Global Neighbourhoods

Shel Israel & the Detroit Wheels

         
                          [Detroit River looking at Canada. Photo by Shel]

The guy next to me on the flight to Detroit wanted to know why I was headed to his hometown. I told him I was with FastCompany TV and I was visiting GM & Ford. He scowled. "Another trash Detroit story," he muttered, picking up a Grisham novel and ignoring me for the remainder of the flight. From the airport, I hopped into a taxi where the driver told me he had worked on the line at Ford for 18 years before getting laid off last year. He asked me why I was in Detroit and I told him. "Another trash Detroit story," he muttered and we drove the remainder of the way in silence.

People from Detroit have become accustomed to journalists writing about the burned out buildings you see along the freeway from the Airport into the city. They're tired of comments about their main industry in atrophy.

There was no use telling these redundant skeptics that I had come in search of good news. The Detroit-in-trouble story has been done and done again and is old news. I was here to see what was going on in social media at Ford & GM. My best story was to be able to report on a great turnaround taking place. Being the first to report that--if true--would make me a bit of prophet.

 

In fact, after one day at GM and another at Ford, I found numerous glimmers of hope. I saw uses of virtual reality (VR) and machine-human integration that persuaded me on a personal and inexpert level that happier days and better cars were in Detroit's near-term future. Perhaps, or perhaps, as a non-expert in automotive these were just diamonds in coal mines.

At both companies, I also found small bands of social media champions. People who have at least sipped from the same Kool Aid bowl where I have immersed my head. I perceived these two small teams to be pushing huge boulders up mountains laced with the barbed wire barriers of process and culture.

One of these team members confided in me that he often gets frustrated, but every day when he goes home, he realizes that he has inched just a little further up that mountain and that makes it worth it. I admire his tenacity and his patience.

I saw some amazing and impressive things, some social, that go beyond your everyday blogs, podcasts and Tweets. I saw people talking and collaborating with each other through technology. I was impressed with GM's design center, where I saw how ideas become realities through a process that includes machine CAD, robotics and artists working in clay. I learned how a car, designed exclusively on machines may create a vehicle that is sterile to people, whose interior colors are just a bit off for human comfort. "We use computers, of course, but we need clay to give our models life," I saw models of some very hot Cadillacs of tomorrow that are mere concepts today. I was impressed not just by the model, but by the passion of the Design Center guy who escorted me.

                         [Cheryl Bruins Rozier. Photo by Shel]

Over at Ford, I got to tour  the Virtual Build Center, which is equally impressive. I interviewed Cheryl Bruins Rozier, it's manager in sort of a war room at the Center's nexus.There, the companies ecosystem, sits and reviews screen after screen after screen of ever weld point on a new design. They use VR to determine whether a weld or screw twist is better done by robot or human. There are cameras that allow engineers in remote locations to see what is being viewed projected in the room,  and join the conversation.

I would love to have included video footage of both these experiences. After all, I was there as a video reporter. But in both cases, I was not allowed to record what I saw and was being told. Both companies have promised to send me B-Roll, but my guess is that it will be too polished for the handheld style that I will be using at FastCompany.tv. Rozier, did all a CAD drawing a Ford wheel, but it hardly had the complexity and visually and collaboratively striking qualities of what I was allowed to view, but not record.

At GM, I was permitted this "stolen" click of GM Social Media operative

             [GM's Natalie Johnson in VR Center. Photo by Shel]

Natalie Johnson in the GM 'CAVE' immersive environment studio. The company uses CAVE to simulate what an actual ride in design concept would look like. CAVE reduces prototyping by automating virtual environments. An old Chevy Tahoe, I was told, required GM to build 279 physical models costing between $15 K and $1 million each. CAVE reduces a new concept's model 50 or fewer models educing scrap, costs and time-to-market significantly.

The blank wall you are seeing above looks a lot different when it is not grayed out. Natalie is sitting in a driver's seat. In front of her, there's a steering wheel, a dashboard and windshield, precisely replicating one's they will build once the VR refines the design. As was true at Ford's virtual manufacturing facility ecosystem team members in remote locations can see precisely what the virtual driver is seeing and experiencing.

(BTW Natalie is one of the GM social media team, one of the ones who 'gets it' and spends time pushing boulders up mountains.)

What I did manage to capture on video that I will be using in a couple of weeks at FastCompany.tv is footage of me looking absolutely goofy under a VR helmet at Ford, where I got in and out of a virtual car prototype, while what I was seeing got projected onto a screen. It felt very much the way I remember 1968, except that others could see what I saw and this is helping them design cars better.

The trip's highlight was my 30-minute interview with Bob Lutz, GM's controversial vice chairman. In 2005, I had interviewed him for Naked Conversations and had been impressed with his candor. I still am. Shortly before my arrival there, Lutz had set foot into a PR bucket by having been quoted as saying that he thought global warming may be "a crock." What some coverage omitted was that he emphasized that what he thought personally would not change GM's commitment to "removing cars" from the environmental conversation by removing dependence on fossil fuels. What was also omitted in some coverage was the fact that Lutz had inspired and spearheaded the soon-to-be-real Volt, touted as Detroit's greenest car.

Most of my talk was about social media and why he had started blogging to begin with as well as his impressive vision for social media's role in GM's future. The man drips charisma and FastCompany will probably post almost all of my 30-minute interview with him.

What's my takeaway from Detroit? I'm not certain. GM has some great blogs going. When I made entries over on Twitter about my trip to Detroit, three of their four-member social media team were quick to join the conversation. Ford, to date, has no blogs. It has embraced what is called a social media press release which makes it easier for traditional and online media journalist to get precisely the information they're after. But they have yet to blog and no one in the company joined my little Twitversation.

Both companies reinforced the thoughts I expressed in my recent "two camps" post. At Ford and GM there are small groups of social media champions. They ave a passion for it. They understand the value of conversations with customers, partners and ecosystems. At GM, in the form of Lutz, they have the highest ranking member of any enterprise occasionally blogging in the form of Lutz.

But they are minorities in entrenched cultures who are still embracing the way it has always been done, who do not yet understand that transparency is the best way to restore customer trust; who see social media as yet another way to push message out, rather than to listen to what people have to tell them.

As Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point subtitle declares: "Little things make a big difference." There are lots of little things going on in social media. At both companies, these things are integrated with two sincere dedications to making better cars than they have made in recent years and whether or not big differences occur remains to be seen.

Jeremiah's 3 'Impossible' Enterprise Conversations

         

                 [Jeremiah Owyang,ponders impossible conversations. Photo by Shel]

Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang has added to the conversation I started yesterday on 2 social media camps forming in most enterprises. He's right. The issues he points to--asking for public feedback, admitting when you are wrong and "good-mouthing" competitors are the three issues of intransigence for one of the two camps. When I address them, I sometimes hear the grinding of heels as they dig into the floor.

Funny, I recently interviewed the top guys at two of the world's largest companies. Michael Dell had no problem with being transparent on touchy issues and, as you will see on March 3, neither did Intel CEO Paul Otellini. From his recent posts, I think I'll have the same experience next week when I interview GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. Most C-level executives seem to understand why conversations with customers are preferable to pushing messages at them.

Ironically, neither do the entry level knowledge workers coming into the enterprise, many of them born just after the Worldwide Web was introduced.

It's closer to the middle of the organization where the two camps form, and where one considers it

Two Social Media Camps in the Enterprise

I amazes me how much of my time is spent these days talking with people who represent some of the world's largest companies. This is really different for me, but it is where this social media journey has taken me.

I am convinced that for most large companies in many huge categories, the issue is no longer whether or not social media should be used. That genie is out of the bottle. If they want to engage a next generation that is coming into the marketplace and filling corporate seats, they must use it. What little analytics there indicate stupendous growth rates and this means that social media can no longer be disdained or dismissed.

The stress point has now moved to how the enterprise will use social media and I hear a lot about this these days. In nearly every company I talk with, I hear about those who understand that social media is something new and different from traditional marketing. It is not about putting messages into foreheads. It is about the enormous wisdom and efficiency to be gained simply by having conversations with customers, prospects, employees and partners. Clearly I am a champion of this camp.

But in my conversations with people who will be remembered as early pioneers of the new path, there is muttering and trepidation of another camp, one that is often being pushed by the traditional marketing people who see social media simply as another channel to push out brand awareness and product-related messages. It is another way to have the corporation talk about the corporation rather than listen to customer concerns, complaints or even compliments. This camp believes that early days of wide-eyed dreamers like me have passed and now that social media is swimming in the mainstream. It should be treated as mainstream marketing treats everything, a mechanism for the one-way pushing of message.

My Camp #1 friends are very concerned that those efforts by members of their enterprise will ruin it; will take social media and bend and distort it and thus ruin it for the rest of us. If Company XX marketing department produces smarmy social media programs, it will damage the credibility of Company XYZ's social media champions.

I have to admit, there is that danger. But I don't think it will come out that way. I don't think that someone who uses the new tools the way I happen to think they should be used will have their reputation suffer,  Let me tell you why.

So far, nearly every deceptive social media attempt has failed. Real people come to blogs and social media in search of real people they connect to. They are looking for content which is useful or interesting. Regular social media followers understand that Microsoft, for example,  does not, think with one mind, but with nearly 60,000 of them that GM does not speak with one voice or language, but with over 275,000. The 85,000 or so Intel employees do not march in step with each other and their taste in the drummers marking cadence is quite diverse.

So if you blog with transparency and candor about your corporate job and the guy down the hall is devising a character blog by a talking moose to extend brand, he or she may hurt the brand or simply waste company resources, but that effort will not hurt yours, and that is why, in the long run, the simple, interactive credible path will prove to be the wise course for most companies whose employees take pride in their products and services.

My views have very little to do with "soft values," that non-tangible feel good stuff that many executive officers frown up. It has more to do with the smartest business course. Technology has made conversations scalable. You can talk with customers in seconds all over the world. The cost of it is quite low. If you give your audience something valuable. If you show you are listening, you will gain significantly in customer retention, loyalty and their carrying your virtues forward with tools that put word of mouth on steroids.

Quite simply, social media is more efficient than traditional marketing. It lets you build better products and services. It shortens the time-to-customer. It is less costly than advertising and more effective. It gets the people most passionate about your company to talk to others where they have more influence than celebrity endorsement. It is more credible by far than traditional PR. It gives  your company greater prominence in search engines by orders of magnitude over traditional web sites.

Quite simply social media makes pragmatic business sense as both a customer relations engine and as a marketing, support and development cost-cutter.

There may be two camps in the enterprise today. But I have very little doubt that one will get larger as the other withers in atrophy.

Forrester's New Online Communities Report

I was interviewed for the new Forrester Report on Online Communities that was released yesterday. Actually, as I recall, Jeremiah asked folks on Twitter for a definition of online communities and he liked mine. He was the report's primary author. Because I contributed, I got to download the 17-page client report for free.

Of everything I have read to date on the subject of online communities, this is the most comprehensive and the most useful. It describes the multitude of options that a company faces in developing a commnity. It looks at each phase along the path to development. It even discusses the types of adversaries you might encounter in your community and how to deal with each. It is written in tight, clear, unambiguous language.

I would recommend the report to anyone interested in online communities, but you have to be a Forrester client to see it. If you happen to be one, then the report is well worth the $379 fee. If you don't like it, there's even a money back guarantee. If this report motivates you to subscribe to Forrester, you can sign up here.

, Josh Bernoff, Christine Spivey Overby, Scott Wright 

Dan Farber takes editorial helm at CNET

         

Dan Farber, the dean of tech journalists, has announced he will become editor in chief of CNET. He said there will be no more posts for him at his popular Between the Lines, ZDnet blog column.

It would embarrass Dan if I stated how highly I regard him. He's fierce as a reporter but kind as a human. He keeps secrets when asked, yet he's transparent about himself.

CNET was once the disruptor in terms of online reporting. But that was an earlier phase. I follow many members of the ZDNET team, but other than that I've pretty much forgotten about CNET itself. Dan knows news. He knows reporting and he understands social media as well as anyone. He also understands the information that the enterprise hungers for.

I expect to see no abrupt changes at CNET. But I expect to see a steady string of improvements. I also hope Dan finds time to come back to his blog column.

Mazel Tov, Dan.

Inching toward better measurement

         

Josh Hallett has an interesting post  on how Voce Communications is using Radian6 as a social media measurement tool for clients. I have no idea how great Radian is or is not, but measurement is one of the frontiers for social media. We need simpler and more accurate tools in this area.

I have not a clue how good or bad Radian is, but an endorsement from Josh goes some distance with me. Each new measurement tool seems to give some new useful or interesting insight.

Still, I have not yet heard of one that addresses my fundamental question: What should you measure?

Some people think I'm playing, but I am not. In traditional PR, you measure newspaper circulation, then make some goofy assumption that all readers of that newspaper, along with other family members read your clip. It's goofy but everyone knows it and you have a measurement stick in generally wide acceptance.

But blogs are different, or at least I still perceive of them as different. They are not about head counts, but about conversations. How do you measure a conversation? How do you measure it's quality? How do you measure the relevance of the people who are talking about you or your company or products?

Some day, someone will answer that question for me.

Clarification on the Roll-Your-Own SAP Survey

I've received a few answers to my request for a Roll-Your-Own survey and I greatly appreciate them, but I need to clarify something that I overlooked. If I am going to publish your Survey responses on my blog, what you have to say needs to be interesting or valuable to my readers. It needs to add a spoonful of insight to the general body of knowledge.

If you have a blog and you answer the questions I posted, send me the link and I will post a link back to your site. I realize that I voiced what I was looking for poorly a few days ago and I'm sorry if I raised some false hopes. But my customer is my reader and if I post something I need to believe some of my readers will find it valuable.

Rambling with a Librarian

Ivan Chew's inspiring classroom lecture           

                  

                  [Ivan Chew, Singapore's Rambling Librarian. Photo by Shel]

Ivan noticed the symmetry to the thing before I did. Three-and-a-half years ago, I met him while visiting Singapore on assignment for Network World. It was during a tour of the Jurong Public Library where he worked at the time. I told him that I has recently started blogging and he said some dismissive words about what blogging was about. As is my style I told him, somewhat nakedly, that I completely disagreed.

Now, three-and-a-half years later, here he was, giving a lecture to honor students at the University of San Francisco on the subject of blogging and I was video recording him for my soon-to-start FastCompany.tv video blog.

To my surprise, his talk tracked his 42-month journey, starting with our Singapore conversation. Perhaps, also to my surprise was how much blogging and social media had transformed the borders of Ivan's world from a small Island in the Asian Pacific to a global neighbourhood.

Ivan's talk was downright inspirational. You can see a synopsis of his slides and read his account of his trip so far on his blog, the Rambling Librarian. True to its name, it's in eight parts (so far).

Ivan talked about his nine blogs which cover almost every aspect of his Renaissance interests. He talked about blogs for the elderly. He has a 72-year-old cousin who blogs. He discussed a 10-year-old blogger he knows. Answering a question from a University librarian about the possibility of books disappearing, he asked "What difference does it make?" Reading is what matters. His philosophy as a librarian is to encourage everyone to read, to read about any subject they wish to cover.

He rambled a bit, of course, but each segment of his talk, made a point that contributed to his outlook that online conversations are valuable to all of society's members. But he talked with passion and authority. He inspired the students who asked a very high quality and quantity of thoughtful questions. I video recorded him following his talk, but I don't think I recaptured the magic of his classroom chat.

There's a second stroke of irony here. Of all the talks I've given in the last two years, I felt the one that failed to inspire, that failed to get audience engagement was before a group of Librarians in Long Beach. I left that event, with doubts that American librarians would join the social media revolution in any great numbers and in ways that will help their physical communities to understand the value to them of global conversations.

Maybe next year, the librarians should have Ivan as their guest speaker. He'd hit it out of the park. I have no doubt.

SAP Global Survey: hi5's Ramu Yalamanchi

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Perhaps the Greatest Untold Story in Social Networking

                   [Ramu Yalamanchi, Speaking in Mexico. Photo by IAB Mexico.]

(NOTE: This is my 65th interview for the SAP Global Survey on social media's impact on culture and business. You can find previous interviews from people in 30 countries by clicking on the SAP Category of this site, or just by Googling 'SAP Global Survey.')

Quick, a pop Quiz. Name the world's most popular social networks. Okay, narrow it down to US-based. Okay narrow it down to the online social networks located just in the Bay Area. Who comes to mind?

I'm betting very few of you named hi5 Networks. Yet, this is a network that has been around since 2003, has 80 million users in over 200 countries, is growing by 150,000 new users daily and has been profitable for over two years.

We asked Ramu Yalamanchi, who stepped out of eGroups after it was acquired by Yahoo to become hi5 co-founder and CEO how he accomplished this without spending much on marketing or PR and his answer seems simple. Offer something universally simple and highly localized and get people to want their friends and family to have conversations with them.

Here's my Q&A with Ramu:

1. Can we start by you giving me some idea of the hi5 size and scope? How many countries are you in? How many members do you have? How fast are you growing?

Alexa ranks us as a Top 10 site globally, and as the #1 or #2 most-trafficked in nearly a dozen Latin America, European and Asian countries. We are the #1 social network in Peru, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Portugal, Thailand, Romania, Macedonia, Cyprus, Greece, Mauritus and several other nations around the world.

As of February 2008, we had 80 million registered users in more than 200 nations. On the average, about 50% of these users are active on the site every month. Each day, we grow by at least 150,000 new users.

2. hi5 seems to be one of social media's great untold stories. Let's back up for a second. Can you tell me how and when hi5 got started? What was your vision then and how has that vision evolved?

We launched hi5 in late 2003 to provide a service that connected people to one another in a useful and meaningful way. The service was actually an evolution of a prior website Akash Garg and I had launched, a matchmaking service for South Asians. My brother actually met his wife through that initial service, making my mother very happy.

As we evolved into hi5, we expanded our service, but kept our focus abroad. While other social networks at the time were focusing primarily on the U.S. market, we were interested in the growing number of people coming online all over the world. We saw that as a tremendous opportunity to build a valuable service where people could interact with their friends and express themselves.

From early on, we focused on creating a service that would be easy-to-use and meaningful for people in many different countries and cultures around the world. We started with a simple design, made sure that we had high quality translations, and built relationships with media companies in regions where we saw a lot of usage. We’re now available in 14 languages -- with more coming online every month – and also offer customer support in Spanish as well. We’ll continue to explore culturally-relevant services and features that will enhance the online experience of our diverse international user communities. 

3. You are among the world's largest social networks, and yet we hear very little about you. A Google search produces very few news stories. Was this prolonged stealth intentional? How do users learn about you and join?

That will soon change. The U.S. media is realizing what a world class service we are building – as the online users in numerous countries around the world already do.

In fact, our user base has grown entirely through word of mouth. We haven’t done marketing – the users have promoted the service for us by bringing their friends into it. It helps make their experience meaningful when they have friends on the site. We’ll continue to listen to our users as they tell us what they want to see on hi5, and how we can make it better for them. In turn, we hope they will continue to tell more friends and the site will continue to grow in popularity globally. 

4. What are the primary reasons people join hi5? Can you give me some demographic information? Who is a typical user? Does this vary or stay the same from country to country or language group to language group?

Generally speaking, the bulk of our users are between the ages of 18-35, and we have a balanced mix of men and women. We are also particularly popular among the global Spanish-language community. 

However, given that we have millions of users in so many different locations around the world, there are a great number of ways that people use the service. As our members bring their friends onto the service, they build a shared history of their lives, learn what’s happening around them, and discover new people through the service.

The same cultural nuances that you find offline, you will also find online. A service feature that is popular in one country might be less so in another country. We look for ways to tailor the service to our users’ diverse preferences, involving them in the process through discussion forums and direct dialogue, and by working with developers to create a breadth of culturally-relevant applications.   


5. Do people tend to stay inside their own geographic boundaries or search elsewhere?

It depends on where their friends, family and acquaintances are located. If most are within their own geographic boundaries, then you will see them connected within that location. Very often, though, we see connections across geographic boundaries. For instance, we have Turk members living in Germany, Vietnamese living in Norway and Hispanics in the U.S. – all of whom are connected with friends in their current location, as well as with friends and family in their home country. 

I’ll give you another example: one user in Greece recently wrote to thank us for our service because he said he had made friendships “not only in Greece…but everywhere!” On a trip to Serbia, he said, he met friends he had made on hi5. He said, “They showed me their capital, we went out, etc. If I weren’t a hi5 member, I wouldn’t have had this opportunity to meet these people and see their country.” It is stories like these that let us know we are succeeding in bringing people together around the world.

6. You use Lionbridge translation technologies. How extensively is it used and how successfully?  Does slang hold up in translations? How long does it take for a translation between hi5 users, and are the users okay with the delays?

Lionbridge is one of many resources we use to make hi5 available in other languages. They have helped us translate hi5-generated content, not user-generated content. To date, we’ve worked with them on eleven languages, all of which were turned around rapidly – in a matter of weeks.

For slang, hi5 provides a glossary of terms that call out words requiring more attention by our translators. These are often terms that are branded by hi5 or might have specific meaning in the context of a social networking service. Since we usually have these words translated before we launch a new language, it doesn’t really hold up our translations. We also use a translation memory, which remembers phrases that were previously translated. This ensures that all phrases, especially the unusual ones, are translated consistently. Additionally, we have proof readers of the translations and engage the user base for quality review. With each new language we roll out, we launch an identical language discussion forum, and continually update the service and translations as new features are launched, or as users make suggestions for translation improvement.

7. Where is hi5 heading? Will you remain focused on a young and international user base? What new services do you think you will need to maintain your user base as it ages?

We believe Hi5's momentum will continue across the globe, and we’ll continue to draw new customers from all age ranges. Social networks are changing the way that people use the Web, and much of the way that people consume content and information will be on social networks.

Hillary Clinton's Open Mouth Policy

Okay, this is kind of mean, and I don't want it to impact who you Americans out there vote for president. It's a question that came to me during Super Tuesday and I have not deeply researched it, but do any of you recall seeing a picture of Hillary Clinton with her mouth closed?

I've been taking note over the past 10 days, and every shot I see has her jaw wide open. What's that all about? Oversized dentures? Nasal congestion? Advice from a bad campaign manager?

Maybe our friend Hugh MacLeod should sell her the GapingVoid handle. Come to think of it, she may be a bit short on cash, what with that bad $5 million investment she recently talked about. Maybe she could just use GapingVoidette.

Anyway, if you have a shot f her with mouth shut, please post or send it to me. Also Hugh, now that the link got your attention, how about a nice cartoon showing us why Hillary's mouth is always open?