Google launched Sidewiki, an add-on to their ubiquitous toolbar, which lets you “contribute helpful information to any page.” You’d think they grew horns, a tail, and started carrying a pitchfork.

Does anyone else see the irony here? Blogs & other social media tools move control of the collective conversation away from established players (corporations, governments, etc.) and give it to the individual. Now we have as much reach and influence as as multi-billion dollar corporation… in theory anyway.

But look out! Here comes Google Sidewiki!

Jeff Jarvis warns: “I have no control over the content associated with my site, essentially on my site.” He worries that someone will post negative comments. And he’s right– that will happen. But that’s beside the point.

You may own the URL, but the user owns the browser.

How about an analogy? I’ve been picketed. Seriously. The company I used to work for ran out of money and couldn’t pay vendors. Some of those vendors decided to picket. They hooted, hollered, jumped up and down, waved their signs at passing cars. It sucked.But it was a conversation that was happening about our company, right outside our doors, on public property– and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. Think of that failed business as your website, and the sidewalk as the user’s web browser. The picketers are obviously comments in Sidewiki. Not a perfect analogy, I know. But you get the idea.

So, to those of you worried about losing control of the conversation on your websites, I suggest you heed your own advice: join the conversation and be authentic.

You never truly had control anyway.

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Posted by Seth on October 6th, 2009 :: Filed under business, geek, marketing
Tags :: Google, Jeff Jarvis, marketing, Sidewiki, social media

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I used to read BusinessWeek religiously. And there are some great people there. But now it’s for sale and Bruce Nussbaum blames culture. He says that they lost touch with their readers. Oh, sure they tried to understand what their readers wanted… with surveys. Don’t get me wrong. Surveys have a place in market research– they’re great for confirming hypotheses. But they only give you answers to the questions you think to ask. And that is not how to be awesome.

All of this reminds me of a question I asked last year: at what point does a company shift from its original entrepreneurial culture to corporate incrementalism?

I think it happens when the company falls out of love with its customers.

Starting a business is hard. Really hard. And most new businesses fail. So, you’d better be really friggin passionate about that need you’re trying to fill in the marketplace, and you’d better understand the hell out of your customers. It’s a romantic comedy of sorts. The first few years are great! Passionate! You understand each other. Then, gradually (naturally) the passion fades. So does the understanding. And when you lose that empathy, that deep understanding, you lose your intuition. Intuition is what helped get your business started. But what got you started won’t keep you going. It won’t take you to the next level of awesome.

How can you avoid taking home the blue ribbon for being mediocre?

1. Understand the hell out of your customer. Talk to them (yikes!) in real life. Pick up the damn phone and call someone. Go where they are. But don’t be a stalker.
2. Take a stand. Be passionate about something. Nobody ever made progress by being well behaved.
3. Be balanced. You need data to inform your intuition. Neither is a valid substitute for the other. You need both. You need data and intuition.

So. Time for a new question: is it possible for Public companies to be truly passionate about their customers? I’m not sure. Ultimately, they serve Wall Street’s relentless, short-sighted demand for growth and profit. Public companies trade integrity for capital. What do you think? Fire away in the comments.

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Posted by Seth on September 17th, 2009 :: Filed under branding, business, photos, strategy, visual thinking
Tags :: awesomeness, businessweek, empathy, passion, strategy, understanding

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There’s a cultural shift underway, and this “Great Disruption” is acting as a catalyst to speed the change.

We work hard, we work long hours, and we earn ridiculous amounts of money. “We have generally taken the proceeds of our productivity in–you guessed it–increased consumption.” Big house. Big car. Big TV. But as our nest eggs get scrambled, we’re realizing that Stuff doesn’t matter as much as we thought it did. It’s people (and experiences) that matter: our friends and family that fill our big empty houses. But why? Why are we collectively realizing that now?

What if we’ve gotten so fast, so connected, so frenetic, that we’re burning out? We’ve been on a crusade to cram more and more activities into a finite amount of time. And in the tug-o-war between us and time, we lose. Unless someone does for time what the Manhattan project did for e=MC2. Anyway, we’re always out of time. Never enough.

So what effect does a perpetual time famine have on a society, and what does that mean for business? (Warning, this is about to get thick & crunchy) According to this study, we either view our time as limited or expansive. If we perceive time as limited, we tend to focus on the present– more specifically, we tend to avoid negative emotional experiences and use more schema-based decision making. Combine the present-focus with the natural tendency to protect (and desire to be protected during a crisis), and bibbidy-bobbidy-boo, we move away from “bettering” ourselves and collecting things.

We start to “simplify.” We start to focus on positive emotional experiences. We start to ask for quality over quantity. Great example in advertising: this VISA commercial asks the question “when was the last time you went to the aquarium with your daughter… on a Tuesday?”

If this is happening, it’s not enough to make the coolest gadget, or the nicest house, or the invisible hover car that grooms your dog while you eat pizza… although that last one would make for an interesting experience.

What do you think? Anyone have examples and/or counter-examples?

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Posted by Seth on July 8th, 2009 :: Filed under amature anthropology, business, strategy
Tags :: Great Disruption, marketing, not-so-big-house, predictions, small, strategy, VISA

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I work for a big corporation. As with most big companies, the corporate hierachy is pretty tall. That makes it a bit tough to create and/or maintain a culture of innovation: politics and title are usually more influential than a good idea. But blaming management for not accepting your brilliant idea is a cop-out. What if Al Gore gave up on inventing the Internet “because his boss said no?” You don’t want to be a cop-out, so you work the system to make friends, and influence people. But that’s a little like pushing spaghetti uphill. Instead, you could sidestep that whole mess and at least get a running start.

This is where social networking can be more than just an interesting sideshow. There’s a great tool called Yammer. It’s like Twitter for private networks. Maybe I’m slow on the uptake, or maybe I just have a profound grasp of the obvious… but one thing I’ve noticed is that Yammer is (relatively) flat– it completely sidesteps all the day-to-day corporate hierarchies. The CEO and I are somewhere around 6,269 levels removed in the official corporate structure (not to mention half the land mass of the US and then the Atlantic ocean). But on Yammer, we have the opportunity to interact as equals. Most innovation articles I’ve read suggest that flat is good. Flat means that the best ideas– not politics or title– attract the best people. What company wouldn’t want the best people working on the best ideas?

Now, moving the ideas from this ephemeral channel into the real world? That’s another story. But don’t be a phony! Learn some sweet moves and go get something done.

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Posted by Seth on July 7th, 2009 :: Filed under business, innovation
Tags :: Al Gore invented the Internet, business, innovation, organizational structure, social networking, twitter, yammer

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Take a look at this microwave.

Now, take a look at this iron.

What glaring difference do you see–other than one cooks, and one irons? What were they thinking?

I’d venture that the microwave people thought about how to make their own lives simpler. Letters take up less space than numbers around that dial. A nice clean interface, right? Nope. We don’t think like that about cooking times: “Hmm, I’m going to cook my soup for F, stir, and cook for an additional U.” So they had to add the legend next to the actual cook time. Now it’s  cluttered and confusing.

I bet the iron people thought about how to make their customer’s lives simpler. By orienting the opening for the water reservoir so it flips up when the iron is flat, it was much easier to fill using the sink instead of a cup or a funnel… or making a huge mess.

So, when you’re designing your next product/service/experience/ad/press release/story/joke/dinner, whatever you do, don’t imagine a mini devil-me on your shoulder asking: “what are you thinking?!”

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Posted by Seth on June 17th, 2009 :: Filed under business, design, marketing, stupidity
Tags :: design, design thinking, iron, marketing, microwave, mini-devil-seth, product, things that make me happy

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GM is hemorrhaging cash and wants to merge with Chrysler. Banks are buying and dying like lottery-winning centenarians.  GM and Chrysler say a merger would make for a stronger, more competitive company. The buying-banks argue that they’ll be in a better position to lend if they buy up all the dying-banks. Good strategic moves, all around, right? Bigger companies means fewer competitors and economies of scale– synergy. No. That’s not strategy.

Strategy isn’t arbitrage. Take the big record labels, for example. They exist because distributing a record to the market was expensive– and they controlled distribution. Because of economies of scale, they were able to get a lower unit cost. Low unit cost + wide distribution = music for the masses. Then, in the struggle between art and commerce, commerce won: they sucked the life out of the music biz. Bob Lefsetz puts it quite well:

“Major labels depended on Mariah Carey, who was built for a system that exposed product on MTV and Top Forty radio to a captive audience with few alternative media choices.  To try and sell a ubiquitous twit today is like selling Corvairs, it’s just not going to happen.” 

Then, to make matters worse, they went on a buying-binge and gobbled up all the traditional competition. But they didn’t create any value, they just moved some numbers around. And they missed a big strategic threat: I can record a song on my computer with a couple hundred dollars worth of gear and upload it to any number of places. Seriously low unit cost and wide distribution. The labels aren’t competing with each other, they’re competing with little ol’ me. Big is not necessarily a strategic advantage anymore.

Before Al Gore created the Internet, we needed big companies to sort through the myriad ideas, pick out the best for the most people, and distribute those good & services. We ended up with some pretty bland stuff from big faceless corporations that treat us like moo-ing masses. But I think we’ve crashed into the law of diminishing marginal returns– economically and socially. Now we want to know and be known. And with tools like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, we are the filter. With the help of our friends, we decide what’s best for us. I wonder if, as a society, we’re done with growth for growth’s sake. Leave it to a company like IDEO to lead the way (paraphrased): don’t limit your ROI measurement to dollars and cents. Ask “what’s your social impact?”

So, back to cars & banks.  I can’t make a car in my garage. But GM can’t make one profitably either. They should look at what Honda and Toyota have done: no unions, just mutual respect between management and labor. J.P. Morgan is now the largest U.S. bank… but if I call them, I still have to press 13 keys to talk to a real human being. It’s time to start measuring the human impact. Big does not make my life better. The small things, the micro-interactions, that build up over time are much stronger than big because they’re based on mutual respect and support.

As E.F. Schumacher said way back in 1973: “[I am] small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.”

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Posted by Seth on November 14th, 2008 :: Filed under business, strategy
Tags :: arbitrage, big, Chrysler, GM, small, small is beautiful, strategy

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Over @ Indexed, Jessica Hagy has a brilliantly simple explanation of Web 2.0:

So… if that’s Web 2.0… then Web 3.0 obviously will add the Z axis… or, as I like to call it, the “Total World Domination” axis.

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Posted by Seth on August 15th, 2008 :: Filed under business
Tags :: visual thinking, web 3.0

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