shortest post ever, thoughts?

I’ve been using Hulu quite a lot recently due canceling cable (obviously I now get the benefit of reacting condescendingly to small talk about American Idol with “oh, I cancelled cable”, while still keeping up with the daily show . Anyway, I’ve been exposed to a few Hulu ads now and I’ve got so say it’s some of the worst advertising i’ve ever seen (except for an old spice commercial which was awesome).

Anyway, this verizon commercial has to win the award for least imaginative, essentially they copied a chewing gum commercial, yep, it’s a remake.

Here’s the Verizon commercial

Original Big Red Chewing gum commercial:

Who thought this was a good idea?

Twitter shared a fascinating presentation with information on how they are handling analysis of it’s 100 Billion tweets. Much of the analysis is focused on numerous technical requirements but there are some really fascinating business requirements as well.

Those requirements were related to not just the storage of the masses of data, but the analysis of the data and it is in those requirements that I think Twitter is asking it’s most important questions:

• Which features get people hooked?
• Which features do successful users use often?

Goes to show, even with the mammoth task of just storing 100 Billion tweets in ways that are parseable, splitable, reusable, small in data size and hierarchical, they are still focused on some important behavior analysis.

The presentation was put together by Kevin Weil who is the Analytics Lead at Twitter.

Thanks also to both Mack Collier and Rob Kubarych for pointing me to additional material

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After the video of my presentation at Inverge 2 years ago has failed show up I have finally put an audio track on this presentation to provide a bit more context around my thinking and ideas. Amazingly, 2 years later the majority of the presentation still rings true and i believe the better companies can engage with customers in co-creation the more competitive they will be and the more meaning customers will derive out of these relationships.

Couple of things I mention that are not on the slides:

• Putting the fun in functional: Game Mechanics in Social Media
• The company that crowdsources using mobile phones that I mention is TheExtraordinaries.org
• I also mention Uservoice, GetSatisfaction and Bright Idea related to crowdsourcing ideas.

one must first know the rules to break them

This is a rather hyperbolic statement but Twitter is probably one of the most fascinating emergent communication and collaboration platforms since the advent of writing. Communication and collaboration on twitter is emergent, dynamic, and uniquely colored by the individual’s experience. Rather like writing in Shakespeare’s time where spelling and grammar was a fluid, people are experimenting and learning as they participate more. For this reason I thought I’d provide some examples of how I’m using and experimenting with various conventions that i use to try and communicate more clearly on Twitter in a way that can help both people and machines comprehend while still fitting them in the wonderfully constrained 140 characters.

Slashtags
Slashtags are a simple way to add information to a tweet that helps both people and machines understand context around a tweet. At the end of the content of the tweet you add a / followed by some two and three letter codes that provide the meaning (common slashtag codes are by, via, cc, and re). For example:

Curiosity is the purest form of insubordination /by “Vladimir Nabokov” via @Mandahl @ElspethMurray @valdiskrebs #Writing #poetry

Link to tweet

The summary of meaning of the slashtag here is:

• /by – text was originally written by Vladimir Nabokov
• via – I found the tweet by a chain of communication between @Mandahl @ElspethMurray @valdiskrebs
• # – the keywords associated with this tweet are Writing and Poetry

The addition of quotation marks around Vladimir Nabokov’s name is to help any machine readers understand that both words are included in the /by. If this was written as /by Vladimir Nabokov most machines or search engines would interpret this as /by vladimir which is obviously missing some critical context. In the case of twitter names that contain no spaces obviously there is no need for quotation marks as they have no spaces between them. Spaces after the slash are generally separating elements that stand alone, either twitter names, URL’s, or hashtags (the # is known as a hashtag and acts like a keyword or metadata, see twitter fan wiki for more info)

Just one slashtag
It is worth noting that everything following the / should be metadata and therefore it is not necessary to add any more slashes. It’s also worth noting that there is no need to repeat a slashtag either, if you have several people you are cc’ing or found via you can just add as many names after the tag and assume it can be assumed they are part of the preceding slashtag. Here’s an example of an unnecessary slash and via:

@sushobhan: why working & middle class Republicans are like “Turkeys voting for Thanksgiving” http://bit.ly/asInxq /via @dollar5 /via @karllong

This should read (also note I removed the superfluous colon after the twitter username):

@sushobhan why working & middle class Republicans are like “Turkeys voting for Thanksgiving” http://bit.ly/asInxq /via @dollar5 @karllong

by vs via
I often notice people using via when they should really be using by. For me it’s a pretty critical difference if someone wrote an article vs just pointing at it. Here’s an example:

@karllong: the future of the Internet will be driven by reputation http://bit.ly/cHqpeg /by @bhc3 via @contrafactos @innovate

Experimental use, RSVP
I think one of the great things about slashtags is you can really experiment with them and if you do it in a way that a human reader can understand it becomes a way for people to learn and collaborate, creating standards and norms by just usage. Here’s an example where I was invited to a drink up that I was unable to go to, but wanted to promote it to my followers, without giving the impression that I was going to be there. Here’s the experiment:

This is the tweet from Techstars about the drinkup:

@techstars Winter Drinkup this Thursday in San Francisco. RSVP http://bit.ly/cOtRjH /cc @jeffrey @chrismessina @karllong @davemorin @tedr

And my response, using an experimental slashtag of rsvp:

damn, I’ll be out of town RT @techstars Winter Drinkup this Thursday in San Francisco RSVP http://bit.ly/cOtRjH (expand) /rsvp no cc @chrismessina

This is not going to be interpreted by any machines at this point, but it is human readable so I’m adding some value. Also because it’s not a standard slashtag I made sure to use it as the first / so it would be as obvious as possible what I was intending.

Anyway, those are some examples of how i’m playing with slashtags, I’d love to hear about any emerging communication standards you see emerging on twitter, cheer.

For further reading on slashtags and other Microsyntax, as Stowe Boyd calls it check out these other links:
Microsyntax.org
Adapting twitter to the new RT from webmaster source

Also for further examples of slashtag usage i’ve created some searches on twitter to gather my various usage here:
Karl Long’s use of /via, /cc, /re and /by

Shiv Singh from Razorfish has put a great presentation that highlights the value of social media as part of a collaborative approach to marketing. Shiv calls it Social Influence Marketing, but it’s essentially an approach to marketing that includes the customers in many of the activities.

Anyway, worth digging through this presentation, I love slideshare

Found via Center Networks

Everyone knew that Avatar was a technically advanced, but you will probably be surprised at the amazing fusion of performance and technology. The whole special is brilliant and if you liked the movie you will enjoy this a lot. The real treat though was how James Cameron was using essentially an augmented reality camera to shoot the scenes, in other words he’s looking through a virtual camera in which he can see the combination of the real world actors inside the virtual world he has created. In many ways an advance on the old virtual reality helmets that were all the rage in the 80’s.

I think the fact we can all watch things like this on the internet weeks after a blockbuster has come out is a testament to the way the internet works, maybe also an indication that DVDs are going to have to raise the bar if they want to stay relevant.

“Through our scientific genius, we have made this world a neighborhood; now, through our moral and spiritual development we must make of it a brotherhood. In a real sense, we must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

Michael Porter popularized the idea and proposed generic strategies for organizations like Cost Leadership and Differentiation. Normally i’m not a fan of generic strategies as I don’t think they really lead to a sustainable advantage. IMHO most strategies should take such good use of your organizations talents, capabilities and resources that it should be virtually impossible to copy your strategy. In other words if you are worried about sharing your strategy with people because you think people might steel it, I’d suggest you find a new strategy.

That being said I’ve realized recently that there are a couple of generic digital strategies that, rather than being stolen, could help maintain focus and understand what business you are really in. The reason that I think these strategies are important is that I believe the dynamics of competition in the digital and social media space are vastly different than the economics and dynamics of business over the last 50 years or so. The two generic digital strategies I’ve been thinking about are either “Drive the Community” or “Become the platform” (I’ve added social production and data production as examples of value creation, but not limited to that).

• “Drive the community – Social Production” – Yelp, Threadless, Foursquare
• “Become the Platform – Data Production” – Twitter, Google, youtube, Wordpress
• stuck in the middle – Facebook, myspace

Drive the Community – Social Production

I’ve been thinking about yelp for many years as I’ve always felt it was at the forefront of companies that were using social production as a way to create intellectual capital. In other words they got their customers to do work for them as opposed to trying to just sell them something. This concept of social production or co-creation has had me enamored with the internet from the very beginning because it changed the economics of creating value. For me the very heart of strategy rests on the value creation question, who does it, why, by what means, and how do we do it better and cheaper than the other guy. This is the reason for intense focus by strategists on “value chains” as a means to explain how different parts of an organization ‘adds value’.

The Drive the Community Strategy answers the question ‘how do we motivate participation that will create a specific value. For yelp that specific value or unit of production was the review and they put in place community eco-system that would drive the creation of reviews, and lots of them.

Now yelp is of course a pure play business, but I think Drive the Community strategy is where organizations need to be looking who want to take advantage of the tremendous activity and engagement that is happening online. Both Dell and Zappos are examples of companies who have used this strategy. What companies need to avoid is trying to become the platform which will waste resources on reinventing core technologies. When I first joined Nokia 3 years ago an agency was in the process of building a blogging tool from scratch in flash, needless to say that was killed and we installed wordpress

Become the Platform – Data Production

Tim OReilly has said on several occasions that data is the ‘intel inside’ of Web 2.0 and for platforms that is often where the money is hidden. No better example of this than Twitter’s recent shift from cash burning startup to profitable business by inking content deals with Google and Microsoft. What twitter has sold access to is it’s data, it’s real time data. What Google and Microsoft and many other startups in the Twitter ecosystem have to do now is provide context to that data in a way that is valuable. Many people of course misunderstand the value of access to this real-time data and talk a lot about real-time news, and IMHO the closer news gets to real time the less valuable it is because the less context it has and the less time has passed to enable reflection, synthesis, or understood what other perspectives were involved. What is fascinating about real-time is as Chris Saad @chrissaad said the other day in a conversation with myself and Jeremiah Owyang @jowyang “real-time inference” is the valuable part, in other words what meaning can automatically derived from various data points in real time.

I’m digressing, but the point is that by becoming the platform Twitter has carved out a sustainably competitive advantage in a very short space of time and has now inked deals with two companies that would have surely preferred to keep their 25M but are being forced to pay for access to data.

So what’s the difference between a Drive the Community strategy and a Become the Platform strategy? Well in many ways i’m sure most organizations are some combination of both. Twitter it could be argued came from a drive the community strategy and became the platform. Possibly, but I think the cautionary tale is for organizations that don’t know if they want to drive the community or become the platform. AOL, Facebook, Myspace etc. and for that reason I think these could be valuable frameworks.

What do you think? Who do you think is doing a good job with either of these, any other companies that are stuck in the middle?

Related:
ost by Jonathan Rosenberg of Google: The meaning of open. Competitive advantage in the internet age. /via @timoreilly

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Hi Ben, here’s a note I tried to send you recently via Linkedin:

“I recently read about your decision to make social a core part of your strategy, which as an ‘on and off’ subscriber to the economist I’m thrilled to hear. I’m also professionally interested as I’ve been writing about social strategy at http://experiencecurve.com since 2003.

Best,

@karllong”

As it turns out LinkedIn thought this would be annoying to you, which of course is a possibility, but I was willing to take that risk. Unfortunatly Linkedin didn’t want me to take the risk of disturbing you so gave me this error screen when I had finally crafted the note to my satisfaction and within the limited wordcount that Linkedin provides.

Anyway, I don’t want to labor the point but I figured this serves as one example of how companies often fail to understand “social”.

Anyway, good luck with taking the Economist social, you guys have an amazing treasure trove of content, especially the audio. I’m sure very few people know how much great audio content you guys produce.

Thanks to Neville Hobson for writing about this in the first place “making the economist social. Oh and I highly recommend to anyone the podcast that Neville partners on “For Immediate Release“, despite it’s PR focus it required listening for folks learning about the social web.