“A brand is the sum of the good, the bad, the ugly and the off-strategy. It is your best and worst product. It is your best and worst employee. It is communicated through award-winning advertising as well as those ads that somehow slipped through the approval cracks and sank anything riding on them. It is your on-hold music and the demeanor of the receptionist who puts that valued client or prospect on hold. It is the carefully crafted comments by a CEO as well as negative buzz by the water cooler or in chat rooms on the Internet. Brand is expressed through written, audio and visual content. It is interpreted through emotional filters every human being has—where anything can happen. Ultimately, you can’t control your brand. You can only hope to guide it.”
~Scott Bedbury
I am to list the first sentence of the first post of each month for the past year. If the title was important for context, I've included it.
January: Hiring but not payingWell, with that forthcoming title, I thought I'd see if there are any students out there, bursting with ambition and seeking mentorship who'd like to some design work for PS as an intern.
Rouxbe claims to be "The Recipe to Better Cooking" but is it?
Royal Carriage Inn goes on my list of places I want to go hide to write.
I thought I'd be pilloried for March Conference Showdown; instead the audience (perhaps tired) seems indifferent. You just never know.
From Google blogger slams Michael Moore's Sicko
If you work with Engineers, and these days who doesn't? then you ought to read The Fishbowl: Understanding Engineers: Feasibility
"Under the radar, Appfuel -- a five-person startup in San Francisco -- has been developing an application that fulfills what everyone knows to be the real opportunity: If a company can mine your Facebook profile to know who you are and what you like, it can show you targeted ads."
A rather eloquent if occasionally overwraught essay on what the Kindle stands for on dive into mark opens with the dead-on juxtaposition of two Bezos quotes
Amelie helps me unload groceries.
'nuff said.
"A guy friend was speaking at a conference recently, and there wasn't a single female speaker," she said. When she criticized that, he e-mailed her, "You sound cranky. Are you having your period?"
ABC News: Guide to New ABCNEWS.com The new site is designed to harness the power of community.
Come see me speak Tuesday, June 12, 2007 at the Monthly Program of BayCHI. I'm talking about becoming a founder.
That was the subject line of an email that came to me this morning from pal Brad: "Mario Batali and Michael Bauer need Public Square."
This is what getting Dugg looks like.
Alinea Image Gallery - Cuisine
Amelie's hair kept its shape after I removed the tiny ponytails.
"Seeking to keep the peace in its popular online hangout, Facebook Inc. has overhauled a new advertising system that sparked privacy complaints by turning its users into marketing tools for other companies."
howard rheingold's the virtual community
"When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and evocative, like, well, 'The Virtual Community,' even though a more accurate title might be: 'People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community.'" - HLR
We talk a lot about Social Networks, Social Software, etc as Web 2.0... as if using technology to manage human relationships was a novel phase in the progression of technology. We like to think that we invented computers to help us do "important" work like math, and eventually co-opted it to our human needs of community and communication. But electronic community predates the web. BBSs, Usenet, MUDS and MOOS, and of course The infamous Well popped up as soon as there were modems. In other words, as soon as one human could send a message to others, they did.
Web 1.0 had innumerable examples of community, and social behaviors intentional and un. We are all humans, and as such we work though Maslow's Hierarchy of needs even in new mediums, seeking first animal comforts then working upward to abstract intellectual pleasures.
"My direct observations of online behavior around the world over the past ten years have led me to conclude that whenever CMC [computer-mediated communications] technology becomes available to people anywhere, they inevitably build virtual communities with it, just as microorganisms inevitably create colonies."
~~ Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
So if humans acting like humans online is not new, why the hubbub? We are seeing now is the arrival of Social Software on the Web, and this is a bit different —in scale of distribution, if not in originality— and it's worth noting that the social is now part of almost every online activity, including those originally considered data-only tools, such as bookmarking or spreadsheet creation.
Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behavior —message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking.
~~ Tom Coates, of PlasticBag.org
I don't want to be too quick to dismiss the "Web 2.0" part of this conversation, since so many smart folks have said firstly that we are in a sufficiently different time in the evolution of the internet to be versionworthy, and secondly that that versionworthy change is marked by collective human behavior.
In other words, Web 2.0 is made of people.
Tim O'Reilly, carrier of the 2.0 flag, worked hard to find the dividing line between the versions of the web:
| Web 1.0 | Web 2.0 | |
|---|---|---|
| DoubleClick | --> | Google AdSense |
| Ofoto | --> | Flickr |
| Akamai | --> | BitTorrent |
| mp3.com | --> | Napster |
| Britannica Online | --> | Wikipedia |
| personal websites | --> | blogging |
| evite | --> | upcoming.org and EVDB |
| domain name speculation | --> | search engine optimization |
| page views | --> | cost per click |
| screen scraping | --> | web services |
| publishing | --> | participation |
| content management systems | --> | wikis |
| directories (taxonomy) | --> | tagging ("folksonomy") |
| stickiness | --> | syndication |
Almost all of these differences can be reduced to injecting the element of human behavior into what was previously a data-only system. Some of these differences are labored... (akamai vs. bitorrent?) but overall the pattern is persuasive and clear.
I can't help but think of Peter Morville's terrific little essay from 2002 on Social Network analysis. It was the first time I'd seen data and social networks used in an integrated manner, if it was mapping real-world and not virtual world systems. 
Looking at the key diagram for it, you begin to see how social networks can be as effective in solving retrieval problems as data networks (i.e. taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, etc.) This was but a hint of what was to come...
I also want to call attention to the fact that at Graphing Social, O'Reilly also presented this slide :
And this one
Placing these items together presents a ironic look at how analysis can lead to Kumbayah moments.
I notice how terrified we in the technology business are of the human aspects of our work. This theme will come up later, as we look at the question "does technology matter to virtual community building", but for now let's note it's hard to use "peace" and "love" these days without irony and a certain amount of distancing. Are we so scared of aspirational emotions? If we are going to talk about social systems, we are going to have to face the fact that terms like Love and Caring and Friendship are probably going to come up, so stop giggling.
What I find funny (perhaps intentional on O'reilly's part?) is that one can hardly trace the roots of the computer industry without hitting enclaves of hippies. Peace love and understanding ... if they make you uncomfortable, go look for a blog on CSS. This one is about to get gooeyer and gooeyer.
At least embracing our softer side also opens up consideration of a dirty word banished with Web 1.0's crash: Community.
Why does this distinction matter? Because I'm going to spend the next several... well, essays now, but originally it was hours in a workshop... explaining how each design elements affects the nature of the social space. And that social space can be social without being a community. I think that's an idea worth thinking about. Do you care about the other del.icio.us users (those you didn't know before using the website)? How about Digg users? When does it change? How does it happen? Does it matter? What's love got to do with it?
next: The who what where when and why of the Social Web.
LinkedIn made me an offer I couldn't resist, and Jim and I are both camping out here for the duration, delighted that the rest of the world is discovering what we just figured out: this company is going places.
Cucina Media is still alive, and we were able to come to an agreement with LinkedIn that allows it to continue and prosper. PublicSquare will be seeing a number of new features in the coming months. Stay tuned.
I gave a half-day workshop a month or so back, and I meant, I really meant, to write it all out. Well, At urging of friends, I'm going to promise I'm going to go through this, slide-by-slide (with some exceptions such as "break: be back here at 3:15) and get out into the world what I've figured out about this connected age we are in. That promise will hopefully lock me down to blogging about that rather than say, Amelie the marvelous and beautiful. Or pork chops.
The original deck:
The first four slides do the usual job of introducing the talk. One point worth bringing up is I decided to represent myself via my various profiles. I was amazed at what the act of juxtaposing my profiles on one page showed. They acted as puzzle pieces, showing a more complete picture of who I am that most people could ever get... in fact, if comprehensive, more complete than I might want to share. It will be a good question for the aggregation companies: how do you continue to give people the ability to manage their appearance online once all the pieces are in place?
Next: What is community, really?
This, the first Christmas tree Amelie has had the pleasure to decorate, also was a lesson in classification. Her system was to place like items together: all small gold balls on one branch, all big red balls on another. All adults know it's important to scatter evenly, yet I can't fault her as 90% of her books are about matching like to like. Hmmm...
A good reminder of how much systems depend on context.
I left the tree that way, btw.
They posted Ross's terrific opening talk from Parc's new series on Social Media and Web 2.0.: Made of People, including audio and video.
All things 2.0 are made of people. The social software that powers the current wave of innovation takes a different approach of getting out of the way of people to unleash their abundant desire to share and collaborate. While these tools exhibit fantastic social dynamics on the public web, adapting them for the context of an organization is a challenge not only for tools, but practices. Sharing control to create value isn't exactly the instinct of the enterprise. This talk will explore the social software design and business patterns that might make us more human.
I came in a tetch late, but trying to catch up.... when it's archived, it'll be here, probably in about a week.
Okay, now for my notes on Charlene Li, of Forester.
She speaks about the "i love dogs" community, set up by del monte for snausages research. I'm torn between horror and pleasure that companies are listening. Sigh.
* talking -- move form broadcasting to two way conversations -- cluetrain 2.0?
New example: Southwest
Their blog is from tons of people, including structural engineers.. how he brings his passion for customers to his work as structural engineering. The CEO asks customers what he should dress as, and dressed as the one the most people asked for (jack sparrow).
Blendtec created youtube videos of them blending up things like two by fours, and asked viewers what else tey should blend. The ipod was the #1 choice, and it has been viewed 4.6 million times... and people then talk about how it makes good smoothees as well as reposting the video to their blog. It cost the company $50.
* Energizing -- helping your best customers recruit others
example: Brides.com puts highlights and widgets on myspace, and offers widgets like countdown ticker to the wedding. Friends see it, and want the same widgets.
Users associate themselves with brands. Brand as identity.
Myspace found that for brands like Addis advertising on the site did okay, but widgets people chose to put up was 40X more effective.
* Suporting- enable yrou customers to support each other
example: oracle mix creates a community for supporting and embracing via forums.
* Embracing: Involve customers in product development
example: salesforce has "ideas exchange" (like Dell's ideastorm) for demand management. Allowed PM's to remove an annoying widget marketing liked via customer compalints.
WHO owns this process? Who should lead the social strategy in a company?
* start with your most customer centric employee
** they use the word customer in every sentence
** it's too easy to get back into the broadcast marketing point of view.
* Put someone important in charge
** don't give it to the guy with bandwidth-- why does he have bandwidth?
** if you want it to be important, it's got to go to someone with clout
* add an executive sponsor who has the ability to get resources from around the organization
* make the social strategy the responsibility of everyone in the company
** sun encourages everyone to have a blog, because the employees can speak honestly aobut the product.
** their policy is "be smart" (i.e. you know what not to post, and what to post...)
Example Case Study
Dell's community forums provide support... they've had them pre-web on compuserve
** a user, predator, has 21,794 posts, 473,113 minutes
** why? "I actually enjoy helping people. That's what got me hooked, when you help people and they say thank you"
** imagine support costs realized
Dell hell-- jeff jarvis's blog on Dell Hell: "Dell lies. Dell sucks."
made Dell realize they had to watch the blogosphere to understand their problems
* feb 2006 dell creates an elite group in customer service to search and find bloggers writing about problems with Dell
* customer service then contacts the blogger to address the problem
June 2006, dell laptops are on fire... literally. July they launch a blog. They tried ot talk about games, servers... and people screamed "what about the flaming laptops!" Then they posted on "flaming Notebook" and told folks what was going on. They admitted they were tracking down the problem, and users thanked them for coming out on the issue.
Dell executives review and implement IdeaStorm
* the first request was linux dells
* he customers chose what version
* the customer suggested no support (it's linus!)
Dell transformed themself
* Michael Dell was pivotal
** pushed for blog resolution team
**led the charge for ideastorm
**gave encouragement in darkest hours
They weren't afraid to move fast and make mistakes
* launched ideastorm in three weeks
Takeaways
* it took a crises to get them started
* they mastered one thing at a time
** listening >> talking >> embracing
** she recommends do one thing at a time, don't be too ambitious.
* it took them two years. it's not fast, and in internet speed it's forever.
** your transforming an entire organization and your customer base.
* executive push and cover made the difference
* authenticity was crucial
** couldn't be stealthy, had to be honest aobut all the mistakes they were making
Summary
* focus on the relationships, not ht etechnology
* start wiht one objective
* think through the consequences when you form a closer relationship with customers
Q&A: inaudible question on privacy --
Great quote from Charlene "People are very concerned about privacy, but they're willing to give it up for free shipping"
She does talk about choice of how your data is used, middle road, idea that if you do anything on the internet, it's not private.
question (lots of self-back patting then) how do I get an electrronic medium to be more like face to face?
CL: use the tools to supplement traditional, use the tools the customers want to use. You have to listen to customers, then communicate. some companies are afraid to participate in forums because they think it's improper to participate in a forum. But it's wildly successful.
Q: are you measure returns? what techniques?
CI: When CEO's ask what is the ROi of blogging, I say how do you measure ROI of PR? They don't usually know how you do it. Measure it the same way you measure any brand building exercises.
Q; anonymous postings? is there a difference between known identities
CI: known identity communities tend to behave much better. They are nicer to each other. It's important to have it be appropriate.. on blog comments she gets fred flintstones all the time. But on a executive group you have to know, so you don't spill the beans to a competitor. When someone complains to her, Li says Call them up! Often it's quickly resolved... bloggers feel proud and satisfied to be noticed.
She gets into the difference between identity and reputation-- Amazon's real names, and Predator's false name but huge reputation from his activities.
Q: you say focus on relationships, not technologies... but it seems like technology is part of it. Is some better than others, is anyone focusing on the technology of relationships?
CI: in Dell, they measure influence, but they don't measure level of pain-- interesting idea to follow through... on a scale of 1-10 how painful is it? Text not good for sarcasm "oh, that was a really good move"
Cut off-- I think they would have gone for another hour.
Next week: Guy Kawaski By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09
Recently I had a beer with Josh Porter, and he mentioned to me how something I said had resonated with him. Apparently, I had advised him to keep a blog on a single topic, posting regularly and well, and that would allow him to "own the space" or at least build reputation in it. My own blog had let me establish authority in IA when I had only been doing it a few months... .
Well, we all know it's easier to give advice than take it. I've been blogging for seven years, and while my first few years reflect a focus, there have been plenty of divergence, and my audience has fluctuated with my attention span. I remember bitterly when a reader commented "I like it better when you blogged about design."
This caused me to wonder, now in these days of blog proliferation, is Josh's success the norm, or an anomaly (and I should clean up my act, even though all I really want to post about is the amazing stuffed pork chop I cooked last night.) This led to an unscientific LinkedIn Answers query:
Has blogging affected your professional life, and how?Has blogging brought you notoriety, gotten you clients, respectability, a job? Love to hear if all this writing is helping (or hurting) folks. Less the "I was fired for begin indiscrete" and more an overall effect ..though anecdotes are fun.
Clarification added 7 days ago:
I'm also interested if *reading* blogs has helped you professionally...
posted 7 days ago in Career Development
Admittedly the last bit was an afterthought, and most respondents did treat it as such.
From the results, I determined Josh (and my younger self) were dead right. Post regularly, and well and it can only do you good. Some folks built a big audience, some built a small one, and some just found themselves with an audience of their potential employers. If I were to list the priorities in order, I would say
You need to
Some particularly useful insights:
from Michael Angeles
Excluding my first job out of grad school, every job that I've taken, including my current full time job, has been because of blogging. I can't say enough about how writing a blog is one of the best things you can do for your career. I get way more in return than I put into blogging. For testing out new ideas, nothing has been better for me than blogging--even better than posting to mailing lists because the audience can be more diverse.Reading blogs is also an essential part of my professional development. The evolution of my craft as an IA really grew much greater when I started reading blogs of peers who like to share ideas (like your EH) and having conversations with people on their blogs. Same is true of mailing lists, however. These days, I do more lurking or freeloading of other peoples blogs than I do commenting because of the lack of time to write, and because Google Reader makes it easy to take things in without engaging. But when I bother to engage in conversations I really get more out of the experience.
Brian Ghidinelli says
Blogging casually, in my opinion, is relatively worthless for your career. I believe if you blog "professionally", meaning it's a core component of your professional strategy, then you will likely develop a following large enough or content of a certain caliber to have some impact on your career.37 Signals' SVN is a great example of "professional blogging" even if the blog isn't what makes them money (directly). They sold thousands of their Design E-Book thanks to the legions of fans they've developed via their blog. In the sense that your readers can become your sales force (or are your sales targets), then blogging is a communications channel like PR, advertising and direct sales. It takes work and vigilance to develop and execute on.
Personally, I blog for myself. I tend to post HOWTO or research-driven pieces where I've invested time in sorting something out and wish to contribute back in exchange for the help I find out there. I don't receive many comments but that's not the goal of my efforts so it's OK. Wordpress has become the easiest way for me to track what's going on in my (mostly professional) life and the fact that it's public, if carefully edited, is a bonus to my "reputation". ...
Gagan Diesh says
... Yes blogging has been helpful as it keeps me honest as a designer by forcing me to research. It IS read my clients before they hire us (part of their due diligence) and we use it in client meetings as reference material when trying to sell the power of design! I have had some good debates on blog entries with programmers who take exception at my design-focused project management approach.
Scott Abel says
Blogging has helped me reinvent myself and create an entire new career...one that I never imagined. My blog, TheContentWrangler.com, has allowed me to share what I know, what I discover, and what I am doing with others. And, it's helped me create a valuable audience of 17,000 newsletter subscribers, and several hundred (or thousand) folks a day visiting my site and/or reading my RSS feeds.It's also attracted advertisers anxious to gain access to my audience. Paid advertising campaigns allow me to continue looking for the next great topics to blog about.
And, blogging has helped me increase my notoriety. Conference organizers have spotted my blog and invited me to speak at their events. Journalists have found my writings online and interviewed me as an expert. Magazine and newsletter editors have asked me to author articles. And, venture capitalists have contacted me for advice before investing in new technology initiatives.
So, yes, blogging is worth it.
However, blogging involves discipline, commitment, and a drive to do better, learn more, and help others. It creates lots of extra work (email, instant messages, and telephone calls). And, it involves thinking outside the box.
Reading blogs is an excellent way to identify new technologies, techniques, and strategies worth writing about. Reading blogs in disciplines outside your own area of specialty helps you to relate the concepts familiar to you with those of others to create "ah ha" moments that may not have ever materialized without such information.
Rob Tannen says
When I started blogging about designing for humans three years ago it was as much to organize and store information of interest to me, as it was share information with people of similar interests. So in a very tangible way it helps me do my job by providing quick access to reference sources (helps that I had to summarize them too).
Joshua Porter
Short answer:
Yes to notoriety, clients, job offers.Also made me a better writer (I hope). And being a better writer is how you not only participate in conversations, but help lead them as well. Being an independent who has a blog to help start and keep conversations, it's incredibly important to be able to write. The more I can make ideas clear, the more clients I'll get.
There were so many awesome answers, and so many good points, I want to encourage you to read all of them... Has blogging affected your professional life, and how?
is the innocent get hurt. But we all knew that, didn't we. Does it make it okay? Let's look at this adsense scenario.
Despite having some delicious metadata to pull from,
meta name="keywords" content="design, conference, event, workshop, information architecture, interaction design, meetup, cocktail hour, salon"
meta name="description" content="The place to list design-related events, from conferences to cocktail hours."
title Create Engaging Applications for Facebook - Boxes and Arrows Event Calendar
Google ignores that -- because it might be gamed-- in favor of what.. the URL? Even the title of the page has better information on the topic of the site than the name.
If they have to ignore what I, the site owner, say the site is about, why not turn to their own giant search engine monster. Surely it knows what queries Boxes and Arrows is relating to... and it's not archery. Nor packing companies.
Worse of all, you know who the real beneficiaries of this system are? The domain name squatters. Only they, the holders of "love poetry .com" and "cheap software .com" can guarantee that the adsense that shows up on their sites will match the searches well enough to get high click-through. This is so effective that one domain squatter I know (yes, gentle people, I have friends in high and very low places) had to give up his only genuine website because a squatter page made him so much more money.
I know relevancy is a sufficiently complex science to resemble black magic, but surely the wizards of Mountain View can do better.
A rather eloquent if occasionally overwraught essay on what the Kindle stands for on dive into mark opens with the dead-on juxtaposition of two Bezos quotes:
Act I: The act of buyingWhen someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007
And in this single moment, the entire problem of DRM is laid bare. And we are reminded that what Amazon (and another other business) does is not about causes, not about morals, it's about business.
