Manage To Change

Who’s the Customer?

At a recent parent teacher conference with my son’s Science teacher, I happened to notice that the best overall grade in the class was a 76.  There were another two passing grades and every other student was failing!

Out of 16 students 3 (20%) were passing.

I asked the teacher about class performance. 

“This is a really bad group of kids.  I’m not doing anything differently than I have for the past 28 years and I’ve never had this happen before.  I know it’s not me.”

You haven’t changed your approach for 28 years and you consider yourself blameless? 

Let’s contrast this with Jeremiah Owyang’s moderation of a Web 2.0 Expo panel.

Jeremiah monitored Twitter while moderating the panel.  As audience comments appeared saying the session was getting boring, Jeremiah shifted the focus of the speakers and addressed the comments real time.

Instead of using Twitter, he might have interpreted body language or facial expressions to figure out that a change in direction was needed (less direct, but still effective).

The point: He got customer feedback and adjusted!

If your customers are leaving, if they’re bored with your product, or if 80% of your class is failing, isn’t it time to adjust your course?

Web 2.0 Expo: Fake Steve Jobs

Dan Lyons, a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs and a senior editor at Forbes, gave one of the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes this morning.  Dan was both hilarious and thought-provoking.

So how does someone become the Fake Steve Jobs?

Dan asked, but Forbes wouldn’t let him start a blog.  Apparently Dan was “old media” and Forbes didn’t have confidence in his “new media” abilities.

So ... Dan started Fake Steve Jobs (anonymously of course). 

Within six months he had 90,000 readers!  One of them was the publisher of Forbes who regularly emailed Fake Steve with comments and ideas.  He also offered a reward to anyone that could find out who Fake Steve was in real life.

“Oh crap!

What now?”

Once again, Dan asked Forbes if he could start a blog.  For a second time he was told no. 

Hmmm?

Back in his NY hotel room Dan emailed Forbes (as Fake Steve Jobs) and asked the publisher if he was interested in having Fake Steve work for Forbes.  As you would imagine the publisher was thrilled.

Dan’s identity ultimately came out and he came clean with Forbes.

What a story! Dan didn’t take no for an answer, proved himself, and simultaneously learned a ton about a medium he had never used before.

I hope Forbes learned something too!

Dan’s closing remark: “We focus so much on destruction that we lose sight of what’s springing up around us.”

Web 2.0 Expo: Sessions from Day 2

Highlights from three of the sessions I attended today at the Web 2.0 Expo: 

User-Generated Censorship
Annalee Newitz, wrote an article in Wired, I Bought Votes on Digg, to illustrate how people can manipulate social networks. 

In today’s session, she contrasted the wisdom of crowds with their potential destructive nature.  Annalee went through several sites (Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and Wikipedia) illustrating that clear rules, quick follow up, and easy ways for users to filter content (preventing them from “stumbling on to content that upsets them”) can prevent unwarranted censorship.

Web 2.0 Product Management: Optimizing Metrics and Viral Growth
Dan Olsen’s session on Web 2.0 product management was likely the most comprehensive and tangible session I’ve attended.  The only problem was that there was no way to take notes fast enough to keep up with him!

Dan spoke about how the lines between product management and marketing have blurred since many products are spread virally, by the customer not by marketing and sales.  On Facebook, for example, it’s your friends, acquaintances, and colleagues that get you to join, not the Facebook marketing department (if there even is one!).

Most of the presentation was concerned with how to define, measure, analyze, synthesize, implement, and impact metrics to increase ROI. 

If I hear that he’s posted his slides on his website, I’ll let you know. 

Every product manager should look at them!

The Next Generation of Tagging: Searching and Discovering a Better User Experience
This session was fascinating.  Kakul Srivastava, product manager at Flickr, discussed how combining user tagging with finely tuned algorithms can result in “inferred tags.” 

Inferred tags make it possible to disambiguate tagging (know that Washington means Washington DC and not the state, the president, or the mountain). 

How often tags are used (identifying “hot tags”) or if there are spikes in usage or searching helps identify breaking news or items of interest.

Kent Anderson: New Blogger & Scholarly Publishing Innovator

Last night I found out that Kent Anderson from the Massachusetts Medical Society, someone whose innovative and thought-provoking ideas I personally enjoy and find extremely helpful, is blogging at the Scholarly Kitchen for the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP).

In his post today, Kent considers some interesting business models that could apply to the iPod and even to scholarly publishing.

Go over and welcome Kent to blogging! I'm sure he'll appreciate it.

Web 2.0 Expo: Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, authors of the book Groundswell and analysts with Forrester Research, lead the Web 2.0 Expo session Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business. 

Download the presentation from Forrester and look at the “Social Technographics Ladder” (slide 8) and the authors’ mapping of key roles within a company to the key business objectives of a social strategy (slide 9).

One point that I particularly enjoyed was their classification of personalities within a company: purists, pragmatists, and corporatists. 

Corporatists are the ones saying “Online activities must deliver business benefits.”  I can’t help thinking the label “corporatists” was a bit of a slam!  Although, the corporatist perspective seems pretty reasonable to me – to a point. 

At the other end of the spectrum were Purists.  They believe “People are the most powerful force on the net.”  They don’t really think of business per se just the purity of the medium and expression.

Of course, I found myself in the middle, a Pragmatist, “People are in charge but corporations can benefit.”

Keys to success (offered for pragmatists):
• start with your customers
• chose an objective you can measure
• line up executive backing
• romance the naysayers
• start small, think big
• and act fast

Personally, I think these are keys to success for most any change management effort – but good advice none the less!

Web 2.0 Expo: Community Building: Good, Bad, and Ugly

Today is the first day of the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

The first session I attended this morning was Community Building: Good, Bad, and Ugly. It was moderated by Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research and included Dawn Foster (Community Manager for Jive Software), Kellie Parker (Community Manager for PC World and Mac World), and Bob Duffy (Community Strategist for Intel).

Here are some of my rough notes (sorry - don't have the time to pretty them up and form coherent sentences!).

Using social networks as a vehicle for customer service: Customer service was traditionally one on one. A person (usually a company) answered a customer’s question or issue.

Community allows a customer to put their question to a group and get answers from other customers, not just the company. It also enables broader conversation about the issue.

All of the panelists agreed that when it comes to building your own community or joining other communities the answer is to do both. Engage your audience where they are - even if it isn’t on your website!

On the differences between marketing and community building and management...

Community management is less formal. Managers and other company participants engage with customers as people.

This isn’t traditional push marketing. It’s bidirectional. Often companies position traditional assets AT the conversation rather than becoming part of the conversation.

Characteristics of a Community Managers ...

Must be passionate both about the technology and the dialogue.

They should be the product experts not necessarily marketing staff.

They need to be amazing networkers. If they don’t know the answers they need to know how to get them. This also helps bridge the gap between the online and offline communities.

They should be diplomatic, often having to handle difficult customers and participants.

Perhaps the most personally enlightening comment for me was viewing the role of the community manager as both the advocate of the community to the company and the advocate of the company to the community.

That seems to be it in a nutshell!

The Hardest Part

It seems like writing is just like most things, the more you do it, the easier it is to do.

The less you do it, the harder it is to get started, to be consistent, and to feel as though you have anything to say.

...and the more likely you are to be redundant!