Google Glass has been very big on the news since 2012 and recently we've even seen venture capitalists claiming that its advent would create a new space for investment in start-ups. It's worth hearing how Sergey Brin presents that initiative and then consider things carefully from the standpoint of human behavior, not technology.
Recently I had the great pleasure to present at a "Friday Session" organized by Cleverwood. The format is great because it's time boxed to 1.5 to 2 hours during which people who know something that could be useful to the others run the session. Usually the topics are focused on the Internet, social media, mobile technologies...etc However, because the challenge of dealing with people is a great one, I'm trying to contribute content that comes from my interest in NLP and coaching.
For many people, dealing with people is one of the most challenging things in professional life. For consultants, dealing with people is critical to the success of their projects. That's why I focused my Friday Session on two key concepts that can be used in a variety of contexts: personal relationships, sales, business development, negotiation...etc. These two concepts are:
The way to use this is simple, but you have to accept the principle of immersing yourself in each of the roles without any attachment whatsoever for your "Me" position:
This can be used to understand conflict, develop negotiating positions, work on a sales pitch...etc It's a great way to explore the "Other" position and understand the way the whole system made of "Me" and "Other" actually works.
So, overall it's "as simple as 1-2-3" and no, business cannot be about me, myself and I.
This is an example of something that is going on in a lab right now and has the potential to become a really big product. It can become:
CrowdPhoto.net emerged in my market watch as an interesting initiative, not only because it exemplifies the potential of crowdsourcing, but also because it was built in a weekend using Amazon Web Services (AWS).
CrowdPhoto is a bit like an Aardvark service for pictures: people request a specific picture like "A pink penguinin North Pole" and specify how much they're willing to spend to get their hands on the picture; other people can submit materials in response to the request and get paid for the picture(s) they provided. I'm not too clear whether there is a reward sharing or other mechanism in case many people provide content on the same request, but that's the concept in substance. The prototype is remarkable in a few ways:
Crowdphoto makes me think of the world described by David Brin in his book Earth, where privacy gets overtaken by low-cost mass-adopted high-tech surveillance, communications and database tools that people carry around propelling the planet into an era of complete social transparency. Each person who freely contributes content on the web has a level of authority relative to the topics they are covering and is therefore more or less influential.
Whether it's going to fly or not as an economically profitable operation is quite another story and to a large extent not a very relevant one. The sheer fact that people have the capability to go from concept to deployed prototype in just a weekend thanks to infrastructure as a service is truly amazing and has far-reaching implications for entire categories of businesses that can now be tested fast and in a flexible way. I just wonder what was the sum total of effort and money invested in preparing the weekend and in building the prototype.
The presentation in this video is a really interesting account of how Dropbox grew to become an awesome product for millions of people around the globe. It's very good inspiration.
An interesting collection of 140-character long snippets of vision and opinions on future trends in online and interactive marketing. Not sure all of this stuff makes sense, nor that what the authors mean is always clear, but it's good food for thought.
TrendsSpotting's 2010 Social Media Influencers - Trend Predictions in 140 Characters
View more documents from Taly Weiss.
The trailer of a new documentary on Art called "Lives of Artists" published by excellent and Restless Contagious Magazine provides an inspiration to share some thoughts about the importance of art for business and also to make a few predictions for 2010 and beyond, indulging the game of futurology as it sometimes occurs. Those predictions were shaped by the excellent content shared by the people I follow on Twitter and elsewhere; so I'm grateful to all of them for what they share and teach. Of course these are my predictions and therefore I'm solely responsible for any issues of rigor and overall quality.
"Lives of Artists" is supported by Coca-Cola and makes the case that Art should be disruptive, aggressive, intelligent, attract attention and push us out of our zone of comfort. The core message finds me in complete agreement, if only because no innovation and no evolution can happen unless we are projected into a different space from the one we are accustomed to. Being projected into the space of difference, change, imagination, dream, daydreaming, vision, possibility and openness is something that can happen either through internal forces of each one's psyche or through external factor and sometimes there are exceptional disciplines that create a link between inner and outer space. Most of the disciplines involved in Art are like that. It's an invitation to think, dream, dare, be-Start-Treky (blodly go where no one else has gone before), imagine, transcend current state, nudge yourself and others out of the comfort zone, flow, freeze, grow, disrupt... BE!
On a much more prosaic and practical level, the movie is supported by Coke and I think it shows the importance of content in capturing human attention and creating brand awareness and goodwill. It's among those signs that make me feel like indulging in the game of predictions:
That's it for predictions and vision today. It's not a round number like 5, 10 or 20, that headlines are so fond of, but, hey it's a prime number :)
In my various projects with customers of such varied industries as music distribution, microelectronics, online and interactive marketing, new media, satellite radio, timber trading and banking, I've had many opportunities to discuss issues facing those organisations that required some form of transition to a next level of maturity. Whether that was for migrating to a completely new software platform, for changing established practices in marketing teams, for reworking the business model or for (re)inventing the product roadmap, we always ended up discussing people and leadership.
These are two fields in which one can hardly do a good job without having a very clear position and mine has always been that people should be treated as responsible adults and that leadership is just not about gorilla chest thumping or "alpha" dominance as is perhaps too widely believed. To me Gandhi has been much more of a leader than a cowboy president I will not name since he's now in the closets of History. That's because "one ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching", which also means that consistency between what someone thinks, says and does becomes an ever more important element of leadership. As do concepts that have historically been considered as disjoint or even at odds with what a leader should be: mindfullness, compassion and hope. It's what Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee call Resonant Leadership. Today I came across The Builders' Manifesto (via AgileMinds), a great piece on the next level of leadership, which finds me in complete agreement. Quick quote of something I particularly liked, but you should really read the full article:
The boss depends upon authority; the leader on good will. The Builder depends on good.
The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm. The Builder is inspired — by changing the world.
The boss says "I"; the leader says "we". The Builder says "all" — people, communities, and society.
The boss assigns the task, the leader sets the pace. The Builder sees the outcome.
The boss says, "Get there on time;" the leader gets there ahead of time. The Builder makes sure "getting there" matters.
[...]
The boss knows how; the leader shows how. The Builder shows why.
The boss makes work a drudgery; the leader makes work a game. The Builder organizes love, not work.
The boss says, "Go;" the leader says, "Let's go." The Builder says: "come."
This is excellent stuff.
When you've been watching the media space for the past few years you know the extraordinary challenges it is facing with its fundamentals, a business model that is broken, audiences that are fragmented, content that still costs a lot to produce even though its revenue generating ability has gone down the drain... Innovation is sought. Technology must be made an ally. Business will undergo massive transformation. This is definitely not about new media versus old media, but about a totally new media landscape opening opportunities to interact with audiences in novel manners and to activate multiple media formats no matter whether your initial expertise is in print, radio, television or the Internet. In that respect, Bonnier's recent roll out of a tablet that delivers the magazine to the audience is a most interesting innovation to watch. And I'm amazed with the buzz around it too.
Just read a piece about where Google might be in ten years and considering the success of Gmail between 2004 and now, the author might just be right even though his forecasts may seem wild at times (e.g. Android prevailing in the mobile OS wars). That gives me an opportunity to comment and discuss a bit further Google's amazing ability to execute beautifully a bold strategy of massive innovation to deliver on an audacious vision to organize the world's information.
Interestingly Devinda Hardawar (@devindra on Twitter), the post's author, reminds us that Gmail was launched only in 2004. Few people can argue it's gaining traction in the segment of people who use predominantly email in SaaS mode and even making inroads into the segment of more traditional users who are stuck with legacy solutions like Outlook Express. Gmail grew 43% in 2008 and took #3 spot in August leaving AOL behind. It's gaining momentum and is probably a good indication of what Google can do in terms of winning market share with a patient approach that it can afford thanks to its advertising revenues.
Furthermore Devindra makes a couple of very powerful statements regarding Google Wave, stating his belief that it's much more important than it may seem on the surface and could well revolutionize the way knowledge work gets done. In keeping with a recent post on this blog, I very much agree with him and do intend to spend more time testing Wave, not dismiss it as Scoble has done, foolishly in my opinion.
Google ability to consistently pursue specific targets is an amazing characteristic of the company. They've been able to roll out a number of major services over the past decade accomplishing key strategic targets with each of them:
Arguably, there's more and there are other ways of viewing what Google is doing, but in every case you'll find great consistency and clarity of purpose in strategy execution.
Looking at the string of their acquisitions over the past decade (another way to assess strategy execution), the consistency of purpose is obvious and their ability to integrate acquired companies and technologies is impressive. Some people tend to focus too much on plays that did not turn out to be successful and fail to see the bigger picture: Google successfully embeds 80% of its acquisitions in the Google system, when the market average is much much lower (I'd say 20% based on the business news I've followed for the past 20 years).
Significant and successful moves included:
Google is recorded as having purchased 59 companies for a total amount that is hard to assess but likely stands in the region of 15-18 billion USD. The track record of acquisitions can in no way be considered as bad. In fact I know only of one company that is better: Cisco. Both Google and Cisco are hugely analytical players, with extra smart employees on board, giving huge attention to recruitment and equally huge attention to acquisitions.
Another thing worth mentioning is Google's creation of an arm dedicated to early stage investments, which is called Google Ventures, a fund that started this year with 100 million USD. Google Ventures has made a couple of very smart bets in clean-tech with smart grid technology (Silver Spring Networks) and biotechnology (Adimab)...
In a recent post published on American Express' Open community, where you need to be registered as Amex customer to leave a comment (so much for"open"...), Guy Kawasaki identifies six types of Twitter users, which feel right if you've been on Twitter long enough and followed / unfollowed many people in an attempt to make the experience relevant to you.
Kawasaki's six types are:
Go to his post for explanations.
To me the distinction between the Smore (the social media whore... you've got to love this new word) and the Brand is not that clear in Kawasaki's definition and I don't see two profiles that are in fact part of the Twitter ecosystem:
Does that make sense?
Through a recent post of one of my contacts, I got to view for a second time a presentation Tim Berners-Lee gave at TED for the 20 years of the web. What had not struck me the first time I saw the presentation is the claim Berners-Lee makes that everything we have today of the web resulted from the idea of hyperlink / hypertext. A big bang of sorts.
It's almost a stereotype of the kind of claims brilliant conceptual types do, because they're so focused on discovery, innovation in its rawest form, beginnings and not necessarily finished forms... which is also one of the reasons why Tim Berners-Lee was not the many economic beneficiary of the discovery. Can you imagine the turn of events had he decided to patent the hyperlink idea and ask for a trillionth of a Euro for each hyperlink created? One of the reasons why I'm not a fan of extreme patenting and rigid copyright.
In this presentation Tim Berners-Lee calls from a new leap, which he thinks is as important as the hyperlink: open availability of raw data. Can you imagine what that means if he's right? I'm ready to bet he is and I'm ready to bet it's a matter that's far more important than data: it's a matter of civilization and a defining factor for civil liberties.
His presentation mentions several examples and he mentions the excellent work of Professor Hans Rosling that I covered in December 2006 in this post (here are the notes of Rossling's talk back then).
Daniel Pink makes once again a great case for non-conventional thinking on the topic of the drivers of motivation. He debunks a number of assumptions that most of us take for granted just because we grew up in a world driven by the fallacy of rationality of economic agents, "carrot and stick" or "reward - punishment" paradigm. Pink shows how reward schemes actually force people to narrow their thinking down to obvious paths and therefore are mostly counter productive when it comes to really challenging situations, which is where rewards would be completely justified...
Perhaps an additional proof, if there was need for one, that money does not buy motivation, talent and ability to apply knowledge. There has to be something else. Something the builders of cathedrals in Europe knew centuries back when they were not only looking for capable craftsmen, but also looking for craftsmen that had a personal win in the success of the project to build a cathedral. And in a way Pink rediscovers and refines that by identifying three key aspects to motivation:
Furthermore Pink's points are highly compatible with the attributes of Resonant Leadership as discussed by Boyatzis & McKee.
Just watch a fascinating presentation:
Experimentation is perhaps the most important attitude for understanding the ever changing landscape of a world constantly reshaped by infotech. From continuous experimentation hopefully comes some experience which can be used for execution of plans; we've got the 3Es of success and the cycle goes on and on.
In this post I'd like to share some thoughts about an experiment that started like all of BusinessQuests' experiments: with a weird question. Today's weird question: is there a way to find out how much carbon dioxide the "2.0" crowd of thinkers and star players is generating just by traveling the world to attend conferences, make speeches, shake hands and send those lovely "tweets" about the weather in Paris or the taste of vodka in Moscow?
The purpose of the experiment was therefore to find out how close I could get to assessing the carbon dioxide emissions of people like Robert Scoble, Peter Kim, Gerd Leonhard, Bradley Horowitz, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig... using only public information that I gathered from the "social web". So this is about using "2.0" tools on the thought leaders and stars of the "2.0" crowd, all of whom are very connected and tend to travel a lot to speak and meet in real life during conferences, not all of them interesting it must be said.
There's more to this attempt to assess carbon emissions of prominent figures of today's web than the results per se. It goes deeper to the question of what uses can actually be made of public information that we publish very willingly as part of our being part of the global networked community of what Richard Florida dubbed the "creative class", what some call the community of the über-connected, the "2.0" bunch.
Whether the results are accurate to the gram of CO2 or not is not that relevant; the fact that the emissions can be estimated with published user data is much more relevant though because it means there is probably a way for people running private intelligence services or marketing organizations (sometimes a nuance without a difference) to do pretty accurate estimates of other dimensions in the lives of the connected crowd from revenues to groups supported to books bought to relationships and addresses... It's food for thought and that's not only for those of use who are active participants to social media and social platforms' permanent beta.
So here are the results (spreadsheets here), using just Google Docs and an amazing gadget called Panorama Analytics for creating pivot tables on Google Sheets. The chart gives average emissions of carbon dioxide for prominent "2.0" figures who were kind enough to allow open access to their travel information on social travel site Dopplr.
For convenience, given that the load time of the Panorama gadget may be long, there's an Excel version of the chart below:
The total distance traveled by each of the people listed here was
broken down into plane, train and car travel making three sets of
assumptions (called scenario 1, scenario 2 and scenario 3) about the
relative importance of each transportation means in the traveler's
total travel distance. The traveler's date of activation of the Dopplr
account was used to calculate the number of months over which the total
distance was traveled and the free carbon footprint calculator provided
by the website www.carbonify.com was used toestimate the carbon impact of each traveler for each of the three scenarios.
From people to industries to institutions, the ubiquitous network and network based applications are profoundly transforming the way things get done. For all the generous talk about the openness, creativity and sharing enabled by social media, the central issue of what public information says about each one of us is getting hotter and hotter even as people from different background converge to bring solutions to address "digital identity", "e-reputation", "brand protection", "buzz", "intelligence", "monitoring"...
Since the very availability of such information and the thought of how it could be used undoubtedly sends shivers down many spines, it follows very logically that the kind of information we processed in this experiment is also information that has real marketing value because it makes sense. It has meaning. Something that is not necessarily true of all the detailed metrics and analysis we get from sophisticated tools that measure visits, bounces, clics, actions, hits, views or deliveries. At the end of the day less may very well be more if that "less" goes more to the heart of behavior tying back to real life of real people with real dreams, hopes, fears, joys and aspirations. That is the real core challenge for marketers today.
A very interesting post was published recently in a blog dealing with the point of confluence of marketing and neuroscience. It shows that bringing an outsider in any team endeavor actually improves the performance of the team effort. The post focuses particularly on decisions made in team contexts and on problem solving. This is very much in line with the kind of experience I have with workshops organized for customers on specific issues they want to deal with. In most cases we end-up achieving significant progress in an amazingly short time and with work that feel effortless although it's actually very demanding. The following are the top factors of success in my opinion:
The list of top global brands was published a few days ago by Interbrand and BusinessWeek. The top 10 brands are largely the same as last year, but the list of brands that have made the biggest gains is interesting: Google (+25% in brand value), Amazon (+22%), Zara (+14%), Nestlé (+13%) and Apple (+12%) make up the top-5 of the year's winners. Brands that have lost value are (unsurprisingly) those of financial institutions with UBS (-50%), Citi (-49%) and Amex (-32%) leading the pack.
The total value of global brands based in the US reaches an amazing 744.2 billion US dollars, while Japan's are worth about 91.8 billion dollars, only slightly above Germany's 91.2 bn$.
Today I spent some time going through the "WTF is social media - one year later" presentation, which I find excellent. It's embedded below for your convenience and below are some of my thoughts on the matter.
The WTF material is really good stuff full of common sense, good thinking and it provides a sobering view of what this thing called social media could be used for. Focusing on fundamentals of business and on phenomena we've been able to observe over the past few months and years, the authors actually help business people who are a bit lost with all the chatter about social media and collaborative workspace. Observations and statements of what "social media" (for lack of a better word) could be used for are excellent and it's a pitty there is only little content about concrete ways in which to leverage the different aspects of social media... but of course who wouldn't understand that the authors would gladly provide that as part of their services at Brand Infiltration ;)
Now the presentation is also excellent food for thought and here are a couple of those that emerged going through the slides:
So social media is probably an excellent phenomenon for specific businesses and for a whole range of purposes and not only marcoms as rightly pointed out by the authors of the presentation... But it's only a tool and as such it's only as good and relevant as the skill with which it's applied to the pursuit of coherent objectives by congruent organizations who will make more than half-hearted committments to the new world of open participation. And that may not be a world for everyone, so expect to see more established organizations die as their environment changes to the point of transforming some long established practices into deadly sins.
- people gladly engage when there's a worthy cause for which there could not possibly be the slightest suspicion of commercial manipulation or commercial
- the rejection of initiatives that seem to be "remote-controlled" by major brands is almost immediate in many cases
- when a space is new like for example the blogosphere a few years ago or Twitter a couple of months ago, the signal / noise ratio is good enough to derive value out of that space with spectacular returns on investment whereas things become much more difficult when more people bring more content and more potential interactions
- the possibility of interactions does not means that there will be interactions, let alone true conversations where people actually listen to other people and truly seek to understand what they mean by what they say, an effort that requires focus of attention and that can be tedious enough to require far more time than is allowed by the culture of the immediate, fast and short of social media
- interactions don't mean transactions let alone economically useful or even profitable transactions
