ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

Business 2.0 puts together the list of the top execs, entrepreneurs and innovators who are setting the agenda in business today. Guess what, you’re number 1.

Is this social business?

Just a quick note that Jeffery Zeldman, someone who has been blogging since before there were blogs has now opened up comments on his “daily report” at zeldman.com, his first “comment enabled” post has already received 55 comments Next step trackback Jeff.

Jeffery is an excellent writer, and someone who has been working studiously since 1994 to make the web better and provide interesting content, with everything from “ask dr web”, “My Glamorous Life” to his book “designing with web standards“. If I hadn’t met Jeffery in the mid 90’s I’m not sure I would be quite up to my ears in the web as I am now.

BTW I’m posting this from the middle of Union Square in San Francisco using Google municipal WiFi. Whether I get this job here or not I think i’m packing up, selling what I can and moving here, I just feel so at home here.

Cheers,

karl

I’m in San Francisco ’till sunday, and I am in love with this town. Such a great vibe. Just a quick post to point you to the Guardian article on the 1% rule, just an illustration of how the mainstream is beginning to grok social media and co-creation.

What is the 1% rule - Guardian UK

Another interesting read:

Ad Age on how social networking will change advertising

Cheers all,

Karl

Update: I forgot to mention I’m meeting with Yobie Benjamin today, who was a guest on my podcast. Yobie is the CEO of Goodstorm.com, a company that provides ecommerce infrastructure to anyone and gives them the bulk of the profits.

I’ve been convinced for a while that the customer experience is the key to valuable co-creation in companies and organizations, and yet I have felt a bit on the fringe, so I was absolutely knocked out when I read this business week article “Ruthless Focus On Customer Experience”.

Big Tip of the Hat: Experience Planner

Episode 4 of “the co-creative business show” a weekly podcast on the topics of co-creation, co-creative business and the technology and media that underlie this trend. This weeks special guest/co-host is John Winsor, CEO of Radar Communications and author of “SPARK: Be More Innovative Through Co-Creation“. I really enjoyed this show and hope you get some useful ideas from it, as always i’m allways looking for feedback, either in the comments, via email, or audio comments. Thanks, Karl

mp3 version of the show can be found here

00:00:00 - COF4 Welcome
00:03:24 - Welcome John Winsor
00:04:42 - Diffusions of Innovation
00:05:05 - Flipping The Ad Model Funnel
00:08:21 - Beyond the Brand (or co-creating from the bottom up)
00:10:34 - Co-creation inspiration - Ethnography, being with customers, “porous companies”
00:13:11 - Marketing vs. Micromarketing
00:14:51 - Skate & Surf Inspiration - Culture, Meaning, Participation
00:17:39 - Engaging in Co-creation is Engaging in “meaning making”
00:18:58 - Patagonia is the example, again 00:21:15 - Fun as a core value
00:22:29 - Hanging With Your Customers - Strategy?
00:23:35 - Fun as a core value: Sign up forms
00:26:58 - Spark: Be more innovative through co-creation
00:30:24 - A more holistic model for business - vertical integration from supplier to customer
00:34:27 - I knows me some ugly Myspace pages
00:36:34 - Mc YouTube 100 Million Videos Served
00:38:32 - The attention economy continues
00:39:33 - The video “conversation”
00:40:45 - Crowdsourcing - Cambrian House & other examples
00:49:55 - Wag of the Finger and Rant of the week: The Coke Show
00:51:54 - Frameworks for Co-creating through social media
00:57:08 - Tip of the Hat: motorola Q wiki
01:00:22 - What can you do with a wiki, beyond encyclopedias, and John Winsors Wiki secret
01:02:11 - Wrap up, thanks, and bob long plays us out with Traveling Riverside Blues

Technorati just rolled out an upgrade, and a revamped design. A very interesting aspect is how they have elevated the visibility of YouTube videos through tags and links: What’s Popular on YouTube. This is a very smart move, especially as the volume of activity on YouTube continues to grow at astronomical proportions, the need for external guides, directories and meme trackers is going to be huge.

Technorati essentially highlights the content that has been most linked to, which has always served google well It’s interesting that it’s linking to a couple of things that i’ve already highlighted on vcritic.com, my viral video blog.

Tip of the Hat: Micropersuasion

The old adage of there is no bad publicity is shown in the alexa rankings for Rocketboom, and for Amanda’s blog Unboomed, both of them in the top three “movers and shakers”

On top of that Rocketboom had a brilliant episode today that was original, creative, and fun, by featuring some YouTube stars really showed itself to a steward of the vlogosphere.

current.tv is is like youtube in the way that flickr is like photobucket. It may not ever compete on volume, but will surely compete on quality, revenue and recruiting Social Media Talent.

Current.tv is like “project greenlight”, it encourages video submissions that the community votes on. In fact the community can “greenlight” projects as part of the voting mechanism, and because current.tv is actually a TV channel, it has an avenue to broadcast the best and the brightest. Oh and guess what, people get paid.

What current.tv has done is probably the model that every channel, that creates original content could benefit from, in addition to it’s normal development process. I can’t imagine a more cost effective sandbox for television content. I wouldn’t be surprised if the concept of a broadcast TV pilot just moves to a social video platform. IMHO this would have been a much better model for Fox Atomic

Current.tv is not a free for all, and it provides guidelines around what it’s looking for from the community. It asks for short stories called “pods”, Mobile video, Viewer Created Ads, and Promo Spots.

As i’ve said before the content will follow the money, but how about the talent will follow the opportunity? Sure some folks will manage to make a career out of youtube, with it’s massive audience, but with 65,000 videos uploaded a day, how do you rise above the noise? If you are creating something artistic, thoughtful, thought provoking, where is the outlet for that? Maybe not YouTube?

Current.tv seems to be more of a patron of the arts, a steward if you like, sure they get great content for their TV channel, but they are also encouraging story telling.

Tip of the Hat: Myphonerocks.com

BTW Jaffe has an interesting conversation going on on JaffeJuice called Why YouTube Imitators will fail. My response is, youtube imitators will fail as long as the continue to “imitate” and not innovate. YouTube has pioneered a model of social media that no-one has figured out how to capitalize on, not even YouTube.

Update: I actually have Current.tv on comcast, channel 107, who knew. Now I’m finding out more about it, I feel like must have fallen asleep at some point, because this is the channel that Al Gore is behind. I guess I heard about it and wasn’t paying attention until I found out how much of it is viewer generated.

Maybe the only thing going for this site is the great Borat movie trailer (the other Ali G like alter ego of Sasha Baron Cohen)

No risk to youtube or myspace video, but another big company dipping its toe in social media. FoxAtomic.com falls into the trap of most social media experiments, like the Coke Show (sorry Seth and Ford Bland Moves and is just too slick and too polished. There was a big controversy a while ago that ugly was the new black, and although i think it’s total crap to say that ugly = success, I think there are certain aspects of ugly that humanize, and lower barriers to participation.

Tired of companies interacting with the bloggersphere and getting their hand slapped by snarky bloggers?

Well Universal Studios called a blogging buddy, MovieMarketingMadness to give him the lowdown on how they were marketing their new movie Miami Vice.

Mack Collier of the ViralGarden thinks this is commendable, and so do I. So this is a viral group hug for Universal Studios who called MovieMarketingMadness to talk about Miami Vice.

Aaaaah, now wasn’t that nice.