Reads & feeds
- Natalie Bancroft and NewsCorp
- Urban Travel Legends… some good tips
- The Toxic Ten… Includes Apple
- Love this work… see latest issue of Wired for more.. we should take our recent project on Facebook and do something like this with it… more art will be created by the community with the artist as assembler
- Love this site…
- Wildstrom’s wish for the next Windows … I keep reading about the start-up time but just don’t face that as an issue. For me it is integrating drivers into one solid tool that works. I want any display, printer or mouse recognized instantly and calibrated. Then I want to save those settings as profiles. Windows used to do this… I must reset my display settings a minimum of ten times a day.
- Jeff Jarvis on Dell and “Loving the Customers that Hate You”… I’m intrigued by customer service that scales proportionately to the product made or service delivered. Lexus is a sure winner in my book. Notable is that in BW’s list, while many are luxury brands an equal portion are those that have made customer service an anchor tenet of their brand. Southwest Airlines, JetBlue and Nordstrom being examples.
- Social Media will change your business.
- Massive collection of SXSW music for free…
INFLUENCEABLES
Johnnie has a bit on the coverage of Duncan Watt’s ideas on Influencers vs. Influenceables… If you haven’t read it, you should… His view is that that ordinary people have just as much influence as influential people have in making something popular. Cory, Guy, Seth, Spike, and scores of others have all chimed in.
On The Media interviewed Clive Thompson who wrote the Fast Company article that compellingly explains Duncan Watts’ word-of-mouth randomness theory. In the radio interview (available online here), Clive summarizes Duncan’s complex theory this way,
“It’s not how influential each person is, it’s how influenceable everyone else is. If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start it.”
It really got me thinking. I’m ready to hold Gladwell’s ideas and Watt’s in my head at the same time. I don’t think they are exclusive.
What I don’t agree with is that society is “ready” to embrace trends – especially commercial trends. That’s what marketers do. They prepare society for trends and then activate those trends… Kind of like Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.
There are instances where society becomes ready to embrace a trend – like Green — and smart marketers figure out how to leverage that.
our competition in facebook
Some applause for our Regeneration competition on Facebook. I’m thrilled the team chose to do this on Facebook…
Mix a premium brand with one of the best applications on Facebook and you get Dell’s Regeneration campaign, which asked people to use FM author GraffitiWall’s application to draw what green means to them. It attracted more than 7,000 drawings using GraffitiWall and a million votes for the best ones. Read the tale of the campaign on Chas Edwards’ blog, ChasNote, and see the amazing work in the Top 150 submissions on GraffitiWall.
A couple of observations:
- Costs a fraction of the cost of doing this on your own site – actually, pretty much nothing
- Zero IT barriers, which for anyone working in a medium to large company is a major factor
- Inviting a community to play is much easier than driving traffic to your own site and asking them to play there
- The tools on Facebook are just amazing… I love watching the graphics take shape – be sure to hit Replay on some of the images.
- We didn’t drive entries (data or form-fill) into Regeneration,org out of respect for the community and playing in the community. Hard to get your head around this as a marketer when you are trying to grow two communities at once – the Dell and Regen community on Facebook – and the community at Regeneration.org.
- Would definitely do this again.
Be sure to join The Regeneration.
Activating Communities…
Interesting read on activating communities inside the Enterprise.
Companies should pay attention to what motivates people to glom onto an online community inside and outside the corporate walls, Bughin says, because it isn’t usually financial gain. At a cable company McKinsey studied, more than half the employees who contributed to an internal wiki did it to build their own reputations and because they identified with the community, he says. Only 20 percent did it for the chance to earn a bonus.
Next, from the dating sites, Martell learned that when you appeal to people’s vanity you not only please them but you keep them around.
What we see at Dell is that people are contributing because they have a view or opinion they want to voice. They want to make Dell a better place and impact the business.
Activating Communities…
Interesting read on activating communities inside the Enterprise.
Companies should pay attention to what motivates people to glom onto an online community inside and outside the corporate walls, Bughin says, because it isn’t usually financial gain. At a cable company McKinsey studied, more than half the employees who contributed to an internal wiki did it to build their own reputations and because they identified with the community, he says. Only 20 percent did it for the chance to earn a bonus.
Next, from the dating sites, Martell learned that when you appeal to people’s vanity you not only please them but you keep them around.
What we see at Dell is that people are contributing because they have a view or opinion they want to voice. They want to make Dell a better place and impact the business.
