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March 22, 2008
I am so disappointed that I had to miss Lisa Stone’s Berkman talk. She’s blogged a transcript here, and pretty soon the video will be up here. Sounds like a great talk…
March 14, 2008
I’ve been at Euroblog 2008 yesterday and today, and will be tomorrow as well. It’s a mix of academics and practitioners talking about marketing and public relations in the age of the Web.
The conference seems to assume that we agree that the Web has changed the marketing landscape, that customers are not mere consumers, that marketing has to change right down to its skivvies. The academics at the conference have generally backed this up with actual research. What marketing can and should be, however, is a matter of more controversy here. As it should be. [Tags: euroblog2008 marketing public_relations]
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Catharine Taylor has a new blog about social media as a marketing platform. Yes, it’s a problematic formulation — which is one of the points of Euroblog — but Catharine is skeptical about the importance of social media, albeit not yet expressing much skepticism about the propriety and effectiveness of using them for marketing.
March 6, 2008
From a presentation I heard this morning. I didn’t catch the attributions:
2.1% of worldwide power is used by data centers
The power consumed by Google’s servers could power Chicago for a year, and equals the carbon sequestering of 250,000 trees.
Apparently, Dole puts a code on its produce that you can enter into a Web page to see a Google Earth image of the farm that produced it
March 4, 2008
Harvard Business Review this month is running a “case study” (pure fiction) I wrote about whether companies can and should be authentic. The case study is intended to be even-handed in its presentation; it’s followed by expert commentary. They’ve posted the case on their Web site and have opened it up to readers for discussion. There’s also a video of Julia Kirby (one of the editors) interviewing me on the topic, on that same page. FWIW, I am not at all convinced that the term “authenticity” is helpful — or maybe even meaningful — when applied to business.
March 3, 2008
Given Wal-Mart’s size and its heavy-handed approach to so much of life, the fact that it’s letting its buyers blog freely is welcome news. (Disclosure: I consult to Edelman PR, which has Wal-Mart as a client. But all I know about this is what I read in the linked article; I assume but don’t know that Edelman was involved. And, yes, this disclosure is now longer than the post.)
February 27, 2008
1995-6 I was VP of strategic marketing at Open Text, right when it went from search engines to intranet collaboration software. I’m at a CIO ass’n meeting in Waterloo, Ontario, where Open Text’s exec chair, and my old boss (and current friend), Tom Jenkins is giving a talk on Enterprise 2.0. Also, last year I did a paid consulting day at Open Text. So, I am biased in just about every way a person can be biased, from sentimental memories to the possibility of future consulting. With that in mind, here goes:
Tom begins by pointing to the Obama campaign. “2.0 is here,” he says, pointing at Obama’s “community blogs” page. Politicians are breaking out of the confines of the media. But, of course, not just politicians, he says.
Web 2.0 really points to two facts: We have bandwidth and an enormous volume of users. (Web 2.0 was always with us in some ways, says Tom, as I nod vigorously.) In 2.0, everyone gets to talk and everyone gets to listen.
He points to the dangers of a 2.0 world. E.g., a Canadian passport control person blogged about the secret marks on passports. The blog site had been intended to increase productivity, but because it was a public site, a secret was blown. Nevertheless, says Tom, “You can’t bury your head in the sand. In the long term, you’ll be at a competitive disadvantage with companies that do embrace these productivity tools.” Not to mention, you won’t be able to hire and keep under-30s (Tom says).
Tom calls Web 1.5 what happened around 2000. Also around then, the lawyers started getting nervous.
Tom contrasts Web 1.0 and Web 2.0: from inform to engage, from few authors to many, from few contributors to many. In Web 2.0, treats the Web as a platform with “desktop-level bandwidth” (or so).
Tom places metadata at the center of content management [and literally points to me in the audience <blush>]
“Social networking is shaping the minds of our employees,” his slide says. Yahoo, Google, etc., are “pre-training our employees.”
We’re starting to map the business processes to the social and human processes, Tom says. This requires getting past technology lock-ins.
Some random facts from Tom:
We have produced 32 M books in our history. That’s about 600 TeraBytes
100,000 films cumulative history= 20TB
4M songs cumulative history = 8TB
300TB of email per year.
100TB Web pages = 100
Alp Hug from Open Text takes up the talk, to explain how to take advantage of 2.0 technology in the organization while avoiding the dangers, which — what a shock! — happens to map to Open Text’s software and services. [It’s good to see Open Text embracing this social software stuff.]
February 4, 2008
This Mon, Feb 11, at 7pm, there will be a Very Special Web of Ideas: A concert by and conversation with Brad Sucks (AKA Brad Turcotte), the webbiest musician on the Web. We’ll listen to some songs performed live and talk with Brad about what the battle over “business models” means to someone making music.
Note that we’re not holding this one in the Berkman Center. It’ll be in Griswold Hall Room 110 at Harvard Law. It’s free and open to all; rsvp to [email protected].
There are lots of reasons Google is not only the most important single company on the Internet, it is in many ways the defining Internet company. Among the most significant reasons: It’s got the creative rhythm of a BS session among the five funniest people you know. Think it, say it, top it, move on. Except with code, not jokes.
Want to slow this process down? Acquire another company. Especially a really, really big company. Especially a really, really big company that is in strategic disarray.
I’d say that I don’t know what Microsoft is thinking, but I actually think I do. Microsoft is thinking about the economics of consumers. Google is in an economy of creators.
We all want healthy competition for Google. But it now feels more like we’re watching evolution than competition.
January 26, 2008
Gov. Deval Patrick plans on funding necessary and humane projects in Massachusetts by licensing three casinos. I’m not crazy about that idea, in part because casinos stack the odds against customers. The house always wins. That’s unfair, even though casinos are transparent it.
If we’re going to finance public programs on the backs of the desperate, we at least ought to give our local pigeons fair odds. So, why not require Massachusetts casinos to pay out at odds that factor in no cut for the house? If there’s a 1:38 chance your number will come up at the roulette table, your winning number would be paid at 38:1, not 36:1. Even without their edge (5.26% in roulette), the casinos would make money selling food, liquor, lodging, parking, pay-per-porn in-room tv, and tickets to entertainers you thought died fifteen years ago.
Not only would this keep the state from profiting from an industry predicated on unfairness, it would also give Massachusetts casinos a competitive edge against the casinos in those other states. Why would you gamble in a place where the odds are stacked against you if you could instead “A mass more wealth in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts…the Fair Play State.”
January 20, 2008
Doris Obermair interviewed me at the Picnic conference in spring 2007, and now has posted an edited version in which I talk about the effect of the miscellaneous on business. (With Spanish subtitles.) (By the way, I list videos here.)
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