manjo's posterous

The European Commission will recommend next week that the European Union begins accession talks with Iceland, an EU official said yesterday (16 February), launching a process that Reykjavik hopes will lead to EU membership by 2012.

The EU is spreading even further and the room for enlargement is getting smaller and smaller. Who is next? Turkey?

Der zunehmende Gebrauch von Laptops führe immer mehr Patienten mit einem netzartigen rotbraunen Ausschlag auf den Oberschenkeln in die Arztpraxen. Das berichtet die Ärztezeitung mit Berufung auf Dr. Claude Bachmeyer.

da hilft wohl auch keine Unterlage.

Der Branchenverband Bitkom hat sich mit dem Ausgang der Bundestagswahlen zufrieden gezeigt. Man begrüße die "Wahlentscheidung für eine Politik pro Wirtschaft und Wachstum", sagte Bitkom-Präsident Professor Dr. August-Wilhelm Scheer.

"Die neue Koalition sollte die Regierungsbildung für eine Reform der Bundesministerien nutzen", so Scheer. Deutschland brauche ein starkes Innovationsministerium, in dem die Kompetenzen für Wirtschaft, Forschung und Technologien zusammengefasst werden.

Scheer: "Das Bildungsministerium könnte sich dann voll und ganz darauf konzentrieren, Deutschlands Bildungssystem auf einen internationalen Spitzenplatz zu bringen. Perspektivisch sollte der Bund wieder mehr Kompetenzen in der Bildung von den Ländern bekommen."

 

Bitkom-Präsident Scheer
Foto: IDS Scheer

"Die Wirtschaftspolitik der nächsten Bundesregierung sollte eine klare Wachstumsstrategie verfolgen mit dem Ziel, 100 junge Hightech-Unternehmen über die Umsatzschwelle von 100 Millionen Euro zu schaffen. Hierzu schlagen wir ein Programm '100 mal 100' vor."

"Die Hightech-Politik muss ein zentrales Thema der nächsten Legislaturperiode werden. Umwelt- und Klimaschutz, die Energieversorgung oder ein bezahlbares Gesundheitswesen lassen sich nur durch die Förderung und den Einsatz neuer Technologien erreichen. Der Aufbau intelligenter Infrastrukturen muss ein Kernthema der neuen Bundesregierung sein."

Scheer ging zudem auf die Piratenpartei ein, die bundesweit zwei Prozent geholt hatte. "Der Zuspruch für die Piratenpartei zeigt, dass die Internetpolitik der alten Bundesregierung Lücken hat. Die Themen Internetsperren, Online-Durchsuchungen oder Verletzungen des Urheberrechts im Netz müssen in der nächsten Legislaturperiode mit mehr Verständnis für die Generation 2.0 angepackt werden."

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Eine sehr interessante Forderung. Für die Transformation Duetschlands in eine Wissensgesellschaft ist das ein wichtiger, vor allem sichtbarer Baustein. Ebenso wichtig wäre ein öffentlich sichtbarer und kompetenter CIO der Bundesriegerung, dieser muss nicht unbedingt den Rang eines Ministers bekleiden von entscheidender Wichtigkeit.

August 28, 2009

PR, Marketing and Advertising suck, now what?

Posted at 07:41 in teamseesmic | Permalink | Comments (View)

I have given a few times in the recent months a presentation,how to launch a product with a community that starts as a first slide with "PR, Marketing and Advertising suck", and I gave it a few times in front of PR and marketing professionals who obviously enjoyed the slide so much that the most recent versions of my slide deck had "matter less than word of mouth" instead of "suck". Anyway, having a panel dedicated to it in front of PR and Marketing professionals and I am staying here today with Guy Kawasaki, Louis Gray, Renee Blodget and Steve Patrizi from LinkedIn trying to summarize my thoughts.

Of course I like to catch the attention of audiences I get to speak to at the beginning of my presentations and I am on purpose pushing the envelope a little, but not only.

Why Marketing, PR and Advertising suck for me

-I do not trust any advertising message or press release, they are generally fake.They are all designed to tell a story about a product or a company which is one sided, it only has the good aspects and they are not neutral. They can be interesting at times when there is news obviously, but even then, much less than what your friends think about it or what the sources you trust, which includes the press and blogs, say about it.

-many bad practice examples that I experienced myself made me not trust many people working as so called PR experts
Only in the recent weeks there were plenty of examples of PR firms cheating by writing fake iphone apps reviews paying interns to leave them, or sending stupid pitches. Most of them are basically standard messages and one time I even got one where they sent an email to me instead of a Wired reporter, with the Dear instead of mine. I have stopped working with a PR agency and manage the relationships with the bloggers and the press myself. The last PR agency that worked for me ended in a very bad situation where thanks to their advise and "carefully" distributed embargo we ended up being in the broken embargoes section of valleywag with all the serious press and bloggers laughing at us. I never want to see this happen again.

-online if the product is good you simply do not need them
Have you ever seen an ad for Twitter, Facebook or Google? Actually that is inaccurate I recently saw a few ads about Google adsense and sure, Google does now lots of marketing in different forms but you get the point, during years those companies spread and got millions of users only based on the word of mouth they got. If people like your product, it spreads on its own in many cases, at least for anything on the Internets.

What is the alternative?

Social software and the web have made word of mouth global and extremely fast and efficient, in a positive or a negative way. If your product is good or bad, people will talk about it if it matters to them. My presentation is all around why brands (which can be personal brands) need to create a community around themselves rather than focus on that NY Times article or that Techcrunch post that will get them millions of users. The best PR in the World gets you a little bump during a few days but it dies very fast and very few users remain and keep using your products. Of course it looks good to have half a page in a national newspaper or featured on TV, but it has nowhere the effect of a real community of fans.

Find an empty space.
If the product is good it will find its users or customersMy conference LeWeb in Paris gathers every year 2,000 people from 35 countries and never got any PR, advertising or marketing. There was a need for it, an empty space, and we executed as best as we could. It became a little brand in the world of internet events and did not need any pushing or faking. Our Seesmic Desktop Twitter and Facebook application got 2.5 million downloads without any PR or advertising.

Ship as soon as you can
Online users are used to unfinished beta products and actually enjoy playing with them even though they are still being created. If they understand that you are building them and iterating fast a little community will rapidly gather around your brand, it happened very quickly for Seesmic.

Listen to every single piece of feedback you get
Brands used to have to make focus groups and expensive testing or even test markets launches before they could know anything people would think about the products. Just search your brand on Twitter and follow what people are saying, if they say nothing it means they do not care or that your brand is not born yet, or worse, it is already dead. React quickly, make your product evolve or launch another one as soon as you can until you get attention. Note that I have not said press attention, I am talking about getting the first fans of your products here.

Answer especially if it's negative
We get feedback about our products every minute or so and of course there is negative feedback. I enjoy it too and rush answering that feedback, it means people care, even if sometimes they are very brutal in public. At Seesmic we have a full time community evangelist, John Yamasaki, answering with me sometimes as many tweets as he can. An angry user who gets a problem solved often becomes your best friend after that and will start telling your friends how cool you behaved because you helped instead of hiding in an office.

Use all the tools available to filter the feedback
I am making one of those tools, but a Twitter client is not enough, feedback comes in multiple forms, I really like Uservoice and Getsatisfaction who let the users vote on the features they would like the most.

Most important, create a long term community
Seth Godin in tribes that I really advise you to read, quotes "1,000 true fans" explaining that having 1,000 real fans around your product helping you and telling their friends is more important than any PR you can get because they are here with you for the long term. They do not come for free and in a few weeks, it may take years and constant attention to create that community around you and your brand, it will come at a cost of lots of sharing and generosity. Share first, help them first, do not ask anything, long term you will get real fans if you are honest and prove you deserve trust. My friend Chris Brogan has just written a great book about how to get Trust Agents. Go and read it.

Why traditional PR and marketing does not work to build a community
Generally the effort is short term, often done with a supplier that can change, on a few months mission or goal, for a product launch, and that does not build trust. Everybody in the company and the PR firm focus on how to get attention for that product launch and press release and do not care a few weeks or even a few days after. There is nobody after the "marketing push" available and in constant touch with the first real fans that could gather around the product. They feel unheard, not taken care of sometimes betrayed when the ad was so over promising compared to the reality of the quality of that product that they are lost forever for that brand. You can hang that NY Times article on your office wall but it did not help much in the long term

Where do we go from there?
I am not trying to insult marketing professionals here far from it, and many get what I am describing here very well and some even use Seesmic. But I feel there is a very long way to go and a deep reboot must happen for brands and people helping them to become more trusted, transparent and in constant touch. A friend at a PR agency recently told me that most brands that get it now usually got a deep online PR issue first that forced them to react. Many remember the Dell hell blog controversy years ago, well Dell is now quoted everywhere as one of the brands that gets it the best, in constant online a click a away in touch with you thanks to Richard Binhammer @RichardatDell and his team who constantly monitor online sources and of course answer actively on Twitter. Many brands read what is being said about them, very few actually answer even negative requests the way Dell does.

There are amazing team behind brands and amazing PR professionals such as Brian Solis (even if we fight sometimes, I respect him and would work with him anytime), who really get it, but I do not have a feeling that it is a majority yet and I am confident it will change. It will take time though, judging by the crap I am still getting daily in my email boxes.

Oh and of course, there are brands people just do not care much about, such as your toothpaste brand (nothing against toothpaste brands, we just do not talk about them that much) in which case there aren't many solutions left outside of mass advertising which, yes, has still lots of future.

When I visited Chicago last, John Bracken and Brian Fitzpatrick aka Fitz from Google organized a very interesting meeting with people from The MacArthur Foundation, Google and various communities including some folks involved in government.

During the meeting, I talked a lot about my thoughts on innovation in the context of newer software development practices and frameworks like agile development and Ruby on Rails. As Reid Hoffman often says, if you're not embarrassed by your the first release of your product, you've released too late." The release early, release often ethos of linux combined with the amount of actual "real work" you can do in one week with Ruby on Rails and other languages and frameworks totally changes the game for early stage consumer Internet investing.

Generally speaking, it's probably cheaper and faster and more effective to make a prototype than to make presentation deck. It's also probably easier to test something on real users than to do lots of marketing and guessing. My recommendation to just about anyone with an idea is to just build the thing, iterate until you have some user traction, then pitch angel investors based on that traction. This is very much in line with the old IETF motto of "rough consensus, running code."

In agile development, you concentrate on doing short iterations with input from your users constantly feeding back into the next iterations.

The "opposite" of agile development is a long process of deciding what to do, anticipating the problems, writing an RFP, work with a contractor until the project is completed, debug it, and then maintain the thing.

The problem is, in the real world, things change and by the time you're done, you're often pretty far off the mark and usually the first version isn't right anyway - so you end up making something 2 years late and a hundred features off target. With agile development, you test, evolve and stay in tune with your users and let them guide you. You can also test and refactor more easily because each "story" or feature is smaller, tested and easy to isolate and remove/change. (Or should be.)

It was very interesting to me that the government folks perked up when we got into this discussion. I remembered a comment by someone at an conference (sorry, I can't remember who said this). The idea was that in big software and in government policy, it was easier to add features (lobby for things to be added into a law) than to remove features. Everyone has their favorite feature that needs to be added. There was very little incentive to remove features and complexity once it was in the law or the code. You end up with things like Windows, some modern cell phones and many of our government policies, turning into bloatware that's huge, too compliated for normal people to understand which doesn't really even do well what it was originally intended to do. I think that keeping units small, proper test suites (accountability at the object level), and agile development can help mitigate some of the causes of bloatware that loses touch with why it exists in the first place and ends up sucking almost all management energy into process.

Also, the idea of floating government policy and iterating rather than taking ALL of the inputs before starting some humongous project also probably makes sense if you have the right kind of structure and discipline. I think there are a lot of things that agile developers have figured out that make sense to look at when thinking about policy and other work.

1 - Extreme programming. Work in pairs on the same screen so that you're checking each other and you're learning each other's productivity and other tricks. Swap partners every iteration. This is a very good knowledge sharing technique.

2 - Test suites. Assume everything will fail. Test what happens when what you have built fails and how it affects the other objects around it. Make sure you will always know when something fails and why. Build system to be robust against human, network, financial, computer failure of the object and build backup systems. Test suites also help you figure out what breaks when you make changes to the system and helps you later when you want to change, remove or refactor stuff.

3 - Small. Keep the teams small, break big problems into small problems. Break the small problems into "stories" or short tasks that a very small group of people can do.

4 - No proposals, specs, RFP's. Use a tracking system like Pivotal Tracker for tracking the tasks, but don't do huge project sheets or try to decide everything before you get started. It's more important for each of the small groups to share their local context and that each small part works correctly and doesn't screw up the stuff around it.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but I think that having a lot of small groups focused on being robust and agile and relatively independent makes it easier for the higher level decisions to be made and retain focus on the mission. Micromanaging is huge and inefficient. Each small group provides inputs to the system and feedback from the "users". Unbundled and small groups makes the whole system much more flexible and "agile" and changes can be made quickly without breaking things and allows focus on context instead of structure.

A lot of my thinking in this area has come from watching Jay Dvivedi and his team at Shinsei Bank and also working a a little with the Pivotal Labs folks. Having written this rambling blog post, I'd still like to say that I'm still rather new to the whole world of agile development, but I think there are a large number of practices that are being developed that can be applied to many other fields including but not limited to government policy development.

very interesting social media marketing industry report by Michael Stelzner (http://www.whitepapersource.com/author/michael-stelzner/). Thanks to the podpimp (http://www.pimpyourbrain.de)

Twitter enabled negative word-of-mouth to instantly affect Bruno at the box office

Posted by Eric on July 15, 2009
Business, Entertainment, Movies

Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comedy about an Austrian fashion journalist, opened to $14.2 million last Friday night. Then, the movie experienced a drastic decline in sales between Friday and Saturday, causing it to fall as much as $20 million short of some expectations for opening weekend.

Many experts speculated that negative word-of-mouth caused the sharp sales decline for Brüno, as social media sites like Twitter are enabling word-of-mouth to affect releases instantly. Time magazine said Brüno could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter, and that Friday is the new weekend when measuring box office success.

Brüno was a trending topic on Twitter throughout opening weekend. We decided to use Social Radar to analyze the sentiment of comments posted on Twitter throughout the last week.

Sentiment was overwhelmingly positive leading up to the opening, with more than 90% positive comments on July 6. But as the movie opening on July 10, the number of negative comments increased sharply, with almost 50% negative sentiment on opening weekend. Words like rotten, uncomfortable and gross appeared frequently throughout posts.

Twitter and other social media sites are empowering consumers to make more informed purchase decisions. With this new level of transparency and instant consumer reviews, product launches cannot hide behind marketing to tell the story.

As we discussed in our post about the angry United Airline customer who gained massive attention with his YouTube complaint, consumers are influencing each other directly more quickly and on a larger scale than ever before. How can companies maintain control of their brands in today’s transparent world?

Tags: Bruno, social media, Twitter

a very interesting blog entry about the effect of twitter as a source of reputation.