2004 - Page 5 of 39 - McGee's Musings

Blogs and market research

One of the things I’ve always found fascinating in Dina’s blog is the way she uses ethnographic methods in her market research (what can I say, I have eclectic interests) and in her thinking about how blogs might generate new kinds of data that will prove important to marketers. For so many kinds of markets, blogs can provide a window into what customers and non-customers are passionate about. The Kryptonite lock problems being one of the more recent examples. The relevance of this direct access to “voice” is quickly obvious to anyone who participates in blogging. The question then becomes why marketing organizations have been so slow to pick up on the potential value of blogs.

In the marketing research context, blogs are a disruptive technology. Instead of having to generate data by way of surveys or focus groups with whatever artifacts the process introduces, blogs provide direct visibility into customers. Instead of having to connect potentially artificial samples back to the actual market, now you have to filter real market behavior, interpret it, and make sense of it. That presents two challenges to market research functions. First, market research staff have to develop new skills. For that, they would do well to pay attention to Dina. Second, management of market research needs to spend some quality thinking time about what to do with access to this new kind of market data.

The opportunity that blogs introduce into the marketing research equation is to create the opportunity to identify and run multiple micro-experiments in the market. Those that succeed get the resources to scale, those that fail generate some useful data and are quickly shut down. There are challenges, of course, especially given how quickly ideas spread in a connected world, but that should be offset by the speed with which experiments can be identified and run. Worth thinking about.

Dinner with Judith and Dina

This week’s fascinating impromptu blogger dinner was with Judith Meskill and Dina Mehta. Only in the blogging world would bloggers from Chicago, Princeton, and Mumbai end up having dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Judith was in town blogging the VON conference, Dina was on her way up to PopTech, and I am here for client meetings tomorrow.

We did do a little bit of small talk, but much like David Weinberger we pretty quickly ended up focusing substantively on several topics around blogging in business. Two that I want to try to recapture are how blogs might change the nature of market research and how the notion of oral culture in organizations might help explain the relatively slow take up of blogs inside the firewall.

Lunch with Betsy Devine: tenure, age, and folly

I finally had lunch with Betsy Devine today at the Bombay Club in Cambridge. This was a long delayed get together that was orginally intended to include Halley Suitt as well. Just as well that we ended up doing two separate lunches. I fear my head would have exploded if I had tried to keep up with both of them at the same time.

As with Halley, Betsy and I picked right up as old friends despite this being our first face-to-face meeting. Rich, stimulating conversation about education, organizations, knowledge sharing, writing, anthropology, humor, politics, science, and architecture to name just some of the topics I can remember.

One topic we talked about was what value was left in the notion of tenure in education both at the university level and below. At one point, Betsy served on the board of education in Princeton while her husband Frank was doing the research that led to his recent Nobel prize (how cool is it to get a chance to talk to someone that close to such an experience – who says blogging is a waste of time when it leads to opportunities like that?). Anyway, I was remarking on how odd tenure seemed to be when applied in public school districts. Betsy explained to me that the role of tenure in that environment was not about academic freedom but about creating some protection for older, more experienced teachers (generally women) who were otherwise at risk of being replaced by the newest crop of teachers just out of school who were not only likely to be more attractive to students and parents but much cheaper as well. I had never made that connection.

That flowed into a discussion of similar biases toward age discrimination in business organizations. That flowed into a discussion of the problems in the private sector that let organizations hold onto the profits that might accrue from replacing your aging, expensive workers with younger blood while being able to pass the broader costs of unemployed middle-aged executives with mortgages and tuitions to pay onto the society as a whole. Age discrimination laws notwithstanding, this pattern of privatizing profits and commonalizing costs is powerful and, unfortunately, rational behavior on the part of executives who are charged with putting the interests of their shareholders first. It says to me that our regulatory frameworks are broken in some important ways that will take a lot more than the trading of rhetorical positions that seems to characterize so much of our current public discourse. One reference that I want to reexamine in this context is the late Garrett Hardin’s Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent. I first found this slim volume about 15 years ago. It offers some excellent advice on understanding and acting on our collective responsibilities as informed laypeople in a world increasingly dominated by experts.

David P. Reed wins WTN Communications Technology Award

Way to go David. Well deserved.

David P. Reed wins WTN Communications Technology Award!

Congratulations , David!

Reed won in fast company. Two of the other nominees were Carver Mead and Niklas Zennstrom. Zennstrom’s most recently founded company, Skype , won the Corporate CommTech Award, and deservedly so. Both Reed and Skype have irrevocably changed the field of communications technology.

I’ve been an advisor to WTN since before it was launched. Thanks to the persistence and dogged determination of WTN Founder Jim Clark, it is turning into something real; witness the recently announced expansion of the X-Prize, now known as the WTN X-Prize.

The four WTN Summits so far have been among the best meetings it has been my pleasure to participate in. At the most recent WTN meeting last week, the conversation I was in with George Gilder, David Reed, Steve Jurvetson, Kelly Larabee (Skype’s U.S. agent) and a handful of other articulate practitioners of communications was worth the trip all by itself.

– isen [isen.blog]

Just the facts

A great quote and a pointer to factcheck.org

Just the Facts. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.” This quote from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan… [Dispatches from the New World of Work]

Overachievement

Another great post from Evelyn at Crossroads with a recommendation for another book that looks worth reading, Overachievement by John Eliot. I’ve got a copy on order based on her recommendation.

The Last Taboo. [Michael Dell at eighteen] decided not to divulge that dream to anyone “because they probably would have thought I was crazy. But, to me, the opportunity was clear.” – Overachievement, by John Eliot That dream was to be number one… [Crossroads Dispatches]

Ads in the Engadget RSS feed

Funny. I thought they were glitches in the feed as well. I certainly ignore them in general. To the extent they do intrude on my consciousness they annoy me. I’m inclined to Dave’s observation that the feed is an ad for the site. Don’t clutter it with noise.

Here’s what the new ads in the Engadget feed look like in my aggregator. At first I barely noticed them, then they looked like big glitches, but now that I see them in every post and I am starting to think about unsubbing. That says a lot, because it’s become one of my favorite feeds. I honestly don’t see why they need ads in their feed, because the feed itself is an ad for Engadget. Every time I read an item there’s a (let’s say) three percent chance I’ll link to it and deliver several hundred readers. There’s got to be a better way to pay for the feed. [Scripting News]

KMPro panel on Blogs in Business

It was a lot of fun riffing with Scoble, Ian, and John about blogs in the organization. I’ve got some notes and reflections I’ll want to post later, but wanted to get this nice summary from Jack posted while I had a moment.

KMPro panel on Blogs in Business

KMPro Chicago hosted an excellent discussion of Blogs in Business with Jim McGee, Robert Scoble, Ian Kennedy and Jon Powell. We covered a lot of ground with a focus on how blogs could be valuable both for marketing to the outside world and for building conversations within the company.

One very interesting thread throughout the evening of conversation was the idea of how blogs can be used to extend the socialization framework that we get when smart people gather around the cube, board table or in the lunchroom. In those situations, people are sharing and learning from one another, but it happens only within a small group of people who happen to be near each other. With blogs (and admittedly other social software) people can extend that reach out to larger and larger groups of people. This was the area where Jon Powell, invited as a skeptic about blogging, saw the most value in what blogging could bring to Hewitt and other corporate environments. Humans seem naturally inclined to share and help one another, and the capabilities being developed with blogging give people more opportunities to do so.

An example of how blogs might work within an organization: Rather than having status reports sent on email, ask those people to post their status reports to a blog. With email, only the recipient knows what is happening and they can provide feedback only when they understand the matter in question. With a blog and with people subscribing to that blog’s web feed, there are many more eyes viewing the reports and many more eyes that can provide feedback or connect the author the help they might need. It’s useful to note that while most readers may just skim, the small minority that do take an interest in the material are exactly the ones that you want taking an interest. They have the background, interest and time to do so, where the immediate supervisor may not.

In describing blogs, Robert Scoble drew from his Five Pillars of Conversational Software: 1. Easy to publish; 2. Discoverable; 3. Social behaviors become visible; 4. Permalinks to a specific item; 5. Syndication. These items were referred back to a number of times throughout the conversation as people asked about other examples and technologies that seemed to be similar. For example, e-mail is neither discoverable, permanent nor syndicated. Similarly, Sharepoint, while ‘easy’ to post and permalink, is not easily discoverable. Discussion groups have a number of the pillars, but they seem to lose in the arena of social behavior in that individuals cannot build their own presence, other than through being known as the expert within the given discussion group.

The idea of easy publishing was discussed by a few people. Rather than needing to “create a website” or “write a paper,” the only thing a blog posting requires is a few cogent thoughts and/or maybe a reference to someone else’s cogent thoughts to which you want to add more. Along this vein there was also conversation around the difficulty of doing this within a corporate environment. Traditionally, corporations have not encouraged people to write what they think – my last company had a policy that more-or-less said this for fear of the legal discovery process. In addition, “people are a lot more worried about making fools of themselves” in corporate settings than in their personal space. The corporate culture will clearly need to change if blogging is to take root.

McGee suggested that blogging in the business – and in society – is going to go through a similar adoption curve as has e-mail: everyone has an address today as a matter of course, but not so many years ago people were trying to figure out what value email might bring to the organization. Blogging – or the ideas behind blogging – will become familiar over time.

Powell mentioned that Hewitt has over 10,000 internal Lotus Notes databases. In post-meeting conversation, a former Anderson person mentioned that they had over 17,000 Notes databases. The question was raised, how will “giving everyone a blog” change the issue that this information is written down and forgotten? How will blogs change the fact that we are drowning in information (or data)? For one, the auxiliary tools that read web feeds (syndication) or that search across weblogs are critical to the difference. In addition, it is the whole nature of how blogs are used and how they operate. A blog is generally written and owned by an individual; it is where they develop their voice and develop reputation: online discussion groups and databases don’t provide this level of ownership to the material.

How does one get started with all of this? People. Passionate, smart people. Give them the conversational tools and they will expand their over-the-cubicle conversations out into their wider sphere of contacts and sources, creating more potential for innovation and flexibility within the organization.

Other notes
McGee made an almost throwaway comment: Within a few years, knowledge workers will probably be taking their own technology into the workplace and negotiating connectivity with their employer. Why? The knowledge worker is going to be relying on that technology to operate in any space, whether it is home or work or consulting or the next job. Why should she be locked into an environment in which she is not familiar or effective?

Scoble has mentioned many times that he monitors nearly 1,000 blogs. He claimed this evening that he could see getting upwards of 10,000 blogs as the capabilities of web feed readers continually grows and improves.

While trying to find Robert’s Five Pillars, I discovered Sylloge’s Five Pillars of Social Software (http://www.sylloge.com/personal/2003_03_01_s.html#91273866): Identity, Presence, Relationships, Conversations, Groups. A nice parallel with Robert’s pillars above.

– jackvinson (jackvinson@jackvinson.com) [Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

My worst technology mistake

Ben Bradley of Growingco.com interviewed me about Knowledge Management that ran over at Darwin magazine a few weeks back. It was an interesting exercise reflecting on my worst technology mistake. It probably won’t surprise anyone here, but I concluded that

In particular, I ve become a lot more skeptical about top-down approaches to knowledge management. And I ve become much more cautious about the importance of pushing the technology envelope. We were doing a lot of good things to improve internal communications and interactions among our experts. We started paying more attention to that to good effect. Not as sexy, but a lot more impact.

My current thinking is that organizations that want to make progress on KM will need to blend top-down and bottoms-up approaches. It’s not a question of which approach is right, but of how to blend both approaches.