So conferences are crazy things! Drinking, music, slides and conversation - not in priority order, but after the event there is apparently a ramp your Technorati authority. The Conference Authority Impact (CAI) is a fairly interesting phenomena which appears to increase your Technorati authority just for attendance, more or less.
So here is what I’ve noticed: spatially relevant’s “authority” went from minimal to horribly mediocre in just days, with NO apparent justification. Oh wait, I know why this may have happened. A bunch of people linked the attendee list and created “blog reactions” which have since my last point of reference raised my technorati authority.
The CAI might just be an interesting thing to understand. What is the credibility of any social media benchmark?
So back to being an opportunist….
So I’ve think there are 3 things I have decided might theoretically extend the CAI: Write (novel), payback (appropriate) and provide a little visibility to the lessons learned directly or indirectly from the event. This is an indirect post.
Conferences as an Authority Generation Strategy
Conferences aren’t just a narrowcast placement opportunity for sponsors, but apparently for the participants as well. Most of these folks hopefully descended on Chicago with products to position and promote. Events represent a promotion channel for the participants’ product, their blog. Apparently not only can brands become humanized, so can bloggers.
So as you think about attending a conference, it might be important to develop an outreach plan to manage the lead nurturing cycles which could deliver increased authority, visibility and a follow up plan on how to use the CAI spring board post conference.
At the end of the day it appears conferences are essentially promotional channels for hocking your brand/blog and sharing tip, tricks and links from others in the room.
With CAI potentially being a real thing, I’m gonna plan a little better…. I’m contemplating logo swag for the next conference and an iPhone giveaway for the most insightful post on currency fluctuation.
Question: Is Authority Generation an expected, warrented or unintended by-product of attendance? Curious, as I’m not sure I did anything new except write a check, eat a bunch of room service and meet some folks.
Hugh’s recent I quit Twitter initiative took me back to his blog again. Hugh’s renewed focus on writing and creativity is refreshing to hear about. While browsing I again ran into the image below, which reminds me of the importance packaging a software product for the a given market segment and within the then current economic context. As I talk to product managers and technology marketers there is considerable churn and angst about managing their businesses into a tight spend cycle. Packaging up into value and down into customer acquisition with planned out year up sells are two themes I’ve been seeing in the marketplace.
Are you simplifying, enriching or repricing your solutions?
From my limited experience, economic states and packaging are temporary, price maybe not. Thanks for the reminder Hugh!
There is so much noise about the market opportunity and the necessity to fund community initiatives for enterprises but little has materialize in respect to direct revenue and meaningful metrics. This is a challenge for traditional marketers on many levels and the type of topics I suspect are being at the Forrester Marketing conference. There is a after the show workshop that asserts the following which might be close to revenue:
Experiments with rich media, blogging, RSS, and social networks show how dynamic marketing techniques can touch on buyers’ emotions, educate and persuade them, measure interactions more effectively, and generate additional business.
2. Perpetual Social Markets
Shel’s interviews of Jeremiah Owang and the Sea World folks are both emblematic of the challenges of linking social media investments to a return. How can you effectively measure and manage social media as a growth engine? Examples exist where a specific event or a series of inferences can be leveraged to assume the impact of social media, as evidenced in the description of Sea World video at Fast Company:
Measuring social media is one of the pain spots for the enterprise. As Kami Huyse, says in this clip of her client SeaWorld San Antonio. “It all depends on what you measure.” …
What to measure indeed - hits, downloads….. Ultimately most businesses measure revenue from Marketers, so perhaps Sea World is an anomaly and most businesses know how to convert the social media marketing budget to revenue and understand how to successfully deploy/develop a community. Let’s see if this is the case from Shel’s interview of Jeremiah, you probably only need to listen for say, the whole thing:
3. Social Media as Infrastructure
With the metric challenges and elusiveness of revenue is social media a function of retention more so than demand? If marketers are unable to deliver/verify incremental new revenues base on investment, should the metric hunt move to revenue retention and customer satisfaction?
Cool technology should never be relegated to the “post-transactional” budget fight…..
4. Platforms as Markets
Is Twitter a market? Facebook? Myspace? With increasing platforms for exchange more and more opportunity appears to emerge as populations flock to platforms. Where people gather transactions happen right? There are many example of this in the physical space - Burning Man, dead shows and in the parking lots of panic shows. So if people are gathering, there has to be transactions to be had - right?
Information as currency and messaging as a service continues to be the key commodities being exchanged on social media platforms….
5. Community as a Commoditizer
The transactional efficiencies of social computing by it’s very nature puts downward cost pressure on goods. Ease of comparison, ease of purchase and ease of access to other consumers/product customers. Ease of discovery. Product differentiation through a cost center represents…
Maybe the title should have been 5 Incoherent Thoughts…
I haven’t spent much time doing pure play product management posting in a while, so I thought I would today. I’ve been doing a bunch of leisure surfing and looking at a bunch of greatstuffonline and challenged myself to think about what it takes to transition a technology into a product. While I didn’t come to a great deal of conclusions, I think I’ve come up with some reasonable litmus tests for consideration:
Does your product have more defects than enhancement requests?
Can the users manage their own product experience?
What is social media? A better question is what isn’t. It’s not big, it’s not broad and it’s not for sale for the most part. That’s a HUGE problem for traditional marketers. To keep it simple - you know social media when you see it. The Social Media Club provides this definition/framework:
Social (from Merriam Webster) “1 : involving allies or confederates
2 a : marked by or passed in pleasant companionship with one’s friends or associates social life b: SOCIABLE c: of, relating to, or designed for sociability
3 : of or relating to human society , the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society < social institutions>“
By this definition social media is essentially a set of infomediary channels. These conversational channels are equally available to individuals and corporations which makes “controlling the message” or positioning the brand a little more dynamic. The dynamic and egalitarian realities are requiring organizations to add corporate bloggers, community managers and SEO folks to the payrolls to shape the discussion. This latest corporate internet frenzy does have a little bit of the “we got to be there” feel of the early internet which spawned the explosion of webmaster roles in IT which transitioned to more creative roles in marketing many organizations. Technology has a way of developing new disciplines and requiring new skills and investment in people - social media is no different. Social media may actually be organizational development writ large - a new model for organizations, Social Management.
With the new roles on the org chart comes a new worker, a connected conversationalist, where work and life are a balanced set of commingled actions which are agnostic to both place and time. I’m not saying everyone is going beduin, but personal is becoming professional and where and when work happens is different. Markets are becoming social, professionals are becoming personal and brands, at social media’s most atomic level, are their tags.
Social media is changing relationships within a business and how everyone at a company contributes to the success in the marketplace and how customers are re-defining old brands and showcasing new brands. The change will be bigger than it appears on the surface.
Yes - looks are deceiving and that’s a fairly sweeping statement, but the new roles in organizations and the proliferation of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter ARE the leading indicators of change, it also loosely ties into my recent theme on corporate gardening, which I see as a good thing. (The other challenge is there is not a whole bunch of empirical data, so you take what you have and create a plausible relationship and hiring practices for social media roles is a fairly compelling data set.) Social media is on the edge of mainstream for corporations the graphic from Indeed below shows the historical growth of social media roles in the marketplace:
The initial focus of change in many companies is within the marketing group, but support and development jobs are also carrying the social media tag. For now, social media is changing marketing more so than any functional group. When will it be a requirement to show your social portfolio as part of the interview process? How long until there are generally accepted new media launch toolkits and methodologies in the marketplace which start showing up on monster profiles and ads?
Understanding/Overstating/Underestimating the Impact
Social media is not so much about direct influence of revenue, but more of a market optimizer - which DOES impact revenue. Current revenue streams AND future opportunities. Essentially social media aids in making markets more efficient with pervasive communication, connectivity and real-time transaction capabilities. It’s a fundamental change in market mechanics.
Think about it - People buy from people right? Social media is about people. Not huge logic jump that times they are a changin. The change in the mechanics can be seen in the rise of social media platforms as preferred places for interaction and research for many consumers/individuals/employees. The emergence of the social customer isn’t just the re-tooling of word of mouth marketing, it is a change in influential scale - a single customer’s opinion can now influence 1000’s of prospects, not just a handful at the barbershop.
Social media is essentially just starting to prime the market pump - removing the air from traditional “brand out” messaging and requiring more substance for “brand flow”. It will clearly take some more time to have all the “plumbing” in place and air out of the line, but we can see that folks removing the air from the buying process, such as Cushman’s Toyota Yaris experiment. Don’t like the pump metaphor - another way to look at it is as a market lubricant which reduces transactional friction caused by the legacy market mechanics.
A Frictionless Market
Markets traditionally are made less efficient due to brokers, intermediaries, traditional marketing, limited access, price variability and the inherent transactional costs of the exchanging goods of value. The fundamental mechanics of communication, value creation and brand management has been diffused into a community of infomediaries - customers, former customers, competitor customers, employees and former employees. For good or ill access to people, information and influence impacts loyalty, awareness and product placement. There is a downside - the risk of commoditization exists with the reduction of transactional friction in the market. Easier to compare, easier to shop - essentially accelerated discovery and understanding.
The Back End Brand
Discovery and access is changing the messaging imperative from who can shout the loudest to the biggest poplution to be considerably narrower engagement - a conversation. Reviews, diggs and micro-content will essentially piece together a brand mosaic which is the brand identity. Today marketers spend time, energy and money on developing mass awareness and cultivating a sense of value before the commercial transaction. Social media is allowing the customer to do this now in parallel.
Essentially the front end brand investment seen today, will need to shift product focus on service and the ability to influence the conversation in a segment. Brand management has moved from perpetuating a mass market myth to influencing post transactional conversations and community lore. Ultimately social media transitions the definition of brand and value to the service chain.
If this is the case - should customer care/support be part of marketing? Or should support be a standalone product with a product manager? Is this the new portfolio manager? This is going to be an exciting time and good market change. So as a marketer, manager or contributors what can you learn and unlearn to leverage this change in the mechanics of the market? I don’t know what the future holds, but I thank Jeremiah and for getting me thinking about it based on the Tweet below:
@oracletechnet says community managers (before social media) used to be called ‘editors’. I’d say they were called Support or Account team
Not sure I made a point, but sometimes you just have to press publish and move on…..
If brand management is increasingly about customer input, feedback and how they share their experiences, does that mean more investment in “after the transaction” is required to differentiate?
With Yahoo’s rejection of the MSFT offer, I am reminded of a line from a book by James Patterson, Cat and Mouse, which make one wonder where Yahoo! is in the planning process. The quote is as follows:
Don’t mistake the edge of a rut for the horizon
It’s all about where you are, what you can see and what you are willing to see when planning for change. I think YHOO may just be making the optimistic rejection offer because they believe they can reach rut escape velocity and transition into a compelling competitor in the market for years to come. I mean what worked in the past has to work in the future, right? Why else would you bring back the former leader - lightning can strike twice in the same place. I know this is sorta true, because my brother has been struck by lightening 3 times - not in the same place, but still statistically crazy - his nickname around the house is Anomaly.
I can hear the logic being leveraged around the board table on the 62% premium and the REAL value of the company. “MSFT is so wrong, we are worth like eleventy GABILLION”! Mathematically I’m not sure how you get to a higher valuation as a standalone entity. One would think MSFT would see significant cost relief through consolidation after a combination that made it uniquely more valuable to MSFT than as a standalone business. I digress - this piece is about what an organization needs to do achieve escape velocity and take a business somewhere new and this is not the type of investment Yahoo is going to make or the time they have in the marketplace. I mean Yahoo has great assets, but it’s no Cray. (or maybe it is). Yahoo! a current event for a piece I’ve been thinking about for a while - achieving a corporate metamorphosis.
Change Requires Education
So is it a horizon or a rut - not really sure, but both getting out of a rut and going to a new place require a massive organizational effort - top to bottom. Getting out of a market or company rut requires a willingness to invest in education throughout the workforce. This isn’t a set of slides and a 1 hour meeting via webex in a theatre offsite - it’s engaging as many people as possible to UNDERSTAND the mission and current challenges in the business. Folks need to understand who are their competitors, why they are losing/not rocketing and what the opportunity is that is being pursued. A core tenant is it needs to be believable as well, there is a little faith required in this kinda thing. Essentially repositioning a technology company requires balancing the now with the new. Folks will need different skills as well, so not only awareness and alignment - but core skills training to help in the process. The previous mode and skills got you where you are.
Innovating is tough stuff and it requires a new view on things - not just for the leadership, but the whole organization. The only way to do this is make sure everyone is aware of the goals, drivers and opportunity and that they have the tools and skills to add value. When aligning to a new segment and market, leverage your tribal knowledge and a synchronized vision to drive organizational partnership and execution. You clearly may need to new people, but you have lights to keep on and there are good ideas in the employee base which could be leveraged that an outsider just might not be able to help with for 18 months.
Partnership Is Not Just a Press Release Opportunity - It’s an Organizational Requirement
Most of time in software companies true partnerships are hard to find. Common ideas, a comprehensive solution and a plan are just hard to get done and execute on, but these are what is needed to find the next market horizon. Partners need to be everywhere - outside the organization and inside.
If an organization is looking to change and deliver “new things”, true partnership needs to be central in the plan and part of the culture. When rebuilding an organization - everyone needs to be considered a trusted partner - employees, customers, resellers and OEM partners. You will need as many evangelists as possible telling the story and pushing the new agenda from every edge of the rut as possible.
Customers are no longer margin generators - but extended members of product management who help drive innovation and adoption. Customer number 6 is probably a margin story, but the first handful need to be your partner. Why would you want to view the first handful differently?
Simply - traction is a good thing - it reinforces in the market and the organization the strategy is viable in a way that no ad placement or poster can. Reference-able customers are worth 10X any traditional marketing spend to demonstrate than an organization IS something else, or at least going to be and that the asserted transformation is real. When you partner with your customer you will quickly see new opportunities and gain insights you can’t get from social media, trade rags and spreadsheets. The crazy things customers tell you just might make the product better - another way to look at it, is it takes a village.
An all-in partnering approach also makes a team a little more introspective and humble. Quickly customers can help you understand the things which aren’t done well or that you can’t do because you don’t have the capabilities. Gaps aren’t bad things - they are opportunities for brand drafting. Be willing to outsource/enhance capabilities with a strategic partner with a viable solution and transfer a little of their brand equity to yours.
A partner approach to delivering new solutions to market can rapidly increase brand visibility and help establish additional credibility in the NEW marketplace. Once you have effectively balanced your partner channels and established new capabilities, you can leverage this investment in partnership to ruthlessly execute on the opportunity and plan with an extended virtual team.
Differentiated Execution
Every company is going to make mistakes when trying to reach escape velocity, but as long as effort is put forth to understand the mistakes and quickly correct, most things will work out. You will need keep as many folks around as possible and bring new folks in to adequately fund the transformation and give it a chance. With a common understanding, moderately larger teams, cross-functional trust and measurable deliverables just about anything can happen. That’s right folks the sky’s the limit.
Planning like this will take far more than the 100 day’s predicted by the not so new CEO Jerry Yang. It’s got to be 180 days to baseline, 120 days to prioritize and another 180 to implement the first wave for a company the size of Yahoo!. This could ultimately be a plan and restructure of $500M-1B for them to transform the business. Seems like a crazy number, but the 1000 folks forecasted to be taken out of the business probably has a $120M annual benefit (salaries, real estate, infrastructure…) and a probable $15M spend on severance. Only another $350-850M to go, good news is at least $200M is investment and $25M is in travel over the next 3 years (strategic planning sessions are best done at the Four Seasons in Prague).
Not sure Yahoo! has the temperament for getting as serious as they should on the restructure, the only evidence I have on this is the recent “let’s cut some costs” to establish the illusion of a plan with rightsizing announced to the market last month. If they were really looking to drive improvement through restructuring it would have been a far more aggressive announcement to prepare for the next incarnation of the organization. Don’t get me wrong, you can cut to innovation and improvement, but often it requires a little more effort than 5-10% of the workforce. You don’t get that cool “Survivor Culture” with extreme execution unless you pull out 20%. At a 20% reduction everyone is interested in staying on the island - it’s a weird Stockholm Syndrome thing coupled with a Sally field “they really, really like me” vibe all which is validated with a bi-weekly paycheck and every monthly super jumbo mortgage payment as the reoccurring milestone of continued individual success.
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Yahoo is widely expected to undertake significant layoffs this week and dump several underperforming businesses as the struggling portal continues to reorganize its business operations.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web giant has declined to provide specifics on the number of employees that will be let go — estimates have ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of its work force, or hundreds of staffers.
Officials confirmed Tuesday that some segments of the company will be phased out.
“Yahoo has embarked on a multiyear transformation that includes making some tough decisions about the business to help the company grow,” Yahoo said. “Yahoo plans to invest in some areas, reduce emphasis in others and eliminate some areas of the business that don’t support the company’s priorities.”
Maybe the board’s right - they will come up with the next big idea, focus on what works and start generating mad cash in 24-36 months in opposition of the trend for the internet’s largest property. Rainbows and Unicorns - catch one if you can.
Facebook is bound to be is the LAST big new thing in the market, so I think I’m going to buy some YHOO stock. The optimism and strategic planning which appears to be going on in the boardroom is all I need. I mean come on - this upward stock trend has to be sustainable and rational, after all the board THINKS it’s worth more than a 62% premium. This is going to make for a great case study for some HBS student someday. For now, it’s made for a mediocre blog post on one of the interweb’s smallest properties.
While I read the Crossing the chasm speil on Apple after 32 years I’m not sure I was on board or even thought there was a bus to board. How can a silver of computing marketshare cross the open market chasm - in a word Marketing. Cool product helps too.
I’m all one for cool products, but for the past 15 years, I’ve been tethered to Intel and the productivity requirements for business. The last Apple I owned was an IIGS (?), yup I know a long time ago - but do you remember the game Oregon Trail on the IIE? Don’t get me wrong, my house has been Mac enabled and I have been from an OS perspective fairly promiscuous, jumping back and forth, using my wife’s when I was lazy or wanted to edit film. Well - I am now convinced the chasm may be in the Apple rear view mirror with what can only best be described as an early morning infomercial on the Today Show which was mainstream geek all the way.
When Al Roker and Matt are aware of the geek shortcomings, it might actually be proof of a chasm exit and of a product platform which is positioned for growth. Gotta go, my iPhone’s ringing and my iPod just finished syncing on my PC.
So I got to thinking about a link from Chris Brogan via Twitter. The link had a very interesting post on communal data and trust. Which got me to thinking about ownership, the right to assign and what owning an identity meant and what attributes are portable. Is identity essentially a concept/social construct, where a “user” is an identity instance or sliver effectively shared within the constructs of the service and within a service’s capabilities. As a user, we overtly agree to acceptably use the service with certain constraints. Can trust be a function of shared identity transactions?
Identity management seems more like a strategy than a portable data set. Is your virtual identity a branded repository or a repository of brands? Does user registration represent the transaction which established a shared transactional identity?
What a terrifically conceptual afternoon today has been thanks to Twitter.
