. It’s finer to see happy customers rave about your fabulous products and services. They speak about you truthfully. They want to share their experience. They are the most effective marketers you will ever have. So make sure that you know and pamper them! You will learn from them – and be able to readjust your messages based on what they say. Ergo: Retweet your customers instead of simply expecting to be retweeted by them. And, incidentally if, as a business, the number of people you follow is far below the number of people who follow you, you have it all wrong. Customers are your real amplifiers: nothing and nobody else.
Keep measuring the results of your end-to-end social media management process. The most comprehensive platform today (disclosure: I am also a Board Member) is Objective Marketer. Listening to customers is more than listening, it’s the art of continuously improving communication between the inside of the company and the outside world by not only managing and producing messages, but by also orchestrating the voices of others and increasing their reach. Build up an army of amplifiers – and not simply a retinue of followers and influencers.
Note: The notion of Company Culture and Employee Empowerment sounds kind of boring these days. Yet, you can’t be an effective Social Media Manager in the long run if you don’t dive into these areas seriously. I know, books on the topic are rarely exciting, but there are a few notable exceptions, such as the The New How, Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy by Nilofer Merchant. I wrote a post about it last December.
If you read French, Martha Argerich : L’enfant et les sortilèges by Olivier Bellamy from Radio Classique is a must-read. Buenos Aires at the end the forties and fifties is a paradise for musicians and music lovers, and the ebullient scene where the seven-year old Martha Argerich makes her debut. It’s the starting point of the phenomenal career of this immensely gifted and free-spirited pianist with her “Nouvelle Vague” looks throughout the decades. The book is wonderfully documented (yet not pompous) and extremely well written. I wrote a more detailed comment on Amazon.fr.
The launch date of the iPad is now behind us. It was more marketing hype; it was a societal event, just as the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone were when they launched.
Very few companies have managed this type of exploit so consistently over the last twenty-five years or so. The best PR machines rarely provoke repeat wonders. As extraterrestrial as Steve Jobs may be, comics or science-fiction series only succeed because of public buy-in. Not only that: while sequels are usually less successful than initial attempts, the history of Apple shows the opposite, with a growing retinue of followers each time. What makes Apple so addicting and so contagious?
We can list two sets of factors:
– Graphical user interface, look and feel, and ease of use with a desktop metaphor that made the Mac so familiar: definitely, although they are not really that unique any longer. Design, style, elegance: definitely also, although one might argue that lots of vendors have produced extraordinary objects that only museums remember: the NeXt black cubes designed by Hartmut Esslinger are truly art pieces.
– In fact, when you look at the Apple flagship products, die-hard aficionados have consistently voiced their frustrations. Something big is always missing. Each product proved to be what Dave Winer said recently about the iPad, “a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future.”
So where is the magic? What strikes me is that some of the major Apple products never came across as “computers.” Your friends have “a computer, “a PC.” You say I have “a Mac.” Not only that. You say “my Mac.” You say “my iPod” – because it’s not just any portable media player. You say “my iPhone” – because it’s not just any smartphone. You already say “my iPad” more lovingly than you ever spoke of any Kindle.
Apple fans entertain a personal relationship with their Mac, iPod, iPhone or iPad: what they are as objects is never obliterated or offset by their respective purposes. They are your property first, and what you use them for, second. For a major reason maybe: the relationship to these products is primarily tactile, no matter how beautiful they are for the eyes. The NeXt Computer was a computer and you had to carry it with your arms just as you carried an Apple II, an Apple III, or a Lisa. The first Mac changed all of that: you lifted it with my fingers and you used a mouse. The iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad respond to your fingers directly. You are continuously in control though the sense of touch, which gives you a continuous feel of intimacy and ownership: fingertips are unique to each individual and fingerprints were the people’s signatures in the most ancient civilizations.
My 88-year old mother, who is French and hardly speaks English, smashed her right shoulder by slipping on a speed bump on a parking lot in Palo Alto while she was visiting. Now just imagine the landscape: she has no insurance in this country and was provided an initial quote from a major hospital in the Silicon Valley of $80K for one night, surgery costs not included (of course). Good for her that the surgeon, Bradley Graw from S.O.A.R. who operated her did such a great job that she was able to resume her life by herself in Brittany two months later!
How to choose a surgeon?
The Silicon Valley is so competitive that it also has an abundance of outstanding doctors and surgeons. So my mother had a choice of a number of experts. The Valley is a village and it’s pretty simple to know who’s who. S.O.A.R, a Surgery Group that specializes in sports medicine, total joint replacement, fractures, etc. came high on the recommendation list, along with quite a few individuals in that team. My mother decided that she would be operated by Bradley Graw, their youngest surgeon, based on the following reasoning. “I want a young surgeon. It’s important to give a chance to young people. They need to build a track record, and they have all the reasons to take special care of people to be successful. If he does a good job on a woman like me, it’s a win-win for both.”
Having lived in the Valley for 25 years, I realized that I had, almost unbeknownst to me, put on the typical ambivalent Siliconite jacket (where you are open to everything and newness-friendly, while basically being cautious just as anybody else anywhere in the country). I believe that I would have spontaneously gone with what we call the “seasoned professional” with ten or twenty years of experience. After the fact, I realized how well my mother had aged, applying even in a rather dire situation a faith in youth she had had her entire life as a school-teacher and headmistress, as well as the mother of five children.
Meet Bradley Graw
Loaded with prestigious degrees, residency, internship, fellowship at Yale, Georgetown University, and Stanford, Bradley Graw is only 33. His interest in a career in healthcare was certainly his birthright: “As the children of two National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers, both my sister and I decided on careers in medicine. My parents [1] actually met at the National Cancer Institute of the NIH and after several years moved to the Washington DC suburbs to raise a family and start a primary care practice in pediatrics. My sister and I both saw the enjoyment my parents had in caring for people and in the science behind clinical medicine.” However, it wasn’t until college that he decided to apply to medical school. “As an economics major at Yale with a strong interest in social sciences I peripherally investigated careers in business,” he says. “Many of my friends took careers on Wall Street, finance, or the like, but I failed to see the positive societal impact that I would have with that type of profession. So, I decided to enroll in medical school directly out of college.”
Both he and his sister trained as surgeons, respectively in orthopedic and general surgery. “For me working in orthopedics is quite gratifying, and the positive impact on people’s lives quite dramatic. Whether it be caring for someone with a fracture, arthritis, or an athletic injury, my work has a high probability of improving quality of life and getting people back to the activities which they enjoy. I feel the past several years have shown the darker side of the American ethical code. The financial crash has left some people extremely wealthy, but others without homes and jobs. The healthcare reform debate of 2009 and 2010 has uncovered a health care industry with a skewed self-interest. With this in mind, I feel lucky to have a profession that allows me to positively intervene in people’s lives. At the end of the workday, I frequently have a feeling of satisfaction and pride as I have tried my best to help someone.”
Brad definitely helped my mother, not only because of his skills, but also because of his charisma and his caring style.
Marylene Delbourg-Delphis
[1] Robert G. Graw, MD, Brad’s father has had a varied career, first as a lead researcher in Bone Marrow Transplantation at the NIH in the late 1960’s-early 1970’s, then as a private practitioner in a small town, and most recently as a healthcare entrepreneur. He started a successful group of urgent care clinics in the Washington DC area, Righttime Medical Care.
Books related to social media marketing keep coming out. The truth is that even if Internet and social media marketing aren’t new, the information needs for marketing managers are huge: the more they read, the faster they will get the immersion feel enabling them to move from a tactical use of social media to a strategic management of social media campaigns.
The purpose of 
Tom Foremski
If you read French, 
The launch date of the iPad is now behind us. It was more marketing hype; it was a societal event, just as the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone were when they launched.
Apple fans entertain a personal relationship with their Mac, iPod, iPhone or iPad: what they are as objects is never obliterated or offset by their respective purposes. They are your property first, and what you use them for, second. For a major reason maybe: the relationship to these products is primarily tactile, no matter how beautiful they are for the eyes. The NeXt Computer was a computer and you had to carry it with your arms just as you carried an Apple II, an Apple III, or a Lisa. The first Mac changed all of that: you lifted it with my fingers and you used a mouse. The iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad respond to your fingers directly. You are continuously in control though the sense of touch, which gives you a continuous feel of intimacy and ownership: fingertips are unique to each individual and fingerprints were the people’s signatures in the most ancient civilizations.
My 88-year old mother, who is French and hardly speaks English, smashed her right shoulder by slipping on a speed bump on a parking lot in Palo Alto while she was visiting. Now just imagine the landscape: she has no insurance in this country and was provided an initial quote from a major hospital in the Silicon Valley of $80K for one night, surgery costs not included (of course). Good for her that the surgeon,