Connecting Businesses One By One
I just read the news about Facebook acquiring FriendFeed. Many are already shouting "game changer", but not really. Facebook already has the huge networking, but it does make some ground on the folks at Twitter as a microblogging or communication tool. I talked a while back about FriendFeed’s new look and feel making it seem much like the already popular Twitter.
Now it has a war chest behind it to become bigger better and more usable I hope. We are already hearing about the demise of blogs for Life Streaming, and this moves into that game as well. I hope to get a better feel for the implications behind this. Good luck to Facebook and congrats to the guys at FriendFeed.
We will see if this becomes a game changer, but for now I think that it strengthens rather than changes things. To be sure, Facebook is becoming a player that now Google needs to be careful of in the long run. Twitter needs to catch up if they want to keep up.
The press release from Facebook will be looked at quite a bit.
Tags: FriendFeed, Facebook, Social Networking, Social Media
I have been writing this blog post for the last 5 years. No, I haven’t been actually writing this post for that long, but I have been preparing to write this post for nearly that long. You see I have been a strategist a long time in Internet years. I have put many of those strategies together, and I am happy to say that many of them actually worked, but I must also say unfortunately, some of them and I should say more than I care to admit have probably failed. I tried most of these ideas and “campaigns” on my own company and used myself as the test subject. I have always tried them in my own marketing, advertising and public relations and as I said, some work and some don’t. This post is not about the “try” or “the idea”, but the execution.
Many colleagues out there are expert strategists. Many charge a pretty penny to come up with a strategy. In fact, I too charge for that, and some would say (you know who you are) not nearly enough, but that is for a another post. There are some great plans drawn out on the whiteboard of board rooms, and there are some bar napkins that I would like to have in a shadow box case as many of our greatest companies started there. My company in fact was sort of started as a dare I think one night after having had too many drinks. Having a good job and a stable company to work for, why would I ever jump into the entrepreneurial pool? I blame the alcohol.
“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
All of us have the best mousetrap. That is our strategy. We have the best way things can be done and the way that they should be done according to our extensive research and study. For my extensive study and research, (please see the archives here for a start) I have tried and failed and taken those ideas that have been most successful. Some of it is still theory after all social media has been around less than some of my young children. Given what we know of facts and how they are applied to each circumstance, all of the strategies seem to be close to the same Plan A or Plan B depending on which consultant or agency you happen to speak with about your company and needs.
I have noticed a trend based on some of the ideas and strategies implemented. When companies are happy with a certain strategy it is only after the execution stage. Most of them are all excited and gung-ho when the strategy is discussed and laid out in front of them, but the truly satisfied are not such until after the plan has been put into place and the results come to fruition. Be it as simple as starting a company blog, setting up a comment policy, providing a podcast, or research on community outreach and providing that service and seeing your first conversion, the elation comes when the plan is executed. It can be even more rewarding when a multifaceted and long and expensive journey has been commenced.
I am known for providing a sports metaphor now and then and this is not much different so I apologize for this ahead of time if you hate those. If I draw a play in the sand and at the snap of the football all goes to hell in a hand basket, the best laid plan pf x’s and o’s is not going to get me points on the board. But when you truly make a plan, draw out a play and then deliver the ball to the end zone, all are happy and we get to celebrate with high fives all around. Seems pretty simple. The problem has always been execution. As consultants or strategist are you executing your plan? When was the last time you were in the end zone?
Tags: Social Media, Better Mouse Trap, Emerson, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Consulting, New Media
Dennis Howlett writes today about the lawsuit involving Sam Sethi and Mike Arrington and Interserve, Inc., als known in our wrold as TechCrunch. As a disclosure I remember this riff vividly as my friend and partner Tris Hussey was involved in this problem and other friends, Marc Orchant and Oliver Starr were also part of the BlogNation.com which is peripherally part of the overall story. I am not a huge fan of what took place in that business deal and I see what happened as unfortunate to my friends.
I won’t get into the merits of the case, nor will I try to discuss the legal issues as I had plenty of the legal world after working there for 22 years. I do want to comment on the somewhat short sightedness I see on behalf of Mike Arrington and TechCrunch as it relates to the lawsuit. I know that Mike Arrington is giving this lawsuit less than a nuisance value and sees no merit to the claims and perhaps wants it to carry it on for more page views (which of course I am adding to albeit a small amount). I’m afraid that this is just the beginning of something that will give Mr. Sethi more fuel for his feud and make this debacle continue.
Mike has stated that he will not participate in the litigation and that they will ignore it, not planning to subject himself to the litigation process in the UK. I think that is not a bad strategy from a legal standpoint as it carries with it somewhat of a "no harm, no foul" consequence. California Law does not really give much weight to the UK and its judgment, be it a default judgment or otherwise. I should note that a default judgment might have less weight than a judgment on the merits, but I digress. From a business standpoint, I think this might be a bad move.
According to Mike his legal costs could exceed £500,000, to win the case which the experts indicated should not have been a problem. The court would then have awarded Mike his legal costs, but that is like squeezing blood from a turnip as I assume Sethi is not in a position to pay that type of money, given what I know of the Blog Nation debacle. The part here that is troublesome is giving life or a breath or two of life to Sam Sethi and his continued efforts to gain the upper hand and make him appear to be in a better position in his case against Mike Arrington and TechCrunch.
In addition, now Arrington must watch how he works around having this judgment against him in the UK. I am assuming at some point it may be necessary for him to do business there or to collect from advertisers there or to get money from the UK. I am assuming that any funds due to him or his company from that jurisdiction can be attached or to some effect, garnished to satisfy the judgment. He has already canceled to speak at an event he told the organizers he would be a part of and who knows how many other ventures he must cancel or at least not appear for in the UK. I am not sure the limitation on satisfying judgments in the UK, but I can assure you that Sethi will be waiting at the opportunity to get his shot in to collect if only a dollar of the judgment. The time to put this to bed is now. The time to finish it is here. If not, this could drag on for some time. As I stated above, that could be what we are looking for from someone that wants to sensationalize it.
If you are a person that is owed money as a result of the Blog Nation debacle, it might provide fruitful to see if you can attach your own judgment to funds related to the Sethi’s judgment. Who knows it might work. It is by far more than you will get if you are waiting for an old paycheck to clear.
Photo above via CrunchNotes*
*I wanted to point out the labeled photo on CrunchNotes is "sethiissuchadick.jpg" 
Classic.
Tags: Mike Arrington, TechCrunch, Sam Sethi, Tris Hussey, Oliver Starr, Marc Orchant, Libel
I was reading through an article on Spiegel Online International and an interview of Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired magazine. The article goes into detail as to the thoughts of Anderson and how he perceives the idea of new media. I wanted to pull out some of the quotes from that article and comment on them. The first of the comments that jumped out and smacked me across the face and it should others in the print media world was his take on the San Francisco Chronicle:
SPIEGEL: Your local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, is fighting for survival. If it was to disappear tomorrow …
Anderson: … I wouldn’t notice. I don’t even know what I’d be missing.
In a word, OUCH. Up to this point I was forming an argument in my head that the print media was another form of consumable information we all rely on for another take of a news story, but to say that a newspaper’s disappearance has not bearing on your world is a mind-numbing thought. I wondered what Anderson would think if a statement about Wired would make him have talk differently if it were to shut down tomorrow? I think he goes into the real reason why that wouldn’t happen, and a take similar to what I inferred with the remaking of BusinessWeek. His take on the cost of old media:
Anderson: The math of profit is pretty easy, revenues minus cost. You do your best on the revenue side and if you are not making money you lower your costs. The problem is not that there isn’t money to be made online, it’s just that our costs are too high.
This seems like a no brainer but for some it seems that this is the mountain they cannot climb. The problem is that there are people out there giving away the cow for free which is of course the book Anderson released. He goes into the economy issue:
Anderson: Attention and reputation are two non-monetary economies. The vast majority of people online write for free. We’ve tried paying some of our bloggers and they thought it was insulting. They’re not doing it for the money, they’re doing it for attention and reputation, or just for fun. For example, two years ago, I started this Web site called geekdad.com. It’s about being a dad and being a computer geek. We’re writing about how to do things that are fun for kids and fun for dads. It’s a community project, everyone contributes for free but we now have an audience bigger than many newspapers. And there are an infinite number of sites like this out there.
Not only are there an infinite number of sites out there that are doing just as he states, but they are doing it on budgets that most expense accounts could not cover in the traditional industry. They are providing the news and they are doing it with close to nothing, which is completely game changing in this economy.
I do like the end of the interview when Anderson is asked about charging for his book and they talk about "time is money." This is somewhat of a dichotomy since nothing seems to be actually free. This could be part of the reason we are in this situation to begin with, someone did it for free.
[photo via LA Times]
Tags: Spiegel Online International, Chris Anderson, Free, Old Media, New Media, Traditional Media, Newspapers, Blogs
I am not sure that anyone in the tech world has written about Twitter more than the popular news site TechCrunch. You may have a hard time picking out the single most popular Twitter post since after 38 pages of search results on the subject I lost count of the number of articles. The most popular recently was the scandal involving ill-gotten documents from the folks at Twitter which Tech Crunch promptly published. But more on that in a minute.
Twitter launched today their Twitter 101 pages and of note was their "Key Resources" page which is contained under the domain related to http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/. I quickly glanced at the people that were listed on the page, and noticed right away that TechCrunch had been snubbed. Not a single time was TechCrunch mentioned. You would think with 38 pages of info on the company and some of the best Twitter evangelists on the planet, they could have worked a link back to TechCrunch somewhere. Some of the best Twitter information contained anywhere is contained on the TechCrunch site.
Now this could just be a matter of numbers or it could be that they could not find a good snapshot overview of their service or it could be some other political reason that Twitter was quick to leave TechCrunch off the list as I mentioned above and wrote about in the TechCrunch and the Twitter Documents post.
This is not going to be too unlike the "Suggested Users" list and I am sure there will be plenty of folks that will be screaming about why they were not one of the featured resources that are listed. Congrats to Chris Brogan for getting on this page with his 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business. Okay, their might only be 10 in there but 50 was a good number.
Sorry TechCrunch I can assure you that the folks at Twitter are not going to cut you much slack from here forward, but keep up the good reporting and evangelizing!
[Hat Tip to Laughing Squid Links for beginning the inspiration for this post through the photo above.]
Tags: TechCrunch, Twitter, Twitter For Business, Twitter Business 101, Chris Brogan
It used to be that in order to be seen as an influencer or to be really taken seriously in your niche or genre, you had to be on someone’s blogroll. Being added to a blogroll gave you some credibility and it also helped you get read by others in your group. You got to be one of the cool kids if you were recognized on a blogroll. The goal was to get listed on a blog roll by someone with lots of readers as well. It also helped you get read by others, or it helped your voice get heard. Being on a blogroll was the gold standard.
Now with the likes of Twitter we get more of a situation of more noise less signal. It is difficult to be heard. 25 Million people all hoping their 140 characters get in front of someone to read. You may have the best ever 140 characters in the history of the world, but to broadcast it to Twitter is to cast it into the sea of information hoping to find a home. I liken it to casting an SOS note in a bottle into the ocean and hoping someone finds it. Chances are it may never get read by the person that matters. Twitter can be the same way. It seems that many online marketing types believe this a great way now to broadcast their message. They think a message in a bottle is a good way to broadcast. Cast a net big enough and sooner or later someone may hear what you have to say. This is not the best case scenario unless you get on someone’s list or in a group. Instead of blogrolls, we now can put our Twitter friends or followers into groups. I use the popular application Tweetdeck, and I have many groups of my followers distilled into readable tweets. I have my social media colleagues and I have technology people and parenting bloggers and no, even though I joke about it quite a bit I do not have a "Hottie" Twitter group. This is how I track what is being sent via Twitter by those I want to listen to and want to hear. I want to hear all 250 Million people out there but I have yet to figure that out sans some special paid for application.
This is how I read most of the important stuff on Twitter. I go through a specific group and see what they are talking about and what they have to say. It may be an hour after the fact when I re-tweet something or I comment or take notice, and the reason is, I don’t have time to scan the river of noise going by at 10,000 people a minute. In the instance I am talking about you get added to my group if you provide me good thoughts or value. I don’t want to miss your tweet. The only thing is, my groups are not public. I need to find something that allows me to show you my groups. I need a public app that shows my Twitter groups, my blogroll of twitter friends. I need to develop this as a widget for blogs or web sites. You can get on my group in in my Twoops (URL taken I checked)? Anyone?
Photo via Mykl Roventine
Tags: Twitter, Blogrolls, Web Apps, River of News, Noise vs. Signal
I have been a huge fan of BusinessWeek since I can remember. I am also a big fan because of the likes of Stephen Baker who I have been reading in the blogosphere for quite some time as well. I found Stephen’s post related to How to Fix BusinessWeek at his The Numerati blog and I was sad when I read it. It was done in a manner that made me thing that fixing or saving journalism is a simple task but nearly impossible to execute. I don’t think the likes of newspapers and other periodicals will be saved as they cannot be saved. The numbers will make it insurmountable. This opening from Stephen was very telling:
Monday I learned that BusinessWeek, where I’ve worked for 22 years, is on the block. It may be sold, or stay in McGraw-Hill (where it’s been for 80 years). But the business is losing money (I don’t know how much). Whoever ends up with it is going to have to figure out quickly how to turn a business news operation built primarily as a weekly magazine into a profitable franchise for the age of near ubiquitous and real-time information.
Losing money–that seems to be an understatement when you think of the offices and the infrastructure that is all the things that BusinessWeek has. Huge buildings, rent, equipment, well the list goes without saying. They have a huge budget to cover to bring us the news and the information or content we consume for free on the Internet. Stephen follows that post with After The Madison Avenue Bubble. This post hammers home another point that seems to be putting a nail in the coffin of the likes of BusinessWeek:
I just got up from my desk and took a stroll through these Midtown offices of BusinessWeek. In a matter of months, if someone buys the magazine, we’ll be gone. It’s terrific real estate. Down by the top editors’ offices, the big windows look across the Hudson. The eastern view looks across Rockefeller Center and toward the Chysler Building. These are expensive digs.
It took me a while to get used to working for a magazine that spent money like this.
That seems to be the biggest issue that will seal the fate of the likes of old media. Spending money like they do and still producing what I can get for free elsewhere. I am not a mogul in the business world but it seems to me that might be a problem. It appears from what Stephen ended this latest post with was almost an acceptance stage of grief when he states:
But in the end, my initial read turned out to be correct. The rich model for a weekly magazine was not sustainable. Those who want to be foreign correspondents today will be lucky to get what I expected: modest pay to work out of their apartments. It will attract mostly young people, which isn’t a bad thing. (They might ask more unschooled questions, but they’re more likely to move to the action and take chances.) It turns out we rode something of a Madison Ave bubble for a few decades, and now it has popped.
Like Jeff Jarvis however, this seems to me to be quite an asset and something that could and should be fixed or in another word–saved.
Well, now, BusinessWeek is for sale and whoever gets it – it is a valuable franchise with a very valuable and wise crowd – will need to reinvent it. I was going to suggest that the magazine do for itself what we were thinking of doing for GM. But Steve beat me to it.
How do I fix BusinessWeek? Easy, in a manner of speaking, I would level the playing field. I have said many times at conferences, at business meetings, and over coffee with colleagues, if the journalists figure out new media, we are all out of a job. Level the playing field is not as easy as it sounds. But if we were to put journalists that have been reporting, writing and selling and have been on top of their game into the positions now being held by new media types at the places like TechCrunch, or other blogging networks, we would see the real cream of the crop.
BusinessWeek is taking their overhead, basically a champagne budget, and putting it up against the likes of Joe and Mary Blogger, publishing from free applications downloaded from the Internet from the comfort of their own home. Joe and Mary’s overhead is nominal at best but they are being compared on the same plane now with those on Madison Avenue. How do you compete with that? Well certainly BusinessWeek has better access and better connections than does Joe and Mary, but that is beginning to change as well as bloggers gain access to back rooms and walled gardens that were usually only for "special people." The scales were always tipped in favor of the "journalist" as they had the access, the diploma, the expense account and the social capital. The latter of which has shifted in favor of those with the most voice, those with the most eyeballs, perhaps those with the most Twitter followers these days. That seems to be the competition now, but that is another post. Getting scooped by the guy in the building over from yours on Madison Avenue was expected, getting scooped from Joe or Mary the Pajama wearing citizen journalist is something entirely different.
Media costs are not even close to level. You must level them to compete. That means no more overhead. Stephen mentions his 5% as being what BusinessWeek has, and Jeff Jarvis said it was what makes BusinessWeek better. The other 95% has to compete in their eyes, and that can only be done by making the remaining 95% carry the same costs as paying the rent on the corner office, not on Madison Avenue, but on West Elm street in the corner of the kitchen.
Not anyone can write well. I know that there is no possible way I could compete with the likes of Stephen Baker in covering the latest in business news and writing and reporting. The only way for me to compete is to provide the story hope someone sees it and that gets me recognized. The only thing I have going for me is I am not being paid a six figure salary and paying $100,000 per month in rent for an office building and paying for the infrastructure that goes with that empire. When Stephen starts working out of his home like I do and doing the same thing, I don’t stand a chance. How do they fix BusinessWeek? Just download WordPress have Stephen work from the corner of his kitchen and do what he has been doing. No way does their competition compete. Now, the remaining problem, how do you charge the companies wanting to advertise for that model? Welcome to the game BusinessWeek.
photo via BusinessWeek
Tags: BusinessWeek, Journalism, Blogging, Old Media, New Media
I have been following along with the hacked or leak of confidential documents from Twitter that have somehow been sent to Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch. I am really fascinated, not by the documents or what my possibly be in them, but how the story is being played by the folks at TechCrunch. Mr. Arrington is in the cat bird seat and knows all too well that this is the case. He is enjoying every waking moment of it. The boastful nature of this story is what I am watching.
I can see that the documents themselves are only in the hands on one news breaker and that is TechCrunch. They were not sent to anyone at ReadWriteWeb, Mashable or CenterNetworks, or any of the many other tech news companies out there. If they were, they would all be playing chicken with the documents to get the most press coverage possible. I am acutely aware and so is Mike Arrington that he holds the keys to that kingdom at the moment. He alone has the magic. I will be watching to see how many posts come out before the first leaked document, and what that document will reveal, if anything. I would say there is not much sex to it or he would have long since posted the information for fear of being scooped. This part also makes me wonder how it is known that he won’t be scooped on the story unless of course, he himself knows that the information is only in his possession which causes some questions. How does he know this? Has he talked with the hacker that provided the info? It’s all very much like a "deep throat" thing.
Mike is going to play this orchestrated tune to the very last. For now, I am going to just watch it as it happens like a Broadway show.
UPDATE: The stories are now being produced one at a time. I am predicting that they are now watching to see what is reproduced and watching like a hawk as to whether they get attribution on each and every post. Anyone else want me to pass the popcorn?
Tags: TechCrunch, Mike Arrington, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Technology, Twitter
I am not yet an expert, but I am trying to learn to be an expert in my area. This is why I read experts. I pay attention to what they are doing and I learn from them. If I listen and store away what they are providing me I garner wisdom. I read people from all walks of life, I read from the marketer, the advertiser, the public relations person and yes, the baker and candlestick maker. All of the people I read and learn from provide me a path to the knowledge about how I can help other businesses.
If I comment on blogs and if I leave a question or provide another perspective on a post, it is because I have read the bit of wisdom and have participated. It is not much different from sitting in a classroom and hearing a lecture and then participating in that lecture by commenting, asking questions or debating an issue. This is my classroom and how I am hoping to earn my thousands of hours to get to be an expert in what I do (I think I only have 5 years or 10,000 more hours of study).
I tend to read a large number of blog posts. In fact, I have more than one feed reader and they are broken down themselves into business reader and personal reader, and even that has some cross over between them so I even read some blogs twice just in case. I try to absorb as much as possible from those around me I do consider an expert to help me get to the next level. Comments foster learning just like it did in grade school when you wanted to know why clouds produced rain or why the sky was blue and all those things of wonder that come to your mind during class. Ask questions, get involved, leave a comment.
Photo via Vito
Tags: Social Media Experts, Social Media, Blog Comments, Blogging, New Media
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