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Apr
21
Two tales of user-centricities
Filed Under New models, VRM, Autonomy, Web/Tech | 3 Comments
I get edgy when I hear people talk about being user-centric. I once fell for it, thinking that they saw users’ wants as their starting point. Well, user-centric is an improvement on the system-centric approach where the top-down design forces users into a slot of whatever is built, no matter whether it works well or not. (Hence the phrase user-friendly applies mostly to things not designed for the user. I don’t talk about del.icio.us as being user-friendly, because its simplicity and functionality allows the user to drive the use, not the designer.)
User-centric says - ‘we are going to build a system, put the user in the centre instead of the system’. So far, so good, but this sits uncomfortably with me as a user especially as one that is used to the online tools that have changed many an old way. The tools - blogs, wikis, feeds and feed readers, BitTorrent, Flickr, Dopplr, Twitter etc - are revolutionary not just because of their functionality, bits of code or their interface, but their design for usefulness, their modularity and constant evolution. There is an element of open-endedness in their design, either accidental or deliberate, recognising that the designers cannot foresee all the uses to which people will put the tools to. The simplicity is the key, the complexity coming from usage rather than the design. In other words, they are user-driven.
A simple test of user-driven design is in the answer to a question - Can the user add value to it? Without users del.icio.us would pointless, BitTorrent empty and Flickr dead, Twitter silent.
Last year at the IIW in Mountain View, I got talking to Bob Frankston about the difference I started to see between the user-centric and user-driven. Bob, in his inimitable fashion, used the tuna salad we were having for lunch during the conversation to coin an analogy. A ready-made tuna salad is user-centric - it has been decided what goes into it, in what proportions and what order. It has been designed around me and for me but I cannot add anything to it.
Giving me ingredients, utensils and a recipe suggestion and letting me get on with it, leads to user-driven design- it can still be meant to become a tuna salad but I get to put it together, determine the proportions, skip or add ingredients. The process is driven by me and the experience makes me (hopefully) better at making the dish.
Of course, there are times for user-centric and there are times for user-driven. Not everyone wants to make everything themselves and neither is it the best or most effective way to design all systems or tools. But there are cases when only user-driven will do. And VRM is one of them.
Apr
13
Quote to remember
Filed Under Open source/IP/DRM, New models, Film, Quotes, Trends, Web/Tech, Media | Leave a Comment
It’s not about the money, it’s about ALL the money.
- description of the entertainment business in Wired article Myka: One Set-Top Box to Rule Them All?
Apr
10
Quote to remember
Filed Under New models, Open source/IP/DRM, Web/Tech, Media | 3 Comments
[H]umans are copying machines. We learn by imitating one another. That’s how we learn to speak. That’s how we learn social norms. That’s how culture happens. Everything we do is an invitation to copy. And now, thanks to digitization and the Internet, we can express that in ways that we couldn’t before. The Internet is the ultimate copying machine, and it’s affecting many business models. There are times when piracy is a great idea and there are times when it’s not; that’s why I call it a dilemma. The point is, though, it is not a dead end. It’s in the interest of all who deal with the buying and selling and sharing of ideas to confront piracy and its implications now — that is, to reevaluate their business models so they include ways to capitalize on a freer flow of ideas and on more sharing of information and content.
- Edward Baker in We are all pirates
Apr
5
On CRM being the right answer to the wrong question and on camera lenses
Filed Under New models, VRM, Business | 1 Comment
Tomas Kohl is on the roll:
The real question was, indeed, how do we as a company manage to treat our customers with some sense of dignity without actually bothering to zoom in on them from the extreme wide angle (customer base, segments) to telephoto (households, individuals). Hence the effort to power up the operational CRM with capabilities of analytical CRM (that is, building some sort of number-based insight into the scary X-gigabyte swarm of operational data).
But the analytical CRM cannot build any meaningful “insight” into who your customers really are while treating the customer data as any other kind of transactional data. We humans are made of shape-shifting bits. We don’t stay transactional very long.
One of the reasons VRM may not be the best term (although there is good logic behind it) is that VRM is not just ‘flipping’ CRM but refocusing companies to a picture bigger than the transaction.
Companies look at the world around them, their markets and customers as if through a camera lens, their focus firmly set to macro or fish-eye. They only care about a narrow shot, zooming close, thinking pixels with replace understanding. (cp demographics, data harvesting, analytics etc) or receding far away from it (market research, analyst reports, industry-wide papers etc). The resulting distortion is familiar to anyone dealing with business.
The bigger (and richer) the company, the more expensive lens it can afford - one of those large long ones on professional cameras - the more distance from the object of their focus. Small companies have ‘cheaper’ cameras and end up being closer to what surrounds them although the camera makes sure they are not part of the picture.
To push the analogy even further, cameras are now widely available and affordable. Everyone can buy one and use it with reasonable competence. Amateurs can occasionally achieve good results with little digital cameras too and so photography is no longer the domain of the professionals. It is the same with tools that capture data and understanding of trends and behaviours - online simple, modular but effective tools match and outperform the lumbering business IT systems.
So companies are not the only ones capable of taking photos, we all can do that, often better than them.
The camera analogy brings out another aspect of companies’ interaction with the world - at arms length, from behind the camera. In my view, they should be part of the picture, swapping the camera with other photo snappers.
Apr
5
Quote to remember
Filed Under New models, Communication, Public relations, Trends, Weblogs | Leave a Comment
For 100 years companies have been pushing what they think people are interested in out through one way communications channels. But now that people are redefining the rules of engagement, companies have to rediscover how to interact with people. It’s about unlearning a lot of behaviors and reacquiring the voice that businesses used in the days before mass advertising and promotion in the conversations that occurred between the village storekeepers and the people in the community. It’s hard to do, but by listening to people (remember the earhorn?) and not being afraid to get involved in the conversation, companies can slowly find that voice.
- Marc Monseau in Hanging with Mommy Bloggers
Mar
28
Musings on social media, enterprise, wine-making and terroir
Filed Under New models, Enterprise 2.0, Business, Tools and applications, Web/Tech | 1 Comment
Most of my recorded experience with social software revolves around the ‘hard’ issues like people and shifting their minds and corporate culture, so in my conversations with David Tebbutt and Angela Ashenden of Macehiter Ward-Dutton earlier this week I wanted to offer a useful perspective on social software in the enterprise that takes a broader view than just focusing on individual employees. I came up with an analogy based on the wine industry.
First a brief background on what has happened to the wine industry globally in the last 30 years. Before 1970s French wine used to be considered the pinnacle of all wines. It was the great French tradition, the noble grapes (despite Phylloxera wiping out most of the original vines in 19th century), but mainly it was the unrivalled terroirs of Bordeaux and Burgundy. (Loosely translated as “a sense of place” which is embodied in certain qualities, and the sum of the effects that the local environment has had on the manufacture of the product).
In 1976, the (in)famous wine tasting of Californian wines next to top French wines in Paris has shifted that world view*. This is because the Californian wines beat the French ones in a blind tasting on their own territory and in their own game - by tasting the way it was believed impossible to achieve without the magic of the terroir. The fallout over the next few decades was profound - once wine-makers all over the world realised that it is possible to produce wine a la Bordeaux or Burgundy in other countries, the experimentation and eventually production of quality wines from other countries has exploded. Thanks to that we now have some superb Californian, Argentinian, Italian, Spanish, Australian, Chilean, South African and Lebanese wines capable of matching the French ones in quality. There are purists who’d disagree and for a long time I have been amongst them but I am not enough of a wine snob to persist in that view in the face of considerable (and very enjoyable) evidence.
Before 1976 tasting, there seemed no point in producing quality wine aimed at the same market that the French wine-makers so successfully monopolised for centuries. Even if you had the same grapes and same techniques, you couldn’t replace the terroir… or could you? A few mad wine aficionados, with burning love of wine, innovator’s zeal, insane persistence and a big dose of luck spend years experimenting with wine-making techniques that would bring their brews close to their beloved Grand Crus. They have changed the balance between the three elements that makes wine - soil, grape and wine-making - and demonstrated that it is possible to compensate for the lack of the terroir magic with carefully applied wine-making techniques. It was no longer imitation of the ingredients or methods but an entirely new mix of components still designed to produce the same highly desirable outcome.
And this is how it is with social media/social software. There is no point in planting the vines of social web in the enterprise and expecting them to produce the same as they do outside in the open web. The soil is not the same, the terroir wildly different. If you want to achieve an outcome of similar quality and impact - better communication, more transparency, faster information exchange, more skilled and engaged employees, more and rewarding involvement with the outside world - you will have to take the grapes (the social media tools and software) and make sure that your ‘wine-making’ balances out what your environment lacks.
The most important things missing from the enterprise terroir is the individual autonomy. It is a sad and indisputable fact that anyone can do a lot more online outside their work than in the office. If companies want to get close to the social web magic, they will need to include this crucial ingredient into their approach. Treat your employees with respect and trust. Give them space to play and experiment. They will reward you with creativity and innovation. And if you do it right, with more respect and trust in return.
Ultimately, as every company has its own mixture of systems, culture and employees drive and skills, here are some tips for companies:
- the best wines tend to be made by people who grow the plant the vines, harvest the grapes and then make the wine with love and care - the best use of social media comes from within the company, your own people who can combine understanding of social media/social software with your business, customers and processes. they can also look for new grapes, new ways to improve your techniques.
- vineyards and winemakers often get experts in but these are invariably very accomplished practitioners with reputation that proceeds them. If you need external expertise make sure those you bring in have a proven record as well as understanding and respect for your terroir and know how to adjust their approach to it.
- wine-makers share their experience, results of experiments, collaborate, even help each other practically - reach out to your peers, to exchange and compare notes, don’t just copy case studies or methodologies, respect your own terroir.
- enjoy your experiments, they might actually be palatable, if not right now, then in the future.
*Judgement of Paris is a wonderful book written for 30th anniversary of the 1976 wine tasting by the reporter present at the event. Highly recommended.
Mar
21
Data (r)evolution
Filed Under New models, Social web, Web/Tech, Events | 1 Comment
Hank William’s presentation at BarCampNYC3 last weekend was the most memorable as well as useful for what I am currently thinking about. Here is a reconstructed transcript from my notes taken during his talk. Any confusion or mis-representations are mine.
In my work I see the same problem solved again and again, focused on number of different things – this issue interesting – how we store data, how do we represent the data? Relational databases don’t look the way our data logic works, if you look at web 2.0 applications and how people are using them.
Relational databases are not good for knowledge as information over time cannot easily evolve to have a structure that didn’t exist when we conceived our application. For example, accounting system, you can design such an application and it’s going to stay that way. With web 2.0 you don’t know when you start what your business model will be and that makes such approach very limiting. Over the last few decades, technologically we squeezed every ounce of performance from technology. The main problem is that they are just very inflexible and brittle!
Why do relational databases have this problem? When you create it, a record is just a collection of information, contact record – first name, last name - you can have thousands of them. But if I want to connect two records, for example, an invoice (name client, field products etc) and another record (I want to track of the fact that if was or not paid), I am going to have keep a field (name of the company) and two tables (a record and a check) defined within that record from the start. So if I want to do something later, authorisation for example, another record, and if I were to relate the invoice to authorisation I have to point the check and relate it to that.
Basically, every time I want to create a relationship between two objects I have to modify the record. That is bad, it means that no object in a system can be stable and every time a new relationship I have to add something to the object in question. When you create your system, you have decide how you want the system to be. When you have 100,000 records and want to change something or evolve, this is a problem.
My favourite comparison of this kind of approach: a woman is having a child, a doctor walks in and says: “Before you give birth, can me give you the name of every friend your child will have or has in the life and by the way, we have got five minutes.
That’s what a relational database really requires. Once you have it set up, you can’t just start doing something even if it makes sense. That’s the problem.
The solution is social graph, a concept that Facebook made famous. You can have multiple objects - these could be invoices, or contacts on Facebook, they could be anything - and the graph is the connections between them. The great thing is that you don’t worry about what this is in order to create a connection. You don’t need to modify anything to create a connection. Every object stands on its own.
This is a fairly radical concept in data management, as we can not only connect these objects, we can also say ‘what’s the relationship?’. Directional (husband, wife) (friend to) if you can imagine all your data with relationships where you can connect the objects on the fly, it radically changes the nature of web 2.0 application.
You can also have another object, not just a contact, a restaurant, e.g. Nobu and the relationship is favourite. You create a new thing called restaurant and immediately we can connect John with Nobu with a relationship favourite. To do this in relational DB you’d have to create a new table and modify John so he has favourite restaurant field, and three more slots to John. It would be complicated and that’s not workable on the web as these are the kinds of relationships that we want to represent.
We always think about how to connect stuff in Web 2.0, this is the way this stuff works, something that’s connected by default. If I want to have an app mapping my restaurants I’d create a new information silo.
How do you connect data of disparate types – pictures in Flickr to a record in Facebook, the idea is to manage these relationships across the whole web. The concept of semantic web is great but I think as it’s right now is FAIL, it’s too complicated, not the way people do things.
Kloudshare – the idea is to be able to store data in the cloud, do relationship search, to query the graph and be able to access it from your web applications. Not to have to set up MySQL server.
There are other issues about social graph, it doesn’t map very well yet although the tools out there So far I don’t have the sense that there are off-the-shelf tools for scaling this stuff. But the cool thing about graph is that it allows for different types of user interface. You can actually create a bunch of user interfaces – a business card – you can represent it and the relationship between various business cards so you can see the graph. I can explore each item on the graph, look at Nobu and see all people who thought Nobu was great etc.
The idea is that from the UI perspective, it is a very simple unified web where you can look at relationship of any object and opportunity to think about data and knowledge and how are things related. It is a profound thing that any piece of information that you have you can stand from that point of information and see the whole universe…
Would love to know more about Kloudshare, sadly nothing came up when I googled it.
Mar
20
Quote to remember
Filed Under New models, Communication, Social web, Business, Quotes | 2 Comments
Why does listening to your customers sound like a web 2.0 idea? It should be a business 1.0 necessity.
- Jeff Jarvis in Starbucks listens - at last
Feb
16
Quote to remember
Filed Under New models, Open source/IP/DRM, Business, Quotes | 2 Comments
The openness of the Internet is what made Google — and Yahoo! — possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It’s what makes the Internet such an exciting place.
- Yahoo! and the future of the internet, The official Google blog. via Doc
Feb
6
Sound recommendations for business
Filed Under New models, Open source/IP/DRM, Business, People | Leave a Comment
From an interview with Mitchell Baker [free registration needed], former CEO and now Chairman of Mozilla Corporation and a director of Mozilla Foundation:
The Quarterly: What can other leaders learn from the Mozilla project about running an innovative company?
Mitchell Baker: Turning people loose is really valuable. You have to figure out what space and what range, but you get a lot more than you would expect out of them, because they’re not you.
Second, figure out where you want input. There are different varieties of input and user-generated content. Figuring out what you really want is very important because you can get benefits out of any of those things. But if you’re doing one thing and sending out a message that you’re doing another, I think you’re dead.
Third, look hard at whether there are areas where you can give up some control, because the returns are great.
Jan
22
The long tail of production
Filed Under New models, Film, Tools and applications, Trends | 1 Comment
This is very cool, especially being able to see how it was made:
Technology doesn’t create amazing things like this, people do. Technology helps people to do that and maximises the chances of new and better technology. And more amazing things being created.
What’s new is that the new camera/apps are steadily coming becoming like a word processor — both pros and amateurs use the same one. The great script is not due to a better word processor; it’s how the great write uses it. Likewise, a great film is not due to better gear. The same gear needed to make a good film is today generally available to amateurs — which was not so even a decade ago. Film making gear is approaching a convergence between professional and amateur, so that what counts in artistry and inventiveness.
The long tail of production is the effect of technology being widely available and, in case of videos, making the physical limitations of video production (expensive equipment, video editing suites, studios etc) slowly dissolve just like the physical limitations of music stores were bypassed by online distribution of music, books and films. On the production side, it means that more people can produce and the story is in watching what kind of things they will make.
Jan
3
The curse of the platform or advertising is not a business model
Filed Under Social web, New models, Advertising, Business, Tools and applications, Media | 4 Comments
I must agree with Alec’s post Twitter Business Models / Calacanis is Bonkers? where he calls Calacanis barking mad crazy for talking about in feed advertising and SMS advertising for Twitter. I am surprised that in this day and age anyone would consider advertising a long term, or even medium term, way of making money online. I can only hope that Hugh was being deeply sarcastic.
At best they may maintain some control over their half-life - how long it will take to lose half of their users, and then half of what remains - but decay is inevitable and will be rapid. Maybe they could milk some cash out of it on the way down, whilst they are pissing-off their userbase? Not a good plan for growth…
Indeed, especially as Calacanis believes in scale and this underscores his recommendations to Twitter.
It’s about scale. When you’re playing in the big leagues with unlimited access to capital you shouldn’t worry about revenue BEFORE you have critical mass.
Here is industrial age thinking translated into online environment. And true enough, to the extent that the mindset still rules our behaviour online. But there may be another way, in the ‘channel world’ scale is in aggregation. In the networked world, scale is in distribution. That is why people from the former build platforms, people from the latter build applications that help distribution. It is not platforms that are bringing the media industry to its business model knees but P2P-eed teenagers, networked bloggers and applications that increase the individual’s ability to produce, share and distribute.
The curse of the platform is that although it may initially bring users value, as time goes on it is hard to sustain, let alone make money as the cognitive dissonance about who your real customers are increases with time. At the start, when building a platform, the platform owners consider themselves, or at least behave as if, serving the users. But the moment they decide to start placing adverts or otherwise ‘monetise the eyeballs’, their real customers are the advertisers. There’s not many of them wot gets it:
Craigslist had been approached about placing text ads on the site. “We’ve had the numbers crunched for us,” he said. “The numbers are quite staggering.” But, no, the site wasn’t interested. “No users have been requesting that we run text ads, so for us, that’s the end of the story,” he said to the befuddlement of the crowd. “If users start calling out for text ads, we’ll listen.”
Another unspoken question presents itself - Is making x gazillion $$$ within a finite amount of time a business model? Or is an exit strategy with $$$ in the bank a business model? Both are certainly a way of making money but a business model is something more fundamental. It is about creating a way to create value, to maintain and grow it. The aims is to make enough money to keep doing just that. I don’t see much of that in Web 1.0/2.0. But I may be old-fashioned like that.
One of the statements that made my heart leap last year is: Advertising is a form of censorship. The Web of 2007 is a house built upon sand. But more about that later…
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London VRM meetings
