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How will your conversation with customers change in the world of Web 2.0 and beyond?

August 21

No Substitute for Authenticity

I enjoy a glass of wine. Or two. Sometimes three. And as a beginning oenophile, I’ve been using the interweb quite often to expand my universe of wine knowledge. This includes reading tasting notes, looking up new wines to try, buying suggestions, and which local restaurants have great wine lists.

"Ernie, if you continue to read about booze on the internet, you and your liver are gonna wind up like this guy!"

Which brings me to the dustup over Wine Spectator’s recent award to an imaginary restaurant. Apparently, someone invested a fake restaurant in Italy, built a fake website, constructed a fake wine list that included very low-scoring wines, and entered it into the famed magazine’s award submission. Presto! They won an “Award of Excellence.”

Apparently, as part of their “research,” committee folks read some (fake) reviews on Chowhound and also successfully Googled the restaurant’s name in order to verify its legitimacy.

What a great illustration of how social media and the easiness + ubiquitous nature of search can make us all so lazy. And not just drunk-lazy.

How does this apply to us and our clients? For starters, I think the term “authenticity” takes on a deeper meaning. While secondary (market) research has its place, there’s still no substitute for good ol’ fashioned primary research. If anything, it underscores the importance of user/stakeholder interviews, surveys, in-person (and hallway) conversations when it comes to any project or endeavor.

Secondly, companies need to be even MORE diligent in their online and offline activities to effectively convey and support any brand authenticity to their current and potential customers.

Any slight whiff of inauthenticity, exacerbated by the locust-like nature of online social media, can do some serious damage to a brand.

posted to: Digital Strategy, Web 2.0 & Social Media | No Comments »

August 6

How bad corporate videos can give a good company a black eye

by Ken Chin

In this day and age where information leaks abound, you can be certain that most things that should be for a company’s internal use will “somehow” find its way onto the Internet. While blog and web postings on future product developments, product releases, price cuts, etc. may generate positive buzz and interest from the online community, there is a dark side to this as well.

Recently, there have been two “for internal use only” sales/promotional videos that have leaked onto the web. The first is one for Microsoft Vista SP1 and the second was for Mercedes-Benz. The Microsoft Vista internal promo, complete with a faux Bruce Springsteen and a recreation of the “Dancing in the Dark” music video with a Courtney Cox lookalike, has been soundly ridiculed by all the major technology blogs from Engadget to Gizmodo as well as major news outlets like the Wall Street Journal and CNET. Microsoft initially tried to spin it as a gag and a parody, but it’s clear that the company made a real financial investment to produce this video and intended to use it to rally the sales troops.

More recently, a Mercedes-Benz promotional video intended to boost sales morale has been circulating on the Internet. The tone of this video, featuring a Bon Jovi wannabe (sidenote: what is this fixation on New Jersey bands by big corporations?), is far more juvenile in nature with such trash talking lines as “Gone is the Bimmer, and to Audi say ‘bye bye.’“ However, the most damaging lines occur around the 2:15 minute mark of the video where Fake Bon Jovi sings “At Volvo they worry, the Japs they just cry.” Considering that Japan and the Far East market constitutes over 10% of Mercedes Benz’s sales, allowing the use of a racially derogatory term in an internal promotional video was not the wisest of choices. Luckily for Mercedes-Benz, it appears their damage control team worked quickly as the video has now been pulled from YouTube.

The lessons learned from these internal video leaks are threefold. First, regardless of how honest or law-abiding your employees are, always assume that confidential information will escape. Very few companies are “airtight.” According to a recent study by Xerox, 80% of enterprise information attacks/leaks are by insiders. In addition, with the availability of cheap bandwidth and wide reach many blogs and file sharing sites have, the speed at which the leaks proliferate is stunning. Second, make sure your firm has a diversity/cultural sensitivity team that reviews and approves all content and media prior to greater distribution. We can look back and laugh at naming faux pas like the Chevy Nova (roughly meaning “does not go” in Spanish), but in today’s high speed digital age, these oversights can spread like wildfire and generate a mountain of negative publicity. Third, have a damage control process in place to constantly monitor the chatter on the Internet to ensure that if embarrassing information has been leaked to the Internet, you are able to address it quickly.

In a perfect world, everyone would be law abiding, globally aware, and culturally sophisticated. However, we live in a place that is far from perfect and as such, companies must be equipped to prevent, minimize and mitigate the effects of internal information leaks. If companies do not plan for these eventualities, they will be on the receiving end of more buzz than they could hope for – of the negative kind.

posted to: Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy, Web 2.0 & Social Media | No Comments »

August 5

Do social media tools constrict or expand us?

by Steve Mulder

During a recent presentation on social media, I was asked a question that still has me thinking weeks later. Someone asked if all these social media tools (blogs, tags, collaborative filtering, social networking sites, etc.) are harming us as a society because by their very nature they help us find people and content that reinforces what we already believe or like, rather than introducing us to new and unexpected ideas. The fear is that by following only people we agree with or products similar to what we already like, we could live a narrow existence and miss out on surprises or things that challenge us.

The question reminded me of a diagram from a few years back. Someone plotted political books based on how likely they were to be purchased together on Amazon and found a clear liberal vs. conservative divide. People tended to buy books that confirmed preexisting beliefs.

(more…)

posted to: Digital Marketing, Web 2.0 & Social Media | No Comments »

July 31

The Quarterly Earnings Call is Passé

by Eric Karofsky

Much has been discussed about the availability of new socially oriented financial products for the retail audience, however even the very traditional institutional audience is beginning to tread into the area.

The retail world offers many examples of best practices. From great sites such as Mint.com, which can organize an individual’s financial accounts, to crowd-sourced investment ideas at the Motley Fool, there are a host of opportunities to gain from the wisdom of the crowd. Recently, Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester listed many retail examples.

Now the institutional side, more traditional and conservative, is beginning to adopt social media practices. No, I don’t expect Facebook and Myspace to have a many buy-side friend groups, however there is a deep interest in more meaningful interactions between investment managers and their institutional clientele.

Advisors and investors are looking for more contact with portfolio managers and members of the investment team. For example, the typical earnings call offers minimal capabilities beyond listening and getting in queue to ask a a question. Feedback is that they are typically too structured, too scripted, and question and answer sessions require too much time, or are of little value.

Research has shown us that analysts and decision makers want to interact beyond phone calls. They want to ask tough questions and physically see how the manager reacts. They want to be able to view it on their own time, and their own devices. They want to understand and learn from other people’s questions. They want to rank questions to make the most of their valuable time. They want to search for specific comments. Some want to offer feedback on the answers and others want to create an evolving dialogue.

In order to be successful, web-based interactions need to delicately balance corporate and legal compliance concerns with the vast opportunities that technology affords. Investment managers that don’t evolve their interactions risk perceptions of transparency and risk providing the conviction that investors need to recommend or purchase a product.

posted to: Digital Strategy, Experience Design, Industry Trends, Web 2.0 & Social Media | No Comments »

July 28

Distributed services - the past, present, and future of the Internet

by Craig Andrews

The Internet started as a distributed network - ARPANET. Its protocol, TCP/IP, was designed so that hosts anyone could communicate without relying on a central authority, and if any one host went down, it didn’t affect the other others’ ability to work. Gradually, as ARPANET evolved into the Internet, that distributed architecture became more important. Today, the Internet is pretty much everywhere, from nanny cams, to laptops, pda’s, servers, data centers, and telephones. And that redundancy and distribution is critical for the whole thing to work.

Great… so I’ve just wasted a paragraph telling you what you already know, right? The interesting part is that business doesn’t like distributed services, and has been trying since the beginning to stop them. For example, the World Wide Web is distributed. Anyone can set up a web server, and then anyone else can view pages on it. I can set up a web server on my PC and someone in China can take a look around. No reliance on Google, or Microsoft, or anyone else. But then, how do businesses such as Google and Microsoft make you rely on them, so they can charge you for their services, or force you to view advertisements, so they make money?

We have this constant struggle of the technology pushing towards decentralization, and the business interests pushing towards centralization. Let’s take Amazon S3 as an example. S3 is a very cool distributed computing technology. The basic idea is that one can write software specifically against S3’s API and then upload it to S3, and the service will dynamically provide more or less resources depending upon the site’s specific needs at any given time. If the site is hit by digg or slashdot - that’s fine, S3 will allocate more processing power. When the surge ends, the power is scaled back, and the payer of the S3 bill saves money.

So far so good, right? But now there is a situation where a vast number of sites have a single point of failure. They also have no portability to other providers. What if S3 goes down? All the sites relying on it go down. What if S3 raises their prices? The sites can’t change providers; they have no choice but to pay.

S3 is relatively new, so the technologists haven’t yet come up with a complete alternative, but some are in the works. But, consider Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging service that allows one to write 140 characters of one’s thoughts. It’s tremendously popular, having over a million users worldwide. But what if Twitter became unreliable? What if they stopped introducing new features, or broke existing capabilities? What if their terms of service weren’t to your liking? The answer to all these questions used to be “deal with it” or switch to another site just like Twitter, that inevitably evolved the same problems. Twitter isn’t distributed - you can’t just make your own Twitter and still communicate via your new site with your friends on Twitter (like how an GMail user can email a Molecular address), nor can you contribute the Twitter software. Your complaints fall on deaf ears.

It took a while, but the technologists responded with Identi.ca. Identi.ca lets anyone download the software the site runs (called laconi.ca), make changes, and run their own server. If identi.ca becomes unstable, the owner starts behaving badly, or anything else disagreeable happens - the users can simply leave. Their data comes with them, and they can still communicate with others on the OpenMicoBlogging network. Imagine that… if you don’t like the service, you can leave.

There are many examples of services changing from locked down to distributed, too. Instant messaging is one: there used to be many many protocols and clients people had to run, such as AIM, Y!, MSN, etc. Then XMPP (aka Jabber) came along. With XMPP, one provider going down only affects those users and not the whole network. For example, when AIM has trouble, every single user of AIM has trouble. When GTalk goes down, I only lose communication with those people on GTalk, I can still talk to my friends on other XMPP servers (for example, when the aol.com email server goes down, it doesn’t affect my ability to send email to gmail.com users from my Molecular address). The damage is limited, and people have choice. Those users of GTalk, who are now seriously annoyed with the service for going down, leave to another XMPP service, and they can still talk to all their friends, just the same.

Microsoft Passport failed for the same reason. People didn’t want to rely on Microsoft alone for their ability to log in to disparate services. Instead, OpenID came along, which allows users to pick, and even change later, who their identity provider is. And now bigger players are supporting OpenID.

These distributed services provide a huge incentive for service providers to keep providing quality services, that are stable, work well, and continue improving. With the constant threat of users simply leaving, these services must always be on the look out for improvements, and they can’t simply add tons of advertisements, or paid registration, when looking for money.

In the short term, the Twitters and AIMs of the world will continue to have huge user bases. But over time, they can’t keep up with the freedom and higher quality of the distributed alternatives. Look around - is the centralized Prodigy still around? How’s Delphi doing? For that matter, isn’t the walled garden of AOL in trouble? Yet the World Wide Web and the email system keep going.

posted to: Technology, Web 2.0 & Social Media | 1 Comment »