Global Neighbourhoods

My 10 2008 Resolutions

I tweeted these already, but I thought those of you who follow me here might enjoy them.

1. Be more humble than anyone else. Be less competitive.
2. Blog more.  Consult less. Screw the mortgage.
3. Suffer fools. Usually you can learn something if you listen anyhow.
4. Know when it's my turn to shut up and listen.
5. Go to Tweet-enders to cure this $#@&*& addiction.
6. Do more video, lot's more.
7. Spend an entire week with family at Tahoe, connecting twice daily maximum.
 8. Remember departed friends & remember life is for a limited time only. Exercise. Smell roses Spoil grandkids.    
9. Let communities define themselves. That's where the crowd wisdom comes in.
10 Rejoice. For George Bush will leave office shortly after the next New Year.

Happy New Year to you all. May the new year bring you only things joyous and tax deductible. 
        
   
   

Loic LeMeur & US Communities in the 50s

[Loic LeMeur. This is what a Community leader looks like these days. Photo by Shel]

NOTE--This is the 4th in my series of undetermined length on virtual communities. I welcome you joining this discussion. Please use the tag "community conversations" so people can find it.

The 1950s in the US were really not good old days. But in a great many ways they were simpler. Most cities had one newspaper, two radio staions and three TV networks.  People had the same information, delivered from the same perspective and few of us would challenge it for another decade. The Interstate Highways system for the most part was unbuilt and there was no commercial jet service. People stayed home more.

Whether we liked them or not, most community members agreed on who the community leaders were. Doctors, the municpal judge, religious leaders, the head of the local Red Cross, and the High School Varsity coaches were among the most prominent. One tier down were lawyers, insurance agents and other professional service providers who would often--like doctors-visit people at home.

These same people were all prominent on the lists of local charitable boards. The best of them were trusted because they helped people with problems--health, legal, family protection, turning kids into athletic scholorship candidates. They were the community members most often quoted in the local media. If they had problems, emergency services got to their homes the most rapidly. If you a problem, chance were you could see them in their homes to discuss the matter privately.

They were also often elected to public office.  They lived in some of the nicest homes, drove the biggest and most expensive cars. Other community members followed them into the stores and restaurants they patronized. We wanted the same gardners and roof repair services that these community leaders wanted.

Times changed.  The butcher, the baker & candlestick maker gave way to the franchise, chain and big block. The malls replaced downtowns.  The lines that defined the communities of mid-20th century America blurred and eroded.

Flash forward to current times. Communities are now forming online.  None that most of us use are more than 10 years old, most of them less than five. They are still forming, but growing at great speed.

What is clear is that community leaders are being selected online today for the same reasons they evolved to the highest echelons of influence in the tangible communities of the 50s. The new community influencer is like the doctor or coach of yesterday. They give to their community that which is needed. They give  a great deal to their communities and the commnities revere them for that generosity.

We trust their judgement. If they like a new technology, we tend to follow and give a try.  If they say they had a great meal in a restaurant, we might give the place a try.  The same with places to travel, music or video. They give the most.  They bcome the most influental and perhaps the most powerful.

For the modern company, this is a painful flex point. This is not how brands extend themselves. You don't get eyeballs to stick on your stuff by being generous. You don't get to own customers by being generous to them. Mass marketing techniques simply don't work when your dealing with communities of a few hundred or a few dozen members.

But, if you give to this community that which is interesting or useful, then the community will revere you for it. They will tell others and send them your way.  Just look at what Loic LeMeur has done with Seesmic. Yes, he has had great traditional ress coverage and that may have helped him with investors. That's not how Seesmic has become the most frequent company named on 2008 hot lists.

It's because Loic has used Twitter almost exclusively to create passionate users as Kathy Sierra would have put it. Unlike others, trying to reach the same community, Loic uses it for all sorts of conversations that are not just shovelware for his company. It puts people on his side.

Loic has joined the tech portion of the Twitter community and he had become a community leader.  He has been generous and there is now an entire community wanting to give back to him.

Loic did not foist his brand  He contributed to a community that could help his brand and in so doing, the community supports his brand.

I submit there is a huge lesson to be learned there.

Australian Govt to Censor Internet

Duncan Riley at TechCrunch has a most disturbing report about the Australian government imposing censorship on Internet content.  This puts them in the same camp as China and it just doesn't seem like something your would expect from a country with a reputation for freedom and independence.

The incumbent Labor Party is doing it, of course for noble reasons: To protect children.  Governments always seem to have noble reasons for taking people's liberty away.

Lurkers? Nope. Just Neighbors

[NOTE--This is my third post in as many days on the topic of online communities.  There will be several more. I am growing concerned with the issues of how traditional marketers and brand managers are approaching social media. I think there is a huge opportunity for social media to become a new, more efficient marketplace, one, in which buyers and sellers can find each other without the noise and cost of outmoded traditional practices. I am hopeful that others will join this conversation. If you choose to do so, I am using the tag: 'community conversations' and I encourage you to do so. as well."]

Words are important to me. I try hard to choose mine wisely. When words are misused they can lead to misunderstandings. Lately, people who watch an online conversation but do not contribute to it have been labeled as "lurkers."

According to Dictionary.com, to "lurk is to lie or wait in concealment, as a person in ambush..." Definition 2 is to "go furtively; slink; steal." This is not what is going on and I think many of the people using this term do not realize the negative implications it connotes.

In my physical community, I have neighbors with whom I never speak. I don't see them at the restaurants I frequent. Never run accross them at my Starbuck's; don't see them at our summer block party. They don't stand at silly hours in a dog park, a pick up bag tied to the leash.

But still, they are neighbors. They are part of my community. Occasionally,  we see each other on the street and we smile slightly and nod--also slightly. A few years ago, when there was a controversial City Hall meeting I spoke out.  As is my style, I did it with passion. A few neighbors who had become active with me sat in the front of the room, they gave me looks of encouragement and applauded. They shared my passion.

The rest of the room was filled with other community members. I didn't recognize most of them. Didn't attach their homes to their faces.  Did not know how they voted. Yet, they were equal parts of my community.  They paid their taxes and voted. They would vote on the issue I was hollering about. They didn't get known as I did at that time. They didn't get interviewed in the local paper as I did, but they had the same say as me on the vote.

My side lost that vote, and I went back to being a quieter member of my physical community. Next year, there would be a different issue, bringing out passions in other people.  Perhaps one would go to the front of the room and speak and enjoy some fleeting community prominence.

Communities are filled with people who are mostly quiet most of the time.  That is their right.  They contribute to the community just by being there, just by baring witness and more important, when they wish, they can be counted and they can be heard. At some moment, they may feel the passion that brings them to speak, as EA Spouse did several years ago, or as the guy with the camera phone did when a hole appeared on his Alaska Airlines flight.

These people are not lurkers. They are just quiet members of particular communities.  They go along. They give us vociferous members audience. Sometimes, they use email or Twitter Direct to quietly share an opinion or two, often politely disagreeing, sometimes with a good deal of knowledge on the subject.

Then one day, something happens.  A subject matter where one of them has great passion or knowledge. He or she steps to the front of the room and they are heard.

These people are not lurkers. They are valuable members of the community. I value the ones who have made themselves known to me. I think of them as neighbors.

Street Gangs in the Community

There is a good deal of conversation going on regarding communities. Jeremiah Owyang is at the center of much of it, and as much as I admire him, I think he may be focusing on issues that are not at the core of the matter.

Along with Jeremiah, continuing probe, there seems to be an increasing influx of complex graphs and Corpspeak terms. That would indicate that--drawn by the fragrance of money--traditional marketers and branding pros are beginning to queue up at the wide open gates of online communities.

Instead of getting cranky about it, as Jeremiah sometimes accuses me, I am going to write a series of posts to explain my thoughts on communities and the dangers they face. I'm going to tag them all "community conversations" and I invite you to do the same if you choose to join the conversation.

This post will sound the most cynical. I see a great future for commercial efforts in online communities. But I see grave dangers that traditional brand managers and marketers will try to drag in the same crap that they have used with steadily diminished results elsewhere, tactics and perspectives that can muck things up as they are evolving in online communities.

It is a bit of an exaggeration to liken marters and brand managers to street gangs. The violence online is not so brutal. But there are simlarities, and the impact of marketers on virtual communities may be as damaging as a street gang can be to an urban neighborhood . Gangs stake out turf by tagging everything. They show colors as a form of brand extension. Both groups think in military terms. Both often behave viciously to competitors. Both often provide goods and services to members of the community that are detrimental to the common good of the community. Both deplete all sorts of community resources.

It is often futile for one person to try to go against the power, numbers, resources of brands or gangs. It takes a village to stave defeat a damaging incursion.

There is one significant difference between online and real world communities. It is easy for an online community to just up and leave. If unwanted elements muck up your online neighborhood, you and the people you encounter can just go somewhere else.

In my community, a good many of its members was enamored a few short months ago, with Facebook. When spammers, direct marketers and data mners began to invade, many of us left and now hang out on Twitter.  If something goes wrong on Twitter, we will migrate either to an existing site or some smart entrepreneur will build a new neighborhood hangout for us.

Sometimes a whole neighborhood just leaves because something better has come along. For example, Seesmic has become a pillar of my community, and many of us are spending much less time at YouTube.

This defense is important for branders and marketers to note.  For years, we could only use bathrooms and refrigerators to avoid TV ads. In online communities, if you intrude, manipulate, buy or pervade, we can just leave.

That's why I keep saying that the power has shifted from the organization to the community. That's why I keep saying the most generous community members are inevitable the most powerful. For branding and marketing efforts to succeed rather than corrode in a community, they are going to have to undergo a fundamental change in approach.

Charlie Griffin Video blogs at Age 100

Chip Griffin's grandfather turns 100 and shows he's still sharper than some people a fraction of his age. He talks about life and some damned Yankee named Lou Gehrig. He does it with wit and wisdom.

Charlie Griffin is the oldest person I know to use social media so far. It seems to me a special gift to his descendents who will be abe to watch him and smilke and learn for many generations to come.

FaceBook's 'Citizen-Generated Translations'

Yesterday, I posted about Luis Rull who has started a Spanish to English translation service for bloggers. As I have written, I consider language to remain among the stickiest barriers of all people being able to have conversations and it is a subject that interests me.

This morning KD Paine pointed me to this WebProNews post of how Facebook is enabling user-generated translation services. While WebProNews focuses on the fact that it is free to the provider, that is of no concern to me.  I find citizen-generated translation it a promising move. Luis may have competition on the Facebook front. There are already over 800 Spanish translations on some Facebook content. The issues immediately become objectivity and accuracy.

To do their jobs, translators need to be absolutely neutral on content. There job is simply to let people of varied tongues understand each other. When I spoke in Spain recently, I received a question in Spanish, that some may have considered controversial. My translator would simply not tell me what had been asked.

I am for most citizen-generated activities. I think glitches tend to work themselves out. Perhaps, Facebook's new citizen-generated translations can start working like Wikipedia, where one translation keeps getting edited and refined until most knowledgeable parties agree on the content.

What I like most, is the number of places where I see efforts being made to translate one language into another in social media so that more people can tlk to more people.

SAP Global Survey: Spain's Luis Rull

[Luis Rull @EBE07. Photo by Shel]

Luis Rull was a co-host of Evento Blog Espana [EBE07], in Seville, Spain,  where I spoke in November. I got the chance to hang out with him and Biz Stone. He seems to have grown up a child of the global Internet communications revolution with an abundance of stories to tell. What interested me for the SAP Global Survey is the Luis' soon-to-be implemented Spanish-to-English translation service for bloggers. Spain has an abundance of bloggers.  Very few post in English, although a good many of them read English language blogs. Like most people, Spanish bloggers are just more comfortable posting in their native language.  But they see the need to join a larger and more more global network.  That's where Luis' service will coe in, but I'll let him tell his story.

1. Tell me a bit about your background.

I was born in 1973 and raised in Seville. My father is a scientist whose research was about computer simulation of molecular dynamics. I played with mainframepunch cards and crayons   before I could ride a bike.

In 1982, My father's work took us to Copenhagen where I met people totally different from my family and friends. I played with kids from Argentina to Russia, and from all over the world, letting find new ways to have fun. We kids were fascinated by the strangeness each other's toys, especially the new electronic stuff that we shared with each other.

I went to college in Granada where I got my first PC. My dorm friends used it to write essays and do homework. There were no networks. We shared with floppy disks. Toward the end of my degree studies, Internet Cafés began came to Granada and used them to email my parents who were already using it at the University of Sevilla.

When I got a grant I got a graduate studies grant at Pablo de Olavide University, I was given free internet access and I became the unofficial IT guy for my research group and friends. I found myself very comfortable teaching others about computers.

In 2004, I read an article about US politics and the rise of blogs.  It motivated me to visit blogger.com at Google and start my first blog to keep my friends and family informed, but it also gave me a place, a notebook to write ideas as they came into my head, content that could not be published in any other place such as a scientific journal.

As I became more knowledgable about blogs and wikis, I kept helping others.  Eventually, I moved into the private sector as a consultant. A new world was beginning and I wanted to be in it. I joined some wonderful internet entrepreneurs from Valencia and we founded Blogestudio.com.

Mainly, I teach clients how to communicate through their blogs and how to discover, store and share information with colleagues and clients.  Now I am beginning my own company mecus.es  with a great team in Seville, focused in Corporate Blogging and Knowledge Management, where I am developing a new service of translation for bloggers.

2. How did you come to co-produce EBE07? Why is it free to attend?

Some of Spain's blogging pioneers come from Seville. Two of them,  José Luis Antúnez and José Luis Perdomo called Benito Castro and asked us to do a kind of summit for bloggers and Evento Blog España was born.

In 2006, Seville's state government, Junta de Andalucía, and Microsoft agreed to be sponsors, with the understanding they would respect our freedom to invite whoever we wanted. Suddenly we had a free place to do it and money to pay the flights and hotels of international speakers. When other bloggers heard about it, the all expressed enthusiasm. Friends and enemies, colleagues and competitors all enthusiastically offered  support. We gathered a great group who knew each other online, but had never seen each other in person.

In our first year we invited Matt Mullenweg, and some of the most influential and interested people in some areas of blogging: Education, Politics, Technology, Ethics, Business, etc. We later discovered that the most interested conversations took place during the breaks and the beers & in tapas bars.

In 2007, the expectation was high and we grew from 200 attendants to 620. Our goal was to respect for the community. EBE 07 was organized for bloggers, and we tried treat them as queens and kings not as subjects. EBE07 was built on them, with low key sponsor presence, free admission and long breaks and social activities.

3. Let's talk about Spain in general. How any bloggers are there? What do they blog about? How many are in business v personal?

I cannot tell for sure, but the Spanish blogosphere is made up mainly of personal bloggers. The growth right now is incredibly fast. There are many more personal blogs than business or commercial blogs. The average audience per blogger is low but the long tail in Spain is really long. From MSN Spaces, to Bitacoras.com or LaCoctelera.com, small groups reign.

Business and professionals have just started to discover the value of blogs in the last three years. I believe that as they understand the profits of listening and gaining their own voice, they will all want to get into social media. There are a lot of resources to help them use the new tools. The number of talented Internet consultants is growing.

4. What other social media tools are popular in general and in business?

Places like meneame.net are very popular, but the management of recommended info thought blogs, twitter, google reader shared or del.icio.us are growing very fast, mainly because they are not very time consuming and are based on people you trust.

In business, the most important innovation is building relationships with people who share your  interest through blogs. News alerts and data mining techniques need a lot of improving, but my opinion is that the heterogeneity blogs are introducing to companies and people’s minds have a lot of potential. 

5. Is social media making its way into government, education and other large institutions? Why or why not?

I think it is only happening in a very small number of places. A few individual civil servant or teachers are using it, but only in a disorganized, decentralized way. The positive way of seeing it is that they are building their own way of using them. They are not following higher agendas or narrow paths. They are adapting social media to their needs, founding great things. My opinion on the lack of interest is that people on top do not want to lose the monopoly of knowledge and want to keep people isolated.

6. Most bloggers in Spain blog, of course, in Spanish. What are the pluses and minuses of that? Do many Spanish bloggers read blogs in other languages?

I cannot say numbers, but my opinion is that many influential bloggers get their influence by gathering information from blogs in English and writing about it on their blogs in Spanish. Many readers don’t have the time, interest or skill in English to get that information from those sources, and they trust these gatekeepers. The amount of information in English is huge and the additional effort only worthwhile for specific niches (For example: your hobby or you competitors)

On the other hand, most Spanish bloggers do it just to express themselves. They are not eager to reach large audiences, so they are not very interested in reaching English readers. But, the Spanish-speaking audience itself is huge because it includes Latin Americans. Internet is becoming more and more popular all over the world and our brothers from the other side of the ocean are no exception. The high quality of some blogs from Argentina, Chile or Mexico proves that.

7. I understand that you are planning to offer a translation service to bloggers. Why? What's the market opportunity?

The market opportunity is a two-way road. It’s obvious that English is the most common language in Europe. If you want to reach a large audience in Europe and USA, the easiest way is to write in English.  Spanish companies are getting more and more investment from abroad and start-ups are beginning to think in a broad way about their market. The world is flat.

Automatic translators do not work properly with dense and rich blogs, so there’s room for professional translators here. The biggest cost for a translator is to specialize in the vocabulary of an area, for example, software. With individual blogs, we can take that away, because the language, special words and expressions are similar every time.

Our products do not only include professional translations but also the adaptation of their blogging software to it. Taking care of SEO matters, ease for clients and freshness of content, we offer the translation of a post within 24 hours. The blogger only has to blog in his or her usual way. We adapt the templates and take care of the translated version. The clients get an identical blog, with the texts in Spanish, with no additional time invested. We only have done it so far  in WordPress, our favourite blog software, but we have researched others and would be able to do it as soon any client requests it.

8. Will it be just Spanish-toEnglish? Would you do English-to-Spanish?

We are also thinking about translation to Spanish. English, French and German are our first choices. We consider Spanish audience very attractive to some English-speaking bloggers all over the world. The consumption of social media in Spain is one of the fastest growing in Europe, and with the weight of Latin American audiences, our product is simply a good choice.

Translating into Spanish is also a good idea because Spanish tends to overrate foreign ideas and people, and that usually gives English bloggers a good first impression.

9. Let's talk longterm. What impact do you see over the next five years of social media on Spain? How about Spanish interaction with the EU and the US?

The shock in the last three years has been so hard that nobody can say for certain. Big media conglomerates had been trying so many defensive strategies that failed. Now, they all join almost any innovation offered to them. This is mainly because small media companies had been fast and imaginative and are succeeding in the growing market of digital audiences. You may see it in the number of newspapers that have easy access to social media tools such as del.icio.us, digg, technorati or meneame (a popular Spanish Digg-style site). You can even see in the content of some news in mainstream media: sometimes you see a TV newscaster saying something that appeared in a blog six days earlier.

It's obvious that the audio and video will have a great impact in blogging in 2008. The number of video blggers and podcasters are increasing in a rate higher than  100% per year. Self-producing audio-visual content is the big change in Spanish media.

The influence of US culture is huge in Spain. Although many Spanish companies are in joint ventures with EU companies, the audience is strongly demanding US content over EU content. With more translation from French, German and Italian we hope to change that.

About 52% of the Spanish population between ages 17 and 52 have Internet access and is growing very fast, according to trusted sources. They represent the more affluent and better education portions of our society.

Spanish people tend to be expressive and passionate about what they like. I see an explosion of quality content. Prepare yourself.

10. Additional comments?

Spain IT community is beginning to think about the world in a “flatter” way. Spanish Content generators will follow them

Redefining Communities in a slow news week.

[Doc Searls (l) with Cluetrain co-author David Weinberger. Photo by Shel]

Jeremiah complains this is a slow news week. Between the holidays. It seems to me that you have to be a worse workaholic than I am to lament a week that let's you look up and around a bit. Over on Twitter, he seems to be back in a debate that seems to come up whenever we people centered on social media have a slow news week.

What is a community? Who runs a community? Who cares?

The definition of community really hasn't been much changed since the Internet came in. Since the advent of social media, there are a lot more communities and a great many people belong to more communities than they used to.

But by defintion, they remain the same. Communities are bodies of people loosely joined together by a common interest.  Historically, that common interest could be geography, a profession, a religion, a political affiliation or even a hobby like stamp collecting.

The Internet has reduced the physical boundaries of community. You can now have a strong bind with community members you have never met. It is based on shared passion and interest. Communities are like living bodies, in that the health of the body is more important, in the long run, than the continiuation of any one component. If it's your body, you will want to have the wart of cander removed for your health.  If it is your physical neighborhood, you will want that burned-out, graffiti-tagged building taken down.

Yes, companies can build communities.  Governments can do it as well. The results are often bad. Ford Motors built company towns in the middle of the last century.  They owned everything, the streets, the homes, the schools, the churches, even the cars people could buy. Ford decided if you could stay or be evicted and in the end most people decided the company town was a bad place to live.

Some companies still want to build online communities, with walls and gates. They want to own the community residents, and like the Ford Factory towns, this is generally a bad thing. People need to own their own communities.  When they have bad leaders, or too much crime, or poor education, or poor enforcement bodies, they tend to find a way to leave and go elsewhere to enjoy greater freedom.

On Jeremiah's Twitter conversation, someone noted that Facebook's customers are not the millions of users, but the marketer who have come in, who will support FaceBook in its desire to have a decent return on investment. This may sound like an obvious truth.  Some people think users have been spoiled by free services and content and they just have to accept that it's no longer like that.

I disagree. When the community rules become unjust (my theme for today), community members will just up and leave. The will go somewhere else where they have greater freedom.  Facebook is just a piece of virtually geography, and people will have very little trouble moving to another location, where they can share passion and information with people who will join them there.

As Jeremiah well knows, the power of a community is ultimately in the hands of te community members. The real leaders of a community will only remain leaders if they remain generous to the community itself. This is a concept that is very difficult for marketers to grasp. They need to go study what Doc Searls has to say about an Intention Economy, then they need to figure out how to provide it.

If not, every time they show up in numbers, the members of a community will just leave.

It's funny. I feel like I've written all this before. But then again, it's a slow news week.

DRM Belongs to Sony

Warner has become the third of four music giants to equivocate on the despised DRM.
This is an interesting case of a music lobby getting a law passed by the US Congress that the citizens just would not obey. There's a metaphor in here somewhere about a tea party, but it hasn't come to me yet.

And Google wouldn't help me find the applicable quote I was searching for, not the author, who I'm guessing was Thms. Paine.It goes something like, "Whenever those laws become unjust it is the duty of each citizen to takes arms to overthrow..." [If you can source it, please send it. I'm curious].

DRM, is an unjust law, and no more need be said on that art of the issue.  But is the speed in which the record industry giants have equivocated to the wrath of their unruly customers. From beginning to end, DRM lasted less than five years, before, one at a time four of the five Gargantuan members f the record industry oligarchy decided to folded up their portion of the monopoly.

Now, Sony, a long-standing leader in keeping its stuff proprietary stands alone as an enforcer of DRM as all other members have now cut deals with either Apple or Amazon to unlock DRM. Will they continue to enforce it? If so, they will discover the world can live without the portion of music content they think they own.

I can just picture a Sony executive pacing in circles upon the executive carpet, crying, "My empire for a lawyer. My empire for an army of subpoena servers for all those peasants downloading my shit for free!"

They will equivocate as well.  They really have no other choice. And being last will not help them.

BTW, a nice sidebar will be to watch the new marketplace competition between Apple Computer and Amazon.  I think the result will be the eventual end to exclusive Internet distribution rights of music, but that will take a while.  Until then, I think the competition will benefit us users.

And we bloggers can score one for ourselves. So many of us voiced the anger, pointed out the injustice of the law. Score one for the unruly mob that Dan Lyons mocks so often.

Mrs. Bhutto & Citizen Micro Journalism

It was about 6:55 am in California when I took my first sip of coffee and sat down to my computer. That's actually late for me, but it has been a light work week and a lighter week still for social media. As I started to do recently, I turned to Twitter first, before my email and my BBC News Page. For the past couple of days, Twitter has been pretty sparse with most posting about what my friends ate or did on Christmas Day.

The first post I read came from Scotland's Ewan McIntosh. It informed me of the death of Mrs. Bhutto, a woman whose politics I knew a little about and whose courage I admired a great deal. Then Dennis Howlett, a Brit living in Spain, pointed me to his post, which in turn showed me how a few social media folk, particularly Dave Winer were live Tweeting Bhutto news as it came off the TV networks.

This, as Dennis pointed out, is something new taking traditional media content and sharing it, in timely tablespoons, on Twitter. I am certain, I am not alone in getting news from it before I turn to the mainstream. It is not the first time that social media community members in one time zone got the news and gave it to community members elsewhere in the world.

A couple of months ago, I was at a blogger party for Hugh MacLeod when a minor earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area. The socializing stopped for a while, while we watched Twitter on mobile devices delivering commentary so fast that it seemed like the phones might burst into flames. The new of the earthquake's location, that no one was hurt and where it was felt beat the local newspaper's website by 45 minutes, but when the newspaper report came out it had more information, quotes from the National Geographic Center and fewer "wows" and "awesomes" in it.

Today is approximately the third anniversary of the Indonesia tsunami that killed so many people.  I learned about it while meeting with Robert Scoble.  It was a working session for our book on corporate blogging. He was staring at his phone, then he handed it to me. It was the first I time I earned about what had happened.  Later, I would read first hand reports that made me cry from a San Jose-based blogger, Evelyn Rodriguez who had been vacationing in Phuket when the Tsunami hit.  Still later I would learn that in Phuket, a friend had been killed by it as her husband and young son watched.  I  would post about it, and people who had known her joined the conversation, some learning about the memorial service in Tennessee through my blog.

The blogging and Katrina story is also filled with amazing examples of social media's role. Perhaps my favorite was Brian Oberkirch who started the Slidell Hurricane Damage blog so that people from his small, devastated hometown could find each other.

We are all part of the news network now. Twitter makes it a bigger faster network. But social media, time and time again is showing it's value when dramatic and fast-moving news breaks. Too bad it is usually so tragic.

SAP Global Survey: Greece's Stefanos Karagos

[Stefanos Karagos. File Photo]

 

As I've recently written, Greece was a non-player in blogging, when we researched Naked Conversations three years ago. Now there is a great deal happening in social media there, and it seems that wherever you look, Stefanos Karagos is a contributor.

He is among the best known Greek bloggers having started earlier (2001) than almost all of his countrymen. He comes at it as publisher of the Greek edition of PC Magazine, the largest tech publication in Greece with 210,000 readers,  along with three other tech publications.

Stefanos first became active in online conversations back in 1993, when he created the first Greek BBS, which was used to discuss Windows.

He started his first personal blog,  to improve communications with Greek Internet users and to reach his magazind subscribers.  "As a public personality, I need to communicate often," he told me. "Blogging is the most interactive way for me to talk one-to-one and one-2-many."

 

Toward that goal, he has created several blogs including Anabubula.com which tests how the global market works and, " to prove that if somebody creates unique content, he'll have more opportunities to make a difference," he told me.

For each magazine, he has created a social media platform connecting the offline media with online, giving. He told me the online/offline braiding has given each a significnt boost in followers.  He's also created the largest Greek blogger custom search engine which is about to include social networking functionality. Very early in January, he will also launch  Foracamp.gr, the first vertical social media for 500 tech communities worldwide.

 

 

1. Tell me about technology in Greece. How many people go online and where do they do it? How available is broadband?

 

Greek Technology adoption has accelerated over the last 4 years.  Recent indicators indicators show that the penetration of Internet in Greece is more that 35% of the population but household broadband penetration is only 5%. This year, fortunately, the Greek Government pushed the National Telecommunications Organization [OTE] for lower prices of ADSL and in the last 6 months, we saw the biggest expansion of broadband connections ever in Greece.

As publisher of the Greek PC Magazine, I distributed 50.000 free ADSL modems and trial ADSL connections last September, giving the opportunity for more users to enjoy broadband. The prediction of ADSL penetration for 2008 is that it will more than double.

Another intersting fact is that 70% of the users spend more that 3.5 hours on the net, every day. There are 170,000 registered Greek Facebook users.

 

2. Blogging also seems to have taken off in the past couple of years.  What are the factors that have

contributed? Who blogs and why?

 

Most Greek bloggers are young people who adopted the medium quickly and use it as a personal communication platform. We are a Mediterranean country and many days of the year are sunny helping people to go out for coffee and drinks and this is one of the reasons that blogging was not so popular the past years.

But now with low broadband prices the 3G mobile networks to cover a big part of Greece users can use blogging and social media all over the place. Greek bloggers come from many professions and social level and this year, because of the National elections, many politicians to blog and use social media as well.

 

3. What other social media is popular in Greece?

 

International

Facebook.com

Hi5.com

Myspace.com

Youtube.com

Wikipedia.org

Flickr.com

Digg.com

Twitter.com

 

National

Wadja.com [Mobile Social Networking]

Zoo.gr [social networking]

Joy.gr [social networking]

Zuny.gr [a Facebook like special for Greek Universities students]

Pblogs.gr [most popular blogs platform after blogger.com]

Foracamp.gr [Social bookmarking for Tech communities]

Cull.gr [Digg clone for Greek Internet market]

 

New local entry in beta:

Me.gr [social networking]

 

 

4. Tell me about language. Other than their own, what other languages do Greek people speak? You speak English quite well.  You have even started sites in English. Have you considered translating your blog? Why or why not?

 

English is the most spoken foreign language in Greece. From the 23.000 Greek blogs which I monitor via blogz.gr search engine, more than 3.000 are in English. In my Greek blog I offer translation as a feature, via an automatic translation service, because of my very good SEO, 10% of the visitors come from outside of Greece. Translating a site to another language is not so easy and most Greek bloggers actually are looking only for other Greek Internet users.

 

6. How do most people earn a living in Greece? Has social media impacted them at all?

 

Tourism is the No1 market and many Greek people earn a living that way. Until now, social media hasn't played a clear role on everyday life here, so actually, it doesn't  impact most people. For example, there is not one Greek blogger earning a living from it. If blogs grow over the next three years the way they have in the past three years, we will start to see the real impact in Greece.

 

7. Has social media had much impact  in Greek culture so far? What about in the next five years?

I believe that over the next five years, social media will grow rapidly in Greece. 2007 was the  milestone year when social media started to make a serious impact on Greek culture. International Social networks, local blogs and the huge penetration of cell phones are the key reasons. Countires that have big cell phone penetration are on a different path toward social media.

 

8. How has social media changed your life?

 

Since I started blogging in 2001, social media has radically changed the way I conduct my media business, how I direct companies , how I attract and keep clients, or make friends, and even view my local market or the world. I don't think I would still be involved with anything regarding innovation and differentiation if Social Media didn't exist.

Without the ability to give input in a product or a service and see the same time the quick response from the audience, the Internet in my country would not have expanded as quickly without the technologies involved with social media.

 

9. Additional comments?

 

Social Media is a crucial factor for countries like Greece to provide the innovation and differentiation of their technological achievements.

Of Blogging Giving and Getting

Laurelle vanFossen at Blog Herald picks Dec. 25 to remind us about how blogging works and what it's about.

"I want. I want. I want. I hear this every day from other bloggers, especially new ones.

Guess what. Blogging isn’t about want. I know you want: more traffic, more readers, more money, more attention, more links, and more wants."

Blogging, she notes is about giving, and of course she's right. The funny thing is that the more generous you are on the blog, the more of the good stuff you want will be attained. The more you send people away to view interesting, useful stuff, the more people will come back.  The more generous you are, the wealthier you will become in so many ways.

Thanks, Laurel.  Good timing, I might add.

Guardian Picks 6 promising start-ups

The Scoble Link Machine pointed me to this Guardian article, where Bobby Johnson lists six start ups likely to be among the Next Big Things of 2008.  It's a good list.  He picked companies like Twitter, and Seesmic who are generally regarded as hot by early adopters and investors I speak with.

The catch is that history says both Bobby and I will be proven wrong on at least half of these. Why?  Because technology always surprises and disrupts. On Dec. 25, 2006, who among you would have predicted that the iPhone and Facebook would be the two hottest techs of the year?

There is another problem, one that is plaguing Facebook and I fear is likely to plague bith Twitter and Seismic and that is the issue of monetization.  My friends at both companies talk about all the possibilities they have, just like Facebook did. The trouble is so many of the loyal customers at all three of these rapidly emerging companies are conditioned to think every day is Christmas, and the benefits they provide are free.

Advertising, subscription, sponsorships, etc., are all customer losing propositions. I dion't know how they fix this.  I think it is currently hurting the Facebook brand and I am hopeful that Seismic, Twitter and the other promising players on the Guardian list will fiond customer-embraceable solutions sometime next year.

The Quietest Night of the Web

It's happening as it did last year and the year before.  Blg traffic is tapering.  Even Scoble hasnt posted n over an hour.  On Twitter, hardly a chirp is being heard. People are turning to actually real people.  People they live with and love.  Parents and children.  There will be gifts nd food.  beverages and songs.  There will be moments remembered.

It's a wonderful 24 hour period.  Here in California it has just begun.  The children of Europe are already twisting and turning in anticipation. And everywhere the social networks, and posts and podcasts are being put aside.

There is something special and warm and good about the holidays.  There is something very human about the hope and anticipation.

May each of you have joy in your households, peace in your lives and prosperity in your new year.

Dave Winer's Mac Crashes & the Geniuses Claim Disk ownership. Why?

First off, I prefer Naked Conversations, so when there's a customer support group, called "Genius Bar," who requires I make an appointment, even in an emergency, I get bristly and suspicious.  That being said, I am a new Apple customer, and have had good support from the Palo Alto Apple Store. If the people behind the counter were geniuses, they wouldn't be behind the counter, but that has to do with marketing, not support.

Dave Winer tells a story today, that I have heard twice before. He experience a hard disk crash and went to see his local geniuses.  They quote him a disk replacement price of about double what you would pay elsewhere. He says what-the-hell, signs a sheet and the repair is done. But when the computer is returned Apple keeps the old hard disk. He asks for it and they inform him that he just signed an agreement to let them keep the disk.

Now this sucks on lots of counts. First, most f us have confidential information on our hard disks. I had a crash and took the disk, knowing that if I really needed something I could pay one arm and two legs to a group in Petaluma who can pull the data off a crashed disk. I did it at the only othe Mac repair place I know--also in Palo Alto. My new hard disk was twice the size Dave paid for precisely the same price.

But that's not the point.  We all own our own data. We have the right to keep or destroy our own data.  What is Apple doing with it? Why is Apple getting customers to sign in such a squirrelly fashion?  I can think of no customer benefit derived from Apple's policy and behavior.

Which brings me back to my first point. May the Geniuses are doing something that benefits Apple more than it benefits Apple customers. Of course, if they had a company blog, they could explain.  We could have an open conversation. Perhaps they have good reason for their policy. Perhaps they should listen to their customers.

Like Dave Winer, I own Apple stock. Policies like this make me nervous as an investor.

TV Networks have another year of decline

Crain's New York reports three major TV networks had another year of significant decline. The online business publication reports:

"Facing increased competition from cable and new forms of entertainment on the Internet, the broadcast networks have seen their hold on the American psyche slipping. This trend continued in 2007, when after a fairly promising upfront early in the year, the networks failed to produce the hits they needed to re-establish themselves. As of December, the networks' prime-time ratings in the key 18- to 49-year-old age category were all down: at NBC by 11%, at CBS by 10% and at ABC by 5%."

This news does not surprise me. But the data points are nce to confirm what so many of us have said would be the case. The networks, when their talent pool is not on strike, believe the route for their comeback is to give viewers the same crap they've served up for years, but to spend more on the hype to get you to watch.

I predict that we are closer than people realize to the point when their are more people watching online video than Network TV.

Hugh MacLeod on What's this new Marketing Stuff?

http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/004377.html

Just go read it.

SAP Global Report: Dell's Lionel Menchaca

         [Lionel Menchaca. Photo from File]

[NOTE-Jan 11, 2008. I rewrote the intro to this piece. It needed it. I also fixed a broken link. Lionel's Q&A remains unchanged.]

The Dell script pretty much follows the classic Hollywood formula: Sin, Suffer, Repent the Flourish.  Dell's sin was clear. In order to win a hardware price war it scrimped more than it should have on product  and service. It suffered by watching loyal customers migrate to such rivals as HP who overtook it for category leadership. It suffered further from seeing it's revenues and stock priced plummet into a prolonged and well-publicized freefall.

Dell is just now concluding an 18-month period of penitence. The CEO who steered the Dell Supertanker nearly onto the rocks was unceremoniously replaced at the helm by Dell Founder Michael Dell.  The company is buying back its still tepidly priced stock. It has begun a reinvestment program of $1 billion into support.  Reviews of new Dell products are mildly favorable but not quite laudatory.

Dell is most certainly coming back. Dents in its reputation have been hammered out. But the company has not yet returned to the sort of flourishing it enjoyed for more than a decade.

What makes this all so interesting to me is the role that blogging has played in this apparent comeback. The company started a blog in June 2006. Now called Direct2Dell, it has become the most popular blog published by a major global enterprise.

Direct2Dell is a team blog, but the face of D2D, as many people, including Dell folk call it, is Lionel Menchaca, who is the team's most prolific, passionate and frequent contributor. Lionel seems to specialize in the hottest of issues and he handles them in a calm authentic voice. His, interview appears below.

Will Dell actually enter Hollywood's predicatbly closing scene, the one where everyone flourishes and manufacturer and customers live happily ever after?  That remains to be seen. But because of Dell's new faces of social media, there are a whole lot more people cheering for the company than was the case 18 months ago.

Here is the result of my interview with him:

1. First, tell me a bit about yourself. Where were you born and raised?  When did you join Dell? What did you do at Dell before you became the primary blogger?

I was born and raised in Texas. I’ve been a hardware and technology geek since before high school. My career with Dell started 14 Years ago, in technical support—I was a front line hardware tech for two years, and an OS tech for a year after that. Back then, I thought excellent service and support was the best way to create loyal customers. I still do.

I spent the next several years managing and supporting product reviews for Dell, starting  with PowerEdge servers in 1997.  In the years since, I’ve been responsible for reviews and product PR for many of our product lines—everything from storage products to notebooks and desktops. Just before my current role, I also spent a couple of years doing media relations on the corporate side.

Outside of work, I have a wife and two young kids that mean the world to me.  I’m a huge music fan and have watched the Dallas Cowboys every season since 1976.

2. Most people know the general reason why Dell started blogging, but exactly what happened? What finally made Dell decide to blog?  Who made the decision? Why were you selected?

There wasn’t one specific issue that set things in motion, but Michael Dell has been a catalyst throughout the process. He was the one who asked us to reach out to customers who blogged about their Dell experiences to offer some assistance. That led to the creation of a team of Dell Customer Advocates back in April 2006 four months before we launched Direct2Dell. That’s when we started listening and engaging in conversations with customers throughout the blogosphere. During that critical four-month formative period, we learned a lot about what kinds of conversations were going on, and how to be part of them. For us, that was an invaluable part of the process.

Many people assume that we started blogging because of Jeff Jarvis and Dell Hell [read in reverse order], but that wasn’t it. Jeff’s situation was indicative of a bigger fundamental issue that was going on—our customer service levels in the US were slipping back in July of 2005. I blogged about it here. We started blogging because we knew that customers were talking about us, and we didn’t want to sit on the sidelines any more.

Why me? I think it was a combination of things. Throughout my years here, I’ve established contacts within many parts of the company, especially on the product side. Even though I wasn’t a blogger in the beginning, I understood both the technical and conversational aspects and had been reading quite a few blogs before this job became a reality. My technical support background  was also key. That’s why I was one of the folks tasked with getting the Customer Advocate team up and running. And by the way, that team recently celebrated passing the 5,000 blog post mark.

3. When the blog first came out you faced a firestorm of cynicism and criticism. How was this received among the various internal powers in marketing, legal etc. To your knowledge did Dell ever consider abandoning the effort?

You’re right, those early days were tough ones.  We faced criticism from bloggers and from customers alike. The level of negativity scared some Dell folks initially. Our legal department has been pretty realistic about things. There are a handful of issues that need to be reviewed by them—any safety- related issue, for example.  There are a couple of others but, by and large, it’s common sense stuff.

The other two departments that are directly affected by social media are communications and marketing.  By that, I mean they are the organizations that have to come to grips with the loss of control. We’ve made some progress in both departments, but we still have a long way to go. So far, I think we’ve seen some internal pockets of success, but it’s clear that our continued success hinges on convincing more and more Dell folk  within those organizations that open conversations will be a competitive advantage in the future.

I’ve never thought about abandoning the effort, and no one has asked me to.

4. After a few weeks, the conversation seemed to get a lot more constructive and polite. Why? What changed?

I’d like to think that we built our credibility by blogging the right way. To me that means blogging about topics that our customers ask us to address no matter how negative. That process took time because  we had to dig ourselves out of a credibility deficit that we helped create. By working through that, we earned the right to enter the conversation. That changed things.

5. Can you give me some statistics on the blog? How many uniques? How many comments? Growth?

We’ve been tracking at about 1 million page views per week. Unique visitors have reached as high as 300,000 per month.

One of the most important metrics is the change in the tonality of the conversations. In 2006, at the low point , almost 50% of the conversations about Dell were negative. Today, we are at about 23%. I don’t attribute all that success to our digital media initiatives, but it’s clear that they have accounted for part of it.

6.  As you know, many enterprise decision makers are fearful of being shouted at, lack of adequate measurement tools, loss of message control, leaking secrets and of course--no clear ROI. How would you address each of these?

I think all of those issues are reasons why corporations stay away from joining conversations. I would argue though that the benefits of being part of the conversation  outweigh all the risks. In my view, it’s really about facing the reality of the changes that are happening in front of us.  Companies need to admit that control is shifting toward customers. More and more customers are talking about companies they either like or dislike. Those conversations happen with or without companies being actively involved.  And it’s becoming increasingly clear that those conversations have more influence over perception than much of the marketing material and PR messages that companies produce.

We wrestle with measurement tools and ROI all the time for a couple of reasons:

•    This is a new, but maturing field, and that means it will take time to develop  tools and metrics that mean something on a broad scale
•    Proving ROI in social media almost always involves looking at a topic over an extended period of time

In my view though,  the real value in social media is that it has the potential to change customer perception in ways that just weren’t possible before.  Just because that’s hard to measure doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.  Time will tell, but it seems to me that not being part of the conversation is a far riskier proposition.

7. How has social media in general and D2D specifically changed Dell?

Direct2Dell has made us better listeners. It’s forced us to see things from a customer point of view, which we had gotten away from for a while. Direct2Dell also opened the door for us to expand into other digital media efforts like IdeaStorm and StudioDell. IdeaStorm is great because it’s community-driven. Our customers tell us how we can improve and tell us what ideas are most important through voting.

Between our own social media efforts and monitoring and engaging with customers in the blogosphere, I think we are have developed better listening skills in general. This work has shown us that how, how often and what we communicate is changing: timeliness is more important than ever and sometimes that means  setting expectations that we are working to address an issue before we have all the answers.

And while supporting our own properties is important, we realize that many communities that our customers take part in are outside Dell. What’s most important is that we ultimately join conversations wherever they occur, not just on our own properties.

8.  What are some of the stickiest issues D2D has caused you to face?

1)The exploding notebook in Osaka. It was a huge topic of conversation the first week that we had launched Direct2Dell. I blogged about it, and linked to Engadget on the third day after we had gone live. Inside the company, it caused some friction, but I think it was the right thing to do. That helped set the tone for what customers could expect from Direct2Dell—we weren’t going to shy away from negative conversations.

2) The battery recall. Back in August 2006, when Dell was the first company to announce a battery recall, we received some criticism. In the weeks and months that followed, other companies joined in after us.

3) The 22 confessions post on the Consumerist.  This was a situation that pitted the command and control philosophy vs. the new reality of the blogosphere. Here is my post that connected the dots.

4) Product delays: Starting with the XPS 700 gaming desktop which was launched before Direct2Dell existed, then products like the XPS M1330 notebook and later the Inspiron color notebooks. Making customers wait for products is a sure way to create a bad experience.

5) The XPS 700 motherboard upgrade issue. Not setting customer expectations properly created a situation of many unhappy customers. We worked through it and ultimately offered XPS 700 customers the option to upgrade to  a later product at no cost.

Personal Democracy Forum Accuses TechCrunch of Identity Theft

Through Robert Scoble's shared items, I learned about Micah Sifry, a founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and author of the TechPresident blog has accused Michael Arrington and TechCrunch of identity theft.  Micah says he sent Mike a nice email note asking to resolve the issue which went unanswered. He also sent it to another TechCrunch exec who promised to speak to Arrington.  Then Arrington went onto national TV talking about how he wanted TechCrunch to set criteria for the next president.

I have been chiding TechCrunch for the silliness of the apparent results of the Techcrunch Presidential Poll . If this poll means the tech community should seriously back Ron Paul whose currently way ahead, then I would argue the tech sector will have no real influence on the election outcome. On closer reading I've discovered that you can vote once per day, rather than just once, which hints that TechCrunch is looking for more traffic rather than an accurate pulse read on the tech community preferences.

Micah's charge is far more serious than mine. He has escalated his issue in a very short time and it is fair to wait to hear how Arrington responds to it and personally I think it would be wise for him to respond.

Queen Launches YouTube Channel

No, not the old rock group, but the one who resides in Buckingham Palace.

According to the BBC,he 81 year old Queen will use the new Royal Channel, will be used fo her to deliver her 50th anniversary Christmas message. Her first was given early in the second term of Dwight David Eisenhower.

A palace spokesperson said it hoped the site would make the queen "more accessible to younger people and those in other countries."

Is Lyons Lying about Apple Offering cash to shut him up?

Dan Lyons, author of the character blog  Fake Steve Blogs has posted that Apple Computer lawyers have offered him money to spike his occasionally humorous satire blog.  Then he said that once he posted it, the deal was off because the lawyers wanted the transaction to be private. He wrote they were outraged that he m,ade the deal public.

We just have his word for it.

My guess is that this post was better suite for April 1 rather than Christmas time.  But accusing a public company of this form of impropriety may actually generate a call or two from a real lawyer. We shall see.  My guess is that Dan's next step will tell us that the conversations were just verbal and unrecorded so there's only his word--or is it the Fake's word?

Techcrunch Poll. Vote as often as you like

I wrote a few days ago about the silliness of the Techcrunch Poll where Ron Paul continues to be the runaway leader among all candidates and Dennis Kucinich leads among Democrats. Still true, but I can change all that.

I voted for my choice a second time. It went through without a problem. It's like Florida 2000 for the rest of us. I wish I could talk longer, but I thing I'll go back and give my own candidate a few more votes.

What to Kill on the Web in 2008

Blog Herald's Lorelle VanFossen reposts her wish list of what to purge from the web in 2007. Very little of it happened last year, making it the ideal wish list for 2008. Here's hoping her list can be shorter next year at his time because people listen to her.

Another Good PR Pitch

I seem to have renewed interest in bad/good PR pitches these days, particularly regarding social media. Through the Scoble link factory I was pointed to Scott Monty's
Social Media Marketing. He received a video pitch for an ebook. The vid was devoid of hype. It simply had two people staring into a webcam saying what they had to say. Real people. Simple story. We need more of that.

Do video bloggers suck?

The World Hates Video Blogging?

Jim Kukral notes that whenever he writes about it, he gets a ton of comments. He points to a recent TechCrunch post on Magnify.net  that also generated similar comments. Someone noted that Scoble is a "writter" [sic] not a pretty face. I have to agree, Scoble is not one of these artificially tanned, deep-voiced talking heads--not by a long shot. Neither are many of the popular bloggers who are migrating onto online video.

I, for one, think that online video blogging is just now getting started and the possibilities for the bloggers turning into video casters are north of huge.

Media history is filled with the leaders of one media category leading the charge into the next. Journalists became the first radio voices and they now call that the Golden Age of Radio. Then the voices of radio became th first faces of television and we call that the Golden Age of TV. Over time, the marketing teams got more say on who would speak and who would appear and the replacements were smoother and more polished then their predecessor.  They were also dumbed-down and mediocre to make it safe for sponsors who wanted to avoid controversy.

It seems to me that we are not yet into a golden age of video blogging, but we will soon be.The early players are coming in for the most part from text blogging. They are restricted so far by technical issues, time restraints and costs. But those things always fall by the wayside.

Will the Scoble and Makliks fall by the wayside? Maybe. Maybe not.  What's important is that there is something new and eciting and different which is moving into the forefront.  Despite the detractors that Jim points to, the world is interested in Video Blogging, and as the tools get better and innovation refines the tools, I predict a Golden Age of Video Blogging will happen in the next few years.

I only hope that it does not get as mucked up as did the Golden Age of Television, where the people  who were truly entertaining and informative were eroded and replaced by those who were bland but pretty.





Technorati Tags: jim kukral, techcrunch, Scoble

Powered by ScribeFire.

3 more 2008 Predictions

[Charlene Li (r) with Shirley Owyang, will her book beat Naked Conversations? Will Tara Hunt's? Photo by Shel]

I'm feeling clairvoyant today. It must be all those peas. In any case, I have a couple more predictions for the next year.

1. A book will eclipse Naked Conversations as the all time best seller in social media. The two best bets are ones coming from Charlene Li and Tara Hunt. It may be both of them. If I have to pick one, it will be Tara Hunt. I will be ambivalent when it happens. The only way Naked could end up on top of the pile over time,  would be to have the interest n the subject shrink instead of expand.

2. Google stock will see the north side of $1000 a share, even if the recession everyone fears becomes reality.

3. The number of Fortune 500 companies actively executing social media strategies will at least triple.

Me in Pea, to support Susan

[Me, foreground, Pea pile in Background. Photo by GeekGirlTV]

Today, among the Twitterfolk is Frozen Pea Day. It is to support Susan Reynolds who was operated on yesterday for breast cancer. The well-publicized peas have become the symbol, because a bag of frozen peas was the only thing that seemed to soothe her pain after a breast biopsy.

Please go the this site and support her in whatever way you can. I'm late to this party.  The support so far today has been amazingly generous.

Special thanks to the incredible generosity of Eve, aka GeekGirlTV.  Not only did she make my avatar, but she volunteered to do this for anyone who asked her on Twitter.  In the past few dys, she must have made hundreds of them.

Predictions for 2008

1. In about 10 days, about 3 million bloggers will post their predictions for 2008. Heh. But I will have been first, helping to boost this post up in the Google Search Engine.

2. Facebook, having been the most rapidly adopted social media tool of all time will crest and begin to fade, hurt by (1) it's inability to find a monetization system that is acceptable to its user base and (2) allowing spammers and pseudo groups to dampen what was once an incredible user experience.

3. Online Video will continue to expand as both an entertainent and communications tool.

4. Apple for the first time in two decades will capture more than 10 percent of the desktop/laptop market. But it won't come much from enterprise purchases. The long-awaited Vista Service Pack 1 will finally arrive for corporate customers where it will immediately disappoint in terms of performance enhancement.

5. At least two new companies will enter the smart phone market with products targeted aggressively against the iPhone.

6. The Boston Red Sox will defeat the Chicago Cubs in the 9th inning of the 7th game of the  World  Series with a  pinch hit grand slam home run.  They will have been down by three runs and the count will be 3-2 when the hit comes.

7. Ron Paul will not become president.  He will become a correspondent for Techcrunch and make guest appearances on Saturday Night Live.

8. Twitter will continue to ascend in popularity. However, it will find itself in the same bind as Facebook regarding monetization. Both companies will come to learn there is a huge chasm between what they can do for revenue and what they should do.

9.  Two major metropolitan daily newspapers will cease to exist. Best bets are the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe. The world will not be a better place.

10. I will retire as a start ups consultant after 30 years of it to become a TV star, or maybe a rock star, but certainly not an opera star.

Telcos 10 Worst Moments of 2007

Timothy Karr, writing in the Huffington Post reviews Telcos 10 worst moments of the year. It must have been a challenge for him to pick just 10 from so many, shabby, deceptive, greedy moments in any typical telco year.

Like I've been saying, anything that has the word "carrier" in it's description should be mistrusted: airline, insurance, cable, typhoid, telco. Too bad, it's so difficult to avoid them. Very often, they get their powers, not by serving customers, but by legislation and litigation.

Parmet's 4 tips on boosting blog readership

If there's one thing bloggers like to talk about it's blogging. We just can't seem to get enough tips on how to get more recognition. Even those of us on a soapbox shouting that it's about the conversation not the recognition enjoy getting the recognition for having said that.

In that light, David Parmet has four useful tips on how to boost recognition of your blog. This post is one example of what he's talking about.

TechCrunch Poll: It's a Ron Paul landslide

TechCrunch may have wanted to increase its influence when it asked readers to take a partisan vote for president based on the tech-related positions of each hopeful. Right now, Ron Paul is by far the top vote getter in either party with more than twice the votes of all Democrats combined.  Among Democrats, Dennis Kucinich is snugly in the lead over Barack Obama.

This may say more about the TechCrunch constituency than it does for the likely outcome of the upcoming election.

Susan Reynolds & the Peas of Twitter

I don't really know Susan Reynolds, but I like her. I know her mostly through her frequent Twitter posts. I often find her 140 character-or-less entries, funny and/or insightful. Recently, Susan had one of life's least humorous experiences.  She was diagnosed with breast cancer.

After her biopsy, she discovered that an ice pack felt like a brick on her breast and the only thing that soothed the pain was a bag of frozen peas. She posted about this under the unforgettable headline of "Boobs on Ice," which included a photo of her chest covered snugly and tastefully with a bag of frozen peas. When the news came back she became the most recent blogger to share her cancer experience regularly with her social media friends. I wish blogging about cancer was unique, but it is not.

The unique part is the humor Susan has injected into this as well as what has happened in the micro blogosphere. Since then, a significant portion of Twitterati have reposted their photos with peas, lots and lots of peas--in pods, as hats, in hair, as face replacements, as background or foreground, all in a show of support for Susan. I don't believe there has ever been anything quite like this previously in social media. I don't think something like this could have happened without social media.

There's nothing really funny about peas.  There is certainly nothing funny about cancer. But Susan has made a great number of people smile, not at the peas or the cancer, but at her indomitable spirit. Instead of allowing herself to become an object of pity she has made herself a symbol of courage.

Since Spock is also a big name on Twitter these days, let me direct to Susan one of his most famous quotes:

Live long and prosper.

12 Amazing Videos from Mitch Joel's Friends

[photo by CC chapman]

1
Mitch Joel Speaks, originally uploaded by CC Chapman.

Twist Image's Mitch Joel ask 12 of us to name one favorite video from 2007.  The result seems to me to be an astounding and eclectic demonstration of how far online video has come in the past year, and gives us some sense of how far it can go. I had not seen over half of this fine selection, but each of them is an original and memorable gem.

Thanks, Mitch.

A Unique PR Experience

I just got an unsolicited, old-fashioned email from a PR operative who I don't think I ever met.  But he had heard me speak, was familiar with my blog and the topics I covered. In less than 250 words, he told me who he was and why he thought I might be interested.

I was.

His name is Ted Weismann.  He works for the Lois Paul Agency and his client is Lionbridge. I want to speak to them for the SAP Global Survey. Stay tuned.

Ted did me a favor, bringing me a company that may solve part of the translation problem for social networks that I have written and spoken about. He has done me a favor and it is likely what I write will be helpful to his clients.

As the media trained cliche goes: "It's really that simple." If this happened more often, I would not kvetch about practitioners in my former profession so often.

Forbes name 24 celeb bloggers plus a staff member

The Web Celeb 25 - Forbes.com

The 2nd Annual Forbes 25 list is out and there are several of the names--Arrington, Scoble and Om Malik for example and they should be pretty proud. But wait a minute, wasn't Forbes the Magazine that likened us bloggers to a lynch mob nt so very long ago?

Hmm. The Forbes Page has some interesting sidebars, one an article about bloggers who were not real people. But then on the main list, there's this blog written by someone called The Fake Steve Jobs, who wasn't a person either, but a contrivance by none other than that same Forbes Editor who likened bloggers to a lynch mob in a Forbes cover story.

But Forbes covers this with an indepth interview with--you guessed it--that same Forbes editor who likened bloggers to a lynch mob. What I really liked is that the Forbes teaser on the interview with the Forbes editor says he "breaks silence." Excuse me? This guy has been on every interview program and column this side of Oprah, which once again shows she knows where to draw the line.

Now where did I put my torch? Anyone got a match?


Technorati Tags: arrington, scoble, malik, forbes 25 Dan Lyons

Powered by ScribeFire.

Social Media Horror Stories

I'm working on yet another project for SAP with Giovanni Rodriguez at The Conversation Group.  We are interested in hearing about the worst, most vexing stories regarding PR and social media that have occurred. The uglier the better.

I don't care if you were directly involved or not.  I don't care if your perspective is as a member of a corporate team or consulting; press, analyst or customer. But please let us know what facts we need to double check before we use them.

By coincidence, someone named AftertheLaunch started following me this afternoon on Twitter.  As I usually do when I don't know someone, I followed the url. There I discovered Shama Hyder has started a category called "Marketing Bloopers." She begins with one I had known when I spoke last month to the California Library Association. You can bet I'll be following Marketing Bloopers very closely.

Branding, Broadcast & My Global Neighbourhoods Concept

No, I'm not announcing the restart of the book, not right now at least. This is a continuation of my previous post regarding Jeremiah and an afterthought of a still earlier post linking to Shel Holtz.

But, there's a lot of conversation going on this morning about the role of brands and broadcasting in social media. I've posted a couple of times about it today and they are both related to both the vision  and one of the problems of the Global Neighbourhoods book.

The essential concept of Global Neighborhoods was that not only is geography becoming less important, so are Internet sites. The fact that Facebook has 50 million members or that YouTube has a 125 downloads for every NY Times sold is becoming less relevant as well.

Instead, we are forming our own topical groups. They are smaller than online communities, merely neighborhoods of people who share common interests and bop from Flickr to Twitter, from blogs to videos top real world social gatherings. The people who contribute the most to these groups are the most influential. Members of these global neighbourhoods shape what other members buy, watch, visit and listen to.  They may even shape how we vote and think.

When I wrote the book outline, I estimated that the largest of these global neighborhoods would be no bigger than 150, a number I derived directly from Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point--a book you should still all read. But, technology has allowed that number to get larger. Perhaps 500 "friends can actually communicate with each other.  But most neighborhoods are much smaller perhaps less than 15 members.

The Global Neighborhood is small and intimate and personal. By it's very nature, mass marketing and branding efforts cannot work in them. Such efforts are not personal. Mass merchants build awareness through intrusion not collaboration.

We are moving from mass markets to millions of micro markets. And how one conducts "mass micro marketing" into  these global neighborhoods is a problem that is just starting to find answers. Dell's Ricardo Guerrero uses Twitter to offer close out deals to people who wish to follow him.  My friends at Eepybird make extremely creative branding  videos that get posted on  YouTube and that is also extremely human and cool in my opinion. I'm trying to get Boorah a small client to see Twitter to give advice on where to eat in your neighborhood, but we are just screwing around right now.

These are all just baby steps into the issue of branding and social media, product marketing and social media, advertising and social media. They may work or fail and the rest of us will learn from the experience.

DVR Owners watching TV ads? I doubt it.

Why Don't DVR Owners Skip Commercials? - Silicon Alley Insider

Peter Kafka reports on yet another survey that says most DVR owners still watch TV ads. He speculates the reasons:

• We are ancient (35+) and well past the age at which we can adapt to
new technology. Future generations will reflexively zip past
commercials without a second thought.
• Advertisers have already
adapted to the DVRs and have suddenly begun creating innovative and
compelling ads which are worth watching.
• We are comatose and would rather stare blankly at a screen then expend the necessary effort to hit the fast forward button.

I see three entirely different reasons than him:

• We are taking refrigerator or bio breaks.  I call them input/output sessions.
• We are using the time to Twitter our friends on what we think of what we are watching.
• We are making quick calls and emails.

I don't know about you, but my Tivo is only one of three tech tools I use during my brief spells in front of the tube. I have my laptop and my phone at hand as well and I actually get a far amount done without actually missing much from the tube.

What I seriously doubt is that over 75% of DVR viewers actually sit and watch that vast wasteland which is TV advertising.

Technorati Tags: silicon alley insider, peter kafka, DVR, TIVO

Powered by ScribeFire.

Can Brands be social?

My friend Jeremiah has been on a tear with valuable content lately.  He's really coming of age now that he's this big mucky muck over at Forrester Research. He's been asking a lot of people a lot of things about brands and communities marketing and social networks.

He's provided a lot of really interesting insights. I'm sorry he has not asked me, but I'll probably spend some time telling him tonight when we have dinner together--whether he asks me or not.

I think his perspective is moving away from some of the fundamentals that make social media different and superior to traditional branding campaigns and marketing.  When he asks such questions as "who owns a community" or should brands Twitter, he's revealing that he may be getting a bit too snug with clients.  When you begin seeing the world through the perspective those clients have, there's a danger you'll lose you greatest value, the value of turning that perspective inside out.

The essence of social media is that it is humans.  Humans connect to humans and they form communities. They own their communities, brands don't. The perspective of traditional marketing is to take a message and find delivery channels to inseminate into people's foreheads. This is not social. Social is for a marketing executive to start a blog and ask people why they hate his marketing efforts--then listen--really listen to what people say the way Dell has done and a few others are trying to do.

Brands don't Twitter.  People Twitter.  And if I follow someone on Twitter and it turns out I like and trust that person, then I may feel better about the brands he represents. Can brands be social? Of course not. Brands are inanimate intangible things. They are contrivances intended to make you feel some sort of emotion about a company or it's icons. That is not a social thing.

Whether his clients like those messages or not, they are the truth and to try to chip away at the truth is an unfortunate exercise even when it is well intentioned.

At least that's the sort of stuff I will tell me good friend Jeremiah at dinner tonight. It should make for an interesting conversation.

Laughing Squid and the Muttering Retailer

Anyone who knows Scott Beale and Laughing Squid, understand he has a wonderful, slightly off center sense of humor.  His recent Best Buy Blue spiff shorts is a good example. But what made this interesting was not the nearly predictable Cease and Desist letter from the world's leading electronics retailer, but the speed in which the retracted it.

Fast Company's Valeria Maltoni has a good report on how the blogosphere got to follow the story as Scott reported on it via his Twitter.  But the most interesting twist is that--of all things--the Best Buy PR folk jumped in to save the day for Scott and prevent a huge wart on the public face of BestBuy

Broadcast Tactics in Conversational Environments

My friend Shel Holtz has a good post about the difficulty corporate communications people have breaking one-directional broadcast habits as they enter the conversational environment of social media, particularly social networks such like Facebook. He serves up a great Jonathan Crow’s experiment that many people will find useful.

He also surprised me  by reporting on a study from the American Marketing Association that suggests a lot of people like ads and apps in social networks, particularly instore promotions and discount coupons. If this is true, there is a thread of hope that somehow as agencies and social networks like the current kicking puppy Facebook who is struggling to figure out revenue strategies that won't have users leaving in droves.

The trick for Facebook and others I think is to have ongoing conversations with customers. People are not insensitive to the need for monetization. They just don't want new media to keep dropping trash in front of their eyes the way the old media does.

SAP Global Report: Egypt's Wael Abbas

              [Wael Abbas. Photo (c) by ICJF]

I restart the SAP Global Survey on Culture, Business and Social Media on a day that started with reports on the murder of an Iraqi blogger. It is an ironic coincidence that I begin with
Wael Abbas, the Egyptian blogger who is among the most prominent at-risk bloggers. He recently received the Knight Foundation Award for Journalistic Excellence for his relentless exposure of  Egyptian acts of police brutality, harassment to women and government corruption.  According to the Knight Foundation, Wael, the first blogger to receive the award has "raised the standards of media excellence" in his country. He has also raised the wrath of those in power and that is because he has shown compelling evidence that at least some of those who hold power in Egypt are prone to abuse it.

Wael started blogging a few years back just as something to do. But in 2005, his focus zeroed in on government impropriety and he has posted pictures and over 800 videos of women being groped and harassed, a ballot box being stuffed and other abuses, but mostly, peristently and relentlessly, he has provided abundant and compelling evidence of police abuse. He has posted 100s of videos showing police slapping around uncharged detainees in police stations and on the streets. In one highly disturbing clip an young man is sodomized with a stick by several laughing police officers. In another a woman, charged with murder is hanging from a pole like a pig over an open fire, while police batter her.

His evidence has been picked up by traditional Egyptian media who had long ignored complaints that police abuse in their country was widespread.  Al Jazeera has broadcast interviews with Wael and shown his clips across Arab countries. More recently Reuters, BBC, AP,  CNN and most major media networks in the West have covered  Wael and shown his  video evidence. An English Literature major in college, who is proficient in English, Wael writes mostly in a slangy  Egyptian directed toward young Egyptians. Accommodating  increased Western interests, he recently began inserting key English phrases. But mostly, he uses the powerful universal language of visual content with sufficient abundance to disprove police counter claims that such abuses are rare.

"Police beating people--often people who are never charged with anything--happens all the time. Anyone in Egypt who has ever visited a police station has heard the cries of people being beaten. People who are brought into a station for routine questioning, routinely show up back in their neighborhoods with bruises and no one needs to ask what happened. I think the world should know this is happening."

He doubts the recent Western attention on him will protect him from an ongoing barrage of threats, detentions and beatings by police who regularly remind him that "they can do whatever they wish to me."  More important he says is that the West understand how one of their closest Arab states allies routinely treats its citizens. Egyot sits on the UN Council for Human Rights, Wael points out. "This is an allegedly democratic government."  Unrelated to Wael are long-standing reports that US intelligence agencies have turned suspected terrorists over to Egypt, to perform acts of torture might be detected in the US.

The point is that Egypt seems to be far from the safest places to dedicated your time, as Wael has done, to reveal what the government would rather keep quiet. Earlier this year, for example, Abdel Kareem Soloman, a blogging law student began serving four years in prison for criticizing Islam and  president Hosni Mubarak. Will the soft-spoken Wael be next. He has been detained and slapped around and verbally abused.  Police have threatened him, followed him, made threats regarding his family and otherwise made clear they think they have authority to do whatever they wish with him. In genral, the government, according to Wael, sees exposing their abuses as a crime, and considers trouble makers like Wael as ingrates to the Mubarak government.

He remains undeterred.

Says, Wael, "Bloggers are ordinary people.  We are not terrorists.  We should be treated as ordinary citizens and ordinary citizens should be treated with respect. The Blogosphere is the last free voice."

Suppressing, Wael's work and ability to communicate has had some help from Western resources. Two weeks after he received his Knight Award at the Ronald Reagan Center, YouTube took down all 181 of his video posts. They say they did it because people complained about the graphic content.  After numerous complaints, YouTube restored 177 of the clips, saying that Wael needed to make the contextual use of violent images clearer. Few observers believed that was the real reason.  Each of the posts have warnings that the clip shows police brutality, or similar comments. "How could the context be clearer than that" he asks. It is a rhetorical question.
At about the same time, Yahoo, without warning or explanation, blocked Wael's email. It was subsequently restored without explanation after press and bloggers pointed to it. YouTube's parent Google have some history of collaborating with governments attempting to suppress citizen rights. According to Isaac Mao, Google voluntarily deleted such "offensive phrases"  as "Tiananmen Square" and "human rights," on its Chinese version, without ever receiving such a request from the government. Yahoo played a historically unsavory role in fingering Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, sentenced to 10 years in a Chinese prison after Yahoo steered authorities to him. "Perhaps YouTube prefers I posts skateboarding  dogs," Wael wonders.

In fact, skateboarding dogs may pass muster at YouTube, but they might cause him a good deal of trouble in his home country, where Wael confirmed the ascending influence of  the Islamic Brotherhood, which argues that life today should be lived precisely as it was during the 6th century life of the religion's primary prophet, Muhammad. The Brotherhood also maintains that showing images of either the Prophet Muhammed or naked animals is blasphemous and should be harshly punished. The Islamic Brotherhood, which has been connected to the Al Qaida, Taliban, assassination of a  Dutch movie director, the Iranian Republic, the Cole incident to name a few also believes that all  non Muslems should be converted or killed.

More relevant to human rights, according to multiple sources, is the Brotherhood's determined suppression of women.  They are considered a prime reason for the reported increase in female genital mutilation and the return to the Burka, a caged framework of cloth that covers every inch of a woman.

The Burka is not required by Egyptian law, but it is being seen everywhere and fewer women dare walk the streets of Egypt uncovered, a common practice just a few years ago.  Wael says the Burka is a form of intimidation, not religious fervor. He told me that women often wear wear tight jeans, lipstick and heels under the Burka to avoid intimidation, beating or harassment on the street, sometimes by police," Wael said.

Wael was recently laid off as a correspondent by a German news service for reasons related to his blog. He barely gets by as a freelance journalist.  He's 33 and financially is forced to live at home with his family. He cannot afford to take a wife. All thing considered, why not just move to a Western country where economic and personal freedom are more  easily attainable?  "I have this problem. I love my country," he told me.

Facebook Revenue Ideas sinking from Awful to Worse

I always argued that free was a bad starting point for companies wishing to make money.  Then Google came along and showed how it could be done.  Then social media came along and charging for anything became a form of blasphemy.

So I have some sympathy for he mess that Facebook is in. I stayed out of the dog-kicking fracas when they introduced Beacon, which I hoped was the worst idea the world's most promising social network would come close to.

But I was wrong again. TechCrunch says that Ads-Click has introduced MicroSocialAds on Facebook.This is a 3rd party ap that pays you to spam your pals. I can hear the drool dropping from the jowls of the Pay per Post Crowd. Why should Facebook care?  Because it brings in one more avenue of crap that I may have to deal with if I stay with Facebook.

For me, Facebook is starting to remind me of an old college romance. It was torrid at first and I thought it was true love. But then there came a series of unpleasant surprises in her behavior. One morning I woke up and discovered she who had been so lovely so recently had become downright ugly to me.


Technorati Tags: facebook, techcrunch, microsocialads, beacon

Powered by ScribeFire.

Alive in Baghdad Blog Correspondent is Murdered

Ali Shafeya Al Moussawi, correspondent for the Alive in Baghdad blog was killed in the very early hours of the Iraqi Saturday morning. Neighbors say members of the Iraqi National Guard broke into his home and fired 31 bullets into his head and chest.

At one time, Robert and I wanted to name the book that became Naked Conversations, "Blog or Die." Then, Steve Straight, wrote his strong objection: "In some parts of the world, it's blog AND die," he wrote. How sadly true and prophetic.


Technorati Tags: ali shafeya, Alive in Baghdad, Steve Straight

Powered by ScribeFire.

World is not flat, but it is getting hillier

Thomas Friedman's book has always irked me a bit. Not because it has sold about 120 copies, for every Naked Conversations sold, but because it argues a case that all my research contradicts. It also only examined large company activities to make a case, ignore start ups and people in general.

Not all people have equal access into the Internet. Not all Chinese get to work for Microsoft. An Estonian or Italian language social network does not have the opportunity that Facebook does.

My SAP Global Survey research shows that geography has become less relevant, but to argue that a neat company started in Vietnam has the same opportunity as a potential competitor based in San Francisco and financed by Sand Hill Road have equal opportunity is a bit ludicrous.

Now comes Pankaj Ghemawat's "Redefining Global Strategy," according to a "Reuters review," the author argues that we are in an Era of semi-globalization and we will be for a very long time.

Yep. When I speak, I very often say that the world is far from flat, but the chasms are getting more shallow and the mountains are eroding into hills. But the hills are still steep and the gaps in ecosystem terrain formidable to cross.

I have not yet read the book. But it is now added to my stocking stuffer wish list.







Technorati Tags: pankaj ghemawat, "redefining social strategy, "world is flat"

Powered by ScribeFire.

A Day Without Twitter

Nick Gonzales at Techcrunch is writing that T-Mobile has shut off Twitter.  Nope, not true. Twitter has shut down for 12 hours maintenance.  They have been telling users all week that this woud happen.

What will we do?

Me? I might post here in 140 character blurbs, seven times an hour.

My Seville Photos

I finally got my Seville photos all posted.  I also managed to get them nicely out of order. You can see them here. look at nearby sets to see pictures of Cordoba, & EBE07, the wonderful conference that brought me there.

It's nice to go back to the pictures a few weeks later and realize what an outrageous trip it was.

Chinese Parents shop for toys made in USA or Japan

Chinese parents favor foreign-brand toys - World business- msnbc.com

As I keep saying, people everywhere are pretty much the same.  We've been the same since we hung out in caves and told our stories with sticks in the dirt and blood and berry juice on the walls. Its primal in people to want to keep their children safe.  Actually its like that with most mammals.

So when Chinese parents who can afford it shop for toys, they want to avoid the shoddy, danegerous traps hidden in cute and fuzzy toys made in China.


Technorati Tags: china toys

Powered by ScribeFire.

Sethi: Blognation is over & it's Arrington's Fault

blognation Updates » Blog Archive » Here’s to You Mr(s) Arrington, Goodbye and Good Luck Startups

My only question is, "Would you buy a used car from this Sam Sethi guy?"

Powered by ScribeFire.