I will leave the arguments about PIPA and SOPA to others (particularly Tim O’Reilly’s response).  What I found particularly interesting in this dispatch on how PIPA met it’s end is how the politicians chose to release their information – directly via social networks.  Rubio and Cornyn via Facebook…   And Orrin Hatch using Twitter.

PIPA and SOPA Co-Sponsors Abandon Bills.

I rarely do product or service reviews here but, as with Posterous, I am occasionally moved by something remarkable.

Quora is a site that allows users to post questions for a community to answer as best they can.  Nothing new there.  What interests me for this post is how Quora has put new life into a fairly old concept.

The information design deserves a bit of spotlighting because it is what  impressed me right away.  Here is a sample page:

What’s going on here?  In this single, elegant page are so many ways to engage an audience around a question.

1. The topic and categorization are crisp and clear:

You can quickly navigate to focus on questions related to Foursquare or Public Relations.  You can quickly find your community of shared interest.  For my part I am interested in Foursquare as an exemplar of what is taking place with location based services and mobile.  I can easily find and drill into this area of interest.

2. Social media is a distributed communications network – each viewer has an option to publish the question with their personal network of contacts and, in so doing, expand Quora’s audience.  Quora fully capitalizes on this by leveraging every possible way to get this question exposed to more viewers:

3.  Quora understands the nature of questioning, giving you multiple ways to “follow” the progress of a question that is being “answered.”  In fact, many of the questions on Quora do not have a definitive answer, they are more like an unfolding narrative from multiple vantage points.  They are opinions.  Following a question will allow you to have emails as the answers come in.  The ongoing answering is often more interesting than just the winning answer.

4. The  image capture below also shows how, like Amazon, -or any other savvy, content-rich site – Quora always provides you with a next step – another place to go based on what you might be interested in.    It is a simple and ageless truism on the net: – never give people a dead-end.

5. Below you can see that Quora heeds Dave McClure’s timeless rant, “The Faces, the *FACES*… it’s *ALL* about the Motherf**king FACES!”

Human beings respond to faces.  We associate with them much more than text and we remember them.  Here Quora uses my avatar to associate with my question.

6. Trading on the concept of social currency (people care deeply about how they perceived in any social structure and will go to great lengths to enhance their status), Quora allows you to build reputation in their system by answering questions and commenting.  They also allow you to have a bio so people can learn more about you after reading your answer.  Not coincidentally this also serves to increase the quality of answers in my opinion.  Finally, Quora allows voting to determine the winning answer.   There is something at stake when you answer a question.

7. Quora also allows anonymous answers which is a double-edged sword.   In the first case anonymous posts can encourage trolls (but when will the net ever be without trolls?).   However allowing anonymous answers can also allow internal sources from a company to post in relevant cases.

Finally, metadata about the question itself is exposed, showing you activity and popularity of the question itself.  This is valuable when trying to assess where topics and questions sit on the trend-line of interest .

The lessons I take from Quora:

First.  Social Integration (a horrible phrase but…)
Quora is social – not just from a technology perspective of integrating with various platforms (Facebook, Twitter etc.) to extend reach, but it also trades heavily on how and why people contribute to community – it leverages the hidden  economy of sharing, reputation and status seeking.  It is also building itself around a tight cluster of people to begin with (silicon valley from the feel of it).

Second, Information Design. It isn’t just what you do – but how you do it that matters.   Social Integration is what makes sense today — how Quora does it is what makes them special.   I spent the early part of my career as an information architect, designing the labeling, navigation and structure of early ecommerce sites.  Back in those days you could pretty much guarantee a huge lift in conversation rates (sales) just by redesigning the online path to purchase.

Finally, the big lesson: There is Always Room for Innovation.    We are just at the beginning of the digital shift and we haven’t come close to understanding all of the mechanics of solving problems the right way.  Just as Yahoo Answers clearly was not the only way to crowdsource answers (hence this post on Quora),  eBay is not the only method to conduct an auction, Wikipedia is not the end-all for compiling an online encyclopedia.   There are thousands of improvements we are yet to experience and I tip my hat to the people at Quora for believing there was better way to get things done.

Related articles

• QuoraTop Ranks the Most Followed Quora Accounts (louisgray.com)
• A view at Quora from the Social Media Marketing Community (ecairn.com)
• Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype (techcrunch.com)

I am always struck by how powerful it can be to be driven by a single, counterintuitive question.

Consider this one: In early 2007 the Spanish bank BBVA asked IDEO to re-think their self-service channel – the automated teller machine (ATM) from scratch. The question was not how to further automate the teller, but rather how to humanize the machine.

In simply inverting this line of inquiry (let’s focus on humanizing the machine) you find entirely new possibilities for innovation.

Focusing on self-service as a means to lower  transaction costs  will  give you automation.  Focusing on simplicity and human needs will give you something remarkable.

This video walks through the process of how a team from IDEO went about rethinking the ATM experience and is worth watching not for the future of the ATM – but for how a company can simply invert their normal question – or objective – and begin striving for something remarkable.

Related articles

• IDEO redesigns the ATM (designboom.com)

I have been watching the Old Spice phenomenon with interest and admiration so don’t get me wrong; it will set the bar for great, creative work in advertising but is it a high point for social media?  I don’t think so.

The campaign, with its barrage of rapid-response YouTube videos distributed through Twitter, is modern advertising done extremely well; it acknowledges (and capitalizes on the fact) that we live in a world suffused with social tools, but it isn’t exemplary of them or the fullest expression of their potential.   It is still essentially a high-polish, broadcast campaign (technically one might better call it “transmedia“).  In fact, I would contend that this is exactly why the campaign has been so successful in bridging the gap from its origins as a television commercial.  They maintained the formula of high production standards that marked the original.   They kept the responses exclusive, selectively engaging people that would keep them “on brand” while maintaining a steady stream of high-quality content.

At the end of the day, the breathless analysis of Old Spice as the zenith of social media leaves one to wonder what the commentariat think social media is, and whom it is actually for.

I once read that in the 1960’s comics and counterculture figures began using profanity in part because they felt that the use of such language precluded their message/movement from being co-opted.   They were, of course, temporarily right and permanently wrong.  It took a bit longer but nearly every song of that age has found its way into an advertisement.  Its slogans have been re-engineered to suit – and peace, harmony (“I’d like to give the world a Coke”) and even songs critiquing material pursuits (Janis Joplin for Mercedes-Benz ) have been stripped of their original intent and attached to one product or other.

So it goes with the social media land grab currently underway as every major corporation rushes to stake a claim on our attention and our loyalty.   They are co-opting a medium whose fundamental and radical proposition is a promotion of interpersonal connection, many-to-many communication, and the privilege of social norms over business norms.

Further, the discourse that informs the way we define social media in practice is being shaped by an army of consultants whose personal stake in this game is deeply tied to the clients that they serve.  More often these are big corporations.  Thus the analysis of BP all too often focused on how BP could help itself during the crisis rather than how society at large might better use these tools to come to grips with corporate malfeasance.   The conversations about Nestle’s “failure” focused on prescriptions that supported the consultant’s value proposition more than the real-world context that surrounded the Nestle incident.   On a much more benign level the analysis of Old Spice would lead you to believe that it is the pinnacle of social media– when in my opinion it rises just above a clever extension of a broadcast message.

The transformative nature of social media lies in the fact that it enables a more equitable distribution of power, ingenuity and creativity.    The sea change that comes from realizing this potential is not about technology or marketing.  It certainly (from my point of view) isn’t about how corporations can profit or dominate.  It is all about how a major shift in our own sense of identity (we are all now authors and authorities), social norms and a new mode of production might give us a better world.   It’s greatest exemplars then are drawn from the grass roots, the marginalized, the entrepreneurial, the unintended and even the seemingly trivial.

Yes, let’s celebrate some interesting corporate case studies.  But let’s keep our eyes on the bigger prize and promise of social media.  Doing so is part of making sure that promise is realized.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Old Spice and the Return of Ad-Power: Are “Transformats” the Future of Marketing? (designmind.frogdesign.com)
• Old Spice: The Archetype of a Successful Social Media Campaign (Mashable)

John Battelle cited a post of mine today in his great FM Signal blog.   At issue were my thoughts on the Nestle Facebook fracas.  John makes a great point and his post helped me get clear on what I increasingly see as a divide within social media between theory and practice.  That is to say, there are a standard set of answers that garner complete agreement in theory but may not hold up so well in practice.   John writes:

I think I’ll open Signal with a response to this post: Why Social Media May Not Be for You… (Yet), from Joshua-Michéle Ross of Opposable Planets. I like the thinking in this post, but disagree with the final thought. Musing on the recent Nestle Facebook “debacle” (which I do not believe is, or needs to be proclaimed a debacle), Joshua-Michéle concludes: If Nestle neither wishes to change or defend itself on the merits – then they shouldn’t be operating in social media.

Well, yes and no. Yes, in that the sheer beauty of social media is that it forces questions to the fore, and thus forces companies to respond to those questions. But no, it’s not OK, as a strategy, to “not be operating in social media.” I sense, perhaps, that Joshua-Michéle was making the same point in a roundabout way.

My reasoning? Because all of our customers are already operating in social media. You can’t pretend otherwise. And it’s better to engage, make mistakes, admit those mistakes, and move on, than to not engage at all. I call this “conversational judo,” and suggest we all practice it, daily. Twice on Sunday, perhaps.

Here is the comment (with very slight clean up after further reflection) that I left on the Signal blog:

Thanks for citing my post. We are essentially in agreement but I think we are lobbying from a fundamentally different perspective. In my opinion the difference lies between theory and practice. In theory every company SHOULD get engaged for the reasons you state above. In practice many organizations aren’t yet prepared (culturally and structurally) for what is involved. If you are counseling a company that will get criticism but has no internal mechanism to either respond or change – then as their counselor should you really be advising they take the dive? The result in many organizations will be personally harmful to those who you are advising (most company punish “mistakes”).

Case in point: I recently counseled a client similar in size and controversial status over their FB presence. They also had very debatable policies (on social rather than environmental merits as was the case with Nestle). I advised them to develop a risk mitigation plan – essentially that that they needed to be prepared ahead of time to either defend, ignore or change in response to the potential criticism. They decided that (1) they had no influence over corporate policy (2) the policy was hard to debate on the merits, and (3) that their remit was still quite traditional marketing (brand awareness). Weighing these together they concluded that the risk outweighed the reward. I think they actually made the right decision given all the factors above.

Do I think that they should be more fully engaged? Yes. Do I think that they are ready? No. So while on a theoretical level I agree that all organizations SHOULD be engaged, they need to lay the groundwork first. I hope the distinction makes sense.

Open beats Closed states a rather obvious law of doing business on the Internetwork:  There is more talent outside your company than within it.  Companies that harness the power of relationships using networks to tap that outside talent will win over those that don’t.

In another Open Beats Closed story, Netflix just announced the winner of its one million dollar contest to improve its ratings system.

Ratings and recommendations are a critical piece of Netflix’ infrastructure.  If Netflix can do a better job than anyone else deducing from your behavior what movies you will enjoy next, Netflix will enjoy an enormous amount of advantage in terms of customer loyalty and increased movie consumption.

Yet recommendation systems are based on  extremely complex and proprietary algorithms involving heavy math and some deep thinking to set up and test assumptions about behavior.   Employing a team of these people in-house for this work is difficult at best.  How do you assess their talent?  My guess is that 99% of Netflix couldn’t even understand the math involved… How will you build a team?  How long will that take?  How will you know if you have made the right bet once your team is hired?

An Open Beats Closed approach allows you to engage a myriad of already-assembled (or self-organizing) teams in competition to deliver an algorithm that demonstrates success.   How is the Open Beats Closed approach working for Netflix?  They are so happy with the results that they have announced another, more nuanced contest to further improve their recommendation system.    What I find interesting about this revised contest is that they are allocating the rewards over time to the teams that are providing sustained, proven results.  Smart.

From the article:

The new challenge focuses on predicting the movie preferences of people who rarely or never rate the movies they rent. This will be deduced from more than 100 million data points, including information about renters’ ages, genders, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies.

Instead of a single $1 million prize, this new challenge will be split into one $500,000 award to the team judged to be leading after six months and an additional $500,000 to the team in the lead at the 18-month mark, when the contest is wrapped up.

It has become fairly obvious to state that Social Media blurs the lines between business functions – but sometimes I encounter such a clear example that I want to share it.

<– Take a close look at this sequential set of Tweets from Peets Coffee and answer the following question.  Is this

(A) a marketing effort

(B) a customer service effort

(C) a PR effort or

(D) all of the above.

If you answered D, all of the above – you are correct.  This single screen capture is a great example of how Social Media blurs the boundaries between business functions.  In one short period of time Peets is answering questions about where muffins at a specific store come from and affirming that their plastic tumblers are BPA free… (customer service).   Peets is also letting people know about new store openings, linking to their Facebook page to let people know about how to meet their tea master, Eliot Jordan (Marketing outreach, events promotion)  and finally, doing a bit of PR on how small scale farmers in Rwanda are breaking the cycle of poverty through growing coffee. (causal marketing / PR).

Disclosure – Tina – who runs Peets’ Twitter presence is a good friend and we had casual discussions about how to use Twitter effectively when she took Peets onto Twitter.  She is doing a fantastic job.

Murphy Goode, a Sonoma County winery, set up a promotion that looks great on paper:

We want to hire a social media whiz (your title will be “Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent”) who will report on the cool lifestyle of Sonoma County Wine Country and, of course, tell people what you’re learning about winemaking.
Did we mention that the compensation was $10,000 per month Plus accommodations in a beautiful home in picturesque Healdsburg, a popular vacation destination in our neck of the woods. Working hours are flexible. And all you have to do is experience wine and good living, and then tell people about it.

MG then set about having candidates publicly apply.   The whole world was invited to vote on potential candidates.   The campaign seemed to be doing well in terms of attention and media and candidate interest.   Then yesterday Twitter lit up.  Not Good(e).  Bad.  Apparently the top vote getter by a 2:1 margin (@martinsargent) wasn’t included in their first cut of 50 candidates.   Voters felt robbed – and said some nasty things…

It is hard to get clear about what actually happened.  I didn’t call Murphy Goode and their website isn’t very helpful in helping understand the terms and conditions of their selection process.  What is interesting to me is how yet again, if the general circumstances are accurate, this whole situation could have been avoided so easily.  The operative word in the term social media is “social.”  When you get engaged in social media you need to abide by a simple social contract.  A contract that is so simple in fact that many people engaged in the complexity of business tend to overlook it.   What is this divine mystery?

Respect people’s time and attention the same way you would if you actually knew them in a social context.

People feel cheated because Murphy Goode asked for their time and attention – solicited their opinion – then seemed to ignore the overwhelming majority of opinion.   Boil this down to a social context.   Would you have a few friends spend a lot of time debating and then voting on which movie to see and then ignore the major vote-getter completely?   I don’t think so.   Remember, the stakes weren’t even as high as a movie here.  This was the top 50 — not the  final winner.

So where next for Murphy Goode?   Will this damage the campaign or their brand in any significant way?

I don’t think so.

The Social Media crowd tends to see itself as the center of the universe.  And gets quite giddy during any flexing of its (admittedly rather small) muscle.  It is also a pretty self-righteous group of lumpen-digerati.    I don’t think this maneuver will have a major impact on the bottom line.  That said it must be a bit painful and surprising to those at Murphy Goode.  I am sure they are having anxious meetings over how to respond.    If they are trying to reach influencers now via this 6 month campaign many of the same people they wanted to have spread their message (social media infuencers) will either obstruct or ignore them.    Also, in the search driven world, this has the potential to generate a permanent, findable record of discontent when searching for Murphy Goode.   Mostly, this is just a simple lesson in common sense.   I suspect it will be forgotten fairly quickly – but was eminently avoidable.

Stimuluswatch.org allows citizens to see local government requests for stimulus-spending projects, add details, vote projects up or down and generally discuss the merit of each.  It is a great example of how the Internet lowers the cost of developing software and allows citizens to collaborate in government.   Anyone from an Enterprise can learn a lot from Stimuluswatch about
1.    How complex software does not need to cost millions (your intranet, your website etc.)
2.    How quickly projects can now get off the ground (weeks not months)
3.    How people outside your company can contribute their talent to get things done (Open beats Closed)

For those of you less inclined to read, here is a screencast that covers most of these details

A bit of history.  Stimuluswatch began with this blog request from Jerry Brito,

Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each project into a wiki-page or other mechanism where local citizens can comment on whether the project is actually needed or whether it’s a boondoggle? How can we create an app that will let citizens separate the wheat from the pork and then sort for Congress and the new administration the project in descending order or relevancy?

I got in touch with two of the developers who responded to Brito’s blog request, Peter Snyder and Kevin Dwyer, to get details on their collaboration.  The final site included all of the functionality (and more) that Brito had asked for was launched after only two weeks of work conducted over seven weeks including the holidays (for more technical detail on how they achieved this, see my Radar post here).

None of these people knew each other previously.  They were brought together by blog post into a common effort.  They used open source tools in rapid development.   They plugged in off the shelf social technologies  (Disqus as a tool to enable forums and commenting on projects, Tumblr as a blog and publishing platform for updates from Jerry and Mediawiki as a tool to allow citizens to collaborate together on building a common definition around each project – much like wikipedia allows users to collaborate on defining the meaning of a concept).  They achieved this in a matter of weeks.

Results so far?  One week after launch Stimuluswatch had 20,000 unique visitors.   These visitors were actively voting, discussing and even cleaning up mistakes in the mayor’s original data. Total cost of the effort?  $40 per month for hosting.

I am not sure that Stimuluswatch is the right set of tools for citizen engagement in public works.   That remains to be seen.  It does demonstrate the power of the Internet to radically reduce the time it takes to create powerful software and lower the barriers to group collaboration. If you are a business being faced with a million dollar software price tag from a big consulting firm you should think long and hard about whether or not your money is being wisely spent.