nextny

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Fascinating - Apple is the new IBM?

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By painting Apple as a new untouchable in the CE industry, has Dave Morgan taken the liberty to show us that the consumer experience trumps just about everything else?   After a decade of losing Apple vs. IBM comparisons (in which I,  as a boy, defended Apple to the ends of the earth, aided by my weekly infusion of MacWEEK) can Apple have a further decade of dominance? Eerily familiar to descriptions of IBM in the 1960s or 70s.

Apple: The First Trillion-Dollar Company? 01/13/2011:

Apple is out-innovating and out-executing the entire market. No other company is delivering better consumer electronics products with better content and communications experiences to the market, and iterating them constantly, than Apple.? Not only that, but no one else is delivering consumer electronic products and related software and content at the scale, and with the degree of customer service, that Apple is today. Not Sony. Not Samsung. Not LG. Not Google. No one.

 

The business of video on demand was possible and eminently doable in 1994-95.  Most of the cable companies buried their heads in the sand.   IBM was content selling servers, having lost the DOS vs. Windows battle (or even OS2/Warp!)  Yet we didn't see it for more than a decade in most US Cable households.  

Great products and ideas die, all the time.  I personally never owned a mac clone, but some of those machines were really insipiring piecves of machinery.  Gil Amelio couldn;t save Apple, but Jobs did.  He rebooted the company.

And that's why the powerhouse that Apple has become, can't last forever.  What IBM has build doesn't rely on one person, ditto to GE, Comcast, Verizon.  Apple has a lockup on the fringe, but it can't take the mass.  The mass just won't tolerate it.

David Pogue suggests this morning that CES was a sideshow of Apple copycats.  His money quote from an industry insider:

“These companies are like 6-year-olds on a soccer team,” one company representative told me. “The ball goes over here, and they all run after it in a blob. ‘Tablet!’ ‘Tablet!’ ‘Tablet!’ ”

The innovation, however, is moving to the cloud- the services on top of the devices.  That will keep shiny, new things on our TVs for now.  See InsideFacebook's The Best Facebook-Integrated Devices from CES 2011.

But it can't last longer than Steve Jobs.  Even as Steve keeps the fanboys cheering (and even some day clicking the "like" button) he hasn't build anything that can outlive him.

Well, maybe, just maybe, it's fixing the news business! (via Fake Steve Jobs)

The news business has descended into the gutter in a pathetic attempt to stay alive. It’s been a horrible race to the bottom. This is turn has polluted our politics, and now we’re seeing the result of it.

Fortunately for the world, we’re going to change all that, with iPad and the apps model. But that’s a story for another day.

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Is Android really "open"?

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Reading The dirty little secret about Google Android, I've been enjoying the insightful analysis of how Apple's decision to free the device from the restrictions of the carrier were key to the identity of the device, and seem more in keeping with what Google originally promised with the Nexus One.  

Unfortunately, the Nexus One flopped.  The non-Apple customers buy their wireless devices and service very differently.  Mass-market phones, even smart phones, need marketing spend behind them, and those campaigns are linked to carrier restrictions and modifications which compromise the "open" vision.  The upshot, according to the article:

the consequence of not putting any walls around your product is that both the good guys and the bad guys can do anything they want with it. And for Android, that means that it’s being manipulated, modified, and maimed by companies that care more about preserving their old business models than empowering people with the next great wave of computing devices. 

I think this rolls back into the S-Curve of technology adoption.  

[credit: Wikipedia]

As the market matures and a it becomes a mass market product,  smart phones and apps become both more standardized and more understandable for the average community.  We see and hear idiotic advertisements exhorting us to be "twin texting turbos" with the Droid 2.  And this is great for Verizon's bottom line, for marketers and developers launching Android apps, and for mobile web content growth.  But it basically sucks for the innovators who want to be able to get a great device and move from carrier to carrier in the US market.

Other perspectives: Nic Brisbourne of DFJEsprit writes

[T]he longevity of the app paradigm versus open web standards will depend in large measure on who wins the hardware battle.  Open standards at the software level probably will probably only prevail if hardware manufacturers with a PC mindset prevail over those with a preference for closed ecosystems...

Unfortunately, the principles of openness have been interpreted to mean an open app ecosystem, and haven't changed the economics of the closed carrier/device model in the US.  Google wants a big market for Android apps and as many users as possible, and that motivation is at cross-purposes with the open-ness that geeks want.

 

 

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A man's reach should exceed his grasp: why Netflix killed Blockbuster

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Blockbuster chief of digital strategy is quoted in Fast Company:

You can always say I wish I did X and not Y. But if you asked me in 2009 whether we'd be the only one in the mobile space selling movies other than Apple and whether we'd have Blockbuster On Demand--never in my wildest dreams would I have aimed this high. [emphasis is mine].

What's the point of a strategy if you can execute on it and pass your own dreams? No wonder my money is on Netflix FTW.

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On Being an NWC Backer

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About a year ago, for a period of around 3-4 months, I was a paying member of New Work City.  I have always been interested in the evolution of the workforce around new technologies, and so I was a spectator of this project for a long time.  When my professional needs aligned with the NWC model, I thoguht, this makes sense for me, as more than an experiment.

Having known Tony via nextNY I suppose I had less of a need to be SOLD on the experience actively, but I will say that if anything, the community under-promises and over-delivers.

It's subtle, but Peter Chislett and Tony and great folks like Frederic Guarino and Mark Bursteiner were fun to be around, full of optmism, and showed how working from the Library or the Cornell Club (some of my favs at the time) were missing something.  Those venues didn't offer stimulating conversation, beta invites to cool projects, or a sense that no matter how f#cked the economy seemed in those days, that we could make it better by our own bootstraps.

This blog is hosted on Squarespace largely as a result of meeting Dane Atkinson at New Work City one day.  NWC will find you business partners, customers, friends, and drinking buddies.  Some of them might like Iced coffee as much as you do (cheers Peter!)

My professional needs changed a bit at the end of the summer and I ended my membership, but I remain supportive of Tony and New Work City's way of discovering the best way to do things with smart and dedicated experimentation.

I pledged my support to NWC, and I'm letting you know I support NWC on Kickstarter not only because it sure looks like Tony is going to do some crazy stuff, but if you believe in something, helping is better than watching.

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Who cares if the cool kids leave Facebook?

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The cool kids are leaving Facebook, says Pace Lattin based on data from InsideFacebook: the 18-35 demographic is now having negative growth in this "early adopter" demographic.   I can't yet find the raw data, but let's assume the trend is true.  Let's assume that the explosive growth of Facebook for mobile doesn't have anything to do with it. 

Any platform that requires the "cool kids" to be there for it to be successful will ultimately suffer the same fate.  We can't all be East Village hipsters enjoying our own exclusive online party, with VCs chomping at the bit to try to invest in the things we think are cool.  Even if all the cool kids leave, Facebook will still have a huge business with the uncool kids.

However.  Viewing Facebook itself as the cornerstone of social is just false. They beat out all the other social networks, more or less.  Round 1: Facebook.  Bigger, longer term, the interoperability of social graphs will make the choice of any one web site unimportant.  

Any platform that requires the "cool kids" to be there for it to be successful will ultimately suffer the same fate.  We can't all be East Village hipsters enjoying our own exclusive online party, and there will continue to be plenty of business opportunities for Facebook even if those users leave.

However.  Viewing Facebook itself as the cornerstone of social is just false. They beat out all the other social networks, more or less.  Round 1: Facebook.  Bigger, longer term, the interoperability of social graphs will make the choice of any one web site unimportant.  

The fact is, hipsters still have parents, and teachers, and friends they want to connect to, and some they want to be able to ignore.  Technologies built on opening the social graph and intelligent selectively sharing the content we ourselves consume is the direction we're heading.  

 

Round 2: unknown.

we haven't really seen the companies that are thinking about this.  Check out where Diaspora is going these days, and see the interoperable social  future.  

 

 

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Help a millenial with experimental advertising!

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Shelly Palmer provoked me to think about whether I am "too into technology to understand real business."  Yikes!

I'm sympathetic to the idea that many "social media" people live in a reality-exclusion zone where they only buy products from brands they can @message on Twitter.  On the other hand, the “real business” folks can probably wait it out, but more and more of them are starting to wonder.

I talked to a small outdoor advertising business owner who might not be ready…but he’s intrigued.  He gets online marketing and does aggressive SEM advertising. But social?

The shift to social marketing certainly made a splash but isn’t sustainable, really. In the early days of Twitter, most of the buzz about the promise of the service to transform marketing was being made by marketing people on Twitter.  Is the future of one-to-one, fragmented media a self-fulfilling prophecy? Perhaps.

That being said, we’re starting to see the ways in which pure awareness advertising shifts into engaging digital and offline experiences that aggregate attention rather than interrupting a piece of content. 

Advertising remains real and necessary, but it will increasingly be built around producing perceived value in and of itself. Pepsi’s PepsiCo10 strategy to take Refresh one step further and start funding new tech entrepreneurs is an bold example, and even if it’s on the wrong side of Wannamaker’s 50%, at least some millennials may get jobs.

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Your privacy's fate: Sealed with a Click

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I grabbed this just now on my Facebook home page: a sponsored Link with the Gmail/AOL/MSN logos, and my email address in bold, Thanking me?

Facebook_Gmail_ad.egg on Aviary

I normally would have ignored it, but frankly I was curious. I clicked. The result, however, was insidious:

So now I can see what the plan is- Facebook wants to keep an eye on your Google account to make sure you don't connect to someone by email without also connecting them to Facebook.

It's hard to know what the cumulative effect of constant authorizations, approvals, and stored passwords really is, but I predict one day it sneaks up on you, an accidental overshare or ads that seem to insidiously follow you whenever you want?  A friend who lands on a site they hate, to find out that you praised it before you knew how much it would offend them? 

Or will it be merely the insidious, price-discriminatiung ad where you get to fly to Fort Lauderdale for $389, but your friend flies the same itinerary for $250 with a free checked bag?

Scary? Only sometimes.  But it all started with one click.

 

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Steve Jobs, The KIN, and the power of No

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“If you boat a lot, you're known as a boating enthusiast. I like to boat, but I just don't want to ever be referred to as a 'boating enthusiast'. I hope they call me 'a guy who likes to boat'.”- Mitch Hedberg

I read that Microsoft's new KIN Windows 7 phones, are "aimed at 15- to 30-year-olds who are social-networking enthusiasts."  Ew.  Never mind targeting teen interests in Glee, Justin Beiber, WWE, college, funny videos, or body spray - who describes a product this way even in a press junket?  Presumably they left the research out, or they'd have realized that 31% of their target demographic already plans to buy an iPhone.

It's shocking, really.  After so many years of getting it wrong you'd think someone could just do the opposite of all that and make a serious score!  Microsoft has been making mobile products longer than Apple has been making the iMac- it just so happens that few of Microsoft's products were very good.  When aQuantive was bought by Microsoft in 2007, my Razorfish colleagues and I collectively worried that we'd lose our Blackberry devices in favor of Windows Mobile "smartphones."  The worry was well-deserved; those who received them were usually miserable.

Microsoft proved unable to create the kind of extensible platform on its mobile devices that has made Windows dominant in the corporation and in the home.  While Windows may be too entrenched to be dislodged from either, it's stunning what Steve Jobs has been able to do in his return to Apple. 

And now, with the prominence of the iPod/iPhone/iPad as a platform, Apple's role as a "gatekeeper" to the platform is drawing a wave of anti-Jobs sentiment, centered around the perception that Apple is a draconian gatekeeper of its own platform.

Maybe so.  Is that so bad? Isn't it better than the sludge that Windows Mobile is? (I have not tried out Windows 7 Mobile so I reserve judgement for now). I believe that the power Steve Jobs wields most effectively is the power of No.  And what Microsoft, by trying to pack everything into every product it ships, has always been shackled to Yes, And... (well, their version of Yes, anyway).

No, that is too hard to use

No, that looks like crap

No, that feature sucks

No, that app doesn't belong in the app store

No, we don't talk to the press

No, I don't answer emails (actually I think Steve Jobs responding to email of late is like the ultimate blog/twitter account)

After all that NO, it's clear that the most important thing to Apple is to make awesome products that people love.  It's not ego, or even greed (except by association- great products cost $$$).  But Apple has transformed itself from a manufacturer of niche PCs that a few people love, to a mass-market CE company that makes products for millions more.  The masses expect Apple to stand behind every product decision and to contuniue to uphold exacting quality and usability standards.

Is that democratic?  Surely not- Steve Jobs is an admired autocrat. He's a sort of a benign autocrat, which  isn't all that bad  (see also the original Thirteen Colonies and "Salutary Neglect")  Strong, determined leaders in the autocratic model don't much care for input from you, or me, or anyone else.  If they stopped to ask what we wanted, we might choose the wrong thing.

As in the 1700s, this was all more or less OK until the colonists got wind of the the autocrat's real priorities- the intolerable acts were ones that benefited the sovereign else at the expense of the colonists.  Enter the rebellion.

Are we net beneficiaries of Steve Jobs' power of No or are we on the brink of Apple's decisions benefitting the company more than the base of users, developers, and accessory manufacturers?

Apple's power comes from protecting the user experience.  Whether you see that experience as stifled by an evil dictator or shaped by divine will is really about YOU not about Apple.  With the user at the center, the design decisions of an otherwise evil monarch are altruistic.  Right vs. left, republican vs. democrat- this is an interpretive exercise rather than a factual one.

Apple is facing an onslaught of ad-driven solutions, particularly if it releases always-on wifi and allows multiple apps to run simultaneously.  A successful ad model could be important to keeping developers afloat.  But the key to that monetization of the audience is the data about the audience, and strategically Apple needs this piece- to be the sole provider of such data and kill AdMob.

So Apple 's development process might be reduced to:

  1. Protect the experience of the user
  2. Protect the interests of the developer ecosystem except to the extent that it woulf harm 1
  3. Serve the interests of shareholders/The Street except to the extent that there would be conflict with 1 or 2

No matter how many applications Steve Jobs or his employees arbitrarily deny from the app store, if people just love the damn thing, they'll think he's Jesus.

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Cuil vs. Google and the DOJ

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My dad emailed me a link to  search upstart Cuil, which I had come across before but never adopted.  It got me thinking about the Obama administration's antitrust hounds barking at GOOG, and now maybe a credible competitor might be important.  But the standard- for being a credible competitor- is really high, I think.

Google's dominance stops when it's not useful, or as fast, as competitors. I think it's doubtful they will lose on speed, but utility is a maybe. Whether the Wolfram Alpha product solves the same problems, or solves some other ones may also affect this determination. 

In the long run, I think Google knows that it's don't be Evil motto really translates into "Don't be useless." 

  • it wouldn't be useful to force users to download Chrome in order to search Google or check their gmail
  • it wouldn't be useful to prevent people from embedding Vimeo videos in their blogspot blogs
  • Google Docs kills Microsoft Office by being Useful for group collaboration
  • Even if Google buys twitter, if they make it less useful, they'll have a problem
 


If they stick to that, they're probably in good shape.  The DOJ may wonder: is Google's ubiquity anticompetitive?  I think for the bulk of its interaction with the world, Google is just a bunch of nice guys who offer a free utility, or maybe a phone.  For those few (relatively speaking) individuals on this Earth who do some form of business with Google, it can seem like a monolithic, and scary, creature.  It's the latter group who want antitrust scrutiny of Google, not the former.

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Freelancing opportunity and the future of the labor force

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I did a lot of work at Columbia on the mobile workforce, seeing labor in firms as units dividing their time between mutliple employers on an engagement basis.  The endgame there seemed to be the end of the traditional labor force.  I even suggested ata  conference last month that it would be interesting to create a real-time job index- jobs that need to be done in the next X hours or Y minutes.  Not sure we're there yet.

Reading a post on Please Feed The Animals, the post title speculates that perhaps there are Fewer Advertising Jobs, But Greater Opportunity.  The post links to a great WSJ article on freelance employment in the downturn.

I think the data are interesting to think about there. The ultra-mobile (where mobility is also lateral between firms) workforce is a chaotic place to be, and strategically, I think this robs many firms of the opportunity to differentiate through talent acquisition. Perhaps this really doesn't matter as much as it once did, and a firm having access to a network of talented freelancers is the talent differentiator these days.

I wonder: is this is a long term spike that will re-make the firm, or perhaps just an example of how firms cut way past the fat in their layoffs, and are burdened with cost structures that don't make sense anymore?  Could agencies have fixed that instead of laying people off?

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Twitter Backlash as Marketers Adopt and Automate

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I read about Scoble thinking of killing his Twitter account, and it seems more and more like the anti-commercialism backlash that we hear with each new service- Going back to Canter and Siegel- the couple in who sent their Green Card spam to thousands of usenet groups in 1994. 

I keep seeing outrage posted on Twitter, in the form of "Why is [company] using twitter to [perceived spammy practice]? [hateful judgement]" It seems to have grown worse with the advent of bots for automating a corporate/for-profit twitter presence.  The ghost-writers/celebrity tweet phenomenon (seriously, Guy Kawasaki?) didn't seem to help.

The tools to automate an external social media presence (e.g. marketing or PR) are getting some traction but it's becoming painful to the user community.  Should we get mad at the brands, or Twitter?

It seems like a much better response to attempt to influence the strategies employed by firms to manage their social presence.  If Twitter doesn't want us to leave, the ads will be tasteful and/or relevant.  Not to mention that at the enterprise level, the opportunity to drive internal morale/knowledge should be just as large as driving brand love and PR externally.

But can we remedy the corporate, pretend to be a person presence?  Is this a possible business for Jeff Dachis new venture?  I'll keep an eye on that.

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Food Brand Site Done Right: Kashi

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In the wake of the Skittles dustup, what can a food brand do?  I wanted to comment on Charlie's post, but I decided yesterday that I didn't have anything to add- Charlie said it right. I  knew that I didn't really like the site, thought it was derivative of Modernista's home page...but what was Skittles  supposed to do?  What can the web do for food brands until mind control beams?

Skittles_at_bsbnyc

After seeing a Kashi ad on TV, enticing me to visit their web site and get a free frozen entree, I said, let's just see about this. Conclusion: Kashi did something very cool. 

As background: I love Kashi.  I didn't always.  Kashi used to be these crazy rice puffs my friend Matt would eat, and I wasn't really up for that.  After I started trying to eat better about 18 months ago, I discovered Kashi frozen entrees, and shortly thereafter the GoLean cereal.   In my apartment right now I have Kashi GoLean cereal on the shelf and a Southwest Chicken frozen entree in the freezer.  I am a loyal consumer.  I tell people about Kashi products.  A lot.  The products work in my lifestyle: whole grains, protein, and trying to avoid artificial sugars.  But not everyone is as vigilant as I am :)

Now, as a comparison, it might not be fair to suggest that Skittles can claim any kind of identification with me, because hey, when was the last time I bought candy?  OK.  However, what Kashi executes is something that is relevant, connects you to the core of the company, and gave me something in return. Here's the Black Bean Mango Frozen Entree.

Kashi1

See the additional contest on the right?  You better believe I want a year's supply of Kashi food! 

I decided to join their community, which actually has some very interesting things about reaching goals, whatever they might be, in wellness and mind/soul health, not just nutrition.  How about: Challenge yourself to sanitize your sponges?  I think this site does great things for the brand.  Is it personable?  You bet.  Here's the Kashi Customer Relations staffer's profile:

KashiCommunityManager Anjanette  

If you're wondering what at thoughtful company Kashi is, check out their registration Captcha.  I'm not opposed to ones like ReCaptcha, which I think works rather well, but this was fantastic, and so refreshing:

With the Kashi Captcha, You could request a verification email instead, but why would you want to?

You could request a verification email instead, but why would you want to?

I willingly entered my home address three times on Kashi.com because I realized, if there is one food brand I wouldn't mind hearing from, it might be Kashi. The TV campaign Kashi is running, which offers a free frozen entree, and encouraging visitors to join a well thought-out community site is at least a viable alternative to creating a social media firestorm just so people will talk about Skittles.  Instead, try Kashi.

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Network Effects, Attention, and Twitter

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A Twitter presence is getting harder and harder to manage.  Charlie O’Donnell’s “how to manage a professional network online” podcast on BlogTalkRadio gives some interesting guidance in this area for those starting out.  I know Charlie limits himself to following 250 people, but it’s not uncommon for superstars on Twitter to be following thousands.  I don’t know what the number should be, but following 210 people feels very different from when I was following 50.  Why is that?

Twitter is an attention aggregator.  The best conversations on Twitter take place in close to real time, and evolve FAST.  Taking advantage of mobile web or SMS updates to tweet from an event or while away from a computer adds a lot to the experience.  My RSS reading dropped dramatically once I started using Twitter, because I was getting MORE of the folks whose blogs I read: more of their thought process, their likes and dislikes, a bit of their lives…and attention from them.  If Twitter is a network of status messages, its biggest achievement may be to confer status (or as Nate Westheimer put it, the paypal of social capital).  Attention is an input for distributing social capital.

But not everyone can stay on Twitter, all day every day.  While we’re asleep, doing our jobs, even making eye contact with people in real life, living life, we are usually interacting with the world without writing it down.  We get value from Twitter when we pay attention TO it, and everyone pays a little different amount.  Twitter's effects are normally distributed, too.  There is some minority of people it hurts, a great many who get little to moderate value, and some other minority who get supercharged about it.  Twitter changed how I view a lot of events, connected me more closely to co-workers, and made it clear that instantaneous responses from marketers could have an impact on brand reputation.

My next post on this topic will discuss how the necessity of filtering affects social network and community growth.

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The future of NOT free

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David Carr writes in today's NYT that "We need an iTunes for news" and I'm finding myself thinking very hard about what actually might help the struggling newspaper biz (bad news from Fitch ratings came out the other day, and it looks like the Seattle P-I is on the brink). 

Is it just "variable pricing" which Carr argues has allowed the music business to stick around, though perhaps not to thrive?  What the music business still hasn't really learned, is how to combat piracy by adding value in the distribution part of the business.  Apple figured the out- the device and the store are, for many many people, a top notch experience (I know there are people who prefer eMusic or other services) but the emphasis Apple placed on delivering value rather than delivering "content" is what gave Apple's iPod such dominance.

So can newspapers just turn around and create an iTunes-like store, charging for the convenience of reading the paper on an enormous iPod touch or the Kindle?  I think the issue is not exclusively supply-side.  That is, newspapers don't have to deal with precisely the same intransigence as the music business with respect to digital- they already (largely) give the product away for free online. When the NYTimes pulled the plug on TimesSelect, it looked like they were screwed.

I posted these thoughts to the nextNY list in December:

The BHAG here is to make enough of your content consumers want to buy your content even if there is some proportion of people who believe it should be free, wants to be free, or that they are entitled to consume it for free.  We are at the point where creators pass up the opportunity to extract some optional $ from many of their consumers while restricting the content to non-optional payers of $$$. 

Maybe we are at the point where optional $ from only some of your customers would make it profitable.  Suppose 20% of the people who visited the NYTimes online in October 2008 paid $1 for the privilege, that would be about $10 million in incremental revenue.  Would another $100 million every year be worth it? We can play with the numbers like this forever, but I think it's one direction creators should move.

I say all of this as a (GASP) paid daily subscriber to the print NYTimes. 

People need to get okay with not-free news.   The reporting of news organizations is indispensable, and high in value.  While the music business has the advantage of live performance and merchandise revenue- which do not suffer from the free copying problem- news has no such cash cow. 

We'll need news to recover from this serious free-rider problem.  A tip jar?  Maybe tying to distribution on a device, or just making the pricing more flexible, or making it just a whole lot cheaper and also easier to pay would be a step in the right direction.  I'm not convinced- just getting people back to paying for distribution seems weak.  They will somehow need to be non-free even if not subscription only, either.

One of Fred Wilson's recent posts mentions Time Oreilly's three rules:

1) Work on something that matters to you more than money
2)Create more value than you capture
3)Take the long view


I believe that in a similar way, newspapers  "create more value than [they] extract" but this has created a mis-pricing problem: users believe they were paying for distribution, distribution became "free" via the web,  but the value created only grew; we have not figured out how to recapture that. Wish I knew the answer to that one.



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A new beginning in 2009

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And you may find yourself....  

In 2009, I'm sure I will.  After I was laid off from Razorfish at the end of 2008, I had the opportunity to do a jump-started job search, and a lot of the leads I turned up were very promising.  The economic outlook went from grim to super-grim in the interim, and I'm bracing for the worst, hoping for the best. 

In the interim, I have a fantastic opportunity to think about some of my longer-term goals.  2008 was a terrific ride in terms of pursuing my writing and performance ambitions.  I became stronger in body and in my sense of my own self- a very successful year.  A year of reinvention, even, as I harnessed a certain power and confidence from within.  Did I ever think I would run nearly 9 miles straight?

And yet I wondered,  describing my situation to friends and family over the course of my trip to California for the holidays, whether this isn't the time to reverse the balance of time and effort invested in my two lives, my technology/business career and my work as a writer and performer.  In particular childhood friend KS, who landed in "the biz" by accident was highly influential about this. 

I have often said that sustenance aside, I'd probably do both.  I enjoy making links between business ideas, helping businesses to be their innovative selves and presenting that to their customers; I enjoy making people laugh.  It happens to be true that the business of comedy at my level means giving away the product to as many people as possible, as a down payment on future returns- I will continue to pursue these opportunities as a secondary activity.

What I appreciate now is how much I am looking for the right fit with a new employer.  The culture and people of Razorfish were important to and supportive of, my professional and personal development.  Doing some personality and values exercises the past few weeks to drive resume development and interviewing, I have gotten a bit better understanding of myself.  I find that the more I describe myself, the more I think I describe my ideal work environment.  So what does that look like?  

What do I know about that company?  

  • Passionate people from diverse backgrounds
  • A focus on strategy across businesses 
  • Always looking for new ideas and reading from a wide variety of sources, connecting ideas and trends together. 
  • Not maniacally focused on quantitative solutions but loving the elegance of making a model work and making good judgments. 
  • High standards of quality about data and creativity about finding sources of it. 
  • Looking for long term success opportunities for the business very likely "shaper" firms rather than "adapter" firms.  
  • Experimenting with new ideas and applications and talking about them with the public.  Creating a community and recruiting passionate followers. 
  • People invested in developing themselves and a company interested in developing its staff.
  • A place where I'll find some other people with performance in their blood, writers or artists or musicians.

I'm going to be compiling a list of companies I think are on this list, and I'm absolutely open to suggestions.

Silicon Valley perspective as I head East

Today I'm packing up from my vacation in CA and heading back to New York.  The NYtimes has a story this mroning about the venture market- In Silicon Valley, Venture Capitalists Turn Cautious and I'm wondering what's new about this story, or indeed unique to the Valley?  The contentions of the article:

  • You can't just say "social networking" and get a pile of cash anymore.  I submit that this has been the case for some time, as the social networking space got so crowded in 2007/8 I wasn't sure how many more of these we really needed. 

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Strategy under uncertainty

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Found my way from the futuramb blog post about strategic planning in the fashion industry to this McKinsey quarterly article about strategy under uncertainty which calls out two kinds of firms: shapers and adapters.  I've been thinking about corporate strategy from an uncertainty perspective since I read  Michael Raynor's excellent book, The Strategy Paradox- in which the roles of managing uncertainty at all levels of the corporation are examined.  Raynor's examples of firms who succeeded by creating options for success under many possible futures are powerful. I previously posted about them here.

In the current economic environment, Hugh Courtney wisely points out that not every firm is going to be able to get out in front of the significant uncertainty and financial turmoil that 2009 will bring.  Some of them will of necessity just be trying to survive.   They'll pursue "bold M&A plays, R&D that others can’t finance, and entry into new markets."  How can we identify the firms who can pursue a strategy of shaping the future rather than just adapting to it?  These are some of their characteristics:

  • very healthy balance sheets, potentially with lots of fully-depreciated assets
  • business models that generate a lot of cash and don’t have much debt
  • typical industries: high tech, service businesses, energy, utilities, and telecom

A very useful insight here is that these companies can re-shape their industry without re-shaping the macro environment- that will always be adaptive.  However, the adapter firms will rely primarily on adapting to the macro environment and hoping to ride it out.

I think startups probably fit into the shaper category as well.  Taking chances that many competitors can't, these firms are constantly investing, with every day, in re-shaping their industries.  A salute, then to the firms, large and small, who use 2009 to create something new and bold, take a chance, and harnessing the silver lining of the year's dark clouds.

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CMO strategy in a downturn

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My newest contribution to the Razorfish Headlight blog is now live.   I tried to look at many of the different elements affecting sales and marketing decisions online and in America; I have a very strong perspective that there MUST be a strategic opportunity somewhere for a company seeking to create value.  

These recommendations could translate to other industries, particularly durable goods which are typically financed.  See CMO strategy in a downturn at headlightblog.com.  

Also this month are excellent articles on digital advertising by my colleagues Neal Gorevic, who writes about dealers using video advertising, and Blake Kimball, who writes about new media planning tactics.

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Twitter Test- Are You a Bot?

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I'm having a lot of thoughts about twitter.  There are plenty of good primers on twitter, and lots of discussion of how the API traffic far exceeds site traffic.  There's plenty of discussion about web metrics that suggests that such a service really can't be accurately measured by panel based or site-side analytics services.  What this post is about, though, are the twitter use cases, the experiences of using the service.

One thing that I have observed from a conversation about a rash of new twitter followers coming out (apparently a couple of days ago the twitter mail queue held its breath and then burped out a whole bunch of notification e-mails) that in many cases these followers had a kind of artificial quality- particularly in cases where they are following dozens and being followed by far fewer.   That irks a lot of people, because it suggests that you are not contributing as much as listening, or dare I say, stalking. 

Twitter, to my mind, will lose value if it moves toward to the 90/10 rule participation - Twitter is no fun if you never send anything, as many people have pointed out to me.  What twitter really does is force you to think about the balance...unless you're a bot.

When is it best used?  When  you send a lot and listen a lot.  Charlie and Nate's video about Jamba Juice and Twitter or Michael Arrington's Comcast Outage or HR Block experiences are perfect examples of this.  There is of course the infamous @jasoncalacanis passport debacle. 

The twitter audience is kind of fickle..and the twitsphere really centers around tech right now, with @jasoncalacanis kind of the king of twitter self promotion.  He can cause weird stuff like this to happen:

One mention by @jasoncalacanis and I get a torrent of new friend requests. Howdy folks!

I probably  err on the side of being too human, in that I follow too few people who are following me.  I try to exercise judgment about how much information I can reasonably consume- I am noticing that if you follow enough high volume twitter users, you can miss a lot of stuff, even @ messages from real-life friends. I try to make my tweets a mixture of the immediate, the insightful, the random and the humorous.

I've never met @mikedoe in person but I really enjoy his tweets. Most of thew original people I followed on twitter were NextNY people like @innonate @ceonyc and @quirk.   Jason Calacanis sent a whole bunch of people to follow @alanataylor- I'm sure she's gonna go far.

So, if you got here from twitter, say hi here in the comments or D msg me- er, do they have bots that do that?

 

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Hoping KDR can go see Path101 at Cornell

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I know I never got much out of the career fairs at Cornell, since I wasn't an engineer, a math major, or in the Ag school studying business management.  As a government major i was essentially expected to go to law school or bust. 

When I graduated in 2002, the job market sucked.  The class of 1999 had all gotten great jobs and I had salivated over the idea of that kind of opportunity only to see it dry up.  Looking for a job after graduation seemed to me like looking for ice in the Gobi Desert- tough.

I'm proud to say that a combination of connections helped me to find a great starting point, in just under a year after graduating.  I never would have found the job I got just by applying online.

Charlie O'Donnell, an energetic entrepreneur and Silicon Alley evangelist, hopes to  make it easier to find the right career, even if you were just a government major. 

Charlie will be at Cornell on Tuesday 2/19, so check out Path101, meet Charlie, and see if you can start your job search a little earlier than I did.