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!

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!

Working with Publishers 101

Lately I’ve found myself talking to companies that want to work with publishers, but they’re having a difficult time getting any business.

In almost every conversation the same issue surfaces.

The vendor wants to make the publisher understand their unique value proposition.

However, the vendor’s general knowledge of publishing is often lacking and their specific understanding of the publisher they’re “targeting” is virtually non-existent.

The vendor wants to be treated like a partner, but they don’t act like one!

All publishers may create and manage content, deliver it via multiple channels, and engage in marketing activities, but they are all different.

A publisher’s ability to innovate around content is critical, yet many publishers are having a hard time evolving. They know it too!

Many would like to explore vendor partnerships, but few vendors take the steps needed to gain the publisher’s trust and respect.

If you want to work with a publisher, start by remembering these points:

You don’t know everything.

You need to listen.

It’s good that you know your product’s strengths, but you must respect the publisher’s strengths too.

Be confident and offer your expertise, but understand that there is no plug and play.

Your expertise needs to be combined with their experience and reconfigured to arrive at the right solution.

Times are changing. Some publishers will make it and some won’t.

None of them will engage you along the way unless you take the time to understand their business and culture.

(Reposted from June 2007)

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?

Google: The Pot Calling the Kettle…

Does anyone else find this amusing?

Microsoft makes a bid for Yahoo! and Google screams monopoly.

I am a big Google fan. While some of their tactics are questionable (especially if you are a publisher), their overall mission is admirable.

But, who has more of a monopoly on all things Internet than Google?

According to the Outsell Inc report Information Industry Market Size and Share Rankings: Preliminary 2007 Results (purchase required): “Total information industry growth with Google included as 5.3% but without Google this figure falls to 3.8%.”

That represents a 1.5% impact on growth in a $381B industry (as estimated by Outsell in that same report).

That statistic only talks about their percentage as an information industry application, service, and content (?) provider.

What about Google’s position as the purveyor of online advertising? What percentage of that market is controlled by Google? I don’t know, but I bet it’s pretty near a monopoly standing.

So is it okay to be a monopoly if you’re Google but not okay if you aren’t?

See also: Google Works to Torpedo Microsoft Bid for Yahoo! in the New York Times.

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.