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Closing the Long Loop on Social Networking

Your Goal: Be the first expert they think of

(…when looking for your product)

And be good at what you do, of course, and ultimately your goal is to buy your kids nice, shiny shoes - but when we’re talking about product in a socially networked, globalized, hyper-efficient, fast-food kind of world, all that really matters is they think you’re an expert.

That’s it.

Become a known expert, and everything else is just progress*.

Closing the long loop means appearing an Expert, not a Sell - so when your cousin Bob is looking for a carpet, you say “check these guys out online; they have hilarious YouTube videos” - and Bob buys a carpet from me, without ever seeing any of my ads.

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Faith in the Unknown

This is, I think, what’s so hard to grasp about the profit in Free Stuff.  It’s chancy; it’s not like buying Google AdWords, where you have a pretty good idea what your clickthrough rate is, who’s clicking, and what searches are helping your competitors instead of you. Social networking is about the long, uncontrollable loop of person-to-person contact.  It’s not 1:1, it’s Many:Many.**  It’s a reputation, not a commercial. 

  • The Long loop says the people who buy your stuff may never see your ads.
  • The Long Loop is an act of faith; cast your dollars into the ‘net, and hope they come back as fishes.
  • The Long Loop is really, really easy to get wrong.

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Getting it Right

To get the Long Loop right, you need to be interesting, genuine, useful, and consistent.
This is my take on the Whys.  If you want the How To version, just Google “social networking for beginners” for hundreds of thousands of links.

Interesting

You don’t need to be interesting because of your product, by the way. Geiko and Jack-in-the-Bock are great examples here: The Gecko’s cute, and he has this great accent, and people keep following him around … Oh, yeah, and he sells insurance.  Which, by the way, is an excruciatingly boring thing to sell.  But the ads are interesting! The Gecko’s awesome - and ditto the caveman.  Ditto Jack in the Box getting hurt and people visiting him in the hospital…

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Genuine

This is the hardest one, I think. It’s the difference between Ashton Kucher going geeky over wearable cameras on YouTube, and Ashton Kucher reading a perfectly worded speech about wearable cameras on a perfectly edited Vimeo-YouTube blend.  One gets millions of hits, the other’s a dud.  One will - at some point - sell millions of wearable cameras.  The other might have the opposite effect.

It means being contactable (if that’s part of being genuine).  It means listening. It means responding.

We’re all allergic to ads.

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Useful

There’s a trick here: Your product doesn’t have to be useful to the people you’re talking to. In fact, in the Long Loop world, it’s often better if it’s not. In the long loop world, you want to look like you’d be useful to someone.  I may not want to buy a carpet, but if a guy who happens to sell ‘em writes really insightful posts on marketing …

You can also be generally useful; Seth Godin writes posts about the Social Age.  Others find this useful - and they buy his books, get him to consult for them, etc.

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Consistent

This is the hardest for me personally (I think :) - if you’re going to stay in the public eye, you have to keep making appearances. For example: If I don’t post on Twitter for a few days in a row, I start bleeding followers.  Sometimes quantity really is more important than quality.

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The Bottom Line

Technology can help with some of the above points - consistency is often just a matter of scheduled Tweets, getting Real People on the phone helps a lot with Genuine, everyone loves ‘trying on’ clothing in virtual stores, and so on.  But tech can’t help with some of the other points.  (Either you’re useful, or you’re not).

To my mind, Social Networking Tech should be as invisible as possible, make people seem closer and not further away. Some will lose - those who don’t Get It, those who don’t care, and those who were hiding inconvenient truths behind traditional media.

Good social tech will help you sell more widgets, get your baby shinier shoes, and some, small part of me likes to think it makes the world a better place.

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…. now go to Sightglass, someone, and tell me about the coffee! :)

* and you’ll recognize that quote if you watched Lost last night :)

** … and the goal is to get positive resonance - to multiply your impact.

Posted in Globalization, Incentives, Networking, Social Networking. Tagged with , , , , , , , .

By LNIngram
3 February, 2010

1 comment

Avoiding the Incident Pit: Avatar, Google, and the Wonderful World of Stereotypes

I’m sitting here trying to figure out why Avatar bothers me so much - aside from those things that always bother a scifi nerd (You’re James Cameron, you put $500 Million into making a movie, and you name your mystery metal unobtanium?… and ask your actors to say it with a straight face? Really?) ….

.. But aside from that. Visually stunning, and oh how I wish I could fly. But the stereotypes. …

  • The noble savages understand nature, (Gaia, goddess), and this makes them better. And they can fly, and they’re magically clean and disease-free, with perfect teeth. And they’re always happy. (And did I mention, they can fly?).
  • The gunslinging jarheads (1): muscle and guns and grinding metal, blinders-on, looking to shoot something. Anything. Explosions! Guns! Big weights! Bad lines! More guns!
  • Academics have no political sense (2); They know what’s going on, but can’t put theory and practice together, or explain it effectively to those who can; sure, the world’s a network, but actually accessing it? Not so much.
  • The lovestruck couple: She knows the natural world, shows him the natural order of things - and he, once he sees the light, fixes everything he’s broken, and comes back flying the biggest creature the sky has to offer - to save her, and the planet, and everyone else. Hiawatha meets the White Knight, on CG steroids.
  • … and the business model; Money’s all that matters. “The only thing shareholders like less than bad press is a bad quarterly statement … I didn’t make the rules…” … shift the blame, pull the trigger, get paid, go home. No morals, no conscience. End of story. (And they even worked golf in. I was impressed).

So Avatar’s a bit like a porn star; enjoy, but from a distance. (3)

… did I mention, the animation’s incredible? Nice soundtrack, too.

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That business stereotype, in particular, struck close to home. I don’t like stereotypes; I don’t want to be one.

Most entrepreneurs I’ve met, especially the Facebook/Google/Twitter -generation, are nice, idea-driven people who like calling the shots and Making Stuff Go. It stands to reason: entrepreneurship largely depends on people liking you enough to buy (into) your ideas; it’s not the right staging ground for someone bent on evil deeds. And yet, the stereotype happens all the time as companies mature. Look at Microsoft.

Hell, look at Google (4): Google’s (informal) model is Don’t be evil . And last week, Google announced it will either renegotiate its censorship policy with China, or leave. … Which brings to mind lots of questions - the first being Since when does Google have a censorship policy? Also, Why are people so skeptical about Google’s goodness of heart? Take a look: Nat Torkington says:

… I don’t think Google really cares that much about free speech. Well, individuals might care at a personal level very deeply but I just don’t see any large company (”EVEN GOOGLE!”) cutting off a big revenue source just for the free speech rights of democracy activists. Call me jaded, but I’m looking for the squeeze behind the scenes that this move actually represents.

There are a very, very few who resist the twin sirens of fame and fortune (Craigslist’s Jim Buckmaster is a great example). For the rest of us, power and money are like sex and guns and drugs and videogames and religion; We the People get addicted. And we make bad, addiction-based decisions. And then we’re looking in the mirror at the worst possible stereotype.

Stereotypes, in other words, represent hundreds of thousands of people shoving blame around. People making tough choices don’t get stereotyped; it’s people going with the flow. The excuses go like this:

The military’s forced to act by outside events. Scientists can’t change anything - they’re observers. The business guy answers to the shareholders, who answer to marketing, which answers to customers, who are shareholders… the cycle goes ’round and ’round. Even lovers are just posturing, serving the ends of a biology - a destiny - they can’t control…….

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We can’t just avoid potential life addictions. Can’t all be Ghandi or MLK (happy MLK day, by the way), and we can’t all have tenure. And I really don’t want to be making ethical or life decisions someday because my shareholders won’t like a 1% dip in returns this quarter.

… After all, most cowboys aren’t in it for the ten gallon hats, and most C-levelers aren’t evil by nature. And we can’t have the moment of truth come so close to a big decision; it’s too late to change your mind when you have your hand on the trigger (despite what the movies say).

So … how do we keep from getting to a place where our choices look like these:

  • Censor searches OR Remove our search (losing time, profit, and a customer base)
  • Kill the Natives OR Get Fired? (or, Kill the Natives or Be Killed) …
  • Get Divorced, or Be Miserable. (there are lots of variations on this one: Get Paid or Be Miserable. Act Submissive, or Be Miserable. … and don’t get me started on heels)…

…?

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Have you heard of the Incident Pit?

… a series of events, which by themselves would not normally be dangerous, but each causes a problem which is made worse by the next event, until you end up with a major incident. (it’s a divers’ term)

We see the incidence pit all the time in the real world. Google’s big moment came when they were first asked to allow censorship of their search. That’s the breaking point - not a political pullout years down the road. Or starcrossed lovers: The time to let go is when your brother says “s/he’s not for you” - not six months or years down the road, with lawyers involved. Or when you’re in business, and someone asks you do do just one personal favor before getting that promotion… (Or on a business trip, when she says ‘we’ll just have one more drink, I promise…’)

To quote the movie Closer:

Alice: … as if you had no choice? There’s a moment, there’s always a moment … and I don’t know when your moment was, but I bet you there was one…

So we avoid the incident pit. And we do this by giving ethical dilemmas the attention they deserve. Even the ‘minor’ ones. We treat our choices as moments of conscience, whether large or small. We take responsibility for our own choices, and for their consequences.

After all: we create the world we experience. Might as well avoid being stereotypes.

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… and maybe that’s why Avatar bothered me so much; because of a fictional world ruled by the imagination … i really expected more.

(1) Sometimes I can’t help it. I blame the Iraq/Terror speech, in particular, for airport security going through my underwear every time I fly.

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(2)Which is funny, because academic politics are some of the stickiest I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter. In my experience, they’re worse than business ones; Business isn’t a zero-sum game. Everyone gets paid, and there’s some incentive to help others - if the company goes down, everyone’s burned. In academia, there are only so many tenure chairs to go around. Ever tried playing musical chairs with a bunch of rabid intelligence agents? Anyway.

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(3) … how’d you like that stereotype? ;)

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(4) See “Google’s Microsoft Moment,” by Anil Dash, for more on this

Posted in Creativity, Culture, Philosophy, Software, Stereotypes. Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , .

By LNIngram
18 January, 2010

1 comment

New Years’ resolutions

  • Blog more.
  • Buy a pair of these lovely boots:
  • Contact Lit and IR professors & see what they’re publishing, what’s interesting.
  • Write about Latin America in my newer, numerous blog posts.
  • Organize Google Reader so I see more of what’s useful, and less of what’s distracting.
  • Stop signing up for spam using my personal email account. Even spam coming from JCrew. With pictures of said lovely boots.
  • Take a business development course, focusing on developing world, small businesses, etc.
  • Get better at research.
  • Write about business development, in Latin America, in my new, numerious blog posts.

AND:

  • Have an AWESOME 2010. — You too, my dear reader.  And check back for more - and even cooler- posts in 2010!)

Posted in Career, Developing World. Tagged with , , , .

By LNIngram
31 December, 2009

2 comments

Lean Process (or, How Many Expense Reports do *you* fill out?)

I’m talking with a friend of mine, an R&D manager, and over the course of a conversation (and a few beers) he turns to me and goes “I know you’re a fan of process … tell me what you think of this idea.”

Great conversation. He’s kicking some interesting ideas around. And he’s damn smart.

But he got me thinking about process, how it’s invaluable when used correctly, and how it’s misused more often than not.

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I start with definitions (I’ve got this English Masters’ thing. Bear with me here ..)

Imnsho, process should parse tasks into small, similar units, so you can streamline (assembly-line) complex tasks.  ie, I write field-level reports, and any CIA analyst can use them to see/change the bigger picture.

  • Process at its best facilitates group ownership of many concurrent, complex projects. It makes it easy to work together, keep track, etc
  • Process at its worst makes people feel like interchangeable automatons. It distracts from accomplishment, even makes it impossible.

Let’s face it; process is almost never at its best. After your startup no-process insanity, there’s a magic moment - probably early on - where your organization’s size and its process levels are at roughly the same level, where process encourages growth, supports it.

Then comes a point where it’s just keeping you stable.

And then the process starts to pull you down. Either it’s sized for a smaller, more agile group, and things fall through the cracks, or it’s sized so large the whole organization slows to a snail’s pace.

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So: How do we size process correctly?

Netflix’ Reed Hastings says process is [almost] always bad.

Netflix is trying to get rid of processes, actively shred them. Their theory: process forces people to think inside the box and implies the company doesn’t trust its employees.

… but Netflix doesn’t have millions of lines of code, hundreds (or thousands) of engineers, or an unceilinged growth expectation.  Netflix expects to stay (relatively) small. Divesting their processes (deprocessing? :) is a move in that direction.

But it’s interesting.

Netflix’s successful unprocessing implies process isn’t the foundation for success. People are. And people only get things done, well, when they’re doing what you’ve paid them to do. The more process you have, the less work they’re doing overall.

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Growth, agility (speed), stability; pick two

It’s really, really hard to grow quickly and maintain the same process, and stay fast on your feet;

  • You can grow quickly and be agile - but then you’re big and fast and unstable.
  • You can be agile and responsive and keep your stability - but then you’re not going to grow past a certain point.
  • Or you can grow and grow and grow, but you’ll slowly ossify; you lose speed.

The question is NOT how much or how little process do we have - it’s this:

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How much time do your processes take?

Process is the means to the end; smooth process isn’t an end in and of itself.

If developing a feature takes two weeks, and writing supporting tests takes another, every two projects i complete I have a third I could’ve completed, but I didn’t, because of my process.

If I have to spend an hour filling out financial and confidentiality forms every time i take a client to lunch, that’s 5 hours/week I’m not working on product development.

I’m not saying any (or all) processes are useless, just that every process takes time.  It adds up.

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Processes should take the same amount of time, per person, as that they did in your processes’ heyday.

If your individual contributors (IC’s) spent an hour on process when the process supported growth - they should still only spend an hour on process 20 years down the line. They’ll have the same throughput. They’lll feel the process isn’t too heavy. They’ll be more likely to innovate, to stick around, to enjoy what they’re doing.

Your top talent - whether that’s sales, engineering, finance, or marketing - didn’t sign up to fill out expense reports and go through six managers to get anything done. Your top talent wants to get really, really good at something they have a passion for. They want to make things happen. They want to be rewarded for doing so. They don’t want to be tangled in red tape. (or they’d've gotten a job in DC).

Therefore:

to keep moving, you need lean processes, processes that are agile, intelligent, and don’t require much user input.

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To grow, you’ll have to invest serious resources in internal technology

As a company gets larger, some extra time is unavoidable; a really big company needs more cross-team conversations than a small one, just as a factor of the extra people, the extra dependencies, the multiple marketing demos, etc etc.  But you can cut way down on this:

Internal technology is key; streamline processes and tools. Make it easier to find and use relevant information. Quickly surface people who can help you do what needs to be done.

Invest in your processes. Keep them lean. Keep an eye on the time people are spending on the processes. Invest in the technology to keep things fast. Listen.

I have great hopes for the future, based on the software industry as it is today; on-demand everything, global communication, widgets and gadgets and plug-in functionality. Software today is infinitely flexible and malleable and - often - changeable through the UI, no coding required. It can readily serve as a backup for any company willing to take the leap.

So: How many expense reports did *you* fill out this week?

Posted in Control, Culture, Patterns, Software, Startup, Technology. Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , .

By LNIngram
16 December, 2009

1 comment

Corporate ‘Net Benefits: Out of the Fairy Tale and Into the Woods

The web runs on social interaction; our need to belong, our search for connection, interest in voyeurism. I want to be In The Know.  Get me laid. Etc.  Most of us are on Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter for the same reason you’d find us in the park (or the woods) a century earlier.

With the majority come the hangers-on, the FarmVilles and Dan Schawbels of the world, people selling lollipops while you’re standing in line for a club,  telling you what line to stand in, and hey, check out the idiots over there!

For you and me, and for these hangers-on, the conversation has to exist for us to get anything out of it ($$, warm fuzzy feelings, etc).  Interactions that don’t explicitly benefit me still implicitly benefit me. The good of the whole is good for you.

Whether you’re Lauren Ingram, Tim Ferriss, Penelope Trunk, or a Tweeting Buddhist Monk, your motivations are fundamentally different from the motivations of larger, more conventional companies.

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Most companies don’t need the social web to survive. They’re using it.

Sure, social networking is hugely beneficial. Trawling Facebook produces an immensely valuable datastore on my potential (and current) user base.  I can see what people are actually saying about  my company. I can even respond!!  The social web lets me control my brand, market presence, and customer interactions with an incredible amount of precision. It’s an instrument for fine-tuning my sales.

But:  If the social web disappeared tomorrow, Dell, Cisco, Ford, and your local pastry shop would buy more billboards. For big, preexisting, nondependent companies, the social web is just another marketing tool.

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I know; I have this habit of stating the obvious, but I’m going somewhere with this (stay with me).

Check out Roger’s Adoption Curve:

% corporate social media adoption is on the Y axis.
not “I have a website,” but “I’m having a conversation with my customers”

Time on the X.

We’re well past the early adopters phase, and into the early/middle majority phase.  How do I know? The tools are standardized, pluginable, and expected on any website. It’s been a while since I’ve run across any company of note that doesn’t have at least a token blog or twitter account. And most of all, because a cursory search of any industry + “twitter” brings up websites like these.

So we’re looking at early-to-mid majority companies using the social web.  We’re reaching the top of the curve. We’re looking at a whole new way of relating to the world. And everyone’s trying to figure out the best way to be corporate on the web.

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Here’s the thing: I see a lot of companies trying to relate to users on the web in the same way they see people relating to each other on the web. But people want very different things from companies than they do from other users. Early on, it was cool just to have that conversation with JetBlue - to write an email and get a response, to twitter and hear back, etc.

As we reach the top of that adoption curve, users are getting more savvy (In marketerspeak, i think the word is “immune”).  Sure, I want my friends and peers to retweet me on Twitter - but I want a company to get back to me as quickly as possible with the answer i was looking for. I’ll follow/talk about a company that helps me out; not just one that’s cool enough to be on the web (”Isn’t everyone doing that now?”)

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Says Wiki: With successive groups of consumers adopting the new technology (shown in blue), its market share (yellow) will eventually reach the saturation level.

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We’re at the top of that blue curve.  The yellow line? That’s business social interactions with their fan/customer base. Heading into the stratosphere.

Companies today see the Interweb the way they saw a crowded street 30 years ago - just begging for billboards and neon signs.

And customers know it.  We’re heading out of the fairytale phase, people.  It’s not enough just to *have* a presence any more.  We’re about to see the real corporate social leaders emerge.

Posted in Control, Creativity, Culture, Customer, Incentives, Patterns, Social Networking, Software. Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

By LNIngram
10 November, 2009

3 comments

My kingdom for a piece of chocolate

I got in the blue cab.  It was standing, blinkers on, across from a deli.  “Where you going?” the driver said, and when I opened my mouth, “Hang on.” A homeless guy in rags and rasta came trotting across the sidewalk from the deli, a plastic cup of orange juice in one hand, the other closed around a fistful of change.

“Let me see …” said the taxi driver, “yep, that’s all the change. No, keep it. Yeah, keep all of it.  And stay off drugs. Be safe, man.”  He closed the window, turned to me.  “Everyone’s got to get through the day, you know?  Now, where you going?”

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The internet is a great leveler; we are how we write.  It’s also the world’s most effective segregator.
On the internet, you don’t have to read anything you don’t already agree with, or follow anyone on Twitter, or watch anything on YouTube that might shock you out of your day-to-day.  You never have to interact with the taxi driver or a homeless guy on the Internet - unless you want to.* Frankly, if you have an iPod, you can drift from place to place without even taking in the scenery… Unless you feel like it, of course.

Even the most social of us monkeybrains can only have so many interactions a day.  We tend to interact with those most like us.  By bringing together distant, like-minded people, and providing them 24/7 interaction, we leave less time for conversations with those who are very different from us.

It’s only natural, and almost certainly inevitable.

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This isn’t a post about the value of nonstandard networks (although I have ranted about this in the past), and it’s not about The Little Things In Life (I can’t stand those posts). I’m getting at this:

The digital is [only] a metaphor for the physical.

There’s a lot of meaning and value to conversations that exist outside our immediate sphere of knowledge, interest, experience. This may or may not advance your career, or get you a tip on upcoming concerts, or tell you (as my last subway conversation did) all about a quasi-haunted house just off Union Square

“Don’t go there unless you never want to see the world the same way again… I’m serious.  Are you sure it’s safe to get off the subway?”
…”In San Francisco. At noon. Downtown.  .. you’ll be fine…”

- but these conversations will alter your perception of the way the world works, give you more perspective.  And humans (as noted by HHGTTG) “…are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others [and] also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so…”

Perspective is hardest to come by, and therefore most valuable.  Experience is applied perspective.  And so on.

And when we genuinely listen and make friendships where we can - that’s where we stand to gain the most. In our unusual friendships. In our side conversations.

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The best moment I’ve had in several weeks was a cold, windy, weekday, San Francisco evening. Dark outside. I wandered into my corner shop and struck up a conversation with the older gentleman running the store. White hair. Yugoslavian/Russian accent. Where are you from? Why are you here? How long have you been here? I offered him a stick of gum, and we had one together.  And on the way out, he said “Hang on,” and handed me a piece of chocolate.

Everyone’s got to get through the day … you know?

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* You could make a case for spammers = homeless, I guess (and hackers = pirates?) … but if the guy who’s always on my corner could design and run a spambot, I’d probably try hiring him.  I’m talking a different kind of life experience, not just different motives per se…

Posted in Culture, Hierarchy, Narrative, Philosophy, Stereotypes. Tagged with , , , , , , , .

By LNIngram
27 October, 2009

No comments

The Digital Age: Reading in Reverse

How to make a profit?

For most companies, it’s simple: Find a niche, create (or bulk purchase) a product, market to paying customers, and count what’s left over after you pay salaries and rent. 

Then there are the new-wave internet companies; The Twitters, Facebooks, and Googles of the world.  They provide a valuable service free of charge to attract customers (aka ‘eyeballs’), paying for it with ads.

Then there’s Salesforce.com. We’re an unusual position, as companies go, neither supplier nor middleman nor ad-driven startup. We’re the organizer and platform, the Go To and How To.  Sure, we create a product, we market, we sell it to customers - but that product’s no good without their product making it out to their consumers. Our success is totally dependent on our customers’ success.

Our profit lies in our customers staying loyal to us
(subscription-based software lives and dies on customer loyalty)

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It’s a bright new world. Companies used to go hunting for customers.  Shiny billboards, full-page newspaper ads, the erotic impact of fast-paced TV commercials.  If you’ve watched Mad Men, you’re way ahead of me here.

It’s different in the digital age, easy to compare prices and features and vendors. I can (almost) always get a book for less on Amazon, and I’ll know if the phone is cheaper (or has more features) across the street, or in China.  Knowledge is power - and, in this case, Knowledge is spending power.

Suddenly, we’re reading in reverse; 20 years ago, a company like Salesforce would’ve been helping companies find the customer. Today, we’re all about customers finding the company, getting what they want.  Salesforce finds itself -like it or not- invested in creating second-level loyalty; If our customers’ customers are loyal to them, our customers will stick with us.

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This is why - in my estimation - Salesforce pushes so hard to be in the top right-hand corner of the Gartner quadrant…*

… and it’s why Salesforce has invested so heavily in the Service Cloud (Salesforce to help you manage customers on Twitter, on Facebook, publish internal articles to the web, get Ideas from customers…).

We haven’t created a Service Cloud because it integrates so nicely into the platform (even though it does), and it’s not because we think it’s cool and hip to be part of the 21st century.  We can all do that on our own time.

It’s because if we lead our customers into the cloud and make it easy for them to connect with the outside world, we help them create a following and a good reputation.

We become their mechanism for creating loyalty, a crucial component of digital age success.

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The really interesting question, of course, is whether or not there’s really, truly a long-term profit in infinitely fast response times, in customer relationships, in social networking presence.  As US airlines are learning the hard way; your customers are completely, abjectly loyal - until the moment your competitor offers something comparable for $10 less.

Everyone follows the money.  But the market, our customers’ customers - it’s all in service cloud, all on-demand. Salesforce made a bet on on-demand software, because our fast-paced leader customers were all getting online, wanting to go mobile and global.  Because their customers were demanding more accountability, more accessibility, more relationship. Because profit does follow customer satisfaction.

Today Salesforce is betting on the service cloud.  Today, we’re reading in reverse, making our customers available to their clients.  And it’s all because you, the reader, insist on using that Twitter account.

Like this new world? Keep asking your questions online.

*https://www.salesforce.com/form/conf/sfa_magicquadrant_gartner.jsp

Posted in Choice, Comparison, Control, Creativity, Customer, Environment, Globalization, Incentives, Patterns, Social Networking, Software. Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , .

By LNIngram
30 September, 2009

1 comment

Silicon Valley 2.0: Tire-kickers and a Buy-Me Culture

Once upon a time, we had a By-Me culture; Google and Facebook were proud standalones, newcomers in the land of the hypertechnical.  And now? It’s a buy-me culture; get your company going, then sell to the highest bidder. Found this in my inbox recently:

Intuit (INTU) is acquiring Mint.com; with one stroke, Intuit’s removed its strongest competition, gained traction in the online/on-demand/cloud computing world, and as a side benefit, gotten all kinds of media exposure. For Mint, the benefits are a obvious, if not quite so cool (aside from, who wouldn’t sell out for $170Million?) Mint’s CEO (Aaron Patzer) becomes Intuit’s GM in charge of online Personal Finance, everyone gets stock options, etc.

Seems fairly cut-and-dried, but I ran across this post on 37Signals, which has me thinking about the larger picture:

Here’s a fresh new company that was gunning for an aging incumbent. And not only gunning, but gaining…They were on their way to redefining an industry… But here’s what happened: Intuit, last decade’s leader in personal finance, just became the next decade’s leader in personal finance. Mint had their number, but they sold it for $170 million. A big payday for sure, and if that was their two-year goal then they nailed it, but I can’t believe that was the point behind Mint. It had too much potential.

Mint was a key leader of the next generation of game changers. And now it’s property of Intuit …

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Why would Mint sell out? They were on top of the world; it just doesn’t get much better for a startup than they had it.

I say: it’s simple economics.

Twenty years ago, your average consumer still expected to pay for almost everything; Microsoft, Oracle, Apple –  all the big software companies were founded on that premise.  If you make something cool, people will buy it.

That’s just not true any more. Today, if you make something cool, your users will try it, use it, evangelize it, and blog about it — but as soon as you start charging, they’ll jump ship.  We’re a generation of tire-kickers, ladies and gentlemen - and, frankly, that’s what ultimately drives this BuyMe culture.  Maybe Mint can take their business model (kickbacks from financial service companies advertising through Mint.com)  — or maybe they can’t.  They certainly can’t start charging for their services; as soon as they do, their fan base will evaporate.

Am I thrilled Mint.com’s sold out? No, not particularly.  I don’t really want Intuit owning my information.

But: Does it make sense? Was it inevitable?

I’m afraid so.

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So what will we see next??

  1. You don’t pay for (most) software these days. Even corporate software’s getting markedly cheaper.  You do pay for hardware.  I expect bold newcomers in the hardware industry, as soon as the economic rubber hits the road again.
  2. On the software side, I expect to see more big acquisitions as we move forward; the software world will just keep consolidating, profits accruing to the proven players.
  3. And for brash new software startups?  Let’s look to China, India, even Brazil - surely someone’s still paying for software …

Posted in Choice, Creativity, Culture, Environment, Hardware, Ownership, Patterns, Software, Technology. Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , .

By LNIngram
19 September, 2009

5 comments

Act, Feel, Believe, Real (Top Chefs: Psychoanalyzed)

On Top Chef tonight (a rerun), the chef contestants were asked to cook a unique escargot-based dish for the French ‘Chef of the Century.’ In 45 minutes. Loser goes home. (No sweat, right?).  Despite all the drama and flashing lights, I was most struck by the body language of the men, versus the women, when they first heard the assignment.

The women - even the women who ultimately did well in the challenge - rolled their eyes, tipped their heads back, clenched their fists, squeezed their eyes shut, muttered under their breath. These are things that add more stress, more tension to the body. Actions like this tend to amplify nervousness, defeat rational thinking.

The men forced smiles, laughed out loud, cracked jokes, made eye contact with other participants, shrugged their shoulders. These are actions that reinforce confidence and clear thinking - and, on a nice side note, they help you check out the competition, see what the herd is thinking, gauge your next move, make you seem part of the herd (and therefore less vulnerable).

Of the four chefs who’d gone home by the end of the segment, three were women.

Coincidence?

I could get into a culture/biology debate, or even explore this as a postfeminist (deconstructionist theory, anyone?) but I’ll leave that for another time.  I’m fascinated by the implied effects of our deliberate, physical actions on our mental state of mind.

There’ve been a lot of studies about how our emotions affect the body; stress leads to hypertension and so on.  And we all know pain focuses the mind like nothing else - but not on things like business strategy, or the next, best circuit.

This is the message: we can - deliberately, knowingly - choose actions to reduce stress and clear the mind for challenges. We can practice these actions until they become a part of the psyche. And when we do this, we do, in the end, become what we’ve acted on.

Just for the record: The men and women who lost talked about nervousness in their 1:1 interviews.  The men and women who did well?  They talked about teamwork, the honor of serving this chef, how important the meal was.

And that implied message? Our state of mind and body matters a lot more than our gender.

Posted in Body Language, Chef, Choice, Gender Roles, psychology. Tagged with , , , , , .

By LNIngram
9 September, 2009

No comments

This isn’t innovation, it’s renovation (And I hate dusting)

It’s been a while since I’ve seen anything really new or interesting in the software world.  Don’t get me wrong - I work for a high-tech enterprise software company.  I see cool stuff all the time - but cool and new aren’t at all the same thing.

There are a few new website ideas out there, that I like: I like Alice.com (”Never run out of toilet paper!”).  I use Twitter … and there are a few good websites that are still keeping up with the market; Kayak.com rocks my traveling socks off.  I’m still on Facebook, you’ll see me on LinkedIn, and I suspect the UPS guy delivering my Amazon packages has my address memorized by now.

But for all the hype, I’m just not seeing much that’s innovative these days. Lots of fast, organic growth? Sure.  Really new concepts?  …

Brazen Careerist - a whole, hyped-up company consisting of … what, exactly?  A “gen-Y version” of LinkedIn?
Yoopster.com - Craigslist personals, but … personal?
Kayak.com - orbitz (or Southwest.com), but better.
Bing.com bought farecast. Oh, and Bing is just Google warmed over.
VMWare’s virtualizing machines; faster, stronger, better (like Amazon’s ec2)

This isn’t innovation, this is renovation.  (And I hate dusting)

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For what it’s worth, here’s what I think:

The (near) future of software is consolidation and personalization.
The real innovation for the next few years will be in hardware.
Then we make our leap into the next software dimension.

  • Software needs something new to innovate on. Until then, we’ll just keep iterating on the same old: take raw data, use your data to help it find you, give you more options on what you see and how you see it.  Repeat.  Take data …
    - Companies will consolidate, offer new product lines, help you connect faster, help you find and save your documents. All faster, all on the go. …

  • And then there’s the hardware!

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In any case, I suspect I’ve (over) made my point.  We’re at a plateau right now.  High-tech hardware’s almost there, high-tech software’s in a holding pattern - encouraged by the Great Recession, I might add.  I think we have another year before these technologies migrate from the blogosphere into games and the hands of consumers - and from there, it’s a year to the the consumer world, another 1+ to high-tech enterprises … and then the real fun begins.

Enjoy your iPhone while you have it.  It’s nothing to what’s coming next …

Posted in Creativity, Future. Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , .

By LNIngram
1 September, 2009

1 comment