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!!!)

Exercise

The more I write, the more I read, the more questions I have, and the easier it is to write.

The more I exercise, the better I feel, and the more productive I am.

I wonder if there are other extensions of this principle - counterintuitive places where if we spend time we ultimately save time and are more healthy.

The more I talk to my customers the easier it is to develop better products?

Your turn.

What’s a “pet” activity that you know is good for you (or your company) and yet it’s so easy to put off?

Getting Used to a Mac

As of yesterday I’m a Mac user!

Why did I switch after 26 years on a PC?

Vista.

Even though Vista was the “straw that broke the camel’s back” this has been coming for years.

As soon as Apple started to care about the business user PC’s were in trouble.

The transition hasn’t been flawless but I’ve been very impressed with how Apple has handled issues.

One thing I find interesting is that they are less willing to put up with imperfections than I am.

It made me realize how often I’ve “lived with” something on a Windows machine that I shouldn’t have.

As long as my machine wasn’t blowing up and I could get my email, drivers that weren’t compatible and other glitches were tolerable.

Shame on me!

The Google Generation

Kate Worlock, Outsell Inc, published an interesting Insight yesterday: Millennials vs. Silver Surfers: Not So Different After All (subscription required).

Kate’s analysis, based in a new report from University College London's CIBER project (Information Behaviours of the Researcher of the Future, commissioned by the British Library and JISC), focuses on the searching behaviors of the Google Generation (those born after 1993).

While the report focuses on them as future researchers and the impact their habits will have on libraries, I found this interesting from another angle.

The Google Generation appears to be without context.

Just take a look at three of the themes Kate highlighted:

· “Speed of searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information;

· Young people demonstrate a poor understanding of their information needs and have unsophisticated mental maps of the internet; they therefore find it difficult to develop effective search strategies…;

· The Google generation finds it difficult to assess the relevance of sources.”

So, the million (billion) dollar questions:

· What can publishers do to help these searchers (consumers?) find a rudder?

· How will our content become relevant to an audience that considers Google and Yahoo! the brand?

· How can we build relationships with this generation directly?