ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

The real reason Zidane did it:

YTMND

Related Zidane non-sequitur

And as usual some rich context from Kottke.com, apparently some mainstream media hired some lip readers with varying results.

The latest show is avalable in two formats, enhanced m4a format with bookmarks, and plain old mp3 format for you oldschoolers.

In this episode: Introduction, why co-creation as a topic? why co-creation is disruptive? (your top 1% of customers leaving). Measuring success of co-creation eg. flickr vs photobucket, youtube vs revver. Co-Creation Tip of the Hat and Wag of the finger. Co-Creative company spotlight: Goodstorm.com and Zooomr.com . Finally the CustomersOnFire.com audio comment competition, your chance to win one of two invites to six apart’s new social media/blogging tool at vox.com

The obligitory “sign up form” is probably one of the most overlooked opportunities in the entire customer experience lifecycle, the red headed step child of touchpoints if you will.

Why? Because it’s probably one of the first points at which the customer is going to “experience” your company, and the experience is generally at best blah and at worst hostile.

Take for instance what you need to fill in if you want to comment, thats right comment on Bob Garfield’s new “open source” Listenomics (which is of course open source because you can comment on it, right?)

Now a sign up form is not only a chance to make a first impression, it’s a negotiation, you have something I might want, and I have some information you might want. As it is a negotiation the value of what you’re offering has to be weighed against the value of my information and the effort that i’m going to put into filling in this form. The problem here, is ad-age uses the same sign up form for everything, and filling in that form might be a valid proposition in some cases. Unfortunately for Bob, the ability to comment on his blog is not enough enticement for me to fill in that form.


Now, the reason I was even inspired to write this post was because I was filling in the cork’d sign up form and it had me laughing out loud, yes it was funny, not only that it set the whole tone for me with regard to the cork’d brand. The experience was such that I “loved” the brand even before i’d finished filling in the sign up form, yes, loved. If a company has a good enough sense of humor to make me laugh during the sign up process then it sure has made a connection with me.

More to the point, why don’t more companies and brands demonstrate a sense of humor?

Anyway, I think that the problems with many sign up forms are exactly the reason that wufoo.com was created.

What is Zooomr? Well, it is very much like Flickr, except Zooomr is very interested in “where” you take pictures, and provides tools for you to Geo tag your photos. So it’s sort of like a flickr+Googlemaps+frappr mashup. Ahh, ok, got it….. Oh except it allow for audio comments on its photo’s as well, so you can sort of have a podcast embedded in your photo…. ok, wow. Oh, did I mention the photo’s have trackbacks as well…

And did I mention that they are going to give me and any other bloggers a pro-account who serve up 1 image from zoomr by putting a link in this comment thread.

Nice.



An example of the GeoTagging, see the thumbnails for “photos around this location”, quite frankly this has got some mind boggling implications that I have not wrapped my head around. Time to experiment.

Tip Of The Hat to Mashable

Update: over 409 comments, and therefore 409 linkbacks, those lucky devils
Update: close to 600 now

Hugh provides some uncharacteristic marketing speak

Tip Of The Hat

I guess you have to have the right film to pull this off, and you also have to have Samuel L Jackson deliver the line with aplomb.

And look how easy they made it to customize my profile with a complete Snakes On A Plane profile. Go check out the “Snakes On Myspace Tool”. Oh and BTW integrating with myspace is not that hard, it’s really just redefining the CSS that all myspace profiles use, and pasting it in the “about me” section.

Iain at Morrison Macmillan just picked up on a previous post of mine that was, tongue in cheek, titled YouTube Bigger Than Jesus. What Iain comments is how Revver has a long way to go before it becomes as successful as youtube, mtv etc. In fact, this is what he says:

And thats a fair point if the measure of success is sheer volume of audience (eyeballs), which i’m sure youtube, myspace and photobucket would like everyone to believe is the pinnacle of success. IMHO the concept of the audience is dead. As the social customer manifesto says

So what does this mean for measuring success if it’s not just about the size of the audience? How about “revenue per customer” “revenue per registered user” how about “value creating activity per user”. Think about the value that is created through the active participation of your customers? People are down on flickr because they don’t have so many users as photobucket, but have you seen the value in collections, clusters, how much richer the experience of navigating that folksonomy is? What % of flickr users are pro users? And how many of those pro users are stewards of beauty and art? Hey, I’m not saying flickr is going to be bigger than photobucket, and wouldn’t want it to, just how do you measure success. As Caterina says in Metrics, registered users and social ecosystems:

In the end most customers in the social media space are co-creators of value and IMHO many companies need to be looking at how they steward those value creation activities. In the end co-creative customers are making meaning for themselves, in conjunction with your brand, your role is to help them become more. The audience may be dead but the show must go on.

Update: I’m finding a rich conversation is going on aroudn the ‘death of the audience’

Inside the Cubical: Moving away from audiences and embracing communities

Tip of the hat to Doc Searls

PressThink: the people formerly known as the Audience

Tim Porter argues the audience is still alive, it just needs resuscitating

This was actually the phrase that inspired me to do a t-shirt blog. It was based upon a daily show skit after the bombing in london exactly one year ago. The daily show correspondent said (i’m paraphrasing)

“I don’t know what’s wrong with the brits here, no bumper stickers, no t-shirts, they just seem to be carrying themselves with quiet dignity and strength. Personally John, I like my grief in T-shirt form”.

So anyway, I made this shirt at goodstorm.com. Good storm is a very interesting “co-creative” business that provides a framework for people to create their own ecommerce stores. They’re also working on another service called “mecommerce” that will compete with amazon associates type deals, but enabling bloggers and web site owners to recommend books, cd’s etc and actually make 50% of the profit as opposed to the rather paltry percentage that amazon offers.

I actually think the trend toward co-creative commerce, which i’m calling “co-commerce” is the next stage in consumer generated content and WOM. As long as transparency, authenticity and humility is maintained then I don’t see why customers shouldn’t get paid for doing the work as the “new intermediaries”

Thoughts?

Karl

Here’s an interesting announcement from Amanda Congdon of previously of Rocketboom….

There seems to be a “creative difference” between the two partners that created Rocketboom. Very abrupt, a little bitchy, and ironic that Amanda says that “transparency is important in her fairwell vlog, because I didn’t hear any, and I didn’t see any on the Rocketboom web site either, WTF, they are acting like Apple.

For many Amanda is Rocketboom, so it will be interesting if the show is able to transition it’s audience. The actual Rocketboom hompage says that Amanda has decided to leave to go to LA, but it seems that Amanda is going to have a competing Vlog called Unboomed. I guess unboomed will be a less regular Vlog that fits in between her Hollywood schedule.

I wonder where that $85k a week is going to go, I guess the money will follow the content this time.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post called Content Will Follow The Money that basically asked a question. Why would people create great content for free and distribute it for free on youtube when revver demonstrated the ability to generate a nice wad of cash for video makers. And although I did not question a ninja directly on this issue, for fear of my life, I was talking creatives like him, I mean, ninjas shouldn’t be hawking t-shirts to try and make ends meet. If Zefrank can serve his stuff on revver and make a few bucks from his creative energies, why not. These guys are creating great shows on a consistent basis, unbelievably Zefrank creates a new, original, bitingly funny bit every day.

Well, anyway, it looks like I should call my site “adviseAninja” because it looks like they’ve just taken a revver like approach and just stuck a little interstitial towards the end of their show on youtube.

I think this is certainly early days in figuring out how to create value through videos online, and in some ways if you are creating episodic content and you build an audience then advertising makes sense as a way to finance that effort. The tricker situation is when content is created that is a “one hit wonder”, like lightning we can’t predict what will be the next hamsterdance, or big red button, etc. How about some “viral patrons”, patrons of the arts that finance the experimental. In the end Viral is very much like art, unique, original, unpredictable, often purposeless, misunderstood, and often beautiful. How do you sponsor lightning?