Category: Interactive Marketing

Should Your Boss Be Blogging? – Forbes.com

Should Your Boss Be Blogging? – Forbes.com

Anil Dash at Forbes.com:

“If you’re an online retailer, there’s truth to the fact that blogging drives traffic. But if you’re another kind of company, the real return on investment comes from simple scenarios: You can collect community feedback, but surveys can be expensive and time-wasting; the expense associated with getting 100 comments back can be great. But with a blog, you can do it in 24 hours. You can also measure the success of delivering information. There’s an expense associated with e-mail that gets lost via spam filters or bounced-back. With a blog, you can insure delivery and then track metrics to see who read the information and clicked through. That’s a quantifiable improvement over the communication tools most companies are using today.”

Update on the Boing-Boing/Secure Computing Censorship story

I said to keep an eye on this story last week as an example of how a company can get Kryptonited (remember when the Kryptonite bike lock could be picked with a plastic pen and the company pulled an ostrich before issuing a recall?). Well, here’s the backstory. Boing-Boing readers (very popular group blog) started to notice they couldn’t get to the blog in certain Arab countries and Fortune 500 companies. The reason was some software, usually installed by clueless CIOs and IT departments, which blocks websites that display images of naked people. Seems Boing-Boing reviewed a coffee-table book about old men’s magazines and ran a thumbnail image of the cover, which, if you really, really squinted, would reveal some nudity.

Well, Secure Computing, the company that makes the software which blocks the websites, which annoys the users and sends the editors of Boing-Boing into fits, is now getting flamed royally.

Sunday New York Times last weekend gave prominent play to the incident:

“But a look back reveals that the January entry made reference to two new books from the graphic design imprint Taschen. Yes, the books are about adult magazines, but they are history books. And as for the thumbnail-size image that appeared alongside the original post, well, if you have to squint, is it really smut?

But that did not appear to be Secure Computing’s concern. According to the company’s definition, the Nudity classification applies to sites containing “nonpornographic images of the bare human body. Classic sculpture and paintings, artistic nude photographs, some naturism pictures and detailed medical illustrations” are included.

“We classify Internet content into over 73 different categories so that customers can chose, by category, what types of Web content they want available to their organization,” the company’s chief executive, John E. McNulty, said in an e-mailed statement, adding that Secure Computing “has no control over, or visibility into, how an organization implements their filtering policy.”

Then NPR had the story yesterday. Meanwhile, the editors at Boing Boing continue to hammer at the company, but the company ….

Go to the website and there’s nary a word. Not a peep. You can almost see the executive team hiding out, looking at the Times and listening to NPR, wondering, “what can we say to make this go away?”

E-mailed statements are worse than saying nothing at all.

Got to meet Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion today

Kind of cool to walk into a meeting a little late, and the first person to stand up and shake my hand is someone who has been in my blogroll for over a year — Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion and Edelman.

Steve Rubel

I went totally blogger gaga — “I know you. I read you. You’re A-List man.”  My colleagues were taken aback I think.

Foldera – a case study in Web 2.0 Buzz Generation

Hats off to Richard Lusk, the CEO of Foldera. (full disclosure: I am on Foldera’s advisory board and am a shareholder. The relationship dates to the 2002 when I began advising Taskport, Foldera’s original incarnation, on marketing strategy and fundraising).

Lusk has been hand carrying the concept of a web-based collaboration tool for the past four years, putting everything on the line to get his vision coded and launched to the world. Late last month the product went into Beta, and Richard, one of the more engaging, charismatic individuals I have known, went to work putting into practice the art of word-of-mouth buzz building around his product.

TM Beta
First, while there were the obligatory press releases, Richard took the beta to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, who in turn blogged about and opened up the floodgates — positive and negative — all commenting on Arrington’s initial reaction (positive), some screenshots, and the Foldera.com description of the product.

That lead to Shel Israel and Robert Scoble to blog about it, which further fanned the flames — leading to the news that 400,000 beta requests flooded Foldera in a week. That’s nearly half-a-million beta requests. No bus wraps, no billboards, no spam …

Now Foldera is following the GMAIL model of a controlled beta (remember when people were eBaying GMail invites?) and letting a lot of desire build up before slamming their servers with traffic. I’ve played with the product and it’s utterly the personification of viral. You get a free account, you invite other people open associated free accounts, and the thing spreads. Think Basecamp meets Office meets ….

I won’t speculate on Foldera’s chances in the market. The users will vote on that when the cover is taken off, but as far as rollouts go, this is the best example I’ve seen yet of how to take a new Web 2.0 company out the door. Hat’s off to Lusk for scoring a coup in online marketing.

Lunch over IP: On the relative length of languages

Lunch over IP: On the relative length of languages

Bruno Giussani on the relative length of languages when translated. He points to an online translation forum that carried this nugget:

  • Spanish document: 25%-30% longer than the English source.
  • Finnish document: about 30% shorter than the English source.
  • Russian document: about 30% shorter than the English source (same for Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian)
  • From German into Finnish the character count decreases by 10% and the word count by 40%.
  • From German into Russian: about one-third more.
  • From German into English: about one-third shorter.
  • From Georgian into English: about 45-50% more.
  • From English into Estonian: about 30% fewer words.
  • French is 15-25% longer than English.

YouTube – microsoft ipod packaging parody

YouTube – microsoft ipod packaging parody

I am loving You Tube more and more every day.

BTW: WTF happened to Google Video?

Collateral Damage » Blog Archive » Welcome home, as it were

Collateral Damage » Blog Archive » Welcome home, as it were

Constantine von Hoffman, senior editor of the now-departed CMO Magazine has revived his most excellent and hysterical blog Collateral Damage, on a WordPress platform no less, with the wonderful theme “Contempt.”

Naked Conversations

I plowed through Shel Israel and Robert Scoble’s Naked Conversations on the plane ride down to RTP this morning.

  • If you blog and you have a day job then most of the book is old news.
  • The most useful application of the book is as a gift to your boss.
  • Read the last half for the useful tidbits, especially how blogging freaks out some command-and-control PR and corporate gatekeepers.

This book has to have been a moving target for the authors, something they acknowledge. The landscape is simply churning too fast to capture on paper. Punchline: get blogging and embrace the good old Market-is-a-conversation ideal of Cluetrain.
For anyone in the firing line of being a corporate blogger, it has some good elements of a manifesto.

Scoble & Israel -- TechCrunch Book Signing

Centralization vs. De-Centralization in Global Web Ops

I have never operated in a multilingual web environment, managing the so-called “localization” of content into multiple languages. At IDG, global publishing was handled on a very de-centralized model, with the flagship brands writing in English and then licensing that content to country-based operations who in turn would pay to have the content translated into their local language, adding in local reporting in that same tongue to build a country-specific superset of the original brand.

Decentralization to gain operational agility is a noble cause, and one I support, but in IT enabled business models it can quickly grow a lot of hair, particularly when corporate messaging and brand management come into the picture. Look at CIO.com and compare it to the Polish version, CXO.pl, and you’ll see what I mean. The Polish operation completely rebranded the domain, creating a variant against the CXO brand, using their site as a portal into other c-level titles.

Having just read IBM Redux, an account of the Gerstner turnaround of IBM in the 1990s, one of the biggest issues that Gerstner and his CFO Jerome York had to confront was the extent to which the company’s “Geos” or geographic businesses, had completely gone off on their own, competing internally and raising havoc with the financial and managerial controls across the company.

Pat McGovern, the founder of IDG, says he adopted a very loose, de-centralized structure after returning from a business trip to find a packed inbox, realizing that he was the bottleneck and that he had to loosen his controls so the business could thrive.

Decentralization was, I think, a necessity in the days before ERP and content delivery networks. The one thing that technology cannot remove is the reality of time zones and the complexity of cross-country meeting and calendar coordination. But time-shifted communications — I’m talking fancy talk for email — and voicemail, has all but obviated the need for a decentralized management model.

If the corporate model for a global enterprise is viewed at three levels — worldwide operations at the headquarters level, geographic which encompasses regions: (EMEA, Asia Pacific, etc.) and then country-level — then the importance of a rational command-and-control structure becomes clear. The trick, for a CEO, is, to borrow the phrase from McKinsey’s Dick Foster in Creative Destruction, to “loosen control without losing control.”

I raise this issue of global governance as I enter the early stages of organizing a network of over 70 sites. While there are obvious economic and operational benefits to a centralized hub model, one predicated on a master corporate database, there is less clarity on how to organize centrally while extending local control and translation down to the country level where the expertise resides. Last week I met with Eli Singer, CEO of Web Collage, and he said the notion that translation must be decentralized is misinformed and that cost savings and managerial control can be achieved in a central hub.

I could always follow my brother’s advice, one echoed by an Englishman I met at Ogilvy & Mather last week, and that is what I call “Texan Translation”: wear a ten-gallon hat and yell English very loudly until people understand you. (The Englishman smiled and said in a loud voice: “I SAID, MAY I HAVE A CUP OF TEA?”) All kidding aside, and abject apologies to the world at large for being yet another American mono-linguist, there is no Web esperanto or precedence for English taking over the world of ecommerce any time, ever, soon. Airplanes, ships .. some industries and professions have standardized on English. Not commerce.