For Work and Play

There’s a very interesting article on the HBR Blog Network called “Rules for the Social Era” by Nilofer Merchant. Definitely give it a read, but the big takeaway I got was this:

“social is more than the stuff the marketing team deals with. It’s something that allows organizations to do things entirely differently — if we let it become the backbone of our business models.”

Social – both in terms of businesses and technology – certainly deserves consideration beyond a piece of the marketing mix. But is it a fundamental shift in the way companies need to approach their business? Or just a short-term phase by which businesses have come to identify with consumers?

More and more I’m seeing the idea of social extending far beyond the marketing function within an organization. At a very base level, social success is achieved via transparency and dialogue – and these are things that can’t happen superficially. The companies that really excel are the ones that behave “socially” to their core. It’s not just a line item in a marketing plan – it is their plan.

Zappos is a great example of a company doing it well. Netflix is a social company – sure, they’ve made some missteps lately, but their likely rebound will be largely due to the way they embraced open dialogue to address their problems. In a sense, they had an honest conversation with their stakeholders, presented their case, heard the rebuttal, and adjusted accordingly.

Bank of America had a similar issue when they tried instituting a $5 fee for debit cards. They put something out there, the public reacted negatively, BoA took it back. But, the big difference I saw in the handling of those situations is that with Netflix I saw and heard directly from Reed Hastings, their CEO. I never heard from BoA’s CEO (see, I can’t even name him/her).

What’s the big deal you ask? Well, I still have my Netflix subscription. But I’m slowly migrating all of my banking away from BoA (to a combination of ING and Fidelity).

It’s not that a personal touch to communications will sway me. It’s that some companies operate knowing from the outset that they’ll make missteps and that it’ll be a constant touch and go with consumers – in a positive way. Others make blunders and try to backtrack and fix them. They didn’t anticipate consumer backlash or engagement, they simply reacted to it.

What this means is that companies need to build social engagement into their business model – product development, positioning, market entry, etc. – and it has to be a constant force underlying everything you do. It has to be an expected element of your business, not a reactionary tactic.

It’s the end of the week (yay), so here’s a smattering of things I found to bring you to the weekend:

• #McFail – we all love successful case studies, but I find I might just learn more from the ones that bomb. In the case of McDonalds, what happens when angry consumers hijack your PR campaign? You better have a backup plan.
• Building Las Vegas – Tony Hsieh must lead a cool life. He owns Zappos, arguably one of the most successful digital age companies. And now he’s investing $350 million to rebuild downtown Las Vegas. That’s when you know you’ve made it in life.
• When companies die - Some of the most fascinating reads are post-mortems on companies that are no longer with us. Particularly when they’re written by the founder. Remember Plancast? Founder Mark Hendrickson gives the inside scoop on why the company didn’t make it. Great lessons and insights in here.
• Best crowdsourcing ever? - You can crowdsource pretty much anything these days. But I give Sam Adams beer the win with their plan to crowdsource their new brew – the Samuel Adams Crowd Craft Project.

I’ve long been critical of Research in Motion’s inability to keep its Blackberry brand and ecosystem on par with Apple and Android. So I was pleasantly surprised to wake this morning to news that its co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, had resigned. Now, I never like to see anyone lose their job – let’s face it, that sucks – but this is clearly a case where enough time had lapsed and things were still going in the wrong direction. From a bungled tablet launch to its lagging OS upgrade, RIM is dangerously close to suffering the same fate of Palm.

But here’s the problem I have with this. New CEO Thorsten Heins has the chance to come out guns blazing and really generate some excitement around this stagnant brand. He has the chance to wipe the slate clean and buy RIM some time to work out its internal kinks. Instead his first words make him look like a new batch of the same dish: “I don’t think that there is a drastic change needed.” Really? Are you sure about that?

Would RIM have been better off bringing in someone from the outside rather than promoting the next guy on the org chart? I know they’ve been very guarded about the company and like to keep things within, but this called for a bit more of a shakeup than this. I have no idea how Heins will do or what he has planned. Maybe it’ll be great. Maybe it’ll turn the company around. GigaOm’s Ryan Kim put it best: “Yo RIM: Where’s your sense of urgency?”

It’s very easy for me to criticize from the sidelines. So I’m going to offer up my very basic thoughts on where RIM should go.

• Court hardware developers. RIM’s last few attempts to breathe life into its handsets have been met with tepid responses, at best. Incremental changes aren’t going to match up against the mighty iPhone. Let others build the hardware and instead focus on the software.
• Work the enterprise. Enterprise customers are still the bread and butter – better not lose them to Apple and Android. RIM needs to put a full court press on to make sure they keep a tight lock on this business.
• Open the app ecosystem. Biggest problem for smartphones not running iOS or Android is the app ecosystem (just ask Windows). If you can’t convince developers that Blackberry is viable platform, open it up to Android (even temporarily). Face it, if you don’t have apps, you don’t have customers.
• Integrate the tablet. Biggest problem with Playbook has been the lack of a native e-mail app. Why on earth would Blackberry, the mobile e-mail king, push out a product that lacked this feature? Gah, and why would you not tie the Playbook seamlessly to everything else made by RIM? You can’t develop products in silos – again, look at Windows for how platform integration can achieve something new.

I still think RIM can be a player in the mobile business. I think they have a much better position than Palm did, so I don’t see a similar fate. But, I think Microsoft finally has some good momentum with Windows, which could be the biggest threat. Right now iOS and Android aren’t going anywhere, and this market may not be able to hold more than 3 main players. RIM has some good pieces, but it has to get off its stagnant trajectory and seriously change course.

Managing my personal finances is both a joy and a huge headache. On the one hand, I love the various tools at my disposal to help keep tabs on my various accounts. Plus, I’ve pulled myself out of recent-grad-with-no-money status, so it’s actually not scary looking at statements each month.

But, with all that, I still haven’t found just what I’m looking for in money management tools. There isn’t that one catch-all that can act as a dashboard for my financial life. There are some that come close, but they all miss the mark in crucial ways.

When it comes to what I look for in a management tool, there are a few “must haves”:

1. Simplicity. If I can’t figure it out in 30 minutes, I’m moving on. Nature of the beast these days; if your app is solving a great need but is too complex, someone else will also recognize that need and build someting better. Inevitable.
2. Comprehensive. If you serve 1 part of a 3-part value chain really well, I probably won’t choose you over the company that offers all 3 parts.
3. Mobile enabled. And the functionality better be equal.

While I don’t think these are out of line, my high bar of acceptance is wholly attributable to the fact that I’ve been overly pleased with financial institutions’ ability to offer online services. Let’s face it, “bill pay” came without a hitch, leaving high expectations everywhere else.

So what do I use? There are a few things I absolutely love:

1. Bank of America. Like I said, “bill pay” has always worked. This is really where my financial happenings happen. It’s the hub.
2. Mint. It does what it says it does, and for that I will always be a customer. BUT, the frequency with which my individual accounts need to be re-linked and fixed is an annoying occurrence.
3. Manilla. I’m admittedly very new to this service, but I think it’s one of the greatest things ever. It picks up all the bill pay shortcomings that Bank of America has. Biggest gripe with BOA is I can’t see monthly statements and never know exactly how much I owe on a particular account. Manilla solves all of this. Same issue as Mint, though, where account linking is spotty.

All great tools. All have their issues. None offer the complete package of account management, budgeting, bill pay, and education. All may purport to do those things, but they don’t do them well enough for me to crown a winner just yet.

The personal finance market continues, and will always, be wide open for competition and new entrants. And I love it. All this competition so far has meant great products for the consumer, and I’m hoping this trend will continue.

After getting over my initial grumblings about Facebook’s recent format update, I actually got excited about the integration with one of my new favorite things: Spotify. I thought this would be great. There’s no good way to share music with your network other than listing the bands you like on your profile page. And this is a topic I consistently would like to share with people. 

Once I linked my two accounts, it took all of 5 seconds for me to realize it may have been a bad idea.

A couple days later….

Oh boy… this isn’t what I wanted at all.

It comes down to two things, and they’re not limited to the Spotify integration, but the entire “Read, Watch, Listen” push that Facebook is making (my concerns apply equally to any of the auto-sharing mechanisms Facebook is rolling out). I definitely want the ability to easily share, but what I don’t want are 1) too much clutter, and 2) no context.

More data doesn’t mean a better experience

The last thing Facebook needs is a mechanism to pump more information into people’s news feed. In fact, as the organization of Google+ would suggest, we’re getting to a point where the preference is for easier ways to filter information. Instead Facebook dumps a lot of inconsequential updates into the Ticker and leaves you to sort it out (or worse, they try to do it for you using some magic algorithm – like I trust that…).

The other thing that’s missing is how to use that data. Look again at how the Spotify integration works within my news feed. I listened to nearly 50 songs in a couple days – am I to expect my friends to sort through that entire list and see what they like? Doubtful. More likely is that would be ignored, like all those Farmville updates that plagued profiles for a while.

Just because I consume something doesn’t mean I endorse it

But the biggest issue I have is that there’s no context for my consumption of that music. I use Spotify to not only listen to my favorites but also to test out new artists or songs. However, the way it’s presented in Facebook, it appears as though I’m endorsing everything I’m listening to. And that list of songs inherently gets linked to my online persona, whether or not it’s an accurate representation of who I am.

What I would much rather have is a mechanism within Spotify to share the songs I want to – and provide commentary around that. For example, maybe while testing out a new artist, I come across something I love. That’s when I want to broadcast to my network what I found. Right now there’s no way for someone to know that I loved that artist, and hated the other five that popped up right next to it.

For Facebook, all of this data about what I’m consuming is great for their marketing partners. But it’s not great for the user. I had 50 songs come through in a couple days. My friends presumably see that, plus the 50 (or more or less) songs from the hundreds of other people in their networks. Now we’ve got thousands of songs being put out there with nothing more than the fact that someone listened to them. Helpful? Not really.

What I’d rather see is that data captured behind the scenes and presented to me in an aggregate way so I can get a glimpse at what is going on within my network. If 30 of my friends are listening to a particular song, I may check it out. But I won’t notice that kind of trend by seeing individual updates.

Or better yet, how about I self-select 10 or so friends (or however many you want) that I identify as influential to me. These are the people that I look to for tips on what’s hot (because let’s face it, all friends in our network aren’t created equal). Then I could see the aggregate activity of my entire network as well as the activity of my most influential friends.

Not only would this create a more useful user experience, it would also help Facebook and marketers to identify the true influentials (because they’d be identified by users) and provide an avenue for optimal micro-targeting.

I would also like to be able to filter the information that’s shared back to Facebook. The auto share is pushing the privacy envelope too far for me. I don’t have privacy concerns when I’m ultimately the one that decides to share something. But when it’s shared on my behalf, without a way for me to filter it, I simply won’t use it.

And this is Facebook’s biggest potential problem. People won’t use this. I got creeped out by Spotify after only a few days. And I was pumped to use that! No way I’m giving Facebook the ability to share every article I read, every mouse click I make. Nope, no thank you.

There’s some great potential here, but some serious checks and balances need to be put in place before it’s usable, in my opinion.

UPDATE: Spotify has rolled out a private listening feature that allows users to not publish every last song to their Facebook profile. That’s good. Now I can keep Spotify connected to Facebook, which I like because it allows me to see friends’ playlists (which they control whether it is shared or not). Nice job Spotify, you reacted well to the outcry and provided an acceptable solution. We’re BFF’s once again.

This article is a couple weeks old, but it really resonated with me. VC Marc Andreessen makes the bold claim that “software is eating the world.” As he went through the numerous industries that are now dominated by a tech company (books: Amazon, movies: Netflix, video games: Zynga, music: iTunes, etc.) I realized just how right he is. Literally every industry has evolved over the last 10-20 years largely through technological growth.

This goes beyond merely digitizing analog records (*cough*healthcare*cough*) and into something much more profound: it’s a fundamental shift in behavior and consumer expectation that has driven this change. Connectivity is now commoditized where it used to be a premium. Andreessen himself says that the current tech market is different from that of a decade ago primarily because of global scale. Everyone is online, smartphone use is skyrocketing. It’s no longer niche to lead a connected life. Therefore, virtually every industry has had to adapt.

This got me thinking further about myself and employment prospects for the next generation. Evidently I’d be doomed as my only ability to write code is circa-1995 HTML. Not exactly going to create the next Angry Birds with that.

But does the American education system value this trend enough to invest in creating the best-in-class curriculum to produce the best engineers? Would that save jobs from being offshored to India where they have outstanding programmers? Or are we being shortsighted if we alter our educational foundation for a potentially short-term trend in the global economy? Your answer to that entirely depends on whether you think this is a short-term trend or just the next step in an evolution that we’re already behind in.

I tend to think that while our education foundation is useful, it does need a significant upgrade to coincide with where our current economy is headed. Let’s be honest, when the 3 R’s was coined, nobody had any idea of the potential for information access to dominate the way it has. As other industries have adapted to that, shouldn’t education as well? And that adaptation shouldn’t just be giving each kid a laptop, it should be tailoring our educational standards to meet the needs of today’s economy. Of course, some would say that’s typically been the job of a trade school.

Clearly I don’t have the answer here (or even a firm position), but I think the points raised in that article have far reaching implications that extend beyond just how industry evolves. Rather, it’s about how we as a society evolve to keep up.

Ugh, there’s something humbling and embarrassing about not having posted anything new in two months! Things started out rather well on this blog, I was churning out interesting stuff (or at least interesting to me) and I enjoyed it. Then life took over and suddenly blogging was pushed behind parenting (rightly so), work (again, probably for the better) and weekends on the Cape (hey, I told you it was my second home).

So, shame on me! But I’m not here to talk about the past. I’m here to talk about how I’m going to fix this. My re-dedication, if you will. I’m hoping that if I put a plan out there for the world to see, I’m more likely to stick to it. So here goes:
1.     Back to at least weekly blog posts – hopefully more frequent, but let’s ease back into this.
2.     A redesign – I’ve been using a rather bland design for a while now, but hadn’t yet found a suitable alternative. I will though.
3.     More communicating – I read a lot of blogs, yet comment on very few. Part of why I started this blog was to invite comments from the outside world. It’s a two-way street, and I will do my part.

Sounds simple, right? Well, we’ll see how it goes, and let’s just hope we don’t have to have this little chat again.

The explosion of social media use over the past couple of years suggests a fundamental change in the way that we relate to one another. Information sharing is instantaneous, it’s easy, it’s interactive. And there’s more of it. We’re now a society, a culture, that caters to a social experience, through and through. Despite that, I have been overly disappointed with the social tools and uptake within the one place where we spend a good majority of our time – the workplace. Social media and the workplace have yet to produce that perfect mixture of ease, instantaneousness, interactivity.

There are tons of tools available, and it seems every enterprise service is now integrating social media components into it. From Salesforce.com buying Radian6 to Monster.com launching a Facebook application to establish itself as the social network for job seekers. Social media integration is, if not old hat, something no longer seen as tangential but rather critical.

So what’s my gripe with social integration in the office? I just referenced Salesforce.com making efforts to get more social, and they’re certainly at the cutting edge. But I still think these companies are missing something key. It can’t just be a copycat of how we use social media in our personal lives translated to the office. Rather, we need something that integrates seamlessly with the current office environment.

It’s no secret that people behave differently at home and at work. The very things people claim to hate – beurocracy, hierarchies, closedness – are all things that are seemingly inescapable in the average office. The majority of companies operate in a hierarchical fashion, and with that comes layers of people, approvals, need-to-know bases, etc. It’s an environment that’s inherently non-social. Sure, people collaborate in small groups, but the fight for resources often means that people are competing with one another internally. That push-pull can be beneficial for pushing people to innovate, but it also creates an environment that isn’t conducive to openness.

And here’s where the problem comes with just copycatting personal social network features into the office environment. Social media is only as useful as what is brought to it by the community members. Facebook is so valuable because all of your friends are on it and they update daily – it’s the best way to keep up with your friends, family, acquaintances. A Facebook for the office doesn’t have the same appeal because it’s not part of the current corporate culture and therefore would be used far less frequently. A corporate social network isn’t worth much if there’s only new information added once a month.

Ah, but you say, we must change the corporate culture! Good luck. For some reason, people are inherently reluctant to change in the workplace. We have our way of doing things, it’s been working for years, why change? What I find is that often the socializing of the workplace gets a few backers, a proclamation of change, then a few months later it’s just another failed corporate initiative.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re making progress. And there are some companies doing it better than others. Cisco is one that comes to mind. There are others. But I think the vast majority of companies wouldn’t even try this kind of technology, and those that do face huge hurdles implementing it. There is a culture change needed, but it won’t come from some feature-rich technology, it needs to come from the company leadership – they need to not only champion the benefits of social integration, but be using it. If the CEO is doing something, people are a lot more likely to follow. If some fledgling group within the company is doing it, people are a lot more apt to ignore it. It’s simple logic – following the CEO will get me promoted, following this group of people probably won’t.

I really hope to see an overall culture shift in the way the American workplace operates, a shift from a close, hierarchical structure to a more open, collaborative and social system that not only encourages the use of social media but thrives because of it.