Monday, August 30, 2010
Are you a night clubber, club houser or greasy spoon local yokel?
After an informal audit of my Big Three social network usage - LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter - I was a little surprised to see that I use LinkedIn and Facebook way more than I use Twitter. I asked myself why and the best answer I could muster was that Twitter is just too loud. Thinking some more about it, I concluded that, if these three online hangouts had "real world" equivalents, Twitter would be like that loud pick up joint you frequented in college - fine for meeting new people, but ultimately characterized by superficiality and brashness. Facebook is the greasy spoon diner you went to with your dorm and study buddies at 2 AM for a pitcher of coffee and a Western omelet and LinkedIn would be the clubhouse where you pretend to be important and rub elbows with other pretenders (pardon the cynicism). So, I guess this means that, when it comes to online social genuineness, Facebook is where its at - for me anyway.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Finland - Breeding Ground for Race Car Drivers and Community Builders
I've been loving watching Top Gear on Netflix streaming lately, even though it's last season.
In the episode I watched today (embedded below), they sent James May to Finland to learn from Mika Hakinen how to do the Scandinavian flick and other tricks of the trade. I always knew Fins were disproportionately represented in the ranks of elite drivers, but before watching this episode, I had no clue why.
It takes three years to get your full driver's license in Finland. Before the authorities grant it, you must prove able to control a car on a wet skidpad. According to Mika, this means that, by the time a would-be Finish racer takes the track, he's got an innate feel for the car in turns, even at high speed with the rear tires breaking loose.
After learning all he could from Mika, James took the wheel in Captain Fast in some Finnish town's Community Race, which happen weekly all over Finland. Notionally, these community races are very similar to Legends car racing in the US, where the value of participating cars may not exceed a certain dollar value. The idea - there and here - is to keep it fair to emphasize driving skill and not how much money one can pump into their car. What I found very interesting, and cool, about the Finnish version is the way they achieve this end. In the states, being the litigious lot we are, Legends racers are governed by a mile-thick rule book and an army of inspectors. The proverbial space pen that can write upside down.
In Finland, they take a much more practical, and I'd argue, effective, approach. There, after any race, any participant can buy any other participant's car for a set amount of money, and the seller must oblige. The proverbial pencil.
Perhaps this knack for simple and effective rule enforcement explains why it was a Fin who fathered the world's most successful community software project. Like his compatriots who, at age 15, can effortlessly flick a car's rear end loose through a gravel turn at 80 MPH, Linus Torvalds - a man with zero formal management training - has captained the Linux community with uncanny ability.
The lesson I, and I'd bet many Linux watchers, have traditionally drawn from the fact a Fin invented and grew Linux to its present status, is sort of a twist on the World is Flat - so flat that even someone from a tiny, remote place like Finland can invent, and rally many of the world's top developers to invest (time and effort) in, a free operating system that would ultimately undo Sun Microsystems (not that this was the goal, but I think it's safe to say that it was an effect, and a big one). But maybe this is wrong. Maybe the real lesson is that there's something special about the Fins and the flatness of the world was merely a necessary precondition for the rest of us to find out.
In the episode I watched today (embedded below), they sent James May to Finland to learn from Mika Hakinen how to do the Scandinavian flick and other tricks of the trade. I always knew Fins were disproportionately represented in the ranks of elite drivers, but before watching this episode, I had no clue why.
It takes three years to get your full driver's license in Finland. Before the authorities grant it, you must prove able to control a car on a wet skidpad. According to Mika, this means that, by the time a would-be Finish racer takes the track, he's got an innate feel for the car in turns, even at high speed with the rear tires breaking loose.
After learning all he could from Mika, James took the wheel in Captain Fast in some Finnish town's Community Race, which happen weekly all over Finland. Notionally, these community races are very similar to Legends car racing in the US, where the value of participating cars may not exceed a certain dollar value. The idea - there and here - is to keep it fair to emphasize driving skill and not how much money one can pump into their car. What I found very interesting, and cool, about the Finnish version is the way they achieve this end. In the states, being the litigious lot we are, Legends racers are governed by a mile-thick rule book and an army of inspectors. The proverbial space pen that can write upside down.
In Finland, they take a much more practical, and I'd argue, effective, approach. There, after any race, any participant can buy any other participant's car for a set amount of money, and the seller must oblige. The proverbial pencil.
Perhaps this knack for simple and effective rule enforcement explains why it was a Fin who fathered the world's most successful community software project. Like his compatriots who, at age 15, can effortlessly flick a car's rear end loose through a gravel turn at 80 MPH, Linus Torvalds - a man with zero formal management training - has captained the Linux community with uncanny ability.
The lesson I, and I'd bet many Linux watchers, have traditionally drawn from the fact a Fin invented and grew Linux to its present status, is sort of a twist on the World is Flat - so flat that even someone from a tiny, remote place like Finland can invent, and rally many of the world's top developers to invest (time and effort) in, a free operating system that would ultimately undo Sun Microsystems (not that this was the goal, but I think it's safe to say that it was an effect, and a big one). But maybe this is wrong. Maybe the real lesson is that there's something special about the Fins and the flatness of the world was merely a necessary precondition for the rest of us to find out.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
I'm a Broadcaster
I just booked a trip to San Francisco for GDC on Hotwire (fav travel site). I was looking at my confirmation email and noticed that I could give Horwire access to my TripIt account and it would automatically update tripit with my travel info.
Cool! I granted Hotwire access to my Tripit account, bcuz I like Hotwire and trust them. That's it. Now everyone who tunes into the Greg Wallace channel, knows where I'll be next week. And it dawned on me that I am a broadcaster.
This has some pretty major implications. For example, I have come to expect that, if anyone wants to know anything about me, and if I don't mind that you know, you can find it. Which in turn means that I don't have to tell "you" - you, unicast you.
I'll be going to Las Vegas in April for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show. I wonder if I can join NAB as a broadcaster? Why not?
Monday, February 15, 2010
B2B Tech Companies: Market What You Know, Not What You Sell
The idea for this blog entry has been brewing for a while. The genesis for it came in 2008 while I was Director of Marketing at Inlet Technologies. The engineering-heavy video encoding start-up tasked marketing with generating leads and increasing awareness but didn't have a massive budget for PPC/PPL activities. This led me to emphasize online and social media marketing approaches in my plan.
Not long before joining
the company, I had read the results of the CMO Council's survey of business technology buyers on the criteria they weighed most heavily when making vendor selections (see image on left). The results validated many long-held beliefs of mine. Namely, that having the most whiz-bang features or the lowest price were less important than demonstrating an unwavering commitment to customer success and a clear view of where the market is going.
Even equipped with what seemed to me to be incontrovertible evidence that the proverbial "speeds and feeds" and "price per [insert relevant speed or feed here]" were less important than support, expertise and commitment to customer success to our target audience, I still faced a baffling uphill climb to get many of the people possessing the expertise - namely the founders, product managers, sales engineers and product developers - to share their knowledge online. There were one or two who "got it" but the social media marketing needs were greater than could be handled by one or two lone "evangelists." We needed broad commitment to participate in social media from across the organization, and it did not come easy.
Since leaving Inlet, I have done project and consulting work for a few b2b tech companies. At one in particular - a small enterprise software company in Europe- the resistance to sharing expertise online was fierce. As I struggled to get these guys and gals to blog, tweet, participate on relevant industry email lists and fora, I came to an important realization about how to sell the idea of social media participation to engineers. I can sum it up this way:
And so, when marketing goes to product management and engineering and says "blog, tweet, and participate in online fora," I think a primary cause of the resistance is the engineering logic that goes "but all the product detail is already on our web site and in the data sheets and white papers that I've already written." True dat. Very true.
And therein lies the marketing failure to define the task correctly.
Effectively leveraging social channels for marketing results isn't about how accurately and quickly you can recount technical details of your and your competitor's products. In my mind, that's "what you sell" and it is NOT what you need to be sharing on social media. Rather, in order to use social media to generate customer affinity you need to share What you Know.
Example. Inlet's engineers know video unbelievably well. And they know what all the major players in the video distribution ecosystem - new and old - are up to. They are involved, either formally or informally, with all the major industry organizations that set standards, and they have opinions. They are working on solving some of the toughest challenges in new media distribution for many of the largest new media companies on the planet. But these challenges, and the expertise required to overcome them, are not unique to NBC, Major League Baseball, etc. They are shared by every organization that wants to participate in the new media landscape. And these organizations are online 24/7/365 looking for help. Someone will provide it and that vendor will have the advantage in building customer affinity, which will drive top line results.
In closing, it's certainly true that there are often strategic implications for sharing opinions and knowledge online. Which is why the head of marketing needs to coordinate social media participation and have a strategic plan for it.
Not long before joining
the company, I had read the results of the CMO Council's survey of business technology buyers on the criteria they weighed most heavily when making vendor selections (see image on left). The results validated many long-held beliefs of mine. Namely, that having the most whiz-bang features or the lowest price were less important than demonstrating an unwavering commitment to customer success and a clear view of where the market is going.Even equipped with what seemed to me to be incontrovertible evidence that the proverbial "speeds and feeds" and "price per [insert relevant speed or feed here]" were less important than support, expertise and commitment to customer success to our target audience, I still faced a baffling uphill climb to get many of the people possessing the expertise - namely the founders, product managers, sales engineers and product developers - to share their knowledge online. There were one or two who "got it" but the social media marketing needs were greater than could be handled by one or two lone "evangelists." We needed broad commitment to participate in social media from across the organization, and it did not come easy.
Since leaving Inlet, I have done project and consulting work for a few b2b tech companies. At one in particular - a small enterprise software company in Europe- the resistance to sharing expertise online was fierce. As I struggled to get these guys and gals to blog, tweet, participate on relevant industry email lists and fora, I came to an important realization about how to sell the idea of social media participation to engineers. I can sum it up this way:
Market what you know, not what you sell.What really motivated me to actually dedicate the time to writing this blog was reading Steve Blank's Emulating Empathy post the other day. He describes his early career as an engineer in Silicon Valley, and being responsible for "imparting a fire hose of technical information efficiently." Though he doesn't explicitly say so, I figure the topic of the technical information was his company's products. In my experience, this is pretty much every b2b tech engineer's comfort zone.
And so, when marketing goes to product management and engineering and says "blog, tweet, and participate in online fora," I think a primary cause of the resistance is the engineering logic that goes "but all the product detail is already on our web site and in the data sheets and white papers that I've already written." True dat. Very true.
And therein lies the marketing failure to define the task correctly.
Effectively leveraging social channels for marketing results isn't about how accurately and quickly you can recount technical details of your and your competitor's products. In my mind, that's "what you sell" and it is NOT what you need to be sharing on social media. Rather, in order to use social media to generate customer affinity you need to share What you Know.
Example. Inlet's engineers know video unbelievably well. And they know what all the major players in the video distribution ecosystem - new and old - are up to. They are involved, either formally or informally, with all the major industry organizations that set standards, and they have opinions. They are working on solving some of the toughest challenges in new media distribution for many of the largest new media companies on the planet. But these challenges, and the expertise required to overcome them, are not unique to NBC, Major League Baseball, etc. They are shared by every organization that wants to participate in the new media landscape. And these organizations are online 24/7/365 looking for help. Someone will provide it and that vendor will have the advantage in building customer affinity, which will drive top line results.
In closing, it's certainly true that there are often strategic implications for sharing opinions and knowledge online. Which is why the head of marketing needs to coordinate social media participation and have a strategic plan for it.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Great Social Media Slides from NRF
James Bickers gave the best presentation at NRF, IMHO. Not just because the content was great, but his delivery was excellent.
Here are his slides:
Here are his slides:
Friday, November 20, 2009
Henry's Hand Ball
I really like Thierry Henry - to watch him play in his prime when he was at Arsenal was pure joy - the guy was (is) so graceful, fast and strong, he must have given defenders nightmares. Even at Barca, my adopted team, he's been a great striker, though he does seem to be showing his age a little.
I like him even more for fessing up to his handball against the Irish - being part Scotch-Irish, I really feel for the men in green - what a total bummer. And, while I guess I respect FIFA for sticking to their guns and saying that the ref on the field has the final say, it sure feels to me like the fairest thing to do would be to allow a replay.
Just now as I was taking a quick break from the marketing and bus dev workload to check the headlines, I just about fell out of my seat when I read this in an AP story about the controversy:
I like him even more for fessing up to his handball against the Irish - being part Scotch-Irish, I really feel for the men in green - what a total bummer. And, while I guess I respect FIFA for sticking to their guns and saying that the ref on the field has the final say, it sure feels to me like the fairest thing to do would be to allow a replay.
Just now as I was taking a quick break from the marketing and bus dev workload to check the headlines, I just about fell out of my seat when I read this in an AP story about the controversy:
"Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen raised the issue Thursday with French President Nicolas Sarkozy at a meeting of the 27 EU leaders in Brussels."What a hoot! Can you imagine Obama bringing up a call in an international baseball game with say the Japonese PM? Just goes to show you how seriously the rest of the world takes soccer.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Tech Data Gets Serious about Open Source
Very interesting announcement from Tech Data this week about their Open Tech initiative to bring more OSS solutions to their resellers.
Several things of interest. First just that they are doing this - I think it speaks well of Tech Data's leadership and also of the growing realization that Open Source solutions often deliver greater value to business users than proprietary incumbent solutions.
Second, what they will be doing - here's the list from the press release:
Some questions - will they include any pure community (that is non-commercial) OSS projects in the program? I'm thinking Apache, Debian, lesser extent OpenNMS, since they have a corporate entity that offers training and support. If yes, what will the support mechanism be? Will Tech Data offer support on these solutions or will they tap into, and provide some assurances around, the support ecosystms that surround many of these projects? I look forward to the follow-on announcements.
Several things of interest. First just that they are doing this - I think it speaks well of Tech Data's leadership and also of the growing realization that Open Source solutions often deliver greater value to business users than proprietary incumbent solutions.
Second, what they will be doing - here's the list from the press release:
Through Open Tech, Tech Data will:
- Recruit New Open Source Vendors – Tech Data is negotiating with several open source ISVs interested in expanding their reseller partner base. Tech Data will recruit open source ISVs developing a wide range of solutions, including business intelligence and database management, data backup and recovery, content management, messaging and unified communications, office productivity, middleware and security.
- Recruit And Enable New Open Source Resellers – Tech Data will enable existing open source resellers to expand their practices with new solutions and open source technical training available through TDEducation. The company also will leverage its data mining and channel marketing to identify and recruit new resellers likely to add open source alternatives to their solutions offerings.
- Establish The Open Tech Community – With a membership of resellers, open source ISVs, and leading hardware manufacturers, the Open Tech Community will work together to develop strategies to capitalize on emerging demand for open source solutions. The community will interact through physical and virtual events, and the new Open Tech Web portal.
- Expand Open Source Licensing Expertise – Tech Data’s software licensing specialists will support the licensing requirements for all Open Tech software partners.
- Enhance Open Source Sales And Marketing – Open Tech will provide open source vendors with a comprehensive channel marketing program to recruit and enable targeted resellers. Open Tech also will provide extensive open source product training for Tech Data’s Sales teams.
- Develop Custom-Configured Open Source Bundles – Through its East and West Coast integration centers and on behalf of its reseller customers, Tech Data will custom configure systems and servers with open source solutions for quicker deployment to end users.
Some questions - will they include any pure community (that is non-commercial) OSS projects in the program? I'm thinking Apache, Debian, lesser extent OpenNMS, since they have a corporate entity that offers training and support. If yes, what will the support mechanism be? Will Tech Data offer support on these solutions or will they tap into, and provide some assurances around, the support ecosystms that surround many of these projects? I look forward to the follow-on announcements.
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