Archive for May, 2009
Google Wave changes the game for small business
May 29th
There were a couple important new technology releases this week but the most significant for the small business owner is Google Wave. Why? This platform provides a powerful communication and collaboration tool you can use with internal and external stakeholders for FREE.
Google Wave brings together email, chat, photo/document sharing, and many collaborative features that would be very useful to a business on a shoestring budget. It opens the door to business channels that major companies are paying millions of dollars to achieve with expensive enterprise software solutions.
Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.
That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
Here is a worthwhile summary: http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/
This technology could be so far-reaching and important I’ll turn to the commentary of an industry expert. This commentary comes from industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang and his blog Internet Strategist:
- Google Wave is about bringing together the Web 2.0 lifestyle to become a workstyle.
Google’s apporach is significant because it will enter the workforce without having to go through IT management. This undercuts players like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP as it grows from the groundup –another groundswell like google docs and yammer. - This also impacts Cisco, Webex and Webex connect who is also trying to try new delivery models to the enterprise.
- Existing smaller collaboration vendors and community platform vendors with enterprise focus will be part of the developer ecosystem and can extend their features to the Wave platform.
- Google is pushing real time collaboration, and traditional email is asynchronous, yet don’t expect everyone to be interacting in real time, all the time.
- This is a missed opportunity for LinkedIn who launched their platform but has not exploited as they’ve only hand selected a few partners.
Alternative perspectives on social media impact
May 29th
My article this week on social media’s impact on personality development spawned many thought-provoking comments and insights. I wanted to share some of the best posts with you as we continue to explore the dangers and opportunities presented by the daily digital hurricane.
Trevor Longino, CEO, Overnight PR.com
I think, as we reach a point where practically everything about us is tracked and assembled in one location (anyone here heard of Google Wave yet?) we will find that anyone who’s not fully opted-in to the hyper-connected reality of the early 21st century will be increasingly out of the loop. Sure, when the CEOs are all people who are 50, never got comfortable with computers, and don’t understand how to “get a twitter,” the gradient is tilted in opposition to the differently socialized kids of today. But wait a decade and see what happens; everyone who can’t dip into the stream of endless communication, sharing, and feedback will find themselves high and dry. My only despair, with younger siblings who are 17, 15, and 13, is that they may send 500 texts a day, but they don’t spell a word correctly in any of them. 
James Wallis Martin, Director at JB Metrics
…short attention spans, a lack of social skills, and a shaky sense of identity. It sounds like what every generation says about the generation about to come. I am sure it was uttered by researchers in the 50′s (Rockers), then again in the 60′s (Hippies), then again in the 70′s (Stoners), then skipped in the 80′s as everyone in the decade suffered, (not just a single generation), then again in the 90′s (Slackers), and now in the 00′s (Emos).
Social networking is allowing all of us to stay better connected with our friends around the world, those that we otherwise would lose contact with, and helping those that find it difficult to socialize, (either do to location, interests, or personality traits) to be able to socialize. I would postulate that the researchers that are critical of social networking are the same folks who find it difficult to find five friends to invite in Facebook. (whether because they are not comfortable with the technology or because they are stuck in physical mode only wanting to socialize with people they can see in front of them).
Brenna DeLeo, Social Media specialist, Image Communications
I agree with your article, however I think that many of these problems are due to a dependence on electronics in general. Instead of playing outside with their friends, young kids are on their computer or gaming systems. The constant use of MP3 players, cell phones and portable games prevent the awareness of the environment around them, not to mention the opportunity to meet and interact with new people. Overall, I agree that ‘short attention spans, lack of social skills and a shaky sense of identity’ could very well result.
John Bottom, Director at B2B agency Base One, U.K.
Mark – I echo your concerns, but is this change necessarily change for the worse? Social standards have constantly changed through history. For example, much modern social behaviour would be considered shockingly casual/rude/impolite to a Victorian observer, but who are we to say that they were wrong and we are right? Or that future generations, as they continue this trend, are wrong. Of course, the growing use of social media, texting, iPhones, video games etc is a big issue today. They’re all technologies that catalyse change – just as movies and TV helped make us different to previous generations. This will undoubtedly have implications for the future, and we (as the over 20s) need to be aware of it. But is there any point trying to stop it? Or even worry about it? The only certainty is change…
Zulfigar Deo, MBA student, Haaga Helia University, Helsinki
Progress is adding to what has already been done. The fundamental nature of change you have mentioned started off last century. If you look at the rate of progression we have made in the last 100 yrs, you’ll see never in history has man done so much in so little time. e.g the fax has come and gone, cassettes have come and gone. Social media, how long do you think it will stay for? I agree we are finally heading towards doing things in a way that even if we wanted to relate to the past we won’t be able to, but this is the start of the acceptance that we are fundamentally doing things differently. Should we start talking how build a sustainable competitive edge from this?
Is social media re-wiring a generation?
May 27th
On a rainy day, I was sitting in a shopping mall people-watching. About 75% of the folks between the ages of 13 and 25 were either texting or talking on their phone as they were walking – even if they were with a group.
Being a teen is all about connecting with friends and social media is the perfect channel to do that. In fact, the average teen in America texts nearly 1,500 times a month and 15,000/month is not unheard of (that’s 500 messages per day!)
Clearly, screen-based stimulation has become the primary source of socialization and entertainment among teens and increasingly younger children. Just a few generations ago, the vast majority of a child’s time was playing with friends in the dirt, kicking a ball or playing “house” (or if you go way back, I guess they played “cave.”) What’s the impact of the “highly-wired child” in our new world?
The social media brain
An individual’s neural framework is nearly set by the time they are 15 years old. Everything a child experiences forms neural pathways, and the most-used pathways become aspects of their personality and the foundation of how they interact as adults. Before the days of screen-based entertainment (most of human history!), the strongest pathways were naturally formed by intense socialization with family members and friends, physical activity and interacting with nature in some way.
With so many children spending MOST of their time in front of keyboards and flashing screen, I began to think about this impact on their development and on society. Wouldn’t personality development in the digital age have to be fundamentally, drastically and permanently different?
A disregard for consequence
New research confirms this. A professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College (U.K.) claims social network sites risk infantilizing the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize, and a shaky sense of identity.
Professor Lady Greenfield said the rapid-fire reward of video games and text messaging could be a cause of the three-fold rise in Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) over the past 10 years.
She warned against “a marked preference for the here-and-now, where the immediacy of an experience trumps any regard for the consequences. After all, whenever you play a computer game, you can always just play it again; everything you do is reversible. The emphasis is on the thrill of the moment, the buzz of rescuing the princess in the game. No care is given for the princess herself, for the content, or for any long-term significance, because there is none. This type of activity — a disregard for consequence — can be compared with the thrill of compulsive gambling or compulsive eating.
“The sheer compulsion of reliable and almost immediate reward is being linked to similar chemical systems in the brain that may also play a part in drug addiction, Greenwood said. “So we should not underestimate the ‘pleasure’ of interacting with a screen when we puzzle over why it seems so appealing to young people.”
A new way of relating
For teens already struggling with insecurity, social networking can provide a constant reassurance that they are listened to, recognized, and valued. That can be a good thing unless there is no balance with other life skills such as learning to interpret non-verbal behaviors, holding a conversation, and dealing with conflict when you don’t have the time to think up a witty text message.
Free, instantaneous, global communication is creating a generation who will recoil at the thought of three-dimensional conversations, whose social identity and self-esteem will be validated by flashing messages on a computer or cellphone screen. The sanitized, detached world of social media has become the norm, and will reach even younger children with new innovations that avoid live interactions.
While this sounds depressing, follow the logic through to its conclusion. Social media is not going away … quite the opposite. So in the ADD world of our future, those who grew up as digital natives of the Facebook society should have an ADVANTAGE over those who were sheltered. Can you imagine a world where an articulate, well-spoken, well-read individual is the social outcast? If you’re under 20, it’s here.
Life was so much simpler when I was playing in the dirt.
More marketing for less: Think inside the box.
May 26th
Constant innovation should be a central part of your business strategy but when the budgets get crunched, there is still plenty of value in the “old-school” marketing basics.
Bargains in traditional media. Marketing dollars are moving toward Internet marketing, but there is still a place for TV, radio and newspaper — and the value has NEVER BEEN BETTER! Newspaper ad sales were down 38% in 2008 – it’s a buyer’s market. More than 90% of Americans spend an average of 236 minutes a day with TV. I recently worked with a customer who was paying $9 for a 30-second commercial on a targeted cable TV demographic.
Focus on existing customers. Up-sell, cross-sell and micro-market to your existing customers. It’s 80 percent less expensive to sell more to existing clients than attracting new ones. How have their needs changed during the recession? There are probably new product and service niches being created with your valued customers. Go find them before the other guy!
Is your website alive? You’ve probably already invested in the website infrastructure and this is a highly cost-effective way to attract new customers. Is your site aligned with current customer needs? Does it have fresh, compelling content? A bold call to action? How is it differentiated from competitors?
Service essentials. Follow up on every lead quickly. 88 percent of people are happy to hear from a vendor after download within 24 hours. Waiting 96 hours drops that number by half. And think about using personal, hand-written notes to cut through the clutter and really delight your customers. Writing a letter … now that is REALLY old school!
Destroy complacency. I see so many customers spending money on advertising channels simply because this is what they have always done. Are your channels still relevant and targeted? Have your customers shifted to another gathering place? Here’s a more detailed article on this topic: http://tiny.cc/9VYRI
Measure what you treasure. It takes no capital investment to make sure the way you measure your success is still appropriate and driving the right actions in your business. Is your marketing plan integrated and measurable?
Re-discover email marketing. This can be an easy and inexpensive way to stay in front of customers, especially if you have a built-in mailing list. This is a tricky channel, but done right, can be highly effective.
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You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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