From Chris Brogan: Jumping Over a Mountain
It might be time to start thinking about jumping over a mountain. Because linear thinking won’t bring about what comes next. It will take a jet pack’s difference in your thinking.
Nice Stuff! I'll cut him some slack (this time) for his "managing communities" comment.
This Harvard Business piece on Zappos: Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too is most excellent. Where it is a great read for a number of reasons it was this that caught my eye:
This is a company that’s bursting with personality, to the point where a huge number of its 1,600 employees are power users of Twitter so that their friends, colleagues, and customers know what they’re up to at any moment in time.
That is very cool. It's about engaging your customers in new ways. It inspired me to start following some Zappos employees and it is indeed true that they have some serious fun. I don't know how many I'm up to now but it's a lot. You can see a list of Zappos employees that use twitter at twitter.zappos.com. I'm now following and being followed by the CEO, COO, the warehouse, and countless others. My interactions have been entertaining enough that I've decided to buy some shoes just to see what the experience is like.
I just have to decide whether to get the pumps, wedges, Mary Janes, or Vans.
Where this has all been great fun, it brings me to the point of this post. Yes, there will be a point. I was fortunate a couple of weeks ago to attend an Enterprise 2.0 panel which was "sort of" interesting. The conversation was lead by the CIO of my bank, which can remain anonymous as it's not particularly germane... all banks would have the pretty much the same philosophy. Basically, most of the discussion that day revolved around how to keep your business information private while starting to leverage the value of these new tools, and where you erect the firewalls.
I asked the naive question about how Anona Bank was using these tools to engage their customers (which includes me), and was told that they do not. As it turns out they block everywhere the bank's employees might encounter real customers: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, IM... and I ask, why not block email too? It was obvious that they really didn't want to have to engage with us messy ole customers except on terms defined by them. Which is a primary characteristic of last generation organizations. I mentioned the problem with Firewalls-- that no matter where you erect them you will be wrong. That as soon as you put them up, the requests will start flowing to punch holes in the wall here-and-there, and that before too long it will be just like that little hole in the levy that becomes a full-blown breach. The CIO of Anona Bank didn't really respond to my comment other than to sport a look that told me he'd spent more time dealing with holes in the levy than he cared to admit.
Which brings me back to Zappos. This is the model folks. Every person talking to every customer wherever they can find them. This is where we're all headed. You can fight it, or you can embrace it, but you can't escape it. You have to engage with your customers on their terms. The sooner you get there the better. I can say with absolute certainty, that if you are an old-world organization erecting your old-school firewalls, that some new competitor, somewhere is cooking up an alternative to what you're currently offering that embraces these new forms of engagement, and they are going to clean your clock. It's not too late to Zappize your business, but time is running short.
From Mark Evans: It’s an Aggregation Festival:
There’s always a new, hot trend on the Web, and aggregation suddenly seems to be where it’s at. The big question is: why and why now? Arguably, it’s because the more people use the Web to consume, create and share content, the more difficult to find what you want in one place. Aggregation services are, in a sense, the Web’s 7-11s where you can find a variety of stuff (although far from everything) at a single location.
I have to admit that I read several aggregation sites daily. BUT, I have to disagree with Mark's conclusion that that they are the "the Web’s 7-11s where you can find a variety of stuff... at a single location." Personally, I almost never go to these locations. I use them initially as a mechanism to browse what's being aggregated, and then subscribe to the requisite feeds. It's a way of previewing a feed. Once subscribed I rarely, if ever, go back to these sites. The one-shop-stop is your feedreader, or perhaps your iGoogle, Pageflakes, or Netvibes pages.
This conversation around aggregators started when Sarah Perez at the ReadWriteWeb wrote a piece on Breaking the Techmeme habit. I read Techmeme's feed daily. I very rarely click through to Techmeme, however. When I do, it's because I want to see what others are saying about something that has caught my interest. I visit Techmeme because I want to see the broader conversation. I don't do this very often. Apparently I'm not the only one who doesn't visit. A quick look at the site rankings on Alexa for Techmeme, and Topixnet, another popular aggregator, shows that their site visits are actually dropping. Do I think people aren't reading these sites anymore? Not at all. I think the drop corresponds to the broader adoption of syndication feeds.
I'll have a post show up on Techmeme every now and then. Perhaps this one will appear? You'd think that a link on Techmeme would generate a good deal of traffic. Nope! For me, Techmeme ranks 12th as a referring site. To provide some context, Twitter ranks 2nd, and sends eight times more people to this blog. That tells me that very few people are actually leaving their feed readers and clicking through. We see this same behavior all over the Web.
This begs the question as to a sustainable business model for aggregators. Got me! I'm glad I don't have to worry about making money on the Internet.
I'm fooling around with making a machinima and I wanted to find some open-content licensed music that I could use freely as an audio clip. I found some music using the Creative Commons search and decided to purchase it from Magnatune. Yes, I was more than happy to pay. I just needed something that I could use freely.
I'd never used Magnatune before but the first thing that struck me is I could enter my own price for the album. I selected the default $8 and paid with Paypal. It was then that they gave me this message:
Give this album away for free!
You can pass these download instructions on to 3 friends. It's completely legal and you'll be helping us fight the evil music industry! Complete details here: http://magnatune.com/info/give
It's a new day, and I'm kind of liking it.
Mashable jumped the gun a bit: Is Scrabulous Officially Dead?
In true Facebook fashion, a group was formed to help save Scrabulous, but to no avail. It looks like Facebook has complied, as the application is no longer active. There’s now an error page where the board game application used to be. And while it hasn’t been confirmed that Scrabulous is gone forever, this recent development appears to show Facebook’s compliance with Hasbro and Mattel.
Wrong! Having just played in several games I can report that Scrabulous is far from dead. There is no question that it is on life-support, however.
Hasbro, in trying to take Scrabulous down is pursuing a last century business strategy and it's a big mistake. They need Scrabulous just like a rock band needs their music played -- bootlegged or not. Scrabulous has helped to pull Scrabble from the pile of obscurity and created millions of new players in the process.
If Hasbro had half-a-brain they would be embracing Scrabulous by either ignoring it, or by cutting Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla a sweet financial deal. The worst thing that could happen is to have the game go away. Where I don't know the numbers, if I was guessing I'd say that analog Scrabble sales have soared since Scrabulous exploded onto the Facebook scene. Hasbro couldn't buy this sort of promotion at any price.
I hope that Hasbro gets a clue before they kill the goose...
I was reading this article in Fortune: Will someone please start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous?, about Hasbro trying to shutdown Scrabulous for copyright violations. I didn't find the intellectual property parts of the article that interesting, but this did catch my eye:
Their site launched in 2006 and quickly signed up 600,000 registered users. Not too shabby for a year’s worth of work. So the brothers launched a Facebook application in June, 2007 and the results were stunning: 2.3 million active users as of today. For those of you keeping score, the application generated 70 million pageviews in the past month. Not a bad deal for a two-man operation.
I don't know about you, but 2.3 million users and 70 million page views seems pretty impressive. With numbers like that you'd expect them to be making some serious cash. But no...
Jayant said that he didn’t exactly understand what all the fuss was about. Its ability to generate insane numbers of pageviews notwithstanding—he said some players play as many as 170 games at a time on Facebook—the application isn’t throwing off that much money. He declined to say exactly how much, pegging revenues at “over $25,000 a month.” Hmmmmm.
That's only $300k a year for 2.3 million users and 840,000,000 pageviews?
If you're thinking that you might strike it rich on the Internet you might want to think twice before you give up your day job.
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