Category: Community

Fool me once …

Last summer I was leaving RTP for the flight home to the Cape and did my obligatory 3:30 pm quick stop at the Shell station on the corner of Rte 54 and Miami Blvd. to top off the tank and spare myself the $9 per gallon gouging the rental car agencies hit the clueless with when they return with less than a brimming tank.

I popped into the mini-mart for a bottle of water. On my return to the car a nice looking lady towing a forlorn looking six-year old came up to me and told me a roadside story of woe.

“I hate to bother you but my son and I are traveling to Fayetteville to see my husband who is home on leave and our car has broken down and AAA would only tow us as far as this gas station and we need money to get the alternator replaced but Traveler’s Aid won’t give anything but a reference to a battered woman’s shelter….”

She started crying. Honest to sadness tears of frustration and heat. She totally convinced me. Nailed me. Me, the man who knows how to repel Manhattan bums with Churbuckian mind bullets. A guy who tells panhandlers on the subway: McDonalds is Hiring.

I gave her a twenty. Her face lit up. She was happy. I was happy. I’ve never parted with more than buck in the past, but a twenty? I drove away thinking: “Dude, you just got taken down.” But I felt Christian and all eelemosynary and Mr. Pay-It-Forward-Like. It felt good. I felt special.
Tonight, same Shell Station. Get out of the car. See a van that looks like rolling squalor. Think immediately of last summer’s charitable act and think, “Nah. Not twice. No way.”

Get a bottle of water, pay, come out. Dawdle a little bit in opening the water, swallow an Advil, tempting the fates to bring out the Ambrose Bierce that runs deep within us all.

I’m standing right next to the van of squalor and nothing happens. I unlock the door. Get it, start up, turn around to back out and …

There she stood. Same kid. Same face. Only this time the window between was closed and was going to stay closed.

I flipped her the bird, let her read my lips, and drove away. She didn’t bat an eye, just moved onto the next mark, knowing she had hit the same well twice.
And I was twenty dollars poorer none the same and vowing to launder my charitable contributions through the United Way from now on.

A historical look at why face-to-face is vital to online communities

This one is from the archives. Enjoy:

” Following is the article that appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer last
Sunday about the Cape Cod conclave. Many thanks again to David Churbuck,
and it was a pleasure meeting all those who attended.

Cheers,

Fen Montaigne

The Outdoors/ By Fen Montaigne

CHATHAM, Mass. — We had gathered, techno geeks and fish freaks all, for a
night of “extreme” striped bass fishing here on Cape Cod. But by midnight,
the only extremes our band of a dozen had experienced were those of
exhaustion and utter befuddlement: Where were the fish?
Our commander-in-chief for the expedition was David Churbuck, a
writer and on-line editor at Forbes magazine, over-the-top fisherman and
Internet wonk. Churbuck and Devon, Pa., native Thorne Sparkman had recently
launched their World Wide Web saltwater fly-fishing home page, and to honor
the publication Churbuck thought it might be nice to hold a fishing
conclave not far from his home on the Cape.
So Churbuck put the word out to the farthest, fishiest reaches of
cyberspace about a night of “extreme” striper fishing near Chatham
lighthouse. “Extreme” as in standing all night long in the pounding surf in
the dark, casting with a fly rod for phantom fish. “Extreme” as in
extremely challenging.
“Extreme” as in extremely dumb.
At 6 p.m. on an early fall evening, the gang showed up in the
Chatham light parking lot as the sun set tranquilly in the west and a big
blow lumbered in from the east. It was a jovial crowd, and one that took
its fishing seriously. Churbuck, a strapping, handsome fellow with
shoulder-length brown hair, had warned me about them earlier.
“It’s totally twisted, one of the most Fellini-esque experiences
you’ll ever have,” he said. “It’s geeks on the beach. I thought I (ital);
had a fishing problem! You should see some of these guys! They’re more into
fishing than they are into computers. In fact, they got into computers so
they could get more information on fishing. They’re deranged.’
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. After all, it was
Churbuck who had told me earlier in the day, “We’ll fish most of the night,
sleep on the beach a few hours, grab a couple of Jolt colas and head out
again before dawn.”
With the conclave, Churbuck explained, we were making the
transition from cyber space to “meat space”. As in rubbing flesh.
“Everyone said the Internet and World Wide Web would turn people into
vidiots, that they’d get lost in cyberspace,” Churbuck, 37, said as we
talked in his rambling home in Cotuit. “But the ‘Net has really increased
the value of meat space. Like this conclave. It’s a great chance to meet
people I’d never have met otherwise.”
Our group — software engineers, international business
consultants, hospital workers, etc. — walked down the steep steps and onto
Chatham beach. Fishermen were filing off the sand — fishless, biteless,
glum-faced. Clouds had covered the entire sky and the wind was whipping
into our faces at about 15 miles per hour — not friendly conditions for
saltwater fly-fishing.
For the next five hours we endured what has come to be known in
fish-head realms of the Internet as the Chatham Death March. We fished a
little — with stunning lack of success — but mainly we trudged in bulky
waders over endless miles of Cape Cod sand looking for greener fishing
grounds. At one point, six of us got separated for a few hours, and cries
of “Dave! Dave! Is that you, Dave?” were swallowed up by the black night
and howling wind.
Returning to Chatham light utterly dehydrated, soaked with sweat
and chafed like babes with terminal diaper rash, we cursed Churbuck. Then,
around 1 a.m., we fell dead asleep in our cars.
Stretched out in the front seat of Churbuck’s battered Volkswagen
Fox, I drifted off to the sound of Dave snoring like a train wreck. The
next thing I knew, Churbuck was muttering, “Hey, it’s 4:15,” and we were
rousing ourselves for the dawn fishing patrol. We breakfasted heartily —
Coke, strawberry Twizzlers, extra crunchy Reese’s peanut butter cups,
Oreos, Cheeze-Its and jalapeno-laced Monterey Jack cheese cut with a rusty
fish filet knife. Well fortifed, we donned our waders and hit the beach
once again.
* * *
Churbuck and Thorne Sparkman are on the cutting edge of something
that may either become the publishing phenomenon of the future or that
might, as Sparkman quipped, “go the way of the CB radio.” The World Wide
Web — a massive, amorphous, chaotic and fascinating conglomeration of
interlinked computers — is still in its infancy, and Churbuck and Sparkman
are groping to figure out where this beast is headed. Things are changing
so fast, said Churbuck, “you’ve got to burn your hut as soon as you build it.”
What the two men are building is something called “Reel Time”,
which they describe as the “Internet Journal of Saltwater Fly Fishing.”
(For those who can find their way around the Web, Reel Time’s address is
http://www.reel-time.com). At this point, Reel Time concentrates on
saltwater fly-fishing in New England, and mainly on Cape Cod, Martha’s
Vineyard and Nantucket.
It provides the latest information on fishing conditions, news on
fishing derbies and other events, articles and essays, on-line videos,
photos of the fish readers have caught, archival material and Internet
links to fishing guides and tackle shops. Reel Time is, at the moment, a
hobby for the two men, what Churbuck describes as a “completely non-profit
ordeal.” Neither is contemplating quitting his day job — Churbuck at
Forbes and Sparkman at business school at the University of California-Berkeley.
Eventually, they may make money from advertisers, but for now they
want to make a name for themselves as the best location on the Internet to
read about saltwater fly-fishing, a rapidly-growing sport. Already, they
are getting 6,000 “hits” — visits from readers — a week on Reel Time.
“There are few times in your life when you feel you’re in the right
place at the right time,” said Sparkman, 29, who grew up in Devon, attended
the Shipley School and St. Pauls and graduated from Harvard. “I feel this
is right. The Web is touted as everyone becoming their own publisher, and
that’s one of the problems. There’s so much junk. But there are people who
will survive by estalishing a brand name, establishing a community that
lasts, a place that is really worth going to.
“You have to understand that to capitalize on the net you have to
enrich it.”
Sparkman, whose father practices internal medicine at the
University of Pennsylvania, has fished hard his whole life. But he moved
into the fish junkie category in college when, after a serious car
accident, he took a year off and fished his way around the world —
Iceland, Equador, New Zealand, the Florida Keys. Before heading to Berkeley
this fall, Sparkman was working as a consultant to Time Warner for their
on-line publications.
Churbuck, a Yale graduate, covered technology for Forbes magazine
before taking over their on-line publications. He works out of a sprawling,
shingle home near here that has been in his family for six generations. He
and Sparkman had known each other for several years before deciding to
launch Reel Time, which first appeared in July.
“It’s gone beyond a labor of love,” said Churbuck. “Reel Time is
kind of on-the-job training for my Forbes on-line job. It’s a stalking
horse. I don’t want to learn the lessons of electronic publishing with the
Forbes name on the line. It’s too high stakes. But hey, if this screws up
+- the Internet Journal of Salwater Fly Fishing — who cares?”
* * *
The wind had not died down. If anything, it was worse. Churbuck and
a handful of conclavers trudged in the darkness to the semi-circle of beach
below the lighthouse and cast gamely — and futilely — into the wind.
Seaweed clung to our flies on every cast. At one point, a monster roller
broke at my feet on the steeply-sloping beach, soaking me.
Dawn broke gray and nasty, and we walked a few hundred yards out
onto the spit of Chatham Beach. It should have been perfect striped bass
fishing, for we were at the peak of the fall migration in one of the
hottest striper spots on the East Coast. But once again, we got skunked.
We repaired to Larry’s PX for some cholestoral and post-game analysis. A
dozen people who had known one another only on a computer screen took
pleasure in finally meeting.
“I really like it — putting names and faces together,” said Scott
A. Sminkey, a software engineer from Littleton, Massachusetts. “I was
getting to know some of these people as if they were my good and close
friends and I had never met them.”
For several days afterwards, discussion of the no-fish conclave
hummed over the Internet. Juro Mukai of Seattle, who did not attend, sent
his congratulations.
“I say three cheers’ for Dave and the attendees,” he wrote on one
discussion forum. “As every wise fisherman knowns, not catching is as much
a part of fishing as catching, and comradery more than either . . . I know
that it doesn’t require fishing to have a great outing. Kudos to Dave and
the gang!”
Hope springs eternal in the bosom of the fisherman. Even computers
can’t change that.”

Lenovo blog number two is rolling

Inside the Box » Blog Archive » The Most Useless Feature on a ThinkPad?

This has been a good day. We launched the second “official” Lenovo Blog — Inside the Box — with Matt Kohut, our worldwide competitive analyst at the helm. This marks the debut of the corporate blog template and the debut of our corporate blog aggregator at http://www.lenovoblogs.com.

OgilvyPR — John Bell and Veronica Oleynik — made the design and hosting happen. Without them …. we’d be using Blogger or WordPress.com and not living in the slick world we do.

Collaboration as an online service

Knowledge management is a fuzzy IT challenge that feels like it will soon become as tired as Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems, but finding new life online under a few new labels, such as co-creation, collaboration, and innovation networks. What I know about knowledge management systems and tools comes from my participation in McKinsey’s Business Knowledge Services initiative in 2000-2001, my strategy consulting with Richard Lusk in the go-to-market strategy at the online collaboration company, Foldera, and reading of Thomas Davenport’s Working Knowledge and Thomas Stewart’s The Wealth of Knowledge and other desultory scans of the business theorists.

I’m going to focus the next few weeks on the concept of external knowledge management — the practice of seeking and managing intelligence from the market versus managing what lies within the organizational wall. I wrote an article in 2004 for Forrester Magazine with Navi Radjou on his research into corporations that constructed networks within and outside those walls to increase their time to market and improve their portfolio of innovations (I hate the term innovation on principle, having seen the term abused by makers of everything from candy to pickup trucks. I define “innovation” as invention made commercial). Those networks have tended to emphasize the connections between an organization’s internal resources and contractors or partners.

The extension of knowledge management to include outside contributors and participants leads to the point of this post: what tools can facilitate the collaboration? The old models of using enterprise solutions such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange have crumbled under the rise of PHP forums, commercial (and open) wiki structures such as JotSpot and MediaWiki, and now Office 2.0 plays such as Zimbra, Foldera, and 37 Signals’ Backpack, and Google’s moves into online applications such as spreadsheets and word processors.

IBM’s announcement last week that it was moving its online innovation activities — such as its lauded “Innovation Jam” — to Second Life sparked some interest, but I remain reluctant to endorse Second Life due to the more significant account set up issues that confront new users. Some press beefed about the PITA factor when a competitor of ours held a press conference in Second Life, but I can’t completely throw the metaverse play to the dogs just yet, even after spending an hour in “Amsterdam” yesterday ogling the virtual hookers …

But I digress. Online collaboration tools seem to be focused on point to point collaboration plays such as 37Signals which extend an organization’s reach beyond the constraints of its enterprise tools – aka Lotus Notes. Opening a Notes account or granting a non-employee VPN access into a corporate knowledge management system is much more trouble than its worth, so solutions such as Basecamp are filling that niche. Foldera’s tool offers a lot of promise and when it comes out of beta next year, the proof will be in its adoption. I have not played around with Zimbra, but my buddy Dan Lyons at Forbes has been experimenting with it and gives it high marks.

For public collaboration — inviting the masses in to comment and play — there are of course blogs and their comment structures, but as I have noted in an earlier post on the mechanics of blogging and community development, they ultimately give too much amplification to the power of the blogger’s voice and little to none to the commentary.

That leaves wikis — a solid platform for collaboration as the Wikipedia attests — but not one without a significant amount of parliamentary processes to control vandalism and defacement.

And so I shall experiment, downloading the installer for MediaWiki and building out an instance here on Churbuck.com.

A time for forums, a place for blogs …

This week’s theme seems to be developing into the metrics of “engagement” and the rules of thumbs to describe participants, lurkers, and fanatics. Since opening my first Blogger blog in the spring of 2002 (which quickly went dark as I tended to run my mouth off and was horrified one of my reserved Swiss employers would freak out if they read it), I’ve been looking at the differences between blogs and forums and the impact they have on that fuzzy liberal-tinged buzzword: “community.”

Community, for those of you born after 1998, was the power word of the first web revolution. It always conjured up images of community gardens, Morris Dancing festivals, church bake sales and youth soccer tournaments, but I digress.

Community was theoretically engagement in the form of a dialogue between the reader and the publisher and readers and other readers. I got into it as an operator in 1995 when Thorne Sparkman and I decided to launch an online magazine for saltwater fly fishing called Reel-Time. Thorne found an email list archival tool called HyperMail and had it hacked to serve as a crude threaded discussion platform. One of those discussions was named “BBS5” and it was very popular. I won’t go over the whole tale of Reel-Time — it’s over ten years old, has tons of traffic, is ranked first in Google for its key terms, and has a devoted “community” of people obsessed with saltwater fly fishing. There was an article written about one of our attempts to get people to meet face to face — on a beach in the middle of the night in October — that is pretty funny. You can find it here.

Reel-Time embodied a threaded forum, or BBS (bulletin board service, a hang-over term from the days of dial-up community when someone would run a community on a PC and people would dial into it one at a time). This is the format made infamous by USENET newgroups, and the basis for such legendary communities as the W.E.L.L., The Source, CompuServe, etc.

The interesting thing about a threaded forum is that it is a Maoist construct where everyone is on equal ground. Sure, contemporary software can grant different levels of power to different classes of users, but the content is pooled as opposed to “pulpited.” Meaning, anyone can start a thread or discussion, anyone can contribute, and no one’s postings is given prominence in terms of display or prioritization.

The first threaded community constructs were completely classless — the tools lacked any semblance of moderation capabilities, so me, as the “moderator” had to manually go in and surgically delete offensive remarks with no powers to ban members of the tin-foil hat league. Trying to run a community with no “god” powers was like trying to run a Vermont commune full of peaceful hippies with a few Charles Manson’s mixed in. BBS-5 eventually collapsed under the weight of anonymous flamers, forged identities, and general mayhem. So we migrated to another commercial platform which royally sucked and drove most of the committed posters to another site, where the same issues reemerged.

Eventually, thanks to Mark Cahill at Vario Design, we moved to a php system, VBulletin, and everything has been good ever since. We designated about ten “super” users as moderators, giving them some administrative powers so they can move spam posts into a rogue’s gallery, and keep the garden, as J.P. Rangaswami refers to it from the Chris Locke days (Reel-Time was born out of a project I collaborated with Chris, aka RageBoy, back in 1994 at InternetMCI).

Here’s the money graf: blogs are not communities. While there are comments and trackbacks they are not the place to build communities of engaged participants for the simple reason that the blogger, not the commenter, owns the pulpit. While there are group blogs where multiple writers share the same space (Boing-boing is the model there) there are no massive group blogs where 10,000 users vy for attention. In fact, the snake-display model of a blog — with comments hidden until one clicks through the headline to the permalink — is totally opposed to the thread and post model of a forum.

I write this as I:

a) look at forum technologies for a corporate project

b) think hard about Reel-Time and our fail efforts in offering our most active participants blogs (which we called Flogs — for Fishing Logs).

c) wish there was a better format for displaying comments in line or at least more visible in the context of the master post. (there is, I am too stupid to implement it.)

A formula for community engagement

Confused Of Calcutta » Blog Archive » None of Us is As Smart as All of Us

J.P. Rangaswami has a great formula for engagement and participation:

“I’ve always believed in a simple rule-of-thumb about opensource communities:

* For every 1000 people who join a community:
* 920 are lurkers, passive observers
* 60 are watchers, active observers capable and willing to kibitz
* 15 are activists, actually doing something
* …and 5 are hyperactive, passionate about what they’re doing, almost to a point of obsession”

This maps pretty closely to the experience I’ve seen at Reel-Time since 1995.

The Third Moment of Truth

The Third Moment of Truth

Pete Blackshaw is smart:

“Take the idea of opening up literally: open the brand door and put out a friendly welcome mat. Make every consumer who knocks on the door feel important and empowered. Co-create a response in the form of an answer, an acknowledgement, a thank you, a solution, or, in some cases, a form of compensation for their willingness to share their ideas and suggestions with you. Do this even if there’s a wee bit of incremental cost in making the effort. Trust me, it’s more efficient than the way we throw paid media at consumers, and it targets efficiently against influencers.”

The Case of the Spy Cam

Lots of blather and navel gazing has been expended about proving a blog’s ROI to one’s corporate overlords. Emotional appeals founded on Cluetrain sentiments: “But it’s the right thing to do!” or “We’ve got to adopt a conversational marketing model with our customers” aren’t going to win one high marks in the current culture of Measure-It-to-Manage-It.

How can one position corporate blogging as a crucial part of a company’s overall strategy? Let’s put aside reputation management, and focus on the relationship of a blog to a company’s web strategy. In my case, that strategy is to sell stuff online. Sales and blogging seem highly incompatible and counter to the general ethos of Blogistan. As ads creep into some blogs, the economic imperative becomes less jarring, but using a blog to forge a relationship with an audience and then slam that audience with “Buy Now!” starbursts is not generally regarded as a cool thing to do.
In July Lenovo launched its first blog: Design Matters. It is about design, industrial design, technology design, the design heritage of ThinkPads, and the new design principles behind Lenovo-branded products. We think design is our strength, the point of differentiation from our competitors in a vicious commodity market, so the thinking was to blog about it because it might spark a conversation with our fans.

It did. I won’t go into how I built the traffic for the blog, but let’s say it was purely organic for the most part. No ads were bought, no press releases released. It received some homepage linkage from Lenovo.com for a little while, but didn’t take off until the fans at Thinkpads.com and Notebookreview took notice of its existence.

Okay, so on October 5th, our chief designer, David Hill, tells me to look in the drafts folder in the blog’s WordPress dashboard at a post he’s written about a new USB camera. We’re talking about an accessory. A $79.95 device that clips onto the top edge of a monitor or laptop screen and captures video and audio for teleconferencing. Whoopee, right?

Actually, the device is pretty cool; looks like an old Minox spy camera. A nice departure from the usual Orb-Ball. Couple pictures to whet the blog’s readers’ desires, some commentary by David, a link to the Minox site, and we’re done. Wrong. Let’s put it into perspective. This little accessory never got so much exposure in its life. It didn’t get the homepage of Lenovo.com. It didn’t get a massive press rollout. It’s a nice camera, a $80 (why do we continue to inflict $0.95 pricing on our intelligent customers?) add-on, nothing like a $3,000 ThinkPad.

Let’s look at what happened.

First; the blog’s traffic through SiteMeter shows no significant spike due to the posting. The post garnered 17 comments (including two by David and someone on his staff) over five days. Not bad. Fourteen reader interactions. As of today, it is the third most popular post on the site in terms of first page viewed, which means the post is getting some linkage as the eyeballs aren’t going to the homepage first. The blog’s traffic spiked on Friday, when I started to detect a lot of inbound links from other sites. Here’s the chart:

… so turning to Technorati, I ran the search “Lenovo AND Webcam.” This gives me a buzz indicator. Did the blog post move the needle in terms of the pre-post chatter about Lenovo webcams?

I’d say so. And a scan of the verbatims indicates lots of nice commentary. Remember, these are posts, not posts and comments, so the overall chatter is doubtlessly higher.

Now, comes the “BFD” question — big frigging deal. Did you sell any? This is where I turn to Omniture SiteCatalyst, our high-powered metrics and analytics engine to see if we actually sold any
Omniture tells me, thAT of all units sold between Oct. 5 and the 10th, the “40Y8519” was the 17th best-selling item on Lenovo.com in the U.S. and racked up 23 sales. Okay, so we’re not talking billions served. But still, a look at most popular pages on the U.S. site shows that the little web cam was in the top 100 pages viewed, with more than 1,500 views (yes, I formatted a link to the product page in the original post). Furthermore, I learn, that the top referrer was Engadget. By a mile, with nearly 70% of traffic coming from its pickup of David’s post. Sales, globally, are probably double, so I can make the case that the blog pushed some sales, but more importantly, that by blogging about a specific SKU we were able to plunge a spoke of traffic deep into Lenovo.com, bypassing usability and navigation architectures, bypassing change-requests and stodgy content management systems, bypassing legal, PR, and everyone business undevelopment operation in the business (no aspersions to Lenovo’s teams, I speak in general cynical terms).

In retrospect, I blew it by not offering David’s audience a specific reason to buy one. Beauty and cool factor aside, they aren’t getting a reward for their attention. A discount or special offer needed to be provided, some prize inside the post to thank them for their attention. After all, no where else is there such a public manifestation of ThinkPad fandom than in the comments of the Design Blog. We owe them something for that.

Most excellent example of comments in a blog I have ever seen

Jack Slocum’s Blog » WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI

My post over the weekend about missing some vital Lenovo mentions in the comments of blogs that I track yielded some excellent suggestions from faithful readers about various plug-ins and options to gain better insights into the sentiments of peanut gallery. Rick Klau at Feedburner, Mitch Ratcliffe at BuzzLogic, and Chris Murray, ex-of-CXO all chimed in with good pointers.

Then I find this baby. Jack Slocum took advantage of Yahoo’s open architecture and built a comment tool for WordPress that is to blogs what David Foster Wallace is to footnotes. Check out the expandable nav bar on the left. The ability to drop a comment on a specific point in a blog post. I am totally freaked and want it.