innovation playground Idris Mootee

The 7 Basic Rules of Social Network Design for Marketers

With the rising popularity of social networks and user-driven online services McKinsey conducted a survey on how businesses are using web 2.0. Respondents show widespread but careful interest. Expressing satisfaction with their Internet investments so far, they say that Web 2.0 technologies are strategic and that they plan to increase these investments.  However this is not going to be an easy one for these large corporations.

Yes, they are all looking for effective social networking strategies to drive customer engagement. There are so many questions to be answered such as: What are the right elements in a social networking strategy? How close or distant does it need to be between the social networks and your corporate networks? Who owns the communities? How do we market them?  Here are my answers:

1/It is about open dialogue. Social networks are about open dialogue, discussion and debate with no censorship (with the exception of illegal or offensive content) with little or no moderation (moderation is acceptable in certain cases but generally not preferred). The ubiquitous comments section site is not optional and must be open to everyone as a reader (not contributor).

2/Don’t think about owning the communities. If you have the mindset of “maybe we can own this community” or “what incremental sales do we get out of these social networks?” then you’re going to fail at it. If, however, you go into it thinking “how can we facilitate the co-creation of value (content, stories of knowledge)?” then you will succeed in building a successful social network environment and allowing it to develop its full potential.

3/Transparency is a given. Any spin or attempt to shape, control, or manipulate these conversations are not acceptable. Organizations have encountered many unpleasant challenges or questions and often complain that they aren't part of the conversation. To be authentic, they need to stay deeply connected and as the same time distanced to the community. In every social network there are people who might appear to be critics. Don't mistake their passion for conflict.

4/Participants in social media are individuals and so are their profiles. The source of ideas, comments and participation should be identified and associated with the individuals. So anonymity should be discouraged but permissible (in some situations when there is a lot of sensitivity). But don’t think about mining the profiles for marketing purposes; it is a dangerous line that no one wants to cross.

5/Individual identity building is part of the value proposition. Social networking websites create value by providing an arena to build meaningful relationships, allow connectivity, establish independence and most importantly to strengthen one’s identity. They need to provide tools to allow people to build and express that “virtual-me”.

6/The community is the marketing. Social networks cannot be marketed as a product by using traditional marketing techniques such as promotional pull or advertising. The idea is to create the fertile environment so people can embrace their own spaces and communities so it can grow.

7/Voices extend to everywhere in the networks. The consumer generated content from social networks are highly distributed in nature and made up of tens of millions of different voices making it far more textured, rich, and heterogeneous than traditional media could ever be (even online). These voices are on the vast edges of our networks and never in the middle.

Microsoft Latest Competitive Moves

Microsoft has been working a few interesting projects that could empower new users. First one is Silverlight, which carries the best of traditional software development and Web development in a new model that extends the skills and reach of both disciplines (procedural code versus or used in conjunction with scripted code). The idea is to allow a high quality experience to be created by a large number of pros with skills in .NET, JavaScript and eventually Python and Ruby, plus the ability to compile dynamic and scripted languages into a multi-platform CLR that works well both on a Mac or a PC.

The second one is Popfly which is tool like Yahoo Pipes that enables developers to quickly develop mash-up style Web applications and services. This will drive the expectation of user experience in software from the bottom up. People ask questions about why do big expensive software packages cost so much and provide so little. I wonder why people are not asking that enough.

The third one is Surface which is a next generation computing paradigm that's built on the same technology many of us use today or will use in the coming months (Vista and WPF). After years of development, they plan to release a computer that uses the tabletop as its high-resolution display, recognizing objects placed on its surface and skipping the traditional keyboard and mouse in favor of a touchpad-like control interface. This is a biggie. They envision a number of applications such as people placing a card on the table to call up a virtual stack of digital photos from a computer server and then rotate, resize and spread them across the table using their hands. In another, diners split a tab by dragging icons of their meals to their credit cards. Practically from general retail to fast food and casino.

And then there is aQuantive's Atlas, which will be powered up by Microsoft and will have a chance to become the dominant platform. Plus Microsoft Web 2.0 strategy that includes Version 2.0 of the so-called “Community Kit for SharePoint,” which includes new versions of its Enhanced Blog, Enhanced Wiki, ChatterBox Ajax and Tag Cloud editions. Microsoft is ready for the game.

The Future of Marketing - Part One

This is a presentation I often give to B-School students who are interested in marketing and advertising. It is a long one and so here's part one. Part two involves a group exercise to map out future scenarios of ad agencies and how they'll be transformed. I have four scenarios of "agencies of the future" and all require significant transformation.

Bob Greenber (CEO of RG/A, an IPG Co.) has written another article in Adweek saying: "Talent alone will not transform agencies from a traditional model to one rooted in digital technology. The transformation also requires changes in thinking, culture and process that are painful and difficult - but not impossible - to make."

I see that almost every agency is undergoing such a transformation. I think many of them will never make it. It is about deep rooted "assumptions" and "attitude" as it is about talent. Some people say the future of advertising is that there isn't any. Yes and No. I think the future of advertising is simply great products that have marketing "embedded" in them and the role of advertising agencies will be taking that story and bringing it to live in a transmedia environment. See my presenation below for the full story.

The question is: Which ones will survive and which ones won't.

Yes, we all know advertising agencies are dinosaurs.

From Ideas to Strategy and Purpose

A friend of mine called me a few days ago and wanted to talk about his new venture. I am happy for him. No question that it is a big decision in some ways for him. The question came up was “why”, is it about money or is it about creating something. What is the strategy?

I asked him about his "purpose". He was a little surprised as he expected me to ask him about the strategy. I said to him “purpose” is bigger than “strategy”. Much bigger. At best, strategy is just a number of smart decisions or tactics or some clever ways to play with the economics of the value chain. But purpose is different, it is a journey. Strategies are about means; they cannot be an end in themselves. An end is a reason. Many companies today are not lacking strategies, they lack a reason--they lack “purpose.”

One time when my friend Lee Feldman talked about how his company should be about People, Profits and Planet, there's no question that it was inspiring and I can see how that can become the purpose of any organization today. He is an intelligent man. Purpose is crucial because of its scope and ubiquity. It is large, much larger than any other elements in a business model or organizational design. It is much more involving. It is a choice to pursue your destiny--the ultimate destination for yourself and the organization you and your partners founded... It draws equally upon your emotional commitment and intellectual whole--it calls upon everything you are, everything you've experienced and everything you believe in.

How many leaders out there today can talk intelligently (and authentically) about “Purpose”? Purpose is all that successful CEOs need to talk about--although they may not actually usually use the word itself. If you have that and commonly share that with your employees, that you are destinied to be great. I hope this piece can inspire those who are starting their companies and are about to embark on the journey finding that "purpose". More next week.

The User Experience Professional Who Cares

It is sad for many at Blast Radius as this is Dave Lougheed’s last week here. He’s onto the next opportunity (VP User Experience of Chapters). I'm happy for him as he can put good use of his skills together with full ownership of the experience. Dave has been a Usability Strategist for more than a decade and no doubt one of the best in the industry. He provides great leadership and mentorship to the larger team and most important of all he cares. So I asked him what he can share with others. Here it is from Dave:

“But the one thing I really learned and will always remember: If usability work is done properly, the end user will never notice.”

Usability originated from the human-computer interaction design, at Blast Radius it's part of Experience Design and at some places like Critical Mass, it's part of Strategy (I was told by friends at CM). It doesn’t matter where it sits, there is always a "people" problem and a "technology" problem when it comes to the user experience. For these passionate professionals, this is what matters to them:

- User-driven everything.

- Contextual information is key

- Trust, Authority and Empathy are the pillars of information design

This "Experience Diagram" is a nice piece which I pulled from David Armano's blog Logci+Emotion  which I recently discovered (he produces great visuals and insights on the subject of experience design). He expands the role of the experience designer and his ideas are very relevant to our current transmedia environment. Usability (as core of Experience Design) is the thing that has dramatically changed the way we interact with products, people and machines. It is becoming more and more important in the modern society. I see it moving upstream as part of a company’s business strategy. In 3-5 years, may be. 

Attention Virtual Job Seekers - Bain, HP and Microsoft Recruiting at Second Life

This week Wall Street Journal reports that companies including Bain & Company, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft are now planning to recruit through Second Life. These companies are hosting job recruitment events on Second Life for the next few weeks. I'm not sure how many of you are prepared to do this, as we walk around as “avatars” and interact with recruiters while they test our skills. Hmmm.. I will talk to the team at Blast Radius who specializes in virtual identities design and see if they offer any advice on "How to present yourself as an Avatar" or maybe this is just another great idea for my (your) next book (or career).

If you plan to do that, I seriously think you should take a look at your current avatar image and see how that fits into your future career plan (especially if you wear a lot of "bling bling" and want a job with Bain). Dressing up your avatar in a pantsuit doesn't represent the kind of tech savy necessary (or even desirable?) for a job with Microsoft, unless the job is … designing avatars. I have yet to fully understand why companies that have recruiters all over the world can't dispatch them to a real-life auditorium.

I may consider to offer avatar image management services for those who need it. Anyone want to be my business partner? Please present me your avartar first.

Creative Collison - If Google bought Addidas 2010

I received a lot of emails with questions on the presentation I posted yesterday. They were mostly asking about how industries converge and how creative destruction happens. Not a simple question to answer but we all agree that “drawing of lines” between industry boundaries is becoming ever more difficult (or even possible at all) in today's disruptive technology-driven business climate. Products become services and services are powered by software. Then the interface deisgn humanized the interactions and thus becomes the brand. And your brand is out there in the networks which leaves you with little control. Social networks will soon be competing with search technologies; portable gaming device (you can make VOIP calls with Sony PSP and soon mobile calls) will compete with PDAs and even readers are now competing against media publishers.

The blurring of interindustry boundaries is attributed to such factors such as deregulation, globalization but mostly strategic (and democratic) use of technologies.

Most industries go through a "shakeout" phase during which the number of players in the industry declines. Industry output generally continues to rise, however, which implies a reallocation of capacity from exiting firms to incumbents and new entrants. Thus shakeouts seem to be classic creative destruction episodes. Shakeouts of firms tend to occur sooner in industries where technological progress is rapid (thanks to Google). I often employ scenario planning to help clients imagine the future. Here are a few interesting slides I want to share.  This was developed a year ago by Mike Smit and I to show hypothetically when two companies which operate in different industries can combine to create new markets. It is part of a larger “futuring” exercise and here are a few of those slides. The idea is "what if Google bought Addidas in 2010?"

Display Your IM and MySpace On Your T-Shirt - The Future Convergence of Fashion and Technology

I thought I might share this keynote presentation of mine (which was two years old when I was presenting in Spain and Italy 2005) and many ideas that are mentioned in here are now coming to the market. I talked about how fashion meets technology. Future young people will use all kind of mobile devices to send email, IM all these bite size messages to others, so displaying them on your T-shirt is the future. I wear my attitude, not only mine but my friends. It is a walking display of collective attitude. Call it "digital activism". I think we are 2 years away from this. No more A&F, net big thing is WearableYourSpace. It'€™s about radically rethinking the concept of what an "intelligent lifestyle" actually means. What is "wearable MySpace" looks like? We will be seeing social intelligence extended by integration of social network and geo information. Smart fashion offers exquisite design and technical solutions integrated with everyday objects including your iPhone. The future is exciting. Enjoy!

Social Networks Next Game

Continuing on looking at the development of social networks along its lifecycle, search is definitely the next thing that changes its very idea. Whether it’s just a manual search (with automated grouping or member-recommended groupings) will depend on the concept models of how each of those social network sites. It’s no question search will be the killer feature for social networking sites.

Check out Digg for search. The new Wink Collections allows you to create a group of interesting links and share them with friends. They added social networking and now support rich media including YouTube. The new share feature is a bit like the one from Facebook.

There is another new feature: a people search engine for Bebo, MySpace and Linkined - that appears under the People tab on the homepage. Wink is doing a complete crawl of these sites, allowing you to find people based on their name, username or interests etc. Wink also lets you bookmark people and add them to your connections. The advanced search is even more powerful, allowing you to search specific areas of a profile page.

Another company Plaxo has created the first Web service to share data between major address and calendar programs. With Plaxo 3.0, as the new service is known, consumers can synchronize address books and calendar data locked up inside Microsoft Outlook or Google etc.  This new service is going to compete with other social networks (particualy for business users), which, rather than forming links between computer address books, link people online through their shared media interests--based on what they write or the photos and video they choose to share.

You should also check out a meta-social networking site call Snag. It offers search across LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and Hi5. It also allows you to see your friends from all the networks, see your inboxes, and get status updates on your friends. This is the meta social network search. I can vision a feature that shows which social network one has signed up or actively engaged in.  Or create network maps of how one is affiliated with another through a number of networks. This will be a cool and useful feature, especially for business social networking. I will share my slides on the future evolution of social networks once I am done with it.

Google Strategy 2009 - CONFIDENTIAL

Let me show you a page in the Google strategy document 2009. Google will be the launching "Where you go, I will follow" marketing services for advertisers. They will launch this ad serving serive based on their two years of development work and some acquired technologies. The new Google strategic platform will be built around face recognition technology. They will literally be able to tell where you've been, why you've been there, and when you've been there.

Back to 2007,Google is now very close to acquiring Riya, a face recognition service that has expanded into a visual search engine for faces (and objects). They didn't want to buy the company because they prefer to develop one in-house. This can be integrated into Picasa to automatically detect people in your photos and organize them better (like MyHeritage does) and might be the foundation of a new kind of image search engine, that understands more from the pictures. But this is only the begining. They've just acquired Neven Vision, a company specialized in image recognition.  Neven Vision has developed a suite of mobile recognition technologies that enable images to become the interface to digital content—photos of ads become hyperlinks to branded content portals, while your camera phone can snap a picture of your face to secure verification of identity and control access to your private data. By equipping customers with an intuitive visual interface that anyone can use, this technology is unlocking vastly untapped market opportunities.

Initally this technology will be used by Google to improve Picasa, by detecting and recognizing obects and persons in the picture. But the biggest challenge would be to integrate this into their image search engine. The future goes beyond photos, imagine when we enter a department store and the security cameras pick up our face and activitate the personalization engine, then we will be beamed with special product recommendations, promotion pricing or just a list of our favourte designer items waiting in the changing room. Can you imagine the power available when, face-image recognition + search record data + location data = ?

How about walking past a shop window with the screen showing the exact product that you have been waiting for and was searching for on the internet the previous night?

How about walking into a store when the giant screen shows your friends and their shopping lists as they are linked to you in your social networks?

How about walking into the subway and the billboard showing you a happy birthday message to you together with a recommended list of presents you should get for yourself?

The only way to avoid this is to wear a mask and a hoodie when you go out, you will be ads free.

One thing I love about magazines (I subscribe to roughly 46 publications) is that there are no pop-up ads, no tracking of what I was reading, and I am nowehre to be found. Nice.

Yahoo! Mayday Mayday Mayday

It has been more than 8 months since Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, wrote an internal note to senior staff about his vision on the current company’s (lack of ?) strategy, Yahoo finally took the step to replace CEO Terry Semel with "Chief Yahoo" Jerry Yang. The question is what’s next? What’s the game plan? Employee morale is at its lowest, and a few key management positions remain unfilled including the CTO job. There hasn’t been any innovation coming from Yahoo for a long time. A few months ago Yahoo opened what it calls "Brickhouse," a unit devoted to developing innovative new products, but so far there's been only one release--Yahoo Pipes, an interactive feed aggregator.

Yahoo has been acting like an “old media” company for the last 36 months. With 12,000 employees and so many different products and business units, Yahoo has become a large, complex corporation that is slow responding to competitive threats, such as Google on search and search advertising. They missed out totally on the whole social media space and are way behind the curve in their video sharing properties (they did a pretty poor job at that too). They failed to integrate their services or create a centralized place for people to hang out. Yahoo's 360 social network has not been widely adopted, although there is ‘some’ good stuff there.

More importantly, Yahoo! has failed to articulate a clear strategy about how the company will compete with Google and be the dominant player for years to come. Better monetizing search is NOT a company strategy, it's only a tactic. Improving a lead in graphical ads is NOT a strategy, it's a tactic. Doing a few more acquisitions is NOT a strategy, it’s a tactic. As a career strategist for 25 years I can tell that they don’t have one. That’s a very serious problem. This fleet of 757s is flying without navigational support or any sense of destiny.

This is like the first life crisis of a teenager and the next two years will be important turning points in Yahoo! history.

What it is telling us is: If Yahoo has trouble competing against Google as a media company then what hopes do traditional media companies have? I want to write about the next media crisis.

ROI for Communities

One big challenge marketers face all the time is the ROI of developing online communities or social networks. The question is what's in it for them as a brand/company and this is always a little tricky. The second question is how close/distant this community needs to be from the company site. Should that resides outside or should it be branded separately? It seems that 25%-35% or so of major online businesses in the process of or has already implemented an online community (1.0 or 2.0) or social network while the other 65%-75% are wondering where to begin. The primary considerations are:

1/ the business objectives and purpose of the community - without a goal, you cannot measure success. It also needs to be time specific. I will not go for more than 3 years.

2/ a community require ownership and or should I say co-ownership with your members. That needs to be clear up-front. You don't own them.

3/ we need to determine upfront the nature of the communities and take into the level of involvement that we desire to have (high involvement vs. low involvement product categories)

4/ reciprocity is key - the community will succeed only if the marketer benefits (ROI) and the audience benefits. This value exchange needs to be properly communicated and revisited every 12 months.

5) Return on Investment - . As marketers or publishers - you not only have to satisfy your audience, you have to justify the investments (both one time and operational cost). There's no simple answer to this. In fact, I am building a comprehensive model to calculate the ROI. The variables that drive the return on investment vary based on your industry and may include reducing support costs, decreased attrition rates which lead to higher revenue, improved customer loyalty, customer, building buzz, product launches, competitive differentiation, rapid product innovation, etc. In general they belong to one of the three categories below:

- Customer Service and Support

- Product Development (ideas and collaboration)

- Brand or Product or Category Marketing

Before starting on your ROI, this will give you some general ideas:

- Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T)

- Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay)

- Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester)

- Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users and have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKinsey).

- 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg)

The Next Big (Small) Thing

I often chat with my friend Scott Friedmann about radical ideas to reinvent industies and how we have no shortage of them. We talked about hundreds of ideas of reinventing the next Starbucks; the next Burger King; the next MTV and the next eveything. The scary part is almost all of them are viable. That leads me to think where is the NEXT big idea that can drastically improve our way of life for the general mass??

I was thinking about seatbelts and bicycle helmets the other day. Whether you secure yourself with a basic rope like a crazy cab driver in Naroubi or a smart automatic seatbelt in the latest Mercedes, the seatbelt is now fairly well accepted in most societies. It has not always been that way, and through its creation in the 1800s many lives were saved. It takes a very simple idea /creation to change the way people think about their sense of safety. The saftey belt idea saved many lives and still saves many today. Cell phones may yet be the other big invention that can claim to have saved many lives.

Then I ask myself where is the next seatbelt? ….simple idea, big impact. Bringing it closer to home to what I do, what's the last digital device / apps that is simple but yet have a big impact? With all this GPS / LBS / RFID / Google Earth... I think there are plenty of ingredients to cook up the next big thing.. (not another videosharing site please).

As business strategists we always think about creating new markets, the question becomes how do we ensure that the poorest segments of society can access these product? I remember reading about "design for the bottom of the pyramid”, but who is taking the lead to do this?  While corporations are looking for their next big growth opportunity, the world at large is looking for a more inclusive form of capitalism. What if we can engage the 6 billion people who are making less than $1 a day… profitably? Serving this traditionally underserved market demands a bottom-up approach to business modeling and ideation. This kind of "Social Innovation" will be the next big thing on its own. And that's a key part of the framework I developed in my CEO Innovation Playbook which I am adovcating within my business circles.

Do you have the next big idea for the bottom of the pyramid? Send them this way.

Facebook Open Platofrm Strategy

When Facebook launched its Facebook Open Platform tools last month, hundreds of developers were allowed for the first time to create mini-apps that members of could install and use in their profiles. It is a killer strategy. Expect lots of innovation and that includes silly applicaitons like this one. With "Food Fight," you can select from a menu of cafeteria staples and proceed to hurl them at people on your Facebook friends list. Created by David Gentzel, this is as pointless as it gets, you can fling a slice of virtual pizza at your buddy. But don't get too crazy--you only get$2.50 of "lunch money" per day to spend on food to throw at your friends. Not sure if it is enough these days.

Social Networks for Business

I was planning to complile a comprehensive list of social networking sites (complete with taxonomies) and it's quite the challenging task. I started with "business" related sites (see the list below) and soon I realized it would be hard to differentiate between a business social networking site and a business "who's who" search engine. There's already a social networking company Visible Path, which calls itself a "relationship capital management company,"  that's improving its search capabilities. It signed a deal with business information broker Hoover's to help salespeople using Visible Path's software find and contact executives listed in the Hoover's extensive business database.

The difference between search and social-networking sites is that users opt in to social networking sites, whereas search engines index online information until site owners opt out. And commercial data brokers collect information regardless of whether those in their databases object. And now, a new crop of web communities are taking the popular idea and customizing it to address the concerns of specific business needs. Sites such as Partner Up is deisgned to allow entrepreneurs and businesses to find people who are interested in being a partner in their business. These opportunties are traditonally brokered by accountants and commercial bankers. I think this is a great concept but needs a lot of refinement. A level of facilitation is still needed to make this model work.

Affinity Engines, Appiir, Business Parc, BusinessPartnerships.ca, Contact Network, Doostang, ecademy, eConozco, Eliyon, EntreMate, eXtremeNetworking.biz*, Friendly Favors, GoingProfessional, Growth Company, I'm Not From Here, InterAction, ITmob, ItsNotWhatYouKnow, Join Network PLUS, LLC, Kickstart-Connect, Konnects, LinkedIn, Link Silicon Valley, matcheroo, Mediabistro, Monster Networking, NetMiner, Netmodular Community, Networking For Professionals, Online Business Networking Resource, Open Business Club (openBC), OrderGenerator, PeopleThatClick, Point Relevance, Polypol, PowerMingle, RealContacts, ReferNet, Reunion, Ryze, SelectMinds, Senior Management Network*, Shortcut, Silicon Valley Pipeline, Spoke Software, Sullivan Executive Networking Community, Tacit - ActiveNet, TENG, Viaduc, Visible Path, WisdomBuilder, Zerendipity Networks, Zerodegrees.