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.

Independent planning by business function (R&D, Marketing, PR, Product Development, Customer Service etc.)   breaks down in the network era because the customer’s view of your company is now the dominant reality in the market.

You may have a brilliant marketing campaign but if the product is a loser – you are lost.  You may have a brilliant product but if your customer support is appalling, your potential buyers will be forewarned.   You might have a fantastic brand proposition but if your products don’t add up to the promise – the proposition is hollow.  You may have a content strategy built to drive engagement but if that content doesn’t have a meaningful attachment to your products – all the brand preference in the world won’t amount to sales.

The gap between message (brand and communications) and delivery (product/service quality) is the distance any organization now needs to bridge in their planning efforts.

You begin to do this by:

1. Having a much more sober discussion about current reality (are you marketing 2nd rate products with an innovation message?).
2. Widening the net on who informs your planning process.  Bring others in early  and think beyond your business unit.
3. Actively engaging the outside world (online monitoring, customer meetings, community management etc.) so that you stop living the manufactured reality “inside the building” and start finding reality outside the building.

Related articles

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Image by Tony the Misfit via Flickr

As we watch the sordid cavalcade of media gaffes – from Anthony Weiner‘s MMS messages to Chevy’s “slip of the tongue” (someone tweeting on behalf of Chevy mistakenly thought they were using their personal account when they declared that Detroit was full of terrible drivers) we are seeing  a society that is coming to terms with the blurring line between text and speech.  That is, the ephemeral nature of all speech is being given the permanence of text.

We will spend the next generation coming to terms with the consequences.

Once something is said it cannot be unsaid.  True.  But historically it couldn’t be shared to a wider circle of listeners.  Speech is not permanent.  Speech gives way to time and passes into the fog of memory.  Therefore the social norms governing speech are more forgiving.  We are expected, allowed even, to say things  without due consideration, in close company, knowing that we will regret some portion of what we say.  We are able to use the full context of a conversation (who is there, what has been said before etc.) to nuance our speech and say things that wouldn’t look good when reduced to text.

And yet on social networks we speechify, we talk and we are saying plenty of things we might regret.   Such speech isn’t meant to be a permanent record.  But it is. As Meghan Garber writes in a Nieman Lab post:

As a culture… we tend to insist on categorizing our communication, drawing thick lines between words that are spoken and words that are written. So libel is, legally, a different offense than slander; the written word, we assume, carries the heft of both deliberation and proliferation and therefore a moral weight that the spoken word does not. Text, we figure, is: conclusive, in that its words are the deliberate products of discourse; inclusive, in that it is available equally to anyone who happens to read it; exclusive, in that it filters those words selectively; archival, in that it preserves information for posterity; and static, in that, once published, its words are final.

We are hurtling towards a world of total information capture where email, texting, instant message and mobile video are documenting our everyday speech and action – in effect rendering all speech as text.    There will be few places to “talk” without that talk being given the weight and permanence of text.

We are then faced with two options: Either give up the liberties that speech allows – thinking “out loud,” using the context of the conversation to add meaning to a comment and so on – or become more lenient with speech that happens to become text.  In the case of Weiner, his behavior is unacceptable in any context.   As a society we understand his transgression and he is being punished for it.  Fair enough.   In the case of Chevy, a mistake was punished through Chevy firing both the Tweeter and the entire agency he worked for.

I hope in future we are able to see the distinction and dole out our punishments accordingly.   We all say things we regret.   Now we all write things we regret.  Perhaps as a result of this shared reality we will learn a bit more forgiveness for each other.

This originally appeared as an  O’Reilly Radar post .  Subsequently this issue came into sharp relief again when “Duke Nukem Forever” publisher 2K Games fired its PR agency for threatening (on Twitter) to blacklist journalists who gave the game a negative review.  While the threat was subsequently retracted the PR agency is still fired.

Recently I had to jot down a few talking points  on some ways that the network economy is impacting business strategy.   I dealt with about three trends.  Below is the first set:

1.

Everything that can be networked, will be networked (phones, computers, books, music players, automobiles and even our own health data thrown off from bathroom scales, pedometers and the like ).   Each device, once connected,  becomes capable of extraordinary things; They will be smarter, they will have memories, they will know who you are and they will have extraordinary powers of prediction.   And the more data it connects to – not just from you – but from other devices,  the more valuable it gets.  In this inevitable future, a connected device is really just software in a very cool package  and the more data is has to process, the smarter or more valuable it gets. “Dumb” gadgets become commodities. As the “always-on” world awakens to the need for a continuous stream of compelling content, the data exhaust from sensors embedded in our connected devices becomes a living narrative and a source of high value content.  Examples: FitBit, NikePlus etc.

2.

Image via Wikipedia

Intelligent devices become distribution channels for higher value content or data.

Think about how the iPad becomes a a distribution platform that allows us to monetize once-free content now that it is “packaged” within an app.  The same goes for much of what is taking place on the  Android, Apple and Ovi app stores. (see Jim Stogdill’s excellent Radar post on this subject: (http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/04/the-ipad-isnt-a-computer-its-a.html).

3.

As devices get connected, the ecosystems they belong in (the user data and sensor data they collect and utilize, the user experience they connect to  across paid, earned, owned media etc.) becomes so complex as to be entirely unmanageable by human beings. The opportunity is to abandon a “central planning” approach and begin programming for collective intelligence, that is coding ecosystems that evolve based on real analysis of how customers are using them (what Web 2.0 has been saying all along).   Programming for Collective Intelligence allows us to move away from centralized planning towards a system that course-corrects based on real usage patterns of users and provides dashboard visualization as a sort of cockpit from which to tweak the overall direction (business goals, KPIs) against which the system is designed to optimize.  While this approach has been fairly obvious in the management of complex supply chains and massive data processing tasks such as online search, we have seen very little true optimization of customer experience.

Image via Wikipedia

This was originally posted on O’Reilly Radar.

In business “Faster is Better” is better for more reasons than you might think

For the past several years I have been thinking about the role of speed in customer experience and business strategy.    We live in an ever-accelerating world and the competitive terms of business are built upon achieving speed for many reasons.  Here are just a few, from the obvious to the more speculative:

Speed is our default setting
Human beings live and operate in a constant state of now; we processes extraordinary volumes of information in real time.   The acceleration of technology is simply an effort to catch up to our zero-latency experience of being.   Whenever given a choice we will opt for a service that delivers response times as fast as our own nervous system.

The technology and processes around us are nowhere close to catching up – yet wherever they do, we see incredible value creation.   Any information processing technology that moves from batch to  “real-time” experiences a quantum leap in value – especially for those who adopt it first.   Consider the arbitrage opportunity in financial systems capable of receiving market prices (or other data) in real time or the efficiency of inventory management occurring in real time across the supply chain and you get the idea.  All of the systems that surround and support modern life are accelerating into real time systems.

Speed is money saved
Walmart’s revolution lay in accelerating inventory information to near real-time throughout its supply chain.  The result was incredibly efficient – huge cost savings  that were the basis for its domination of the American landscape.

Speed is gratification delivered
When I worked in e-commerce in the mid 90s we quantified the obvious;  faster page load times equaled more revenue.  Our analytics showed that milliseconds spelled the difference between a sale and a lost customer.

Today we see the rise of Flash drives in consumer electronics not because they are more reliable or durable (they are not) but largely because they wake your computer from sleep faster.  The magic of the new iPad 2 (which uses a flash drive) is it’s cover which will automatically wake the device and bypass the estimated 3 seconds it takes to click-and-swipe to turn on the device.

Speed is loyalty earned.
Money is a metaphor for our use of time.  We pay attention and we spend time.  Taking too much of a customer’s time is a form of theft that can cost your business.  Conversely, if a product or service saves us time, costs less in attention – we feel rewarded.

Speed equals certainty – delay equals doubt
I have heard it argued that Google won the search battle as much due to the speed of delivering  results as the vaunted relevance of those results.  They put their response times in milliseconds on every results page.   In a social interaction, any pause before responding to a simple question  ( “does this dress make me look big?”) qualifies the inevitable response (“absolutely not”) as less certain.  My example is a stereotype and a bit whimsical, but it is emblematic of how we transfer these same emotions to our interactions with people *and* services.  In other words, speed/responsiveness engenders feelings of trust, certainty and comfort.

Speed is a key facet of business strategy
All of this amounts to a simple edict: consider speed as a dimension to your business strategy; not as a by-product of seeking efficiency but as a means of winning customers.  I have used examples from the digital domain but the same premise applies to any offline experience – from hotel check-ins to the “out-of-box” experience of your new product.   In more ways than one speed can deliver advantages beyond quality, or efficiency.   Speed can deliver intangibles like trust and loyalty.

Speed is a pain in the ass
Delivering on the speed manifesto puts stress on an organization and, more importantly, on people.  Our schedules get compressed, our deadlines tighten and the bar for competitive productivity keeps going up.   While many lament the increasing pace of  modern life – it is a futile complaint because it focuses on the effect rather than the cause of increasing speed.  Over and over, we reward speed with our attention – and with our business.  As customers we demand speed from the products and services we purchase.  The consequence is that as employees  or business owners we find ourselves subordinated to an accelerating pace of work to deliver on that demand.

Speed is a choice we make
I believe that the terms of success for people in the world will increasingly reside with managing their own pace and flow of attention *against* the demands of speed.  Those capable of strategically disconnecting and applying selective focus will be at an advantage in business or in life (hasn’t this always been the case?) because exercising foresight and judgment, two critical life skills, are not necessarily improved by speeding up.  Quite the opposite.

But this isn’t the same as saying that we must slow down in business wholesale.  As long as society rewards speed with equity,  it will be the fundamental basis for competitive advantage and worth paying attention to.

A fascinating article at the Daily Beast chronicled an attempt to reverse engineer the Facebook social news feed. It sought to answer questions about how and who Facebook chooses to display on your news feed page.

Not surprisingly, Facebook makes assumptions based on behavior to ensure that it propagates people and information with the highest likelihood of gaining attention or engagement. For example, individuals whose profiles are “stalked” by others show up disproportionately in news feeds because Facebook assumes they must be stalked for good reason. They must be interesting.

As Facebook becomes an increasingly vital part of how businesses connect with customers, the algorithms determining who gets attention will become increasingly important. They shape business communications and behavior.

We have now a long history of content being written to accommodate the rules of search engines — particularly Google. We research keywords and then ensure they are placed at the front of our headlines and titles. We reorganize content into staccato bursts of bullet points and subtitles, and so on. Optimization of this kind now dominates all professional content production on the web and shapes our experience as consumers of that content.

As our social, economic and political lives are increasingly mediated through a few consolidated technologies such as Facebook and Google, software exerts a profound influence on the way we engage with one another. The natural, sociological secrets of how to gain attention are being codified. In turn, this creates a normative effect on how we behave. We conform to the rules embedded in the code.

We have always written lead lines with an eye to attracting readers, but there are two aspects here that are new:

1. The widespread incorporation of scientific rigor into the exercise. For example, the Huffington Post does A/B tests of its own headlines to favor the winning headline.
2. The uniformity of the resulting norms. We are conforming to a few dominant algorithms.

Gaining attention in this world becomes as much about the science of standing out as the art of being outstanding. And every link forged is a form of currency exchange where the market favors the heavyweights.

While I don’t doubt that we will see a continued wellspring of creativity emerge from an open web, these algorithms themselves represent a bias toward those who decipher the code. Doing so requires resources that favor the large over the small, and the organization over the individual. There is nothing new to this progression, but it does run counter to the heroic individual archetype (the lone blogger, the basement video show broadcast around the world, etc.) that the web often celebrates as its own unique progeny.

This is cross-posted from O’Reilly Radar

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Ray Ozzie, the visionary behind Lotus notes and the departing Chief Software Architect at Microsoft posted an open memo this week.   I highly recommend reading the whole thing.  There are two quotes that I found of particular interest and I will dedicate a post to each one separately to keep things focused.

In this first section he reflects on the past 5-years of disruption that has remade much of the world we live in and some of the challenges he sees coming.

…in the past five years so much has happened that we’ve grown already to take many of these changes for granted: Ubiquitous internet access over wired, WiFi and 3G/4G networks; many now even take for granted that LTE and ‘whitespace’ will be broadly delivered.

We’ve seen our boxy devices based on ‘system boards’ morph into sleek elegantly-designed devices based on transformational ‘systems on a chip’. We’ve seen bulky CRT monitors replaced by impossibly thin touch screens.

We’ve seen business processes and entire organizations transformed by the zero-friction nature of the internet; the walls between producer and consumer having now vanished. Substantial business ecosystems have collapsed as many classic aggregation & distribution mechanisms no longer make sense.Organizations worldwide, in every industry, are now stepping back and re-thinking the basics; questioning their most fundamental structural tenets. Doing so is necessary for their long-term growth and survival.

As end-consumers of these changes it is easy to remain inconsiderate of how transformational these developments are.   However in business, emerging technologies and the customer expectations that they have created represent tectonic shifts in how business must respond and reorganize.

And as the pace of connectivity and access points (mobile, tablets, connected devices) increase so will the rate of change.  In this environment the only ones who will thrive are those capable of rapid, continuous adaptation at an organizational level.  This is not a strategy – but a cultural trait.   The adaptive organization is one with a workforce capable of (1) surfacing leadership from all levels of as inputs to decision-making, (2) amplifying weak signals from the points at which the organization meets the outside world (sales, customer service and even further beyond into customer led innovation etc.).  (3) matching the pace of information flow inside the organization with what is occurring outside and (4) developing rapid feedback mechanisms with which to assess the impact of (5) making a distributed set of bets.   In this way, optimization of small strategies will often win over the “big bet.”

Technology is the superstructure upon which all business is now reliant – Every business process and every function is mediated through electronic technology: from communications (telephone, email, electronic documents) to finance, resource planning and supply chain.

In this regard business must coevolve at the rate of technological change in order to remain competitive.    This is not the same as saying successful organizations must maintain cutting edge technology – but that they must foster cultures that are capable of shifting and changing with the requirements of the business environments they find themselves in.   As Technology comes to resemble organic processes and evolve at a quickening rate so must our own organizations.

Quote via Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

The title of this post is a quote from Kevin Kelly.  I was reminded of it when I read this brief entry in Boing Boing, titled, “Winds howl over the deserted moonscape behind Rupert Murdoch’s UK Newspaper Paywalls”

Newser’s Michael Wolff has a report from behind Rupert Murdoch’s notorious UK paywalls which went up this month around The Times and Sunday Time’s sites, which are apparently ghost-towns, unpeopled even by the print subscribers who get free access but can’t be arsed to log in (and never follow links to Times stories, since chances are anyone in a position to make such a link doesn’t have an account for the site).

Does the idea of charging for a perishable good (news) that exists in overwhelming abundance, can be copied and redistributed at zero cost and only has value for one-time use make sense to any economist on planet earth?

via Winds howl over the deserted moonscape behind Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper paywalls – Boing Boing.

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2009 was the year that everything received a “social” prefix; social media, social web, social business and so on. I wanted to ask John Hagel – co-chair of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge – for his take on the significance of the term and its importance for business.
John starts with a great quote, “in many respects we are going back to the future:” the Internet began as a social tool with early bulletin boards that connected small groups with shared interests (mainly academic researchers).  Then the Worldwide Web came along and the population went boom. Millions of people flooded the system to look at basically static content… With the rise of social technologies like blogs, social networks, Twitter etc. we are just now rediscovering the web’s inherently social capabilities.  John goes on to talk about the value of social networks to connect people and surface tacit knowledge and the concept of serendipity on the Social Web.

This is the second in a series of interviews conducted at the Web 2.0 Summit last month.  First interview with John Hagel on the Real Time Web is here.  These interviews originally appeared as part of The Future At Work series.

Cross-posted from Forbes: I just finished watching the video for Red Laser, a real-time bar code scanner that works on the iPhone (video below the fold).     Just hold the camera-eye over the UPC code and get ready for results to show up from Google Product Search or Amazon.   Then begin reading customer reviews, comparing prices etc. The clue to forecasting the future is to watch the trendline – not the snapshot.  Redlaser may be a bit clunky right now, not everyone has an iPhone etc.  That is the snapshot.   Here is the trendline:   We are becoming accustomed to using our phones in-the-moment to answer all manner of questions (who was the actor in that film? and so on).  This small behavioral change has huge implications as more and more of our physical world finds its data-doppleganger online:

• How long before we can scan any food product and know more about its ingredients than the misleading label tells us?
• How long before every in-store customer seamlessly moves online to the vast Internet marketplace to find the rock-bottom price and bargain with the store manager?
• How long before every object’s identity in the physical world can be referenced to a super-set of attributes such as reviews, ingredients, price comparison, carbon rating etc.

This referencing need not be through a set of UPC codes that you consciously scan.   Just as your computer can access the Gracenote database to identify the artist, tracks and times of a random music CD that you put into your drive,  we are heading into a time when any experience will likely be passively cataloged (movies you are watching, music you are listening to and so on) for later reference. This has quite a few implications: (1) I think these technologies will accelerate  a race to the bottom on pricing as ever more shoppers with a mobile do product and price-comparison at the in-store point of sale. (2) Thus service and experience based products will become even more critical to a retailer’s success. (3) Product (or service) quality will increasingly trump crafty advertising as the only sustainable advantage once customers have instant access to more reviews and information from peers. 4) Environmental and other cause issues will be of increased importance as consumers will find it easier to live out their values in their product purchases. (5) Personal data – your location, wayfinding through the mall, product searches and even your exposure to ambient types of advertising (did you watch that commercial?) will be captured via your mobile device.  This is already happening in simple form via IMMI (be afraid) for those willing to get a free mobile device in exchange for being tracked 24/7. Overall I believe that these technologies will empower people by giving them more access to valuable, peer-created information.  However, these last predictions (or rather observations on the growth of what is already taking place) should cause a healthy amount of anxiety about personal privacy.  I have committed a fair amount of time writing about these issues on O’Reilly Radar.  Like all powerful technology the benefits need to be framed within a structure that protects our ability to act as free agents in the world.