Coming out of my first 90 days, I discovered this list of mystery acronyms I started on my first week at Lenovo. What is frightening is that I now understand most of them:
Favorite terms:
Publishing 2.0 » Corporate Blogging Reality Check
Scot Karp posts a smart one:
“This encapsulates so much of why corporate blogging is hard. “Companies” need to behave predictably, unlike people, for the sake of Wall Street and their shareholders. For companies and people to connect through blogging, companies will need to become a lot more human — advocates of corporate social responsibility can tell you how hard that transition is.
Of course, in Microsoft’s case, the Scoble loose canon model is still better than the Steve Ballmer lunkhead model — can you imagine Ballmer blogging? You could only read the blog on a Windows PC using IE, etc.”
All Things Distributed: Naked Answers
The contrarian view that all corporations should not leap into blogging is growing. This in from Amazon’s Werner Vogels, chief technology officer, who after getting the Naked Conversations treatment from Scoble and Shel Israel, asks the Emperor’s New Clothes Question:
“I wanted them abandon their fuzzy group hug approach, and counter me with hard arguments why they were right and I was wrong. Instead they appeared shell-shocked that anyone actually had the guts to challenge the golden wonder boys of blogging and not accept their religion instantly. I have been a promoter of weblogging for a long time, so I didn’t feel particularly bad to challenge these two authors to tell me why customers would get a better Amazon product if we would institutionalize blogging at a wider scale around Amazon. Beyond “a more human face” and “conversations with individuals from Amazon” there was no real response how blogging will make the product named Amazon.com better for our customers given all the techniques we already use from soliciting customer feedback to discussion forums to snooping weblogs and comments sites, etc,.”
A while back I blogged on the absence of any customer service links on Amazon. That is not the case anymore. Vogels makes some excellent points, points I’m wrestling with as well as noted experts come to us with the strong recommendation that we blog, blog openly, and pervasively. Initially, I was all in, excited to open the corporate gates (in large part due to the exuberance of Naked Conversations), but now, after watching Scoble get scorched on the Vista delays, and sensing some serious nastiness and fatigue and incestous backbiting throughout the blogerati, I wonder, truly wonder, if a corporate blog — a general corporate blog — is an invitation to hell on earth.
I have more than ten years in so-called “community management,” was online participating in the Well in ’88, and consider myself as wise to the tribal customs of online discourse as the next guy — but doing so as a corporate faceplate, striving for transparency in an environment scrutinized by regulators, auditors, attorneys and other non-business development types … it doesn’t make a ton of sense to just open the lemonade stand.
Now GE launched an R&D blog earlier in the week. That is useful and cool. But does GE’s investor relations people need to blog? Does any CEO truly need to blog?
I scratch my literary itch blogging about stuff like this, clamming, flowers, birds, friends, whatever — but to dash off some corporate message as blithely as this spew …. danger ahead.
» The Cookie Monster in the Closet | Jeffrey Young’s Technicon | ZDNet.com
Vintage Jeff Young on a tear about metrics, online advertising, corrupt bloggers, and the price of milk at the local 7-11. Seeing as how he links to my metrics booklist, I thought I’d reciprocate:
“I’m talking about the unquestioned adoption of the religion of the Holy Church of Internet Advertising, and its scary priestdom of “metrics”, whose dominance is destroying the beautiful egalitarianism of the Web. It is about to get worse by orders of magnitude with the appearance of “location based services” as the patents recently revealed by Google make clear. If that all wasn’t bad enough, there is the Faustian deal with the Devil crafted by Google to hobble Chinese access to the Internet. The rise of a cult of advertising, the silence of the lambs as we go quietly to slaughter, and the howls of protest when our government listens in to Al Qaeda coupled with the muted protests about Google’s “do no evil” manipulation of search results in order to do the bidding of a repressive and authoritarian regime strikes fear into my heart.”
Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. First, as the Great McNealy once said, “You have no privacy, get over it.” Second, apply the Free Lunch rule to any website and ask yourself: would I pay for this? If you aren’t paying for it, then some marketer is picking up the tab for you in the slim hope that you might reach up and Punch the Monkey.
As for the Blogosphere Eating Its Young (not you): sure; it’s the way of the world. Slag and be slagged and watch the traffic pile on when the bodies start flying across the Infomercial Stupid Hypeway.
And metrics are fun. Seriously. To be able to divine the entrails of one’s traffic is very, very refreshing. Don’t get all privacy-crazed. No one knows who is who in a traffic log. It’s the patterns, the data mining, that human drive towards perfection in all operations, and the footnoted realization that you can never, ever, ever be 100 percent sure, but you can keep tweaking and optimizing until you know, down to the penny, what’s working and what’s failing ….
This scrutiny is murder on editors used to two metrics — newstand and paid circ. Now they can see who did what to them when. Accountability is a bitch.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Seven rules for corporate blogging
For some reason Carr’s polemic against corporate blogging strikes me as a troll. Take on the most visible corporate blogger – Scoble – make a list, buck the conventional wisdom that corporations must blog, and then wind it up by suggesting that comments be disabled and the lawyers called in.
As it is pointed out in the comments — Scobelizer is not the Microsoft official blog, it’s Scoble’s personal blog, he just happens to have the balls to talk about work in it.
I do not talk about work here. Would I behave differently under the corporate banner? Sure.
MarketerBlog: Measurement & Metrics: Time for the Internet to Join the Grown-Up’s Table
Smart blog that is going into the blogroll.
My Weblog: Internet Commerce: Sephora.No, HP, Yes!
“Internet commerce has to be drop dead simple and build a consumer’s confidence. There are two computer purchasing sites that I do business with and which come close to replicating the Amazon.com’s gold standard. In addition to HP’s commerce site, I also like Lenovo. And Lenovo comes close to establishing a sense of community. If i have a problem with a ThinkPad notebook one of the first places i go is to Lenovo.com. The site queries my computer, determines what model i have and establishes its configuration. Logic trees take over from there and pretty soon I’ve found the answer to my question, or more importantly, a solution to my problem.”
Jim makes some good points about getting in-and-out out of a shopping experience in as little time as possible. Usability comes to a sharp point when applied to the transactional web. Where a media site is all about delay and diversion — related links, click here, please don’t go away — a commerce site is all about masking complexity (ship to multiple addresses, remember my account details, find-it-and-buy-it) and getting people in and out of the store as soon as possible. When a consumer has a negative experience, like Jim did at Sephora trying to get a gift certificate, to when they have a positive, like one gets from Amazon’s One-Click, the chances of a repeat transaction are highly predictable.
I had two commerce experiences yesterday — one was with NewEgg as I purchased a new 60 gb 7200 rpm Hitachi drive to revive a dead Fujitsu P2040, the other was at Fujitsu when I tried to get the OEM information on the dead Toshiba drive. Fujitsu failed. NewEgg ruled. Now, Fujitsu was able to find my machine based on the serial number, but had no level of detail about the components. I had to google out to a third-party “enthusiast” site for P2040 owners, look at the discussion threads, find the part I wanted, then hit NewEgg. Fujitsu lost all opportunity of selling me an upgraded drive — I suppose it’s understandable given the complexity of any PC manufacturers catalogue and the impossibility of keeping sunsetted machine information active for any period of time.
I want to hit a site and be recognized as a customer, to be asked how my machine is doing, how that book was I ordered, and then be offered suggestions on how to improve it.
In some circles of interactive marketing, there is an unhealthy obsession with the term “viral.” Essentially it is a synonym for cheap in my opinion, and completely misunderstood unless one takes it with the same rough definition that you’ll know it when you see it.
There’s pedestrian viral — the stuff that clogs your inbox from your brother-in-law. Today’s meme is the crazed guy in Brooklyn ranting about Starbucks into his webcam and dropping F-bombs every other word. Okay, sixty second video rant, delivered to me via video is not viral. The second time it gets forwarded to me, like the Numa Numa guy, the Star Wars Kid, or the Car-Sunroof-That-Decapitates-Cats, then it is a phenomenon, but is it “viral?”
Then there’s overcooked viral — the dumb crap that some ad agency bakes for a client and then buys advertising to promote. I won’t cite any examples because I don’t know any.
Let’s first look at the attributes of Internet viral.
1. It is spread by email. Mostly. Blogs can spread it too. Slashdot, Boing-Boing, they are the mass media of the medium.
2. It is generally video. Four year-olds shooting M-60s, Seth Godin at Google, the aforementioned ads. Text viral is stuff like the Darwin Awards or urban myth stuff. Jokes are not viral.
3. It is rarely a game. Viral games … I remember an animated quiz that asked guys to select which urinal they would use under several situations. A plastic surgeon friend was quite taken by a “Real or Fake” quiz (which I kicked his professional butt at).
4. Viral is often pornographic, involves obese people, and makes fun of rednecks.
5. Animation can go viral. Jib-jab, etc. and indeed is very viral when done right. PPS — or powerpoint slideshows are viral too. Paul Allen’s MegaYacht hit my inbox a lot. The Engrish Powerpoint was big in January. The world’s biggest piece of construction equipment. That British music cartoon hit thing around Christmas about the kid riding in his father’s “JCB”
6. The best product viral was the Subservient Chicken — and that proves the other attribute of viral, it must carry a high dementia factor. Burger King rules at dementia. I think I saw the Subservient Chicken get ridden in a rodeo last night on the tube, but the killer part of the ad was the set up so the singers could shout “Buckin’ Chicken” at the end. That will make anybody look up from the newspaper.
I worry that he who sets out to be viral is as doomed as a geek who sets out to be cool, or a bore who works at being funny. I regard good viral as a stubbed-toe opportunity. You go “aha!” and if you’re lucky it will pyramid faster than a get rich scheme in Albania.
Stowe Boyd blogs on Foldera’s presentation at ETech, focusing on CEO Richard Lusk’s success in working Blogistan to build 1 million indications of interest in Foldera’s collaboration tool.
[usual disclosure, I sit on Foldera’s advisory board and hold shares]