For every Like that is made, Facebook is able to correspond a product affiliation to demographic information such as sex, age, geography, and education, as well as social graph data about relationships and influence within a group. With Places, Facebook can even correlate product activity to mobile location data. If mobile payments ever take off, they could get actual sales data as well.

Ad Age recently asked the very poignant question: What Happens When Facebook Trumps Your Brand Site? (alternate title for the article is: How Facebook Became the Biggest CRM Provider). The online article was accompanied by the following graphic showing the top ten brands on Facebook (in terms of total Likes):

Top brands are garnering millions of Likes, yet only driving a couple hundred thousand visitors per year to their branded sites. What this all means is that Facebook has better data about customers than most consumer products companies do. As Ad Age notes:

For many marketers, their Facebook fan bases have become their largest web presence, outstripping brand sites or e-mail programs either because a brand’s traditional web-based “owned media” is atrophying or because more consumers are migrating to social media.

While fan pages may work a lot like a marketer’s traditional “owned media,” they’re not actually owned by the marketers. Facebook hosts the pages and provides analytics for free, but growing marketer dependency on the network for CRM programs, combined with simultaneous declines in traffic for many of their own brand websites, could give Facebook a valuable revenue opportunity.

Of course, it would be difficult to sell granular individual data about users (people would object); however, Facebook could sell aggregate data (trend analysis and market research) and act as a “black box” CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution whereby companies offer targeted promotions and messaging to individuals with select profile characteristics, mediated through Facebook. Already some companies are using basic Like data to hone their retail strategies. In one example, Urban Outfitters is arranging clothing in its online store based on Like activity and offering select promotions to all those who have liked products. Additionally, Facebook is making information about the Like activity on ads (i.e. “social context” data) available to advertisers on its site. Armed with this data, advertisers can decide to further optimize campaigns by targeting people who have expressed a Like for the ad.

With the Like button, Facebook is benefiting from the power of weak tie relationships (Facebook calls it “lightweight sharing”). Many markets point to the fact that people that Like a product aren’t real fans or brand advocates in the traditional sense. This is s feature, not a bug. By lowering the bar for Liking something, Facebook has opened a channel to—and is gathering data about—ordinary consumers of the brand who otherwise would have no formal connection to the company or its products other than isolated, anonymous purchases. This connection can be potentially valuable in terms of loyalty programs and promotions, market research, and customer support.

A number of factors suggest that the number of Likes will probably continue to grow, including: the continuing growth of the Facebook user base (see chart above, which shows no indication of plateau), expansion in global markets (70% of Facebook users are outside the U.S.), the recent proliferation of the Like button on a range of products and services (the Like button is now on over 350,000 sites), and the growing use of mobile technologies that allow users to Like physical products and experiences. With this in mind, it’s by no means hyperbolic to think that Facebook could be the largest single CRM provider in the world.

Widely recognized for creating some of the most brand loyal customers around, Apple has designed an overwhelmingly popular in-store summer camp targeted at 8 – 12 year old children.  The camp features a series of four different workshops: Movies, Music, Photos, and Presentations.  Each is designed to give children exposure to Apple’s hardware and software suite.

While certainly not as exciting as the dinosaur camp that I attended in my childhood, I think that Apple is really onto something here, and all kidding aside, I know many adults  who could benefit from similar workshops.  Here is the ad for the Presentation Workshop: 

Replace kids with employees or executives and school with work and think about how many people you know who should probably be first in line for this workshop.

These sessions are being offered at all U.S. Apple retail locations free of charge and all technology required is to be supplied by Apple (unless you’d like to bring your own gear).  Of note is that if you’re looking to sign your litte one up, you’d better hurry as many sessions are already filling waiting lists and some have been closed for registration due to oversubscription.

I think this is an interesting example of industry creatively stepping in (albeit for self-motivated purposes and on a tiny scale) to help provide training in skill sets that our school systems may not be able to immediately address – advancing the technological skills and comfort level of some of our youngest scholars.

What’s your take on Apple’s attempt to create a little army of I’m a Mac evangelists?  Creative marketing combined with valuable skills training or targeting a market too young for comfort?

If you’re wondering where online brand communities are going, a recent study from Gartner predicted two trends about the future of communities:  60% of Fortune 100 companies will have communities by 2010 and more than 50% of these will fail to establish a common purpose with their members.  The high failure rate is attributable to many causes, not the least of which is difficulty in determining where a community should “live” within the corporate setting.  Should accountability lie within the marketing department?  Customer service?  Product development?  Moreover, how do you measure success of a community?  How do you add enough value to engage regular visitors and encourage them to create content?

Company-sponsored communities are such a new phenomenon that there’s very little in the way of historic analysis and insight, especially on the quantitative side.  For this reason, nGenera and Agent Wildfire have created a survey to collect data from top company-sponsored communities.

Want to contribute to the study and be privy to the results?  If you have experience with a brand community, you’re invited to participate in the 2009 Brand Communities Survey.  The topics of the survey are:   the basics, focus and objectives, audience and outreach, incentives, rules, tools and platforms, staffing, metrics and ROI and overall advice, covering 55 key questions we always wanted to ask but never had the time.   All respondents will receive a topline version of the results once the responses have all been reviewed.

Personally I think that Facebook and Twitter have a lot of potential as fee-based services for online entertainment, enterprise productivity, intelligence mining, information distribution, and others applications that would be build upon and expand from the free service offering, while leveraging an incredibly large audience. But for now, ads are the most direct route to a source of revenue…if people pay attention to them. A big IF. One company that is serving ads on these platforms, albeit in a different way, is Magpie, shown below. This pay-per-tweet service utilitizes a Twitter users’ account to broadcast a message to the users’ followers through tweets, and although the same click-through issues still apply, its interesting that this company is using a different approach to generate attention. And yet some questions remain…let’s dive in.

Magpie: Pay-Per-Tweet Advertising

Last summer I introduced Social Spark and its pay-per-blogging platform that matched bloggers with advertisement suppliers. Magpie is similar in that it allows advertisers to leverage someone’s social media audience (Twitter followers) and distribute ‘contextually appropriate’ ads through tweets, in exchange for compensation to the Twitter account holder of the pay-per-sale, pay-per-lead, pay-per-click or pay-per-view variety. The way it works is, a Twitter user signs up to Magpie and provides them with posting privileges to your personal account, specifying the type of compensation, as well as the volume of tweets the company can use for advertising in relation to normal tweets (e.g. 1/20). Advertisers use these accounts to distribute targeted messages based on the content of the twitter user and its respective audience, as if they come from the Twitterer. The amount of money that you make as a user depends on the type of plan you’re on, detailed below, which is taken directly from Magpie’s FAQ.

• Pay-per-Sale: Here you get a cut of the sale price when one of your followers buys something on one of our customer’s sites through one of your tweets. This is perhaps the most lucrative of the compensation models.
• Pay-per-Lead: Every time one of your followers enquires about a service or joins up for a subscription or the like, you get compensated (compensation rates tend to be 15% greater than Pay-per-View, depending on the campaign)
• Pay-per-Click: You get paid every time one of your followers clicks on a link. Currently Magpie’s click rate is double that of any other online advertising.
• Pay-per-View: You get paid a base amount for allowing a tweet to be placed in your stream – this amount depends on the number of your followers and the hotness of your tweets.

While there are upsides and downsides to this model, what’s interesting is that the ads are likely to get more exposure because they’re sandwiched right between authentic tweets, and it’s less easy to actively tune them.  Advertisers are able to reach a large volume of people through this tool, and insert a (theoretically) relevant message into a discussion that people are personally involved in. These are definite pluses for the tool. My breakdown of this platform becomes: a lot of people will see the ads but its success will depend almost entirely on its ability to convert views to click-throughs.

What about Magpie’s disadvantages? As with SocialSpark, there are ethical considerations at play here. Although Magpie allows and encourages people to create a disclaimer to affix to the end of the their Magpie tweets, for transparency, the whole pay-per-tweet activity is in that gray area where people may debate whether it is appropriate to lend your personal voice and relationships to companies for money in this way. Although one might argue that this is nothing other than brand sponsorship at a micro level and online, the flip side of the argument is that the diffusion of a branded message across trusted, personal relationships crosses a boundary. Regardless of one’s philisophical perspective on this debate, I see one possible consequence to a Twitterer who follows this path – where they lead, others may no longer follow – right or wrong, people may not appreciate having a ‘bot’ advertise to them, diluting their feed of real tweets, and may protest by no longer following that Twitter user.

The key factor in this then, becomes whether those tweeted ads have any value. Even though the ads are supposed to be targeted, I remain skeptical that any keyword based tool can understand a conversation to the degree that it’s able to insert textual advertisements that match the context. Twitter seems to be used as a tool to specifically reference events or activities, so a textual ad that has no direct relationship to that tweet is likely to stand out like a sore thumb. Text that is not targetted becomes spam, and the last thing you want to do is annoy your reader base, especially when there are so many other people competing for your attention.

Personally, if I were Magpie I would be interested in exploring how Twitter users could work together with Magpie in self-selecting advertisements from a range of possible topics, which could still be inserted on behalf of Magpie advertisers, yet would benefit from the Twitter account holder’s human touch and knowledge of its readership. I suspect that restructuring the ad placement mechanism in this way, to present you with a list of relevant ads that you can insert into your respective content, would increase relevance and click-through rates, while also decreasing resistance as a result of the bot-generated ad delivery system. Thoughts?

Lots of interesting elements on the table. Would you be bothered by ads like these showing up in your tweet feed? Why?

Of course no one really knows how much accumulated wealth there is in the GI and Boomer generations, or how longer life expectancies and inheritance taxes will affect the transfer of wealth, or if the current downturn will eventually empty the Boomers coffers, leaving nothing at all. Still, there seems to be an untapped opportunity in there somewhere.

For companies with Boomer marketing strategies, it could mean it’s time to start thinking about what strategies are needed to ensure that Boomer assets and business stay with the enterprise. At the very least it’s a whole new angle on retention and relationship marketing – call it “inheritance marketing” if you will. I recently came across the term gerentocracy to describe the imbalance of political power between the young and the old. How about geriadvertising for Boomer-inspired advertising?

An interesting article in USA Today talks about how, while Boomers have enjoyed unprecedented levels of wealth; “Households headed by people in their 20s, 30s and 40s have barely kept up with inflation or have fallen behind since 1989. People 35 to 50 actually have lost wealth since 1989 after adjusting for inflation.” This would seem to suggest that targeting Boomers is the way to go.

In the book Workforce Crisis, by Ken Dychtwald, Tammy Erickson, and Robert Morison, the authors discuss the implications of the imbalance of wealth distribution (written in 2006 before the market crash):

“How should companies and governments plan for the shrinking number of young workers, young taxpayers, and young consumers? Most marketing is still youth-oriented (or “youth obsessed”) even though today’s mature adults (those over fifty) control two-thirds of the accumulated wealth in the United States. Boomers will be the most financially powerful generation of mature consumers ever. What happens to marketing and product development when 80 percent of the consumer growth comes from the fifty-plus age group? How will businesses maintain brand loyalty when customers reinvent themselves at forty, sixty, and eighty years old? Will boomers, who have been active spenders in their middle years become more frugal as they mature?”

But, Boomers are moving / have moved out of their key spending years. Tammy Erickson wrote a recent post in Harvard Business, “What Demographics Tell Us About the Economy,” where she talks about how tracking the number of people age 46 to 50 in a given economy can be used as proxy for growth in consumer spending, and how this “big spender” demographic is declining around the world. She says, “This narrower age range, 46-50 year olds, will decline in number in the United States for the next twenty five years, until about 2035, when members of Generation Y will begin to enter this age category.” Looking at this data, targeting Boomer inheritors and Gen X makes sense, but inheritance marketers may have to wait for a while to see the returns.

Regardless of how well- or poorly-informed an inheritance marketing strategy might be, there are definitely Boomer brands out there that are trying to reinvent themselves. Here’s an example from this past year that sparked my thinking on this and made me smile a bit as well. I don’t know if Canadian Club has been thinking about Boomer wealth redistribution, but I have to say the tag line for ad campaign certainly helps make my point. “Damn right your father drank it!” says CC was a cool brand for Boomers, but can still be cool for their Net Gen children. Certainly invokes images of my own dad living out his college years in California in the 60’s.

No matter what you were looking for, at least one would have left a lasting impression.

Recently, world-class French pole vaulter Romain Mesnil bared all in a YouTube video aimed at bringing attention to his quest for sponsorship.  The video featured Mesnil running through the streets of Paris, pole in hand (for jumping, come on!), with his unmentionables covered by a digitally-imposed black box as onlookers tried to figure out what was going on.  The video concludes with a message imploring viewers to return to Mesnil’s site on March 31st, stating “You haven’t seen anything yet.”  Click here for video (watch at work at your discretion). Mesnil’s former sponsor, Nike, did not renew their support in October and ever since, Mesnil has been very creatively searching for a replacement.

One of Mesnil’s earlier efforts had him wearing a jersey with a large question mark during competition and he has also posted other great YouTube videos (even before this round of looking for sponsorship) that have helped bring a more playful side to the sport of pole vaulting. 

So now that the 31st is here, what was Mesnil’s (other) big reveal?  He has posted two auctions on eBay targeted at prospective sponsors 1, 2.  The first auction is for a sponsorship for his 2009 season and the second is to have your photo/logo/message posted on Romain’s jersey, with proceeds benefiting the ARTC (brain tumour research).  At the time of publication, bids totalled >19,000 Euros, with just under 10 days remaining in the auctions.

As far as new media strategies for the branding of an individual (athlete) go, I’d say that Mesnil has started down a very intriguing path and he has managed to reach a widespread online audience, as well as gaining traditional media coverage, with prime time exposure on French television networks and news broadcasts worldwide.  I can only imagine where he’ll go next…

The reason that I am writing about it here is blatant self-promotion two-fold – we are attempting to build chTONGUEeek by sticking to the principles of wikinomics, and do so at an absolute minimum of out-of-pocket expense. From what we’ve seen so far (with this project and the research), these two things often go hand in hand.

As of right now, the total expense incurred has been a little over $200, and outside of a few plans we have for rewarding contributors, we don’t expect this to go a penny higher for the foreseeable future. About 1/4 of this expense was unavoidable – domain name registration. The rest was for the logo design, and to get us off on the right wikinomics foot we decided to go with crowdSPRING for what eventually became this:

Regular readers may remember I wrote about my interview with the founders of crowdSPRING back in June. The idea behind the company is simple – anybody can post a description of creative project, the reward that they are offering, and the end date. Interested artists within the community then submit designs (the company guarantees a minimum of 25), and the buyer can continually provide feedback as they flow in to guide the community towards what they want, before finally selecting a winner. crowdSPRING takes care of the payments, legal issues, etc.

We decided to post our project for the minimum amount – $150 – with a one week time frame, providing a brief description and an absolutely terrible graphic representing what we were thinking. Over the course of the week we received a total of 69 submissions, with quality ranging from pretty bad to quite intriguing. In order to get the most out of the platform, we provided feedback (at minimum a rating) on every submission in timely fashion, and it was the work of Peg770 that was clearly rising to the top. We sent her a couple of personal message for some final tweaks, and in the end declared her the winner, receiving a portfolio of different logos she had created for us (you can see some of them in the box marked with the award tab). We thought it was a great experience, and absolutely brought home the power and value of crowdsourcing.

From there, we’ve built the initial site through Word Press (free), borrowed some hosting for the time being (free), and had the more skilled of us (not me) get the site designed and “live,” while we both focus on creating some hopefully entertaining content in our spare time (of which there is very little). Next steps include the launch of our initial store through CafePress (either free or $6 / month), figuring out our incentive plan for attracting a community of contributors (probably not free), and most importantly building our social media marketing strategy (free, but what will be the most time consuming). It is the latter I am most interested in, and will be reporting back time and again if something interesting comes up. In the meantime, seats are still available on Twitter and Facebook – but they are going fast .

The following is my analysis on why “Lost in America” didn’t achieve the desired YouTube fanfare that AT&T was hoping for.

1. These videos seemed too much like an infomercial. Within the first 90 seconds the cell phones are introduced in such a way that makes it appear like a blatant attempt at product placement. If people skip commercials on TV, why would they watch a 7 minute commercial on their computer? “Meet the Beckers” was intelligent because it let the story and the characters sell the brand, they didn’t include obnoxious scenes of the car driving down a country lane. Not only does the obvious use of product placement seem forced and out of context, but the premise of the story is as thin as floss; how many people do you know get lost in a major city with an entire camera crew following them?
2. The characters are almost impossible to relate to, but even worse than that, you don’t even want to relate to them. Part of what made “Meet the Beckers” so successful was the fact that you wanted to be like the brother who drove the Audi. He was young, successful and respectable. These girls come across as ignorant and unintelligent at one point exclaiming “I don’t even know what a caribou is!” Aside from a small niche market of 15-year old girls, Justine and Karen don’t appeal to many demographics. Who wants to be associated with a girl yelling “Here moose-ey, moos-ey, moose-ey” into a bush located in urban Alaska?
3. AT&T contradicts themselves. One of the challenges for Justine and Karen was to find a place in Anchorage, Alaska where they got “full-bar service.” Now, I’m not a geography major but I happen to know that Anchorage, Alaska is not exactly in the middle of nowhere. Shouldn’t AT&T be promoting the fact that they get full-bar service in any location?
4. It’s not engaging. After watching Episode 1 “The Drop Off” I had no desire to tune into episodes 2-11. I wasn’t compelled to research for more information about the phone and I certainly wasn’t interested in buying one. Is it because I am not in AT&T’s target market? Perhaps, but after receiving a mere 31,000 views across YouTube, MySpace and four other websites I would be inclined to suggest that others may feel the same way. It is also important to note, that Justine posted six of the eleven episodes on her site (iJustine) which accounted for 20,000 of those views. I think one of the main problems for AT&T was that they tried to dress up a traditional telephone commercial (albeit a very long commercial) in viral clothing by incorporating two Internet stars. This differs from “Meet the Beckers” where Audi clearly deviated from the traditional car commercial, going as far as showing competitors vehicles for the same length of time as the Audi. A better idea might have been to give one girl the new AT&T phone and give the other girl a phone from a competing company and show which one has more accurate GPS service, easier keyboard to type on, takes better pictures, drops less calls etc.. Or even take a page from Audi’s book and use characters to represent competing brands and make the phone a secondary focus.

There are multiple avenues that companies can use to help create effective Internet campaigns but inserting two web-stars into a poorly written and executed Internet video series does not make for a successful viral campaign.

That’s why I was so happy to come across this story about Ukoonto when I read the Globe & Mail over lunch. The article is about a young entrepreneur (and soon to be former sound engineer) named Hans Eich, who builds eco-friendly wooden building block toys from his St. Catherine’s based workshop. While I can’t say that I’ve tested the products myself yet, they look great – and from a wikinomics perspective what’s most interesting is how Hans has developed and promoted his company.

As the article notes, outside of an occasional trade show, Hans relies solely on Web 2.0 tools to spread the word about his products. When he started up, he had practically no money, and no big business plan – just an idea to create a toy company. He launched it under the domain of “my toy needs a name”, created a framework online, and asked people for ideas and feedback. From there, to quote Hans:

It was all about interacting with people and trying to set up meaningful relationships. The business evolved out of that.

If you go through the article, you can read about all the interesting lessons he’s learned – from use of things like YouTube and Twitter, to why it’s so much harder to create “fans” on Facebook than create groups, to backlash he received when he tried to push his products to hard in communities he joined, rather than really engaging with the people. To quote Hans again:

You have to listen first before they start listening to you. Traditional media is about telling, but Web 2.0 is all about conversations. It’s very much about letting go of control and engaging with people.

I’ll let you learn the rest from the Globe article, but I found it just an extraordinarly refreshing read – particularly when the three articles on the previous page were “EU to get call for stimulus package”, “Easy credit, public spending fuelled boom”, and “Lost auto jobs pegged at 15,000.” Amidst all the doom and gloom, it’s important to remember that there is an extraordinary opportunity out there for entrepeneurs that can create a good product they are passionate about, and learn to leverage social media and the web 2.0 in a compelling way. As Hans noted, given that most of the tools he’s leveraging are free, his out-of-pocket costs have basically been limited to website design costs. Think about how different it would have been if Hans tried to launch his company twenty years ago…

After reaching for a Motrin myself, I decided to check out what he was talking about. The article he was referring to was this one- The Worst Thing About Blogs. In the post, Ryan lumped my recent story about Starbucks’ wikinomics-enabled marketing success story with other posts from the likes of Guy Kawaski, Hugh Macleod, Steve Rubel, and Michael Arrington, with the lead-in sentence of (The Worst Thing About Blogs) is that they never let reality get in the way of a good post. Ryan then concluded his post with the following:

If we can deduce anything from the blogs above, it also makes you 1) Sound like an idiot 2) Act like an asshole 3) Always get it wrong

So it’s fair to say he wasn’t a fan of the post. As I read through the comments (some in support of his POV, others defending the posts including my own), Ryan again highlighted my post as particularly egregious, and for good measure pointed out again that it sucked. The reason he gave is that we don’t live in a vacuum – I can’t / shouldn’t be writing about only the Starbucks marketing story when there is another huge thing going on (Starbucks’ recent report of a 97% drop in profits).

So at that point, I had to decide what to do. In turn, I thought I’d share my thought process, and what came of it, since it might be helpful for other people and companies dealing with similar situations. You can see my first comment on his post (last I checked it was 4th from the bottom).

1. Decide whether to engage or not. The blogosphere, and particularly the comment sections, is notorious for maliciousness. As a general rule, if a writer starts dropping insults like “idiot” and the aforementioned a-bomb, I tend to prefer to just stay away. But this seemed like a special case. Ryan seemed like a fairly intelligent person, who’s job appears to be in relation to PR and social media, so I was intrigued by not only the message he chose to send, but how he chose to send it. And whether I liked it or not, based on the volume of comments it seemed like a fair number of people were reading it – so there could be direct benefit from engaging in the conversation.

2. Timeliness versus “Coolheadedness”. As another general rule, I tend to prefer to “sleep on” such issues, in order to avoid a hasty response that I might later regret. However, in this situation I was also dealing with a timeliness issue – popular blog posts can fade away quite quickly, and as I mentioned it was already Friday afternoon. I knew I had neither the time nor inclination to look at this on the weekend, and a Monday response might be a little too late, so I opted for an immediate response. Always dangerous.

3. Cede the point versus defend myself. All of us make mistakes. When faced with a criticism, it is of course important to decide whether you think the complaint is valid and cede the point, or instead defend your POV – noting that sometimes you can do a little of both and find some common ground. In this case, I felt Ryan was quite off base, and decided to actively defend my POV.

4. Choose the tone of the response. When someone is directly saying you sound like an idiot and act like an asshole, it is quite easy to fall into the trap of responding in a similar manner (hence, my “sleep on it” rule of thumb). I wanted to ensure my tone was different – a little more thoughtful and respectful. However, I did start my response with “As the idiotic a-hole who wrote the blog post on wikinomics, I thought I should respond to your criticisms”, so I didn’t fully succeed on this front. But if you read the rest of my comment, I think you’ll find it fair, reasonable, and respectful.

5. Respond directly to the criticism. In this case, I re-articulated what I understood his exact complaint to be, and responded directly to that. This helps to keep the response directly on-topic, instead of meandering into a variety of other tangential subjects, and helps make sure there is a common understanding of the “topic” both people can refer to. In other words, if I misunderstood, my misunderstanding would be clear and he could respond in kind.

6. Demonstrate knowledge in the area (if applicable). In this case it was fairly easy – in a former life I worked for one of Starbucks’ prime competitors in Canada (Second Cup), know a lot about their strategy and business model, and can talk at length about them on demand. I felt that briefly demonstrating I had this knowledge helped set-up my argument for why I chose not to share it in this particular situation.

7. Ask the critic to back himself up. In this case, it was again easy. Ryan was making a direct complaint about what others wrote in their blogs, on his blog. In turn, I asked a simple question – “if you scan through you last 20 blog posts, do you believe they stand up to the bar you have set for others here? Does each one represent high-level thinking, and provide full perspective on all the issues at play?” You can tell from the question what I think the answer is, but the bigger point is that a well phrased question, on-topic, can be valuable to the response. If Ryan can’t defend his POV by using his own posts, he’s clearly got another issue to deal with here.

8. Get a peer review. This one is self-explanatory, and is particularly valuable if you pass on the “sleep on it” option. However, in this case I didn’t go through a peer review process.

I think that covers most of it. So how did it work out? Well, it’s hard to say. After I posted my response the comments section on his post was basically dead, but I can’t necessarily claim responsibility for that – the post was now several days old, and we were heading into the weekend. But it is perhaps notable that of the two comments that followed, one was from a person admitting they didn’t understand most of the blogs he referenced, and the other (perhaps picking up on my question) indicated Ryan’s post should be added to the list of posts Ryan was complaining about.

Ryan himself didn’t respond to my comment on his blog. He did, however, send me an email. This message was notable on several fronts. Perhaps most importantly, there was an absence of inflammatory terms, which either indicates a subtle shift in his thinking, or that it’s more difficult to say such things to someone directly than when referring to someone you’ve never met on a blog. He also re-affirmed being a fan of the book itself.

Ryan also generally stuck to his POV, and re-articulated it in a slightly different / better way. Notable inclusions were that my post was kind of like enthusiastically writing about Nero playing the lyre while fires raged in Rome, and that my not acknowledging the strategic decay of the company within my Starbucks story was almost negligent.

In my mind, this puts us in a much better space. I’m fine with relatively cordial disagreements and differing POVs, and even noted in my response to Ryan that based on what I can piece together about his story Don might be interested in talking to him (think Wikinomics meets Grown Up Digital). However, my POV has not changed, and to sum up this now exceedingly long post I will share three points I made as to why I felt it was not important to put the other strategic issues in perspective in my piece. If you disagree, feel free to share below – but please keep the swearing to a minimum .

The first is an issue we have to deal with regularly in our research. Often times the best examples on the “bleeding edge” of innovation are being done by companies (start-ups and old alike) that have fundamental and fatal flaws in other respects. Some of our best research comes when the rest of the world is focusing on how Rome is burning, but we manage to find a “Nero playing the lyre” that not only other companies can learn from, but they might otherwise not hear about (because everyone is focused on the fire). The challenge for the reader is then to triangulate that information with everything else they know about the situation to draw their own conclusions.

Second, it’s important to remember the context in which a particular piece is being presented. We have heard complaints from readers if/when we stray off-topic on our site – the brand “wikinomics” indicates what type of information they expect. When we write about particular companies, it is perspective on the “wikinomics” part of their strategy and initiatives that people want to hear about. If they want to read about the other aspects of (for example) Starbucks, there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of stories covering 97% drop in profits and associated issues in Google News. If I search for Starbucks Lexicon, there are three hits, and none of them are on topic. It is by telling that wikinomics-related story few others are talking about that we create value for readers and keep them coming back.

Finally, space constraints are an important consideration. The piece I wrote was a little over 300 words. When you write short pieces, as I’m sure you well know the blogosphere demands, it is generally crucial to maintain a laser focus on a fairly narrow topic – every word giving context or providing background is a word that’s not being used to describe the issue at hand. Not everything is supposed to, or can, present the “big picture”… or it would be like boiling the ocean every time you want to make a pot of spaghetti.

Mr. Murdoch is no stranger to political controversy and variety; his board seat with libertarian think tank the Cato Institute says one thing, his endorsement of Hillary Clinton certainly says another. His political ideas aside, he’s got some cogent ideas about the role newspapers need to take in competing with their solely-online brethren (The Huffington Post, Slate). In the third lecture of the series, titled The Future of Newspapers: Moving Beyond Dead Trees, Murdoch suggests we’re “moving from news papers to news brands“, and I agree.

Murdoch advocates for a “repositioning” of what created newspaper loyalty in the first place:

“I like the look and feel of newsprint as much as anyone. But our real business isn’t printing on dead trees. It’s giving our readers great journalism and great judgment.”

At their best, news articles are well-explained stories—filled with a coherent narrative, good intuition, and insight. But the Internet is again turning raw information into a commodity. I was having a conversation with another Wikinomics contributor, Denis, and he said that he often only skims the news sections of the Globe and Mail now, as he’s read most of that content on other sites online. Instead, he says he finds himself lingering on the Op/Ed sections, where these journalists earn their keep by offering thought-provoking opinions and occasionally inflammatory polemic. I too find myself focusing on the opinion pieces, as I enjoy exploring what makes people come to entirely different opinions when exposed to the same set of facts.

Now while I agree that newspapers are becoming more brand-aware, what’s the other side of the coin in this argument? What are the concerns? The first one that jumps into mind is kind readers will forget “let the reader beware”, and take things as gospel—conveniently unaware of the editorial colouring. My sister, a journalist with the Winnipeg Free Press mentioned that good writing, even if it is heavy on the opinion, has that expository section where the author sets up the facts, then explores the implications of those facts. I think we’ll need to trust the reading audience to find those sections. As a Net Gener, I fully ascribe to the “trust, but verify” school of thought, which serves me well when venturing down the Fox News rabbit hole.

Here’s a strange idea: maybe internet content could push educators to focus more on teaching critical reading and logic, giving young people even better tools with which they can explore their world. A little idealistic; it’s already going on independently, so why not ride that wave?

Newspapers are no longer confined to the front steps of your home anymore, and by using the internet as their new medium, Murdoch has certainly made me rethink their imminent demise. Online outlets like Slate and The Huffington Post have done fantastic jobs of offering their angle on issues political and otherwise, and have real cachet with their readers. The line that stands out in Rupert’s talk is a harbinger for editors reluctant to embrace a new platform:

“My summary of the way some of the established media has responded to the internet is this: it’s not newspapers that might become obsolete. It’s some of the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper’s most precious asset: the bond with its readers.”

Newspapers will have to fight to carve out those editorial niches, but it’ll pay handsome dividends. But will they take license with that “bond” they have with their readers? The end of that story rests with their readers. They’re a discerning bunch, but navigating the landscape may be more subtle than merely reading the words “fair and balanced” on the nameplate.

1. An engagement index comparing fan to group activity. The idea here is that becoming a fan of a particular brand is fundamentally different than becoming part of a group that associates with it. What’s particularly interesting here is that while groups are generally created by customers (i.e. totally outside of the company control), fan pages are increasingly “facilitated” by the company itself. While this isn’t always the case, and I still have to sort out exactly which ones are, I decided to explore how the fans and groups associated with particular brands might behave differently.

The figure above is a 2 x 2 I developed based on two metrics. The horizontal axis is the ratio of fans to members of the most popular group. In 25 of the 27 cases, the number of fans exceeds the number of people in the most popular group. The contrast in ratios is startling though – Wal-Mart is the lowest at 0.1, and Levi’s is the highest at 127. The vertical axis is what I call an average activity index – the ratio of wall posts per fan to wall posts per group member. In every single case, the per-person activity in the most popular group exceeds the activity on the fan page. The range is again quite high though – from 0.3% (the NBA) to 67.4% (Victoria’s Secret).

Now a lot more analysis needs to go into this to figure out what it all means – it’s not easy to say exactly what is “good” and what is “bad”, for example, and I’ve had to make a few judgment calls that will need to be handled a little more rigorously for the final analysis. But I think there’s some promise here – even just starting from the relative positions of Victoria’s Secret, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and Levi’s, for example.

2. A Facebook Love / Hate Index. Here things are a little easier to understand. I’ve started going through the groups that have been created around various brands, and putting them in one of four buckets – love, hate, neutral, and employee (noting that the love/hate balance within the employee focused ones appears interesting to explore). Looking at it from a brand perspective, the love/ hate ratio seemed like it could be interesting. I’ve looked at a handful of brands so far, and the current ratios range from about 1.1 : 1 (Wal-Mart) to a startling 67.3: 1 (Disney). McDonald’s is down near Wal-Mart territory (1.5 : 1), and Starbucks is up in the 18.4: 1 range. Looks like it could be a simple, powerful metric to track.

3. Relative Fan Activity. Another easy one to understand: Wall posts per fan as an indicator of engagement levels. From the sample of brands i’ve looked at so far, the range is from 0.0013 (MTV) to 0.0526 (Avon Products). Others near the top are NASCAR, Molson, Bath & Body Works, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, and the NHL. Others near the bottom are The Gap, Levi’s, Nike, Sephora, and Abercrombie & Fitch.

4. Relative Group Activity. Very similar to #3 – wall posts per group member (in the most popular group associated with the brand) as an indicator of engagment levels. As noted earlier, the relative activity in the groups is greater than on the fan pages. The range from the sample I’ve looked at so far is from 0.0144 (Nike) to 3.67 (NBA). Others near the top are NASCAR, NHL, Crate & Barrel, and Avon Products. Others near the bottom are Victoria’s Secret, Somersby, Levi’s, and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Just from the process of writing this, I see another 2 x 2 in my future – relative group activity versus relative fan activity. But before I go there, I’m interested in hearing what people think. What looks promising? What might I be missing? Is there another lens that I could be taking? Any thoughts on #1 would be particularly appreciated…

After watching the clip there are two quotes that stick out as having provided some great insight into HP’s future direction:

“Brands are not defined today by campaigns but by the consumer ecosystems we nurture to support them”

“When you look at your customer service, the digital strategy can play an incredible role and in fact what I think and what we have seen is that it can actually be much more effective….We know of communities that have existed on their own as a social community around HP are actually solving customer service issues for HP customers better than at times some of our own service department people. So you can have more accuracy within this community, bring efficiency into the process of the operation and actually be more effective….I do believe it is a digital strategy that should exist across the operations of a company and not just in marketing and communications.”

It is evident that HP not only promotes consumer feedback and the creation of social networks around its product lines but it actually listens to what consumers are saying, which in turn creates a win-win situation for the both consumers and the company. As outlined by Mendenhall, it creates an entire process that becomes more efficient and effective –by using the information gleaned from these social communities to help correct consumer problems the first time they occur. This results happy HP users and a customer service department that isn’t laden with call-backs and complaints about the same problem. The positive customer experience that follows translates into positive word-of-mouth and ultimately creates a stronger brand. As HP has learned, it doesn’t necessarily matter what HP’s marketing campaign says about their brand, it matters what a trusted and influential source (friends, neighbours, digital communities) has to say about the brand. It is the old marketing rule dressed up in digital clothing; listen to your customers, apply the information they provide, create a satisfied consumer base. This may seem simple or straightforward but more often than not companies fail to see the value provided. Some companies aren’t aware that social networks about their brand even exist let alone use the information to improve their service and even worse some companies create social networks around their brand as if to say “we’re doing something digital” and then ignore any consumer-generated ideas. Companies like this invariably believe that they better understand their brand than does the customer. In other instances, customer suggestions make it inside the company boardroom but they either get lost in translation or because they don’t fit with the current strategy they are cast aside.

Hats off to HP for making the effort to actually listen to their customers, perhaps other companies can take a (digital) page from HP’s playbook, or else risk alienating clients and eroding brand value. In an era when existing and potential clients can connect with one another in ways never seen before, ignoring these influential, digital communities is a risky business practice for firms seeking to remain at the forefront of their industry.

While i’m out with my Oompa-Loompa posse, you could be working on the next presidential speech, entering into a world of fame and fortune, or changing the world!  Well… not really, but you can pretend.

It’s no secret by now, that the Internet has changed the way we interact with the world around us – without leaving our homes, we can shop and talk to people around the world, educate and entertain ourselves, and do many other things. From my perspective, one of the most powerful aspects of the Internet is that it allows us to interact with the world, and express ourselves, in completely new ways. In the past, the average person was only a media consumer, but increasingly the Internet platform provides opportunities to become a part of the media itself; this provides participants with a more interactive and engaging experience.

A number of years ago, when the Internet was still in its mainstream infancy, I remember being linked by a friend to a news clipping involving me. It looked something like this and at first glance was pretty realistic, although relatively transparent after further investigation. However, the fact that it was obviously fake did not detract from the fun, and these easy to create, fake-clippings, made numerous rounds around the Web. This was the first time in my memory when a static Internet was starting to transform into a dynamic, customizable, and entirely different creature.

Since then, a lot has happened in the relam of customizable media. Hallmark e-cards came into existence, where people could send personalized messages and media to friends and family. Websites now allow you to customize user interfaces to optimize your browsing experience, as well as choose how you receive or distribute content. Virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel, Second Life, and World of Warcraft popped up right, left, and center, where you could now create digital avatars of yourself or some fantastical creation. These are just a few examples of a Web that has been transforming to incorporate demand for tailored media consumption, and these examples paint a simple picture for the future of consumer engagement…

The fake news clippings were the first example of this customization, but they involved simple text media. As you can see from my Oompa Loompa picture, created using faceinhole.com (and which, according to Alexa, is growing impressively), the same can now be done for pictures. And as JibJab demonstrates impressively, the same can be done for video as well, right down to the animation of the face. The technology is still developing, but it is not unrealistic to believe that one day, media will be module-like and allow hot-swapping of components, from the protagonist’s appearance to the environmental settings themselves, with a highly detailed level of realism.

Plastic surgery has come to media…and advertising and entertainment is about to become more interesting by far. Doritos ran a contest for the 2008 Superbowl where participants submitted their own Doritos commercials and the top submission would run during the Superbowl – it was a huge success, with top favourites being viewed millions of times on YouTube, generating huge publicity for the company. By now, this example is no longer ‘news,’ but for example’s sake, now imagine that the competition allowed you to go to the website and “live” the advertisement by being in the commercial itself. Take another step, and what if the commercial was no longer just about you? What if you could upload your image, send the link to a friend who did the same, and so forth, until the hypothetical commercial about your friends actually had the realistic faces of all your friends! Movies, television, commercials … just use your imagination.

Companies can engage their customers by providing welcome opportunities for entertainment and involvement rather than simply pushing a message – a participant will absorb the message when interested. This idea is not entirely ‘new’ but the tools are, and I look forward to seeing what the future holds.

Thoughts about other applications? Concerns about the implications? Let me know what you think!

It’s cute, but moreover, it shows that YouTube (and Google) understands that a number of video comments would have been better-off not posted (a point similar to my previous post, about the extent to which online systems should be designed to protect us from ourselves). Not just that, it shows a lot of personality, something that seems like something of an odd comment when talking about a website or large company. These personalities serve to “de-technologify” technology, making it easier to simply interact with it.

Some examples; things that made me smirk (or frown) as I tried out new software and websites:

• Google’s Chrome Browser — when something goes wrong in Chrome, you’re not presented with some snippet of code in HEX along with an error code. Instead, you get “Aw snap, something went wrong.” It catches you off guard the first time, and it’s not drab or boring like a typical application error.
• 404 pages — Things will go wrong and people will try to access pages that don’t exist, there are lots of ways that a webmaster can choose to let a visitor know that something isn’t right.
• Windows Vista’s Cancel or Continue — a good example of a complete lack of personality, especially on a prompt that shows up far more than is necessary, it ends up simply becoming a nuisance, making the software aggravating rather than useful.
• OSX’s bootup login prompt — when a mac boots up and requests a password, if you enter the wrong password, the window shakes. It’s simple and communicates that you typoed, all without the need for a popup asking you to try again.
• Winamp — I don’t think that many people use Winamp anymore, which is too bad, because it’s always been great software. Way back when I first loaded up Winamp, the software autoplays a clip “Winamp, it really whips the llama’s…” — backside. Nothing especially functional, but it still serves to set the software apart, and stayed in my memory to this day.

As we do more and more things with and through software, that software itself becomes the face of the company that designed it. For personable companies and applications, having a certain degree of transitivity between the personalities of the applications, and the personalities of the companies, becomes a very good thing.

Looping this back to the XKCD-YouTube example, I appreciate that Google/YouTube is able to recognize that there’s a lot of rubbish-comments on their site, and that they’re able to make light of the situation in a very public-facing way. This doens’t mean that my YouTube usage is going to go up (the only way that could happen is if more hours were added to the day), but it does serve to make the company a little more human, and a little more likeable — not a bad accomplishment if I’m trying to decide where I want to go to watch online video content.

My list above is far from exhaustive, are there any companies or applications that strike you as really having some personality of their own? Does it improve your experience, or detract from it? Or, are you just waiting for the day when most of our overt interactions with technology are intermediated through Turing-capable virtual people, complete with their own, robust personalities?

So I was wrong and a good reader pointed it out, and the mistake was promptly corrected. That’s one of my favourite aspects of the blogosphere: many eyes can spot even small mistakes. So after the favour, I wanted to see if the commenter had a blog of their own I could check out their handiwork. The poster left their email address when they posted the comment so I googled them.

Turns out that the domain it came from was actually a communications firm with a decidedly corporate focus. After reading more closely, it turns out that GE Commercial Finance is one of their clients. So it seems like the kind poster didn’t stumble upon this site looking for Trion, Wikinomics, or another interesting posting from yours truly. So with my slightly bruised ego, I did some further looking about the business of “policing” the blogosphere for corporate mentions, and ensuring people get their facts straight.

So what do these firms do? Shift Communications is one such firm, and they point out that the blogosphere (and other Web 2.0 tools) is a prime forum for public opinion which can influence others. They go on to say blog monitoring is a great way to figure out what people truly think about a product or service. The idea is that the blogosphere is a sort of early-warning system to identify if there are any disconnects between what companies want to portray and how consumers experience their products and services.

So consider this an open letter. I’ve mentioned Shift Communications. Will they find this site? In the hopes that they do, I pose the nice people at Shift a question: How’s business? Have companies been compelled to action thanks to blog-buzz? Or is it only for online PR catastrophe avoidance? In other words, do they sweat the small stuff or was this a one-off?

Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.

This week in the roundup:

• Jeff DeChambeau revealed the new beta of the Wikinomics blog
• Ian Da Silva uncovered the power of the social web for consumers
• Patrick Harnett introduced us to Wesabe and money management on the Web
• Andrea Bettello shined the light on a different type of TV experience

In case you missed it, you can catch the last roundup HERE.

On September 15, 2008…Jeff DeChambeau revealed the new beta of the Wikinomics blog:

A pet project of mine for the last little while has been to redesign the Wikinomics blog. Given the topic of the blog, though, it seems hardly fitting to launch it in a non-collaborative way. So, I’m doing a soft-launch and would like to collect feedback from the community about what works and what doesn’t.

To showcase and test the new look, I’ve set up http://wikinomics.com/beta/.

Tell us what you think about the new site @
Presenting the Wikinomics Redesign (beta)

As it turns out, it’s a site that in its own words “provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.”  The site was started by Berkeley professor to help address the concern that most consumers know very little about the products that are brought in to their homes everyday.  Using a team of scientific, technological and academic experts, over 60,000 household products have been rated on three separate metrics: health, environmental, and social performance.

Discuss how your products match up on GoodGuide @
Looking for safe, healthy and green alternatives? Try GoodGuide.

The neat open source aspect of Wesabe is that it has a robust API which allows Wesabe enthusiasts the flexibility to develop whatever their cost-conscious minds can dream up. Wesabe has an articulate stance on how having better information about your spending habits is the first step toward reining them in. There are widgets for Vista, OS X, and even your iPhone.

Get ideas about how Wesabe could be used in interesting ways @
Wesabe: The Frugality of Crowds

Using NanoGaming, LiveHive is essentially creating a new environment for the television viewer. The shift from traditional one-way communication is underway as this Waterloo based firm promises to take viewers (and advertisers) to a place where the viewer can now actively engage with the program, ultimately creating a stronger connection. NanoGaming is more than just a fun way for the viewer to become involved, it also introduces opportunities to create a more effective advertising campaign than traditional television commercials offer. By sponsoring NanoGaming sites, firms can access audiences from some of the highest rated TV shows (such as the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards) and because TV and Internet are combined, consumers’ levels of attention, association and recall are increased.

What else does this mean for the future of TV? Find out @
LiveHive Systems: changing the way we watch TV

Check back next week for more original Wikinomics insight. Until next week…

The debate took place in the Whole Body aisle at Whole Foods and it was centred around which toothpaste was best – Tom’s of Maine or Burt’s Bees.  The winner was ultimately declared to be Tom’s, and the trump card that was triumphantly played to seal the victory was “It’s definitely Tom’s – just check their enviro rating on GoodGuide.”  Being the inquisitive person that I am, and also feelng a little embarassed to have been seeking the $2 toothpaste among other $6 – $10 alternatives, I had to ask what this “GoodGuide” was.

As it turns out, it’s a site that in its own words “provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.”  The site was started by Berkeley professor to help address the concern that most consumers know very little about the products that are brought in to their homes everyday.  Using a team of scientific, technological and academic experts, over 60,000 household products have been rated on three separate metrics: health, environmental, and social performance.

The site is still in its beta phase, and whether or not you choose to heed/trust the expert ratings is a personal decision, but based on my browsing around today, I’ve already begun to appreciate the insight that GG has helped bring to some of the products I regularly use.  While so far, the site has not managed to gain a critical mass of user input and ratings, I think that once the word gets out there, this tool just might be the arbiter that helps tip the scales in a certain direction for prodcuts with which people have often teetered back and forth between preferences.

Some of the insights I have gained about my personal products include:

My soap could certainly do much better on both the health and environmental performance metrics, earning a paltry score of 4.0 and 5.5 out of 10 respectively;

I could probably stand to follow the lead of the toothpaste aisle victor and switch to Tom’s instead of the tried and true Crest;

And, while my laundry soap leaves my clothes smelling and feeling great, it may be downright unsafe if I am to trust the information provided on GoodGuide.

The moment of truth for the power of GoodGuide will come the next time I do a big shop back home and whether any of my buying habits change.

Take a few minutes and do a mini-audit of your own…How do your purchases measure up?

I say all of this to preface the fact that I am not really a stalker even though I just spent the last hour on criminalsearches.com, where anyone can enter in someone’s name and get a whole list of criminal offenses ( if any) for free. Most criminal records are public information and anyone can search individual state databases for free. The cool thing about CriminalSearches is that it aggregates all of these disjointed databases and delivers a more comprehensive result with much less time and effort. Launched just last month, CriminalSearches is garnering serious attention.

So what did I turn up in an hour’s time? I found my black sheep cousin and all six of his quite impressive drug and alcohol convictions. I even found an old high school teacher (who was fired the year after I graduated) who now has a conviction for assault. Nice.

In my last blog I pondered my personal brand and how to manage my information. While I am fortunate—or maybe just law abiding—enough to not have any dubious offenses tarnishing my online identity, there are likely thousands more who find themselves struggling to move past a youthful indiscretion or other similarly embarrassing-but-not-as-bad-as-it-sounds offense in a society that highly stigmatizes criminal activity.

In theory, a judge decides how much time and effort it will cost a convict to repay their debt to society. After that period is over, the ex-convict’s debt is considered paid and the ex-convict moves on with their life. But now, with such data so readily available, a convict’s debt to society will now be decided by the court of public opinion for better or worse.

CriminalSearches may become a powerful law enforcement tool. One blog about CriminalSearches describes how a family researched the criminal record of the person suspected of killing their son. The blogger claims that the site’s alias information helped investigators find missing records that put the suspect behind bars.

While that may be a rare case, it benefits society to be able to thoroughly screen people they come in contact with and in whom they place their trust. While some people may be upset to find themselves listed as a criminal for a traffic offense, others will highly value this information when hiring drivers and nannies and babysitters. Parents could even look up their kids’ friends’ parents to see if they are safe drivers and trustworthy people before letting their kids hop in the backseat or attend a sleepover.

But there is a fine balance between society’s right to know and the individual’s right to move on with their lives. How will society adapt to such pervasive and powerful information in an increasingly voyeuristic world?

In any case, better look yourself up and see what dirt there is on you. It’s all a part of curating that ever-expanding online identity. If you find incorrect information, such as a ticket that was supposed to be dismissed or expunged, contact the authority that issued the citation and clean up your image. It’s the only one you get.

Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.

In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE.  Friendly reminder: the Wikinomics Roundup has a nice new home on the left side of the page, under Regular Features.

“In the past few weeks I’ve been invited to several legal sessions with different law firms and in-house counsel discussing the potential of Web 2.0 technologies. Many of the concerns addressed are similar: IP, privacy, copyright, trade secrets etc. For the most part, many of these issues are easily addressed. Many organizations already have policies in place to address many of these issues such as simple terms of service, disclaimers and employee blogging, social computing guidelines.”

How are emerging Web 2.0 technologies viewed through the eyes of the legal guardians? Find out @
Is Law 2.0 possible?

“Whenever users are given the freedom to create what ever they want, it is clear that they will do just that. This is always a risk when initiating an open source project. Luckily an open source community is just that: a community. Community members monitor the content, and keep the environment enjoyable for all. This is why Wikipedia and YouTube have been so successful. Administrators are necessary to have the final say in what content stays and what goes, but it is largely a community affair.”

It’s not porn, it’s SPORN. Interesting and work safe discussion @
The Underbelly of Open Source: SPORN

“On the other hand, Wikipedia struggles with the issue of censorship and bias. You just can’t trust Wikipedia because its edited by a bunch of conservatives/liberals/people-I-don’t-agree-with. They aren’t telling the whole story. Of course that argument can be made with the mainstream media as well. But when a major network or newspaper is biased or commits censorship, people complain and/or go somewhere else for their news, they don’t solve the problem. In this case, Wikipedians thoughtfully discussed the issue, reached a compromise, voted democratically, and solved (or at least moved towards a solution for) the problem.”

What makes news trust-worthy?  Join the debate @
Wikipedia: More Reliable and Balanced than the News?

“If each person is their own brand … then your online identity is a large, integral part of that brand. But how do you manage all of the content, yours or otherwise, that becomes attached to your name?”

How do you manage the brand called you?  Take a look @
Brittany Creamer TM

“Seeing this led me to ponder a simple question – what about everyone else? What about that staggeringly large group of people that are neither mavens nor connectors (and particularly those one might call anti–social) – are their social media appetites distinctly different, and if so what are the implications for companies pursuing a social media strategy? More pointedly, will this great mass of people slowly get in line with the adoption curve that mavens and connectors are setting in social media, or might they do something totally different – something that would put some of the prevailing theories regarding cohort behavior into question? To begin looking into this issue, I wanted to start with a particular application where I sense line is being drawn in the sand – Twitter.”

Consider how people of different levels of connectedness fit into the life cycle of emerging technologies @
Social Media for the Anti-Social

Check back next week for more original Wikinomics insight.  Until next week…

Take, for example, the other Brittany Creamer. She’s a blonde basketball player in a state several hundreds of miles north of the unathletic, brunette me. I was a little surprised, when logging in to Facebook one day a couple of years ago, to see pictures posted of me with blonde hair surrounded by foreign faces. Although quickly untagging these pictures resolved my mini identity crisis, how do you prevent and manage larger, more serious cases of mistaken identity?

Blogger Esther Dyson suggests the idea of curating your online identity in her blog in MIT’s Technology Review. She raises thought provoking questions about new complexities of personal identities that are less than private-say when your information is hosted on a platform or stored in a database. While she concluded that less vague and abstract user agreements and privacy settings are the quickest fix, I’m still a little skeptical. More specific user agreements could solve disputes about ads tailored to your interests, but I’m not sure how they could help manage user-generated content.

I use stringent limited profile settings on Facebook to prevent my colleagues from seeing my less-than-professional side. My work friends can’t see my wall (no offense!) because I can’t control what my friends post. With Facebook’s redesign, though, a person’s wall is now the page a viewer lands on when they click through to see that person’s profile. The content I created about myself is hidden in secondary tabs. So much for creating your own Facebook persona, now your friends do it for you. So what do my poor work friends see when they land on my new profile? My tight privacy settings now result in my profile looking like a barren desert. My solution? Well, I don’t have one yet. But I’m working on it.

My plan of last resort, should it come to that, will be to generate a fake identity and start all over. It only takes a click of the mouse.

Whether you’re a regular reader, or just pop in occasionally, it’s not always easy to keep up with our Wikinomics blog content. With this in mind, we have created the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, to try and capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog from the past week.

We have attempted to condense the key content to just a few paragraphs, but to understand the idea in its full context, you’ll have to visit the original post. Please also keep in mind that not all blog posts are conducive to being summarized in this way, and what follows is but a fraction of our week’s content. With that out of the way, read on!

An increasing number of artists are now signing recording deals with consumer product companies such as Nike, Red Bull and Procter & Gamble, who are acting as de facto record companies – finding, funding, promoting and in cases even distributing new music. In an effort to promote various product lines, these companies have now begun to look outside of their core businesses for a new way to get their brands out there…

While collaborating with artists for short-term promotional pieces is nothing new, a number of companies are taking their relationship with artists to the next level, and early signs point to a winning relationship for both sides involved. Dupri is very pleased with the budget provided by P&G, claiming “You can’t get this type of marketing budget. There are endorsement deals, but not like this.” Artists appear to benefit by receiving both an up-front payment as well a royalty agreement that outpaces what is offered by the big labels.

• Andrew Jones of the Tall Skinny Kiwi talks about how the Wikinomics ideas of transparency, generosity, and trust relates to the Bible and Christian ideals.
• As mentioned in the comments of last week, a relatively new website, Swirrl, has posted a review of Wikinomics.“Swirrl is like a wiki, but better.”
• The State Sunshine and Open Records blog criticizes “Show us a Better Way”, a new website sponsored by the British Government, but reconsiders the statement after hearing this site is the brainchild of the U.K.’s Minister for the Cabinet Office. The website invites users/citizens to post ideas for new government services.
• Wikinomics and how mass collaboration will fundamentally change learning was one of the topics at the recent NECC 2008 conference.
• Brendan Dunphy’s Innovation Blog debates the Wikinomics Report Card on General Motors. He argues that closed innovation is better when the current market solution is not sufficient.
• Paula Thornton of the Fast Forward Blog talks about Don Tapscott’s economic tsunami in reference to the User Revolution and the Age of Aquarius.

Derek: Dipity was started by three friends who got together and who were long time Internet professionals, one from development, one from design, and the other from a product user and consumer perspective. We were all struggling with the same problem – the tools available that tell stories and provide backgrounds around particular topics are lacking because the web is so media rich now. If you look at the way people use information or when people write stories, they use text and don’t really integrate photos or videos and images.

We thought of a better way to create an interactive experience around topics that takes advantage of the web, people in the world, and the fact that everything is connected. Dipity allows you to easily create interactive experiences around particular topics; could be people, could be places, could be subjects like Darfur, and aggregate information in one place. This creates an easy summarization of a topic that’s easy to understand and a richer experience.

A corporation too, is rather like Dennett’s sea squirt. When young and growing, it is all innovation-everywhere – strategy is an active line function, a brain, through early twists and turns towards fertile markets. Research isn’t a separate function because it is all research. As it matures, the organization may take root in a comfortable market… and eat its own brain. Strategy shrinks and becomes a backroom staff function, and R&D is first localized as a vanity function (“we have a lab with 50 star PhDs!”), and then gradually shrunk. Then one day, the market is threatened and everybody screams, “Who moved my cheese!” The capacity for active strategic steering and innovation everywhere has been lost.

How do you keep it alive in a cost-effective way? How do you prevent the animal from permanently becoming a plant? Succumbing to Luddite researcher screams for more blue-sky funding is dumb – history proves that doesn’t work. Here’s a smarter way …

Here’s my ideal 2.0 banking environment: I envision a unified single-sign-on financial management space that spans all of my financial interests so I could easily move funds—across different banks and institutions—from my checking account to my line of credit, or Visa, or RRSPs, or investments, or mortgage. Picture a Web portal that aggregates data from all of my financial accounts in a single dashboard. The “smart” interface would highlight opportunities for me to save money by using different investment vehicles or compare different promotions being offered. More than just making recommendations, the authenticated system would actually facilitate these transactions via a single click. I would also get dynamic results on how my actions are affecting my lending rate, monthly payments, and tax return in real time…

If you think this utopian vision is too far-fetched, consider solutions like Jwaala.com. The company is taking some early steps towards enabling this type of functionality at banks with products like personal money manager, budgeting and reporting tools, account aggregation, and dashboards and widgets.

A few weeks ago, the popular news aggregator site Reddit went open source. This struck me as pretty surprising, as I know that reddit is competiting with Digg, and I was under the impression that both had algorithms to determine which stories were deemed most popular that were kept secret and well guarded. Opening the source of reddit for all to see would allow anyone to instantly copy the site. Given that the site is coded in and run on languages and software that are themselves open, giving the entire world their proprietary code seems like an easy way to add competitors to the market…

My hypothesis is that the reddit team doesn’t have to worry about knockoffs stealing their lunch because it would take a few years and many, many users for the weighting variables in the clone sites to become anywhere near as refined and useful as in the original. Giving away their source code is really giving away very little. In exchange, they get all of the accolades of openness that come with bearing all to the world, and legions of users who then want to engage in making the site even better — for free of course!

When an organization has a wiki at the center of its operations, people can gather and share the kind of information that others need – including everything from projects, products, initiatives, strategies, and other pieces of the big picture, to the everyday: how to process an expense report, access an office’s network, get business cards printed, or reserve a meeting room. On a wiki, this information can be gathered by the small efforts of many…

But what’s really important about the wiki is not just that one example of the expense report, or even that the report itself is available on the wiki. It’s the idea that employees are working together to put the information they’re carrying around in their heads on the wiki, where others can more easily access it, use it, edit it, and improve it. That builds a culture where all employees can become contributors – both to the goals of the organization, and the evolving knowledge about how to reach those goals.

FreeGovernment.org, launched on July 4, is one of a growing number of online, direct democracy communities that allow users to vote on bills, draft their own legislation, and engage in debate. While these communities present an opportunity to make government more accessible and responsive to citizens, they have failed to earn any influence over politicians.

To change that, Free Government plans on electing the politicians. The community, which is also a political party, is looking for candidates to run in the 2008 US Congressional election. If elected, these politicians will be contractually obligated to vote according to the results of an online poll of constituents (for their vote to count, users will have to first be confirmed as registered voters).

On Wednesday Yahoo! made a pretty cool announcement: Today, Yahoo! Search is taking another step in extending the Yahoo! Open Strategy with the launch of Yahoo! Search BOSS, a web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search. Here are my two favorite wikinomics themed quotes to entice you into reading the post:

“What’s in it for Yahoo! and partners?: Why would Yahoo! open up its search infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies who could use it to compete with us? It’s really quite simple. First, we believe that being open is core to Yahoo!’s future success — opening our network, opening our own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening our search infrastructure via BOSS — will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!.

What’s in it for users? More choice. BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences. These new search products will provide value to users along multiple dimensions, such as vertical specialization, new relevance indicators and ranking models, and innovative UI implementations. Our hope is that the resulting expansion in user choice will have the effect of fragmenting the increasingly consolidated search market in much the same way that cable TV dramatically increased programming choices for television viewers.”

Being Open: Traditionally, De Beers has been very closed in their dealings. Throughout their history, they have tried their best to control industry supply, and keep competition down. In 1994, along with GE, they were charged with price fixing on industrial diamonds. In 2006, De Beers settled numerous class action lawsuits alleging that they were keeping the price of diamonds artificially high and violating anti-trust laws. They agreed to pay out almost $300 million to anyone who bought diamonds from a jewelry store from 1994 – 2006. However, ever since Gareth Penny became CEO and the complete change in business strategy, the company has become more open and transparent. Now, 100% of their diamonds are sold through the Kimberly Process which ensures that diamonds are conflict free. For the second consecutive year, they released a massive “Report to Society”. The Report covers De Beers approach, economics, ethics, employees, communities, environment, and a range of case studies, initiatives and related web sites. However, it was reviewed by Ethical Corporation magazine as “transparent but not entirely reader friendly. You can find the 2007 report here.

Keep checking back each week, as Wikinomics bloggers keeps their eyes on the web, and their fingers on the keyboard. And as always…if something stood out and interested you, please comment!

Many agreed that social media is about community-building, passion, and enthusiasm. Creativity, a multi-tasking mindset, and the ability to think outside the box were also heavily agreed upon. Most importantly, those who find the most success in the social media marketing realm are those who are heavily networked and ensure that maintaining ongoing relationships is part of their everyday routine. – Summary of findings by Tamar Weinberg

Although social media as a set of tools has radically transformed marketing, I do not think it appropriate to use the term “social media marketer.” People do not want to hear from companies as represented by marketers, they want to hear from other people. – Valeria Maltoni, Online Marketer

It’s a unique blend of networking skills (relationships). traditional PR skills (building goodwill), marketing skills (giving customers what they want), and customer service (delivering resolutions to issues). So ultimately, the best social media marketers understand all of these disciplines. It requires a convergence, making the jack of all trades suddenly and incredibly valuable. – Geoff Livingston, CEO of a Media Relations Firm

A social media marketer is someone who is fundamentally oriented towards LISTENING first, and only then offering contributions that move the conversation forward. – Laura Fitton, Presentations Consultant

People using these tools have to “be human” well, and by that, I mean realizing that all life isn’t based on marketing directives. Instead, it’s about contributing, bringing something to the picnic, and doing what Radian6 Marcel LeBrun calls “listening at the point of need.” That means, knowing when to promote your idea, product, or service. – Chris Brogan, Social Media Strategist

A good social media marketer isn’t really a ‘marketer’. He/She is a connector (and is good at social networking), a maven (and is a thought leader and ‘information specialist’ or information resource), and a salesperson that can persuade an eskimo to buy ice.- Muhammad Saleem, Social Media Maven

They are active honest members of Online Communities where they can naturally get the word out about a product or service….. causing their message to become viral throughout online communities and bring in viewers/customers/clients to a Website.- Shana Albert, Web Designer and Social Media Addict

An increasing number of artists are now signing recording deals with consumer product companies such as Nike, Red Bull and Procter & Gamble, who are acting as de facto record companies - finding, funding, promoting and in cases even distributing new music.  In an effort to promote various product lines, these companies have now begun to look outside of their core businesses for a new way to get their brands “out there.”

An early leader in this movement is TAG records.   Launched in April, TAG is a joint venture supported by P&G and led by hip hop mogul Jermaine Dupri, which takes its name from TAG body spray, a former Gillette brand that is entrenched in a battle against Unilever’s AXE in the highly-competitive teen market.

While collaborating with artists for short-term promotional pieces is nothing new, a number of companies are taking their relationship with artists to the next level, and early signs point to a winning relationship for both sides involved.  Dupri is very pleased with the budget provided by P&G, claiming “You can’t get this type of marketing budget. There are endorsement deals, but not like this.”  Artists appear to benefit by receiving both an up-front payment as well a royalty agreement that outpaces what is offered by the big labels.

So far, Nike-commissioned Better Than I’ve Ever Been has succeeded by bringing together hip hop royalty Kanye West, Rakim, Nas and KRS-One, earning popular acclaim and a Grammy Nomination over the past year. Some big label execs are refuting the success of this new model with the age-old “this model wouldn’t work if these artists weren’t already so popular because of our help” argument. If artists are receiving more support (promotional/marketing expertise AND money), and at the end of the day, most consumers do not you care where the music is “coming from,” is this a business model that’s here to stay or a flash in the pan fad?

1. the word “free” is gone. While Wales goes on to add it is a “charitable humanitarian effort”, one could hypothesize the “free” part is now of much lower importance to the wikipedia value proposition. When it first started, one might argue that “free” was one of the key differentiators, and now it is just par for the course.

2. “Anyone” can’t edit anymore. While there has always been an editorial process to weed out the bad and/or malicious contributions, and “reasonable person” would hardly be seen as exclusionary by most, it is a subtle movement away from what some might consider a “pure” mass collaboration. In reality it’s just articulating what most organizations have found that have gone down the road of collaboration – you simply don’t want everyone, because there are always some people with bad intentions.

3. “Join us” is far more explicit in highlighting the community element of the wikipedia offering than simply saying “anyone can edit” – it’s not about your individual contribution so much as your connection with the broader group of collaborators. Again, this isn’t a fundamental change, but an interesting little alteration in the positioning statement that highlights the community element.

4. “Any encyclopedic topic”, while still fairly broad, provides a clearer direction on what belongs on the site. Of course, it leads to the question of what exactly is an encyclopedic topic – is it defined in relation to (and this might sound blasphemous) what Encyclopedia Britannica might publish? I find this topic particularly interesting, as it’s similar to a question I brought up in the long tail post a few days ago – how long can you define what’s relevant in a digital context in relation to the “old” world – be it established publishing models or bricks and mortar stores.

Wikipedia is almost always one of the first examples all organizations look to when they start trying to implement the principles of mass collaboration. Not surprisingly, it seems that more of than not organizations start out with a positioning similar to what wikipedia started with – pretty much anyone can do anything. I believe more organizations need to look at the evolution of wikipedia, and see which principles that could apply to their own strategies- particularly in terms of fine tuning the proposition in terms of who you want to contribute, what kind of contributions you want, and why people should want to collaborate with you. This process will be much harder for most companies that have a more ‘narrow’ offering than wikipedia, and is particularly challenging for those that are trying to make money off of mass collaboration. In turn, this makes doing it properly even more important.