horsepigcow

Probably about 6 months before I was hired by Riya.com, I was interviewed by a VP of Interactive at Chapters Indigo in Toronto.

I think that interview was a couple years ahead of it’s time. I remember really struggling to explain why Chapters Indigo needed the idea of online community and community tools. Saying, “When people go into your store, there is a warmth. They sit and read with others, sometimes comparing notes. I’ve bought many books based on a discussion I’ve had with the shopper sitting next to me. That would be amazing to find a way to replicate online.” The VP looked at me with doubt, shook my hand and never followed up.

Then today, I receive this email in my inbox:

Dear Tara,

Chapters.Indigo.ca, Canada’s online bookstore, is currently soft-launching a new social networking application for Canadian booklovers.

The official announcement has not yet been made, and the press release won’t go out on the wire for another week; we wanted to give you advance notice before the news broke, and we can provide you with answers to any questions you have about the application or specific screenshots you might want.

What’s unique about this program is that it’s a complex and highly-functional social networking application built with a very specific community in mind. In addition to functions on more broadly-targeted social networking sites, Indigo’s community members can reach out to other members in order to form book clubs, recommend books, or write reviews, all with other Canadian booklovers.

Right now the community is visible from Indigo’s homepage (the green tabs in the upper-right corner), or you can click directly: http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/community/.

Best,

Name withheld

Now, before I go on, I should point out that is this an example respectfully written PR note (notice, he didn’t pretend to have read my blog) that was sent because I am a customer (not a blogger – thus demonstrating the desire to let their customers into the scoop before the press…which is awesome).

But besides being pleasantly surprised by the good PR move, I was shocked with the content. Chapters Indigo has launched a social network!? Man, I wish I could remember the name of the VP Interactive I interviewed with. I’d LOVE to drop her an email and say, “Congrats! I wasn’t so clear on describing it at the time, but this is what I meant!”

Although I haven’t spent much time on there, it seems that they’ve created a nice interface that interacts seamlessly with my shopping experience (I can add books to my “have read” list and “planning to read” list as I’m browsing). They also have used ajax in the right places, it seems…and not gratuitously. Whoever it was that they DID hire is a pretty smart cookie and did a fine job of executing on what I meant (but couldn’t quite annunciate). I hope she/he reads blog posts regarding his/her work as well so I can virtually shake his/her hand.

And as an initial point of pride, Chapters Indigo, the book company with too many names (the story is kind of cute on that one…lots of loyalty to the Chapters brand when Indigo bought them, so they kept both names), is a Canadian company. Kind of the Borders of Canada. Except it’s better.

On October 22-23 in Mountain View, Kaliya Hamlin and a group of others is putting on a really cool conference that I thought everyone should know about:

She’s Geeky
A Women’s Tech (un)conference
October 22-23 in Mountain View, CA.

This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self identify as geeky. Their goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and talking about issues faced by women in technology.

Really essential topics are being brought forward (as this is an unconference, input is welcome AND used) such as the lack of women in open source, dealing with analysts, a discussion on whether or not there is such thing as feminist technology, negotiating, speaker training, and the list goes on…

Personally, I believe this conference is important because it isn’t just about some top-down idea of what women should be like in order to ‘succeed in a man’s world’. This is about women (and men) gathering to come up with ideas and solutions going forward. Some topics are meant to provoke discussion and debate and unravel assumptions. Other discussions are meant to give the tools for change. I feel really hopeful that this approach is a good one for our community and I hope that everyone goes.

And, if you are like us and can’t go (boooo! we’re out of town), you can sponsor. They are still looking for people to contribute financially to keeping this a low-cost event. Email shesgeeky at gmail or post your intention on the wiki. Any and all additional information can be found on their website: shesgeeky.org

Many companies have spent alot of advertising dollars to tell us what’s wrong with the competition. I spent the last US election, wondering what each candidate really had to offer since all I heard from them was what their rival did (or was going to do) wrong. I constantly hear from startups who talk about how their competitors suck so bad.

To me, this kind of smack talk against competitors isn’t only in bad taste, but it seems to deflect from any discussion about what it is that the smack talker has to offer. Are they trying to avoid the question as to, “Why would I give a damn about them?” Even worse is when a company disses another company that is clearly ahead of them in popularity. Seriously? If their product/service sucks so bad, why are so many people using it? Perhaps by dissing it, you are entirely missing the point?

The first rule of spreading the love is that you never talk smack about ‘the other team’. Social Capitalists (those that spread love and raise social capital through that action) never feel the need to talk poorly of their ‘rivals’, instead, they admire the smart things that they have done and learn from what they could improve on. Hell, true Social Capitalists work with their competition in order to make for better customer experiences.

A couple of times in my history I’ve been a disser and never has it worked out positively for me. For example, when I started at Riya, I went after Flickr, joining in the angry mob with pitchforks over the Yahoo! TOS. Not only was that a dumb move because it made me look like a jerk, but it also created a bit of a rift between myself and the awesome peeps at Flickr. Therefore, when it came time for me to go to them about using their API for commercial purposes, I had to explain my previous lack of judgement and re-establish trust connections. Fortunate for me, the Flickr folks are wonderful and understanding, but I still felt like a numbskull.

What would have that gained me? Nothing, really.

Now, in a different angle of dissing, that of a David going up against an 800-lb Goliath, dissing causes a bit of a different problem. Now, of course dissing works out well to get avid supporters in your cause, but long term, it isn’t a very viable strategy. What happens when Goliath falls? Where are you, then? What is your new strategy? It’s kind of the end. What happens if Goliath regains public support? Then you just look petty. Worst of all, you don’t have a strategy at all, you have an ANTI-strategy. You have a campaign of ugliness based on what you are not. It’s very tempting, though. We’ve seen lots of situations where the fact of being the ‘little guy’ gives you the competitive advantage. Unfortunately, those tables turn on you as strong as they supported you once you are the big guy. It’s not scalable.

I think much of Firefox‘s early strength came from being what Microsoft was not. Much of the passion in the community was directed towards Firefox because the goal was to take down Microsoft IE. Now that Firefox has ‘arrived’ as a viable browser alternative (and is getting close to surpassing IE in adoption from what I understand), it isn’t the David any longer and has lost much of the steam behind its support. I know more than a few people who used to use Firefox in principle who have switched over to Safari and Camino or even gone back to IE with it’s #7 version. They need to switch their strategy to what they represent (not what they don’t represent) soon.

Instead of talking about what the ‘other guy’ lacks, why not talk about what you have? Instead of how awful the competitor is, why not demonstrate how nice you are?

Companies and candidates who are on top don’t have the need to diss the compeition. They have all of the confidence in the world. It is only when feeling insecure about what they have to offer that they bring out the teeth. Either they are supportive of their competition (I’ve seen this alot in Silicon Valley) – cooperating with them and making deals (co-opetition) – or they admire them for the smart decisions they make and learn from their mistakes. There is much power and whuffie to be gained from being the bigger company/person.

So next time, instead of fighting Goliath, gather around the principles that you are passionate about (ignoring or trying to involve Goliath). It will show your confidence, gain you oodles of whuffie and give you a much better overall base to grow on in the end.

::Ben Rowe in the comments:

The CEO of our my last company spent to much effort on dissing our competitors that we actually raised their profile.

Our customers wouldn’t be half aware of who our competition was were it not for us continually bad-mouthing them.

In my recent presentation at e.day, my “5 sure-fire steps to transforming yourself from a spammer into a connector” (said with booming voice) were:

1. Turn that bullhorn around: stop talking and start listening
2. Be part of the community you serve: get out of the boardroom and into the community
3. Design for maximum happiness: design products that delight people
4. Embrace the chaos: stop overplanning and recognize the everyday magic
5. Find your higher purpose: figure out how to give back to the wider community and do it often

Empty Hope

Now, last time I openly talked about that higher purpose stuff, it led to all sorts of issues…both because of a reference I used that was unfortunately anti-semitic (it was an ignorant mistake, not an intended one, but a mistake nonetheless) and because my talk of higher purpose smacked of self-helpy stuff.

The issue with self-helpy stuff is that, well, 99.9% of the time, it lacks any substance or self-reflection. Authors like Deepak Chopra and Tim Robins come to mind as leaders in this realm. Loads of people buy their materials every year in a hope to change their lives from miserable to luxurious after listening to an inspirational lecture. Do these 5 things or take those 10 steps or repeat this mantra in the mirror when you wake up every morning and it will change your life. Well, of course people buy this because it represents some sort of hope…albeit an easy answer to complex issues. Of course, these materials very rarely change anyone’s life for the better permanently, but there are plenty of stories of success that can be found in the rare cases.

When people buy any sort of marketing message, really, it’s because we hope. We hope that this cereal will make us skinny like the woman in the ad who lost 30 lbs. We hope that that liqueur will give us that european sophistication and appeal. We hope that by booking at that hotel, we are supporting a company whose sole purpose is to help people be kinder to one another (re: Hilton’s latest ads that represent people doing nice things for one another).

This is not at all what I want to represent.

Well, let me rephrase that. I DO want to represent hope, but I DON’T want to represent EMPTY hope. I’m very very sad that positive messages have been conflated with empty hope, which is why I have thought for many years that marketing has been its own worst enemy and dangerously short-term thinking. So now, positive messages have become so distrusted that negative messages are, too, being co-opted. Basically, we’ve gotten to the point that messages no longer mean anything at all. Actions truly do speak louder than words.

Higher Purpose

So, coming back around to Higher Purpose and keeping in mind that actions speak louder than words, I proposed another list of 5 ways that a company can give back to the community they serve in very real ways:

1. Democratize something: create tools to empower the disempowered…to make something inaccessible, accessible
2. Open source your work: donate your code or a deep API to giving others a platform for building their businesses
3. Build bridges: work with open standards like Microformats and OpenID as well as WITH your competitors to build bridges between websites and web apps for better customer experiences. I’m not talking ‘lifestreams’, either.
4. Spread love: create communities and ways for people to connect on deeper, more positive levels. There is enough spreading of hate. Dissent is encouraged, of course, because homogeny is not good for anyone. But disagreement needs to be approached with compassion, not “You are an idiot”.
5. Value something bigger than yourself: Is there something unrelated to your company that you believe in? Put your energy into it.

These are only 5 overviews of more action-oriented ways to give back to the community, and my favourite of all of them is to spread love. I’ve been a huge fan of Jane McGonigal’s work at AvantGame since I saw her speak at ETech this spring. Even though these are ‘merely’ games, the impact she has made in the people’s lives who play them is pretty significant. She gave endless examples of people whose lives have been transformed and whose faith in humankind has been restored. I think Jane’s work represents something that is growing in general, too: compassion for one another.

I – It and I – You

In 1923, a really smart philosopher named Martin Buber published his philosophical thesis on human existence, I and Thou. Basically, he states that the basis of our existence is our relations to others (he was influenced heavily by the work of Kierkegaard and Feuerbach) and we, basically, relate to others in two ways:

• I-It
• I-Thou (I-You in modern terms)

In the case of I-It, I relate to another as an object. Something to be used. An example of this is how many people treat waiters. I did a stint being a waiter in university and was told that the best waiters are as invisible as ‘background’ that delivers food and drinks in a timely manner. The people I served didn’t want to know who I was as a human being, in relation to them, they wanted their food. Ever since that experience, I pay more attention to my waiters’ existence…even if they are not so great. I-It, as Buber pointed out in later texts, is also what happens in the case of racism. When a person lacks compassion for another person, the other person becomes an It. I think it is safe to say that the many people who view the awful images of war victims on the news start to see them as Its as well. We start to numb ourselves to the idea that the dead have left behind families and had lives that are to be mourned.

I-It is also how ‘consumers’ and ‘users’ are framed in a transactional economy as it is a very efficient way to think of relationships. These are masses, numbers and generalized unmet ideas of people.

The opposite, I-You, is the relation between two people where both are, basically, equal and have agency. As in my example of someone waiting on me in a restaurant, I make certain to pay attention to that person as an individual. Even though our relationship is brief and for a single purpose, I don’t think of someone serving me food as my servant or as ‘background’. Tomorrow, they may come into my office and need help with their startup community and I would want them to treat me with the same level of respect. Basically, on whatever level, fleeting or deep, a relationship is formed with an I-You interaction (or a relationship is already formed).

I-You, of course, is the basis of communities. Communities are filled with relationships between people. The only way a company representative becomes part of a community is by a. not being a company representative, but a community member…an equal in the community and b. never looks at their relationships to others within the community as the accumulation of numbers. That’s when I-It creeps back in.

Now, what we work on as part of our higher purpose is creating more instances of I-You where I-It has existed for so long. I-It is incredibly disempowering for the ‘It’. I’ve been the ‘It’ too many times in life. It feels shitty. I’m an ‘It’ quite often as a woman in technology. I’m an ‘It’ when a PR person emails me an impersonal note that says something like:

Dear Tara,

I really enjoy your blog. I especially enjoyed your recent post on blah blah blah. That is why I think you will enjoy this unrelated company’s site. Some sort of description…If you enjoy the site, you may even want to blog about it. Perhaps we can set up a meeting between you and CEO who doesn’t give a damn about who you are, but wants your linklove so that he can explain more for you.

Sincerely,
Joe PR* [name protected]

Of course, there are far worse examples of the I-It experience than receiving a spammy note, but every level on which we think we can treat people like objects, numbers and targets contribute to the overall disenfranchisement we feel from one another. When we live in a world where trust breaks down to the extent it has now, it can only get worse.

I want to spend as much of my time turning this around as I possibly can.

Spread Love

Since e.day, I’ve been thinking of additional ways in which Citizen Agency could practice what we preach. We generally work on democratizing stuff (Coworking, BarCamp), opening stuff up (history with Firefox, Drupal and CivicSpace), building bridges (Microformats and OpenID) and valuing stuff that is bigger than us (we work on many sustainable projects, including the upcoming GreenDevCamp)…but we’ve lacked a bit in the spread love department. Sure, we do this in our day-to-day relationships and the way we personally treat people, but we haven’t really stretched ourselves outside of that.

So, the other day after thinking about the whuffie stuff, I went an registered the domain Spreadloveproject.org, where there is currently nothing, but I have started a wiki, a bookmark group and a Google Group. I’m not entirely clear yet on the projects, but have put down Ping Whuffie and SmoochyBot (formerly known as The Lovendar) as two of mine. As for what kind of other projects, some of them will be app based, some of them task based and others…I don’t know. You decide.

I want everyone to consider this their project waiting for their ideas, too. I figure it will unfold as we move along. Either way, I’d love to see people share their ideas of how to turn I-It situations into I-You situations. Maybe it is as simple as being more aware of the people who serve us as people. Maybe it is as deep as uncovering stories of individual war victims. Maybe it is as light hearted as playing ‘killing with kindness’ games. All I know is that the goal of the overall project is to work towards creating a culture of generosity and kindness between people.

Currently, the wiki is pretty sparse, so feel free to add your own ideas, projects, stories and initiatives – you can also promote the work you are doing elsewhere there, too. I’ve named the contributors as Social Capitalists, kind of a fun play on words.

Like I said above, I don’t want this or any of our projects to be empty vessels of nothingness with a pretty coat of paint on top. I’d like to actually have this mean something, even if they touch a few people and are simple, the projects need to have substance and be directly related to the end goal of creating a culture of generosity. As well, anyone and everyone is encouraged to lead their own projects and movements. The project, itself, is un’owned’. I see it as another starfish project with many leaders. I only provide my ‘leg’ of the journey.

Right after I finished my presentation at e.day yesterday, a gentleman walked up to me to say to me:

“If this future of social capital and whuffie you predict is correct, and I largely believe it is, then that means the future belongs to women.”

I made a silly joke telling him to keep it quiet because this is my underhanded plan all along the way, but in actuality, I hadn’t really thought of it that way…yet. Then my amazing PiC writes this bit on Big Sister, basically, saying the same thing:

The thing is, Big Sister is already upon us. Read about Nick Starr’s experience with Twitter and you’ll start to see how radical, networked, transparency is leading to a retrogression in the power of the dominator model. Power is now supremely not centered in any one place or individual; instead the power is stored in energy bonds that only reveal their potency when a connection is made; in the sinews and synapses of social networks, we are witnessing a resurgency of social capital and of communal wealth.

Yeah, that makes alot of sense.

Once again, over another serendipitous dinner, this time with a group of fabulous folks from the Dutch community who blog at Dutch Cowboys (and cowgirls), we talked at length about whuffie and how that sci fi future that Doctorow painted in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isn’t far fetched at all. In fact, we recognized that the lot of us could come together in such an immediately intimate conversation was because we’ve ‘pinged’ one another’s whuffie and knew it was safe to do so. Only, our pings aren’t with internal computers, our pings are recorded by our blog posts, tweets and other media we make publicly available.

And it isn’t that the future is about women ruling the world or some crazy Amazon Women on the Moon scenario. It’s about valuing all of our feminine sides. The decline of valuing the aggressive, competitive, dominating, quantitative, competitive sides and the rise of the value of our compassionate, open, cooperative, qualitative, collaborative sides. I find it amazing that when I talk, I have so many people come up to me afterwards to say, “Thank you for telling me it is okay to have a different perspective”. That’s huge. Chris did that for me. I was always second guessing and questioning myself and my gut instincts. He just outright asked me why one day. Ever since then, I’ve grown in leaps and bounds.

Personally, I think the future is a much better balance of the yin and yang – where the feminine and masculine are balanced out in personal and business life. There are still many positive things that come from the masculine camp and a little healthy competition (especially with oneself) is a good thing. However, I do think that we will see the pendulum swing further to the feminine before we get there. Remember that halfway means that everyone has to meet in the middle and I don’t see patriarchal power structures that have benefitted for many centuries off of a more competitive, aggressive, secretive world giving up their reign too fast.

I’d also like to put out a call for a couple of things. I have decided that, amongst the many other things I have on my plate, I want to create a Whuffie Pinger online. Something that helps us gather sentiment and good and bad reviews around our buying decisions and culminates them into a Whuffie scale. I’d love it to be visual, like We Feel Fine, but really helpful like Yelp (probably even bringing in review data from sources like Yelp). If I go out to rent a car, for instance, I can ping the whuffie, even via SMS, of the car companies to help me make my decision. The same tool could be used for people, of course, but I’m afraid that in our still masculine culture, this will become like the Technorati 100, a grossly competitive site, full of posturing and alot of dudes gaming it.

So, if you’d like to team up with me to make this, drop me a line. It would be an open source project, of course, but we could figure out a business model in the future.

From my presentation at e.day 2007…presentation and transcript below. The Video.

Slide 1. So, I’m here today to talk to you about a subject that is near and dear to my heart: “How to Make a Gabillion Dollars with Community Marketing…or something to that effect” And, truly, it’s pretty simple…there really are…
Slide 2. …only 3 ways to make a gabillion dollars online. The first?
Slide 3. …duh…we all know it is…
Slide 4. …the obvious…PORN! Sex! Hubba hubba! …which is accompanied by its first cousin…
Slide 5. …spam…because you know you will need…
Slide 6. …a few of these in order to…
Slide 7. …get alot like this and the next thing you know you can…
Slide 8. …roll your own…
Slide 9. The second way to make that gabillion dollars, of course, is to…
Slide 10. …get extremely bloody lucky. I’ve known more than a few instances where people were in the…
Slide 11. right place at the
Slide 12. right time and ended up…
Slide 13. …striking it rich. These are those situations where we love to go back in time and examine exactly what it was that…munity have to do with making a gabillion dollars?
Slide 25. a whole lot. Because …
Slide 26. …customers have a whole lot of choice, and if you haven’t noticed, it’s getting easier and easier for them to…
Slide 27. …tune you out. In fact, doesn’t it seem that the harder you try to get a message across
Slide 28. the more likely it is that you are ignored? You may be producing the world’s coolest widget (and widget means something entirely different in this crowd), which, much like this sign is good for your customers, yet…they completely ignore it!
Slide 29. Do you wanna know why? Do you? Even if you don’t I’m going to tell you (I have the stage)…It’s because…
Slide 30. they don’t care what you have to say, sell or even give away. No they don’t. People don’t listen to ads, salespeople or important messages anymore. People don’t listen to YOU because they are too busy…
Slide 31. listening to their friends! The people they TRUST! The people they care about!
Slide 32. this is not news. The majority of our buying decisions have always been through word of mouth. This hasn’t changed. What HAS changed is that, thanks to the proliferation of online communities…
Slide 33. …our networks have gotten bigger. Which means that we have more options for getting recommendations. This is a screenshot of my ‘Friend Wheel’ from Facebook. As of this day, I have over 900 friends on Facebook. A portion of them I only actually know online and some of them, of course, have more influence over decisions I make than others. But what is important to note here is that even the most distant “friend” on one of these networks has more influence over my buying decisions than any ad or salesperson I encounter.
Slide 34. It isn’t just me or the digerati or the “next generation”, there is significant online growth in all segments of the market.
Slide 35. Just to put this all into perspective for you, this year Forrester Research found that only 13% of consumers say they buy products because of their ads. Contrast that to 60% of small business owners in North America that say they use peer recommendations to make their buying decisions and over 70% of 18-35 year olds who report the same for their media purchases. With every new social network, the penetration deepens. People are getting savvier and savvier. Their bullshit compass is well-tuned. They don’t want a pretty picture, they want to have the FULL picture.
Slide 36. Now, as a word of caution…some companies have gotten smart to this phenomenon and started to join these social networks themselves…not as people, but as companies and characters and as sales. Which leads to a reaction something like this…
Slide 37. Companies like Pay-Per-Post, who cater to clients who want to tap into Social Networks and the power of blogging, think they will influence others through word of mouth, but they have it dead wrong.
Slide 38. They think that social capital
Slide 39. can easily be converted into currency, but it doesn’t work this way. The reason people are on these networks is to…
Slide 40. …connect first.
Slide 41. Connections over time equal trust. And trust is the basis of Social Capital – otherwise known as Credibility.
Slide 42. When a blogger is known to taken money to review a product, the trust between him and his readers is eroded and he loses credibility. By trying to pay for social capital, the company extinguished it.
Slide 43. Without social capital…
Slide 44. You lose this. And when you don’t have this, any recommendation you make is seen as…
Slide 45. …spam and met with…
Slide 46. …this. So, if we were to take this equation and reverse engineer it, your first order of business in standing any chance of becoming an…
Slide 47. Influencer – that is…
Slide 48. …someone with a whole lot of social capital – is to
Slide 49. …make connections and establish credibility.
Slide 50. It’s kind of dead simple, if you ask me. It’s all about…
Slide 51. building relationships. Of course, if this is not your cup of tea, you always have…
Slide 52. ER….um…and…
Slide 53. …lady luck! Now, I think we’ve established the power of this community/relationship thingy and why it is important. But if you have any doubts:
Slide 54. You may think you’re all that, but in actuality
Slide 55. Your customers are tuning you out, because they would…
Slide 56. …much rather listen to recommendations from their friends, who they can trust have their best interests at heart than they would you any day. Now, if you think you are clever and try to pose as a friend, you will be greeted…
Slide 57. …with this. Really, the only way to avoid this type of reaction is to…
Slide 58. …make those connections and establish…
Slide 59. …trust… which leads me straight into the HOW of one goes about making those…
Slide 60. …connections…because
Slide 61. …this didn’t happen overnight. Getting there is simple, really. There are really only…
Slide 62. 5 sure-fire steps to transform yourself from a …
Slide 63. spammer
Slide 64. into a
Slide 65. connector. And if you really rock…
Slide 66. you could even become an influencer yourself…which will lead to…
Slide 67. customer loyalty…and…
Slide 68. increased word of mouth, and, of course ultimately…
Slide 69. could even make you a gabillion dollars. So, here they are…
Slide 70. the 5 sure-fire steps to transform yourself from a …
Slide 71. spammer
Slide 72. into a
Slide 73. connector. Number one…
Slide 74. turn that bullhorn inwards.
Slide 75. This is how marketing has looked in the past. Which, of course, led to alot of…
Slide 76. …this and/or alot of…
Slide 77. …this. So, what is the main characteristic of…
Slide 78. …this that turn people off? Well, most of all, the reason people are turned off is because this kind of communication is…
Slide 79. …impersonal. What worked for the more disconnected world we lived in, pre-internet is no longer so effective. Why? Because people don’t want to be…
Slide 80. …treated like a number, they want to be treated…
Slide 81. …like special snowflakes. As INDIVIDUALS. As human beings. This is precisely why they are getting their information from…
Slide 82. …their friends, who know and care about who they are. People they are CONNECTED TO.
Slide 83. Truly, beyond anything else, people desire these connections. New studies on Social Intelligence shows scientific evidence that we are fundamentally wired to connect. People WANT to connect, even through their purchasing decisions, so if you are still…
Slide 84. …doing this…you are missing out on…
Slide 85. …this…so in order to…
Slide 86. …connect, you need to…
Slide 87. …take this and turn it…
Slide 88. …into this…a beacon for constant feedback. This, of course, sounds easier than it actually is. You need to focus on individuals while at the same time understanding the needs of the wider community. I call this process of focusing on relationships, feedback and listening to customers…
Slide 89. …INreach. For me, the OUTreach part of marketing always takes a back seat to INreach because it has much more impact. You’ve heard the saying, “It’s easier to upsell an existing customer than to win a new one” – well there IS A REASON FOR THAT. Instead of always looking for new customers, we need to concentrate on involving our current customers in the growth and innovation of our products…
Slide 90. But it isn’t just listening to direct feedback that you need to do, you also need to do the deeper legwork like reading blogposts, watching user behaviour, and the best way to start to really understand the needs of your customer is to…
Slide 91. …become part of the community you serve, which is the #2 sure-fire process. Becoming part of the community you serve means you have to…
Slide 92. Get out of the boardroom and…
Slide 93. into the community. Of course!
Slide 94. …but what does that MEAN? So, you are out of the boardroom…
Slide 95. …so now what? What do you do now? Where is this elusive community? Well, the first thing you need to figure out is…
Slide 96. …who IS that community you serve…
Slide 97. Think of the diversity of the people in this world. Everyone has different needs, passions, interests, desires. Trying to serve each and every one of their interests would take a great deal of time and money you probably don’t have. You need to narrow it down. The simplest way to figure who your core customer is…is to figure out…
Slide 98. …what problem are you solving? And…
Slide 99. …who it is that you are solving it for? Then it gets easier to figure out where
Slide 100. …those customers are gathering, what interests them and what other networks they are using…
Slide 101. …and join them! Not as a poser. Not as a salesperson. Not as a trial. Not as a skeptic. But figure out what is useful and great. Fall in love with these tools and learn from them. I’ve seen WAY too many people wanting to build online communities that have never even been part of them. That’s going to work out as smoothly as…
Slide 102. …this dude trying to fit in at your teenager’s skateboard club. If you really want to learn the secret sauce behind the success of Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, you have to use it until you love it…period. Of course, once you start to really understand the needs of your customers, you’ll ask yourself…
Slide 103. …why would they give a damn? Why would they want to use your product? With seemingly infinite choice in the marketplace, globalism, commoditization, and constant overstimulation and inundation with branding messages, if you aren’t offering anything remarkable, you are going to…
Slide 104. …get alot of this. Boring! Lame! So, what you need to do is…
Slide 105. …differentiate. And that differentiation could look something like…
Slide 106. …Seth Godin’s Purple Cow“>Purple Cow. We’ve seen cows. Lots of them. Cows aren’t that remarkable. Now, if we were to see a PURPLE cow, THAT would be different. We would stop the car, get out, look closer, take photos, call the news stations, etc. That purple cow would be REMARKABLE. In business, it’s not enough to be interesting…YOU NEED TO BE REMARKABLE? Because if you are remarkable…
Slide 107. …some people may just give a damn. However, remarkable is not the only way to differentiate yourself. In fact, the simplest and the best way to differentiate your business is
Slide 108. …to care about your customers. That’s right. Since the bar is set really low…
Slide 109. …your best marketing tool is awesome customer service. It really is the killer app. Which leads us into the third sure-fire step to success…
Slide 110. …delight and create amazing experiences. When I say ‘amazing’, I mean that it isn’t enough to make stuff that works well, if you want to incite passion and connectedness from people, you need to create sites that bring up feelings like…
Slide 111. …gratitude and thankfulness….
Slide 112. …utter and total joy…
Slide 113. …loads of love…and of course…
Slide 114. …tons and tons of laughter. Because in order to make connections, it is very important that you…
Slide 115. …design your customer experiences for maximum happiness. If you do this, you WILL…
Slide 116. …connect. If you work to touch people in some way, shape or form, those connections will happen. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, the least complicated designs for happiness are often the most profound. An example of this is…
Slide 117. …ma.gnolia’s “give thanks” feature. This is a very simple, subtle feature. When you find someone has bookmarked something you find rather useful or you are rather delighted with, you just click on ‘give thanks’ link and you can send a ‘thank you’ to the person to show your appreciation. Several people have commented on how much more warm and friendly this has made the community and when it was implemented, it created a kind of buzz that we didn’t expect, attracting all sorts of influencers to the service. Which leads me to the next sure-fire step to take towards success…
Slide 118. embrace the chaos. So…
Slide 119. …what about Planning? Business plans? Models? Strategy? Brand management? Messaging? Well, if there is anything I’ve learnt from working in social media is that when you try to control the future…
Slide 120. …it fights back…and in entirely surprising ways. There are so many hours wasted on coming up with all of the reasons something won’t work or on predicting customer needs that we forget to concentrate on the here and now of customer satisfaction. People and projects are messy. The future is uncertain. It’s far better to…
Slide 121. …lay the foundation for the type of community you want and then prepare to discover…
Slide 122. …the Everyday Magic along the way. Everyday Magic is what happens when you open your eyes to the unpredictable way that the world works around you. Unplanned events can lead to powerful endings. It’s one thing to say embrace the chaos, but here are a few tips on HOW to embrace it…
Slide 123.
1. Stop moving and look around you until you see everything clearly. Ever heard, “Stop and smell the roses?” Whatever you are stopping and smelling or observing, do it. And do it often.
2. Transfer the knowledge. Be transparent and open…ask for help. Secrecy and brand management may have worked pre-internet, but your customers are happy to know you are human. The more you reach out, the more great ideas they will give you.
3. Every time you feel anxiety, acknowledge it. Embracing the chaos is a scary thing. Acknowledging you are scared will bring forward all sorts of help you didn’t know you had.
4. Define your own measure of success. Forget what the books tell you. Forget what even I tell you. Success is whatever makes you happy. Think long and hard about what your passion is and then go for it.
5. Get outside of your personal circle. Some of the biggest innovations have come from taking what is happening in other industries and adapting them to your own. Take a look at the iPhone’s interface…I’m guessing that someone borrowed alot of wisdom from the gaming interfaces in Las Vegas.
6. Realize that everything is out of your control anyway. It’s a totally freeing feeling.
7. Have patience. These things may take alot of time.
Embracing the chaos is a simple concept that will leave you feeling…
Slide 124. …like this about your future and will let you spend more time concentrating on your customer’s satisfaction than on working out hypothetical business issues.
Slide 125. Well, we are finally here at the final sure-fire step to getting closer to
Slide 126. …this. To having the kind of network of people around you and your business that the feedback flows and the word of mouth travels fast. But first, has anyone ever heard of a concept called…
Slide 127. Whuffie? Whuffie is a concept invented by Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame. In his futuristic Science Fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory uses whuffie to describe the capital of the future…which looks just like we talked about earlier…
Slide 128. …Social Capital. But in the future, it is the only capital and has replaced currency altogether. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions. Now, sure this is science fiction, but…
Slide 129. …I don’t think that “fictional” future is too far off. I’ve been witnessing it all around me. In every online community I’ve been part of, Social Capital is a core component of…
Slide 130. …connections and, in many cases is more valuable than money. Now, as the basis of these social networks is…
Slide 131. …trust, something must determine how I value the differing opinions of my…
Slide 132. …900+ “friends”. A friend can’t pay me to make a certain choice. Financial transactions don’t mean much of anything in the world of Social Capital. They work antithetically to it. These transactional ties are part of the market economy whereas Social Capital is part of…
Slide 133. …the gift economy. In the gift economy…
Slide 134. the more you give away, the more Social Capital you gain. Saving Social Capital for a rainy day doesn’t work.
Slide 135. It’s only valuable as it circulates throughout the community. And as it circulates throughout the community, it inherently…
Slide 136. …connects us. So, as I recognize that we still very much reside in a market economy and you still have to make a living, the question is..
Slide 137. …what can you give away that won’t leave you broke? Which leads me to the most important sure-fire lesson of all…
Slide 138. …find your higher purpose. Finding your higher purpose as a company helps you figure out on what level you can start connecting to your customers and to potential customers.
Slide 139. This group of friends have a shared bond: it may be their passions, history or even a common enemy. How do you relate to your customers in these ways? Is what your company does born out of a passion? Serving a need? Fighting a good fight? A company born out of a way to make you money doesn’t give you much of a goal to relate to your customer’s with.
Slide 140. But maybe your company just exists to make money…then what? Is there no Social Capital for you? Nah…it’s actually pretty simple…
Slide 141. …you just have to find a way to give back to the community. And, as is built into the nature of the gift economy…
Slide 142. …the more you give back, the more that comes around to reward you and your company…beyond it just being a nice thing to do, it is part of the growing popularity of something called…
Slide 143. …“Nerd Values” that reads…
Slide 144. …”doing well by doing good”. Which doesn’t mean you have to be a non-profit…
Slide 145. …it just means that you end up doing the right thing by your customers (and the wider community) along the way, even as you grow your business. Craig Newmark is the founder of Craigslist, a really basic site that has crippled the classified industry in most major cities in North America by offering free listings. Craig has done well by doing good. You are seeing this everywhere now. …
Slide 146. All of these companies and organizations either build tools to help individuals go further or they spend loads of time giving back to the community they serve or BOTH. The more that give, the better everyone does in this ecosystem. And you know what else?
Slide 147. Some of them make a gabillion dollars, too! I don’t think it is any fluke that those that listen to their customers, are part of the community they serve, design for happiness, embrace the chaos and have a higher purpose are those that are really excelling right now. So, that brings us back to…
Slide 148. …what can you give away that won’t leave you broke? How exactly do you give back to the community? What are considered…
Slide 149. …gifts in this gift economy?Well, here are just a few to get you started…
Slide 150. #1…Democratize something! What is currently inaccessible? Elitist? What are ways in which you can give everyday people the power to speak up? The ability to create?
Slide 151. Blogger did this for journalism.
Slide 152. YouTube opened up a whole new marketplace for entertainment.
Slide 153. Flickr made it easier for everyone to be a published photographer. What can you make accessible? Give people the tools to go further…Number two is…
Slide 154. #2…Open it up! Open source it, foster a developer community! If you have created something good, people will make things you wouldn’t even dream of!
Slide 155. WordPress could compete with a crowded market of blogging tools to become one of the most successful because it started Open Source. By having the code open, legions of volunteers helped make WordPress an awesome product. A word of caution, though. If you are going to open it, you need to support it. It needs to be a core product and not an afterthought. For those of you squeamish or unable to open your code, why not get some deep APIs in there? Become a platform for others to grow their own sites… Then of course is…
Slide 156. #3…Building Bridges! What we don’t need are anymore closed networks. Your customers are feeling a pain point here in a big way. They don’t want to fill out another profile, they want their current networks to work together. So, how can you build bridges?
Slide 157. For one, you can work on great standards projects like OpenID
Slide 158. and Microformats. For another, you can look at how you can work..
Slide 159. …WITH your competitors instead of against them for the betterment of customer experience. Bridge building is not only good whuffie, but it is good for the customer who WILL reward you for putting their interests first…Number four is my favourite…
Slide 160. …Spread love! I talked earlier about designing for happiness, but what about turning this up a notch? What about designing for generosity? For helping people connect at a deep level? Reaching out to people who don’t get the love all of the time? Designing a site that encourages people to do nice stuff for one another?
Slide 161. Jane McGonigal’s alternate reality games, such as Cruel to Be Kind, are a great example of this. She’s created a mixture of online/offline action where, you are sent directives: give a stranger flowers, kill another player with compliments, etc. People react extremely positively and have reported personal transformations. She has a rabidly loving community. And the fifth example of how you can give back to the community you serve is to…
Slide 162. #5…Value something bigger than you. Take something that has lost value in the shuffle: like the environment, leisure time, health, families, or slow food and dedicate your time to it. You’ll not only build that valuable Social Capital, but you will meet loads of people who share your passions and will probably be willing to help spread the word about your business. So, to sum up just a few of the ways to give back to the community…
Slide 163. You can democratize, Open up, Bridge, Give Love and/or Value something bigger than you. Heck, do as many of these things as possible and your…
Slide 164. …social capital will grow immensely over time…Alright…we’re almost out of time. I know I’ve covered ALOT of ground here…and I don’t know if there will be any time for questions, but to recap…here are…
Slide 165. The 5 sure-fire steps to transform yourself from a …
Slide 166. spammer
Slide 167. into a
Slide 168. connector…
Slide 169.
1. Turn that bullhorn inwards. Stop talking and start listening!
2. Become part of the community you serve. Figure out who it is you are serving. It isn’t everyone. Then get out of your office and into the community.
3. Create amazing experiences for your customers. Design for maximum connectedness, happiness and joy. Empower and elate.
4. Embrace the chaos. Don’t overplan. Learn to be more agile and recognize everyday magic.
5. Find your higher purpose. Social Capital only gains in value as you give it away. Figure out how you are going to give back to the community and do it…often.
Because the surest way to get…
Slide 170. …to this is…
Slide 171. …is through this…and if you still don’t believe me…
Slide 172. …I wish you the best of luck…
Slide 173. …making this.
Slide 174. thank you

I think it’s coming along nicely. Yay factoryjoe!

For those of you who haven’t been reading long, learn more about coworking here. It totally rawks.

::and for those of you who don’t know the reference to the starfish, you need to read The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.

I’m constantly surprised at the number of different ways social networks treat the ‘friending’ process. Chris does an awesome job of recording these patterns via screenshot, but I want to outline a couple of the treatments of the processes of friending and how a couple of my favourite social networks handle it. Particularly:

1. “Levels” of friends
2. Adding friends process

Levels of Friends

As we well know, not all friends are created equal…especially in today’s world of ubiquitous social networking. There are friends (people who you know you can count on – who you hang out with or interact with regularly) and then there are contacts (people you know casually, most likely through online contact). Some SNs allow you to distinguish between friends and contacts and some even allow additional levels of distinction (family, etc.).

Who Does it Well

VOX
[Levels of friends]

Vox, a blogging community, looks at your list of contacts as a neighbourhood…a nice metaphor for the type of community they’ve built. Within your neighbourhood, you can have two additional, smaller, circles: friends and family. Having these smaller circles allows for specific permission levels as well. Naked photos of your baby in the bathtub? That’s cool, permit family to view it only. Party photos from the houseboat trip? Exclude family and allow for friends only.

Other networks who handle these levels are: Flickr, Blip.tv and YouTube.

ClaimID
[XFN]

ClaimID, an OpenID provider, adds something very cool to their friending process: XFN. Personally, I’ve loved the idea of XFN from the moment I laid eyes on it. A simple combination of values makes up nearly every type of relationship I’ve ever had and, if there was a caching program ever created that could timeline these, we could watch the growth and decay of friendships over time. The only piece I think XFN is missing is a bit more robust business relationships (as a small business owner, coworker and colleague don’t quite cut it…I need to add client, vendor and lead, which delineates a personal contact from a business contact). It’s really my wish that every social network of the future adopt these values so that I can chunk my relationships a wee bit better.

Other networks who use XFN are: WordPress and Conferenceer.

Who Does it Poorly

Facebook
[Wacky random relationship structures]

I don’t know too many people who can find value in this motley list that Facebook provides you upon accepting a friend request. Now, granted, this list is grandfathered from the days where Facebook was an app limited to college students, but still, most people fall under my ‘random’ category. That being said, I do love the way Facebook tracks the relationship changes in my newsfeed. I know it is decadent, but I can’t help but watch these. If only they could track the same in XFN…

Other networks who use their own wacky relationship structure: Amazon (pretty granular).

MyBlogLog
[No-choice Friending]

I’m not sure who else is out there who auto-adds, but I like to have more choice when it comes to who I friend than what I was given on MyBlogLog. I didn’t really ever get into it, but when I did decide to give it a whirl, I was less bothered by seeing my face being tracked on blogs than I was bothered by the fact that blogs I’d hit more than a few times were automatically added to my favourites and friends. I still think that in the realm of friending, we should have some choice.

Adding Friends Process

The ‘adding friends’ process is when you either find someone and ‘friend’ them, reply positively to a friend request or manage your connections in general. Some SNs have done an amazing job thinking and rethinking the ways in which they could make our lives so much easier. Some fall flat.

Who Does it Well

Dopplr
[easy friend management]

Dopplr, an awesome network where travelers can post their upcoming trips and compare where they and their friends will be, does an amazing job of helping it’s community connect. For one, it shows you all of the outstanding invitations you have (whose trips can YOU see). There have been times of major influxes of bodies to other social networks when I couldn’t keep track of who I accepted and who I declined. Dopplr also keeps track of who you have friended (who can see YOUR trips). A nice tab to have in case you need a quick ‘turn off’. Even more elegant, though, they’ve added two other tabs that may help you connect with other long-lost friends: New travelers and Who You Might Know (friends of friends). These totally rock and make finding friends super easy (without having to import my gmail address book!).

Flickr
[Using Ajax friending]

Flickr, my fave photo sharing site, uses AJAX in the most brilliant way for their friending process. Just hover over an avatar and add someone in an instant. Another AJAX lighbox comes up to ask you if you want to add the friend or family level to this relationship. No page refreshes. It rocks. Personally, I wish every social network would make friending so darned easy.

Other networks using ajax friending interfaces: Slideshare

Who Does it Poorly

Instead of pointing out individuals on this (other than how disastrous it was in the upswing of Twittermania to try to keep track of incoming requests), some general anti-patterns when it comes to the Adding Friends Process are:

• Difficult to see/find ‘Add as Friend’ links
• An inability to find others in the network (no community pages, no friends of friends lists or access to your friends’ friend lists, no people search, etc.)
• Too many clicks to add a friend (click on the link, page loads choices, then you get a third page of confirmation)
• Duplicate mailboxes (on the SN and in your email box) for friend requests (Flickr, Ma.gnolia and others do this, it’s maddening). I’d like to see more of the Dopplr type separation of contact management.

All in all, most social networks I encounter follow the anti-patterns of friending and make the process ‘unfriendly’. Personally, I’d like to establish a more substantial list of these user interfaces where people, including end users like myself, can vote on the best treatment of these processes (hint, hint factoryjoe, notasausage and atariboy) because I’d love to see this knowledge exchanged. It would definitely make the web a nicer place to surf.

Also, I didn’t cover a third crucial part of friending here, either (which I will address in the future). That is: why have friends at all? Adding friending without a purpose is a bit ridiculous. However, if you can define a reason for people to narrow the network down to a specific peer group, do it and do it well.