Manage To Change

In Search of WOW

A while back I stumbled on Michael Hyatt’s blog: From Where I Sit.  Michael is the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers.

Regardless of where you sit, two of his recent posts are “must reads” for any one!

Creating WOW Product Experiences includes a list of ten common “WOW experience” attributes that he and his management team identified. Why would we aim for anything less than WOW in product development?

In the comment section the names Disney, Pixar, and Apple come up as companies that deliver WOW products. Can we name some more?

What I Have Learned in Four Years of Blogging is an excellent summary of the benefits of blogging in general, CEO blogging specifically, and experimenting with new things (not just technology!).  I couldn’t agree with him more.

Michael has been publishing online since 1998.  As someone who often manages and advocates change in publishing environments, I am thrilled to see a publishing CEO so openly experimenting and sharing his experiences.

Check out the quotes on his left side bar.  Some of them are priceless!

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.

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!

iPhone: Not Quite There Yet

About 4 days after I switched to a MacBook I got an iPhone. While I love this phone, some of its features still need a little work.

Picture and video messaging. People send me pictures all the time. When a picture comes to me on the iPhone, I get a text message with a website address, a user id, and a password (new user id and password every time).

The site is VERY slow and the user id and password rarely work. At minimum, I should get a link that opens the Safari browser on the phone and fills in the user id and password (still clunky, but better).

Flexible Synchronization. Everything you put on an iPhone must originate from one computer.

I use my laptop for all contacts, calendar, and email. However, I share a central music and video library with my immediate family (we all synch to one desktop).

I had to authorize my laptop on iTunes and move thousands of songs over to my laptop to get music on my iPhone!

From now on, every time we get something new, I’ll have to physically put the music/video on both machines.

Voice recognition. I can no longer just say “Call Liz” and get connected. All I can do with my bluetooth is answer an incoming call, hang up, or redial the last number I called.

Camera. It doesn’t zoom and can’t take videos.

Expanded email functions. I prefer not to download email to my mobile device if it's already downloaded to my laptop. I also delete multiple emails at once. My Blackberry Pearl could do both with the exact same POP mail accounts. My iPhone can do neither.

Access to the internet (the “real” internet), easier to read email and text messages, and streamlining down to one device (I gave my iPod Touch to my son) more than make up for the limitations on the list above.

Except for one...

The limited multimedia messaging functionality is very frustrating. My Blackberry Pearl was on the same network and I was able to see multimedia messages immediately.

Why can’t my iPhone do this?

Isn’t the iPhone supposed to be all about multimedia?

I’m confused!

(All comments, advice and/or instruction welcome!!!)

SIIA Day 1 & Tom Glocer Keynote

Yesterday marked the beginning of the SIIA Content Division’s Information Industry Summit. In order to keep up with the flow, I’m posting my notes and highlighting other blogs that are commenting on the presentations.

The keynote speaker this morning was Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters. PaidContent.org covered his presentation in detail, but here are some additional points.

According to Tom, the following forces are shaping our industry and determining what the media company of 21^st century might look like:

• Personalization of media - the increasing ability to receive the content we want.
• Two way pipe – busting the content creation and distribution monopoly previously enjoyed by publishing companies.
• Social networking – allowing upstart competitors to disrupt media giants.

His premise (with the stated goal of being provocative) was that the economics of the information industry make consumer media companies ill-suited to be public companies. The pace of change is rapid and the investment is large with payback occurring only over the long-term. It’s hard to reconcile long-term payback with the short term financial view of public companies.

However, Tom believes the economics can work in professional publishing. Professionals will pay for content. Why?

• Professional publishing deals with must have information and software.
• An individual’s professional reputation and millions of dollars in value are at stake.
• Often the professional’s employer or a third party (the client paying an attorney for research) pays the information bill.
• The professional is looking for the right information and doesn’t want an excess of information (they value a trusted filter).
• Information can be delivered precisely at the moment and in the format that fits a professional’s personal workflow.

Of course Thomson/Reuters plans to fulfill these needs!

Other SIIA presentations yesterday included:

From Content Matters by Barry Graubart: After the Froth: How the Financial Markets Will Affect Information Companies.

From The AppExchange Blog by Clara Shih: B2B Social Networking at the SIIA Information Industry Summit

From PaidContent.org:

• Interview with Caroline Little, CEO WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive
• Old Media versus New Media, a panel discussion with Ken Auletta, Author and Annals of Communications Columnist, The New Yorker; Michael Barrett, EVP, CRO, Fox Interactive; Jim Kelly, Managing Editor, Time Inc.; and Alan Patricof, Founder and Managing Director of Greycroft Partners.

Grease or Glue?

I used to think I was glue, but I’m not.

I’m grease.

I work best in situations where the moving parts have gotten a little stuck; in tradition, in culture, in misaligned expectations, or for any number of reasons.

Which are you? (or are you something different)

Is There Anybody Out There?

Remember my experiment with Jott last week?

Well someone from Jott came by the blog to offer their support. Good for them!

It’s relatively easy for someone to find instances of their company, product, or brand on the web and see what people are saying about them – yet, few companies do.

Or if they do, few comment or participate in conversations.

Harvard Business Review did, very well I might add!

Dell did.

Volvo didn’t.

United Airlines didn’t.

HP didn’t - not even once.

Starbucks didn’t.

LinkedIn didn’t.

Twitter, Microsoft, Second Life, Apple, YouTube, American Airlines, and many others, all didn’t.

I’ve read many detailed accounts of others’ brand experiences, and also rarely see a comment from the brand owner.

Reports can be positive or negative and there are still no responses.

I’m not sure why this is.

The popular perception is that they either don’t know people are discussing them or they don’t care. No one actually knows because they aren’t saying anything!

Do you look for mentions of your product on the web?

What do you do when you find one?

Photo credit & an interesting blog.