View from 30,000 feet

Interesting article about why Apple and Amazon are succeeding while still transforming the industry during a recession.

Apple and Amazon Do Platform Innovation–And Succeed in a Recession – BusinessWeek

Apple and Amazon Do Platform Innovation–And Succeed in a Recession

Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on October 21

Amazon just announced that people are reading more and more books on the Kindle days after Appple announced that people are downloading more and more applications on the iPhone. And profits rose 47%. It’s no secret that these two companies are among the handful that have kept up revenues and profits throughout the worst recession since the Depression and are poised to do even better as the economy begins to growth again.

The reason is simple—but not simple enough apparently for most managers in most global companies to comprehend. Apple and Amazon have created disruptive platform innovations that change the game for consumers. And they have done it within a price range ($300 to $400) that reduces the cost and risks to people even in a recession.

Let’s take this strategy apart. First, a game-changing BIG innovation—a platform innovation. Second, a price for consumers that is low enough to entice them to take the leap into the new, disruptive innovation. Third, a multitude of applications and “stuff” (products, services, experiences) on the platform that provide value (information, insight,entertainment) to people.

That’s it folks. It is that simple. Or that complex. It takes a special type of culture, organization and leadership to make it happen.

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I just started following Mike Arauz on Twitter @mikearauz, and while browsing some presentations on social media, I came upon his chart:

which refers to the spectrum of online friendship.  I think this is a very interesting chart as it creates a quanitifiable way of looking at the relationships between people online and ultimately how they evolve.  Now mind you, I do not see this as an absolute since it doesn’t factor in many aspects of “online friendships” and it does look at the primary relationships in somewhat of a vacuum, ie I stumble upon a site/feed/microblog/etc and begin to take even a cursory view of the content, and then become immersed into a relationship with the author, and if we keep that as the thesis, then the chart makes a lot of sense, and we can then apply it to a relationship with a brand and thus becomes another evolution of the standard marketing funnel.

Now I wouldn’t take the spectrum of friendship as the be all and end all of social media relationships to CRM, but you can derive a considerable amount of strategic influence from such doc.  I created a starting point for you to consider. Though not ideal, when you begin to look at social media as marketing it take a bit of the mystification away from it

Below is Mike’s blog post in deeper details, also please note the caveots on the bottom of his post, very relevant.

Mike Arauz: Spectrum of Online Friendship

Blog: Stream of Thoughts
Spectrum of Online Friendship
Update: Part 2, responses to comments here.

“What is a friend?” This question is constantly echoing across the internet. But, digital relationships (just like non-digtal ones) are not absolute. They are fluid. And online friendship is better described along a spectrum defined by the actions people take and how we feel about them. The more useful question for individuals and brands who are interested in cultivating online friendships is How do I move my friends from acquaintanceship to “best friendliness”? (as I called them on my Friend For Hire flyer PDF)

Last week I wrote about how online friendships are different from what we’ve traditionally called friendships. Digital technology has affected the number of relationships you can maintain, and the intimacy of those relationships, effectively enabling us to create fans who feel like friends.

I wasn’t finished thinking about the nature of online friendship, though.

Click for full size image

Mike Arauz Diagram

Passive Interest
This is the easiest level of engagement. It asks the least of your friends, and achieves the least commitment from us. But, it’s the crucial starting point. I follow my curiosity to you, I’m interested in what I find, and I choose to pay attention. e.g. repeat visits, blog readers, fans, followers, etc.

Active Interest
This is when I care enough to let you know that I care (in a nice way, not in a stalker way . It’s a small step, but a big opportunity for you to identify key members of your audience who are candidates to move along the spectrum. We don’t yet expect a response, we’re just letting you know that we’re listening. e.g. people who leave comments on your blog, wall comments, @replies on Twitter, etc.

Sharing
At this point the audience member starts to become a fan. You and your work become part of my identity as I use it to talk to my own friends about what interests me (remember that we share content for social reasons). I also have made myself more valuable, because I am now partly responsible for the spread of your ideas. e.g. social bookmarking, retweeting links, posting links and content to my own sites and profiles, etc.

Public Dialogue
This is the first phase that requires action on your part. I have either demonstrated an Active Interest or have Shared your work with my own friends. You foster a relationship by responding to my interest in a public forum. By doing so, you make the rest of your friends aware of my existence, and welcome me to the group. e.g. public @replies, referrals in a blog post, and references posted to our various sites and profiles, etc.

Private Dialogue
At this step, we begin to transform mutual interest into mutual trust. We are willing to share thoughts, ideas, experiences with each other directly. We trust each other with direct access, which has increasing value in an increasingly always-on world. e.g. exchanging email, TXT messages, IM, and direct messages on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.

Advocacy
At first glance, Advocacy looks a lot like Sharing. But, the crucial difference is that Advocacy means that I am making an explicit recommendation of you to my friends. It’s too easy now to simply share, all it takes is one click on your bookmark tool bar. Choosing to actually say, “This is important. It’s worth my friends’ time. And I’m willing to risk my own reputation to convince my friends to check it out.” e.g. same tools as Sharing, but different language; usually entails recommending the person or brand, and not just a specific piece of content

Investment
The brass ring of online friendship. This is the most difficult achievement to recognize or quantify. But it’s the most important because it represents the willingness of your friends to take action on your behalf. In the words of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.” e.g. Your wins are my wins.

The last tier, Investment, became clear to me in the wake of well-wishes deservedly showered on David Armano after his announcement last Friday of his move to the Dachis Corporation. I was one of those well-wishers myself, and was genuinely proud and excited to hear about his new gig.

When I think about people (or brands, or people-brands) who have had success at moving their audience from one end of this spectrum to the other, Armano is one of the first examples that comes to mind. This is why he was able to raise over $15,000 in one night for a friend in trouble. And it’s why thousands of people offered up congratulations when they heard he had taken this new job.

Look at what most brands are measuring in this space. It rarely goes much farther than the first tier, Passive Interest. We count visits, friends, fans, followers, etc. Unfortunately the reasons for these limited metrics have more to do with efficiency than efficacy. These metrics are the easiest thing to measure and they return the biggest numbers. But, as you can see there’s so much more value to be had as we move beyond those basic actions.

Your online ambitions can only be as grand as the quality of the relationships you foster. What would you like to accomplish online? As you move your audience from Passive Interest to Investment the possibilities grow.

Caveats:

* In the digital world, none of these behaviors, even dialogue, requires a reciprocal feeling of friendship on your part. I can be your friend without you being my friend.

* These phases are not absolute gateways. It is possible occasionally to skip over one action or another and to advance to the next phase.

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As wifi enabled planes become the standard and there are no other places where you can be untethered from your digital world, it seems to make sense to try to monetize the environment with ad supported access.  The question I ask is why hasn’t it worked in other digital access offerings? NetZero? People PC, etc? Was it the user experience? The interface or lack of interface?

Seeing more and more ad supported browsing environments pop-up, like hospital waiting rooms in Canada, as users are cutting costs maybe this is an opportunity to deliver access that is ad supported as a real value ad. But outside 30,000 feet and maybe underground (ie. subways) where are we where out portable devices don’t get access?

In-flight ad system lets flyers kill time for free | VentureBeat

In-flight ad system lets flyers kill time for free
October 6, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments |

Wi-Fi advertising network JiWire, which serves ad pages to coffeehouse laptop users, has partnered with in-flight broadband provider Row 44 to create a portal called Skytown Center that will let laptop-toting flyers surf the best version of SkyMall ever.

JiWire will deliver the ads to Skytown’s home page, as shown in the mockup below. Depending on how the airline configures the system, flyers may have their choice of Internet access, ad-supported free Internet access, or free advertising content.

For now, no airlines have officially declared that they’ll be using Skytown Center. But Southwest and Alaska have tested Row 44’s system, which connects from an in-flight plane to a satellite. Row 44’s system can connect flyers to the Internet, or give them offline content to peruse.

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So if you haven’t seen this site befuckingawesome.com, its a pretty amazing idea, make the world a better place by doing “awesome” things, quite benevolent.  The problem is, that like many start-ups the market can eventually define the platform, not the other way around, and what you start out building can evolve considerably from the original plan or vision.  Sometimes you accept this evolution as the stars aligning and you grab on to the railing, snap on your seat belt, and watch the world unfold. . . this has happened many times over, from our friends at Wild Tangent (which started as a game developer), to many of the current ad networks, to much more. . . most of the time for the better. . . Wild Tangent is now a very success game aggregation platform and game ad network. And other times you hit a bump loose complete control, but eventually you get back on track and your company/product/platform returns to where you wanted it to be, and you make it out a little scathed, a little tired, but a lot smarter.

This is a great post about that.

BFA Productions

A Social Network Built Around Doing Good But With An F-Bomb In Its Name? What The F Am I Thinking?!

Ambitious. That’s one thing it could be called. Stupid. That’s another. But after two weeks being live with Be Fucking Awesome dot com – the first social network designed for doing good – I’m choosing to simply call it A MASSIVE LEARNING EXPERIENCE.

It’s been a ride. That’s for sure. At first it was all good. We got some exciting press courtesy Josh Spear. He’s got a big blog following and his review was pretty sweet. Thanks Josh. Then we got a great write-up on the front page of the Denver Egotist. Very nice. And we got a couple of other nice web-press-hits too. And our Google Analytics were looking good. This was just one week in, and it was feeling nothing short of FA.

Then week two started. I was hoping for more press and promotion, more steady growth of new users and FAdeeds. Well, being raised at CP+B I’m just like a lot of Crispinites – I never learn. This time the lesson that I hadn’t learned was “be careful what you ask for.” Because last Tuesday the 6th, we got more press. This time from Asylum.com – another glowing review. Pretty cool, right? Well… let’s just say that depends on who you ask. Because all of a sudden, our burgeoning userbase went from a demographic of those who cleary understood that the site was about posting good deeds, to one full of Maxim-magazine fratboy types who were into it to post stuff that they thought was funny or “awesome” from a “I just took a giant shit” or “I just banged two chicks” POV. And not only did this demographic get into it, they LOVED it. On Tuesday the 6th alone we had something like 12,000 views and at one time more than 1,000 concurrent users. But the content being posted spawned a major dilemma for me. “Do I ride it out? Do I trust the system? What if so many of this new type is onboard now that they’ll hush the others? What if they vote up the nonsense FAdeeds to the point where it gets out of the original vision entirely? Do I edit it? Do I delete posts and kick people off the site? But wait… they’re not WRONG. Nowhere does it dictate what is an “awesome deed” and it’s open to interpretation… What do I DO? Have we created a MONSTER?!”

Picture 26

Ambitious. That’s one thing it could be called. Stupid. That’s another. But after two weeks being live with Be Fucking Awesome dot com – the first social network designed for doing good – I’m choosing to simply call it A MASSIVE LEARNING EXPERIENCE.

It’s been a ride. That’s for sure. At first it was all good. We got some exciting press courtesy Josh Spear. He’s got a big blog following and his review was pretty sweet. Thanks Josh. Then we got a great write-up on the front page of the Denver Egotist. Very nice. And we got a couple of other nice web-press-hits too. And our Google Analytics were looking good. This was just one week in, and it was feeling nothing short of FA.

Then week two started. I was hoping for more press and promotion, more steady growth of new users and FAdeeds. Well, being raised at CP+B I’m just like a lot of Crispinites – I never learn. This time the lesson that I hadn’t learned was “be careful what you ask for.” Because last Tuesday the 6th, we got more press. This time from Asylum.com – another glowing review. Pretty cool, right? Well… let’s just say that depends on who you ask. Because all of a sudden, our burgeoning userbase went from a demographic of those who cleary understood that the site was about posting good deeds, to one full of Maxim-magazine fratboy types who were into it to post stuff that they thought was funny or “awesome” from a “I just took a giant shit” or “I just banged two chicks” POV. And not only did this demographic get into it, they LOVED it. On Tuesday the 6th alone we had something like 12,000 views and at one time more than 1,000 concurrent users. But the content being posted spawned a major dilemma for me. “Do I ride it out? Do I trust the system? What if so many of this new type is onboard now that they’ll hush the others? What if they vote up the nonsense FAdeeds to the point where it gets out of the original vision entirely? Do I edit it? Do I delete posts and kick people off the site? But wait… they’re not WRONG. Nowhere does it dictate what is an “awesome deed” and it’s open to interpretation… What do I DO? Have we created a MONSTER?!”

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Here is an article of my keynote at the Mobile Ad Summit at Advertising Week last week in NYC.

Year of mobile? Try years of mobile: Mobile Ad Summit keynote – Mobile Marketer – Advertising

Year of mobile? Try years of mobile: Mobile Ad Summit keynote

By Chris Harnick

September 23, 2009
Industry execs speak out on future of mobile

What is the future of mobile devices?

NEW YORK – Think this is the year of mobile? As mobile marketing integration evolves, every year will be the year of mobile, according to MDC Partners.

While 2009 has been a huge year for the mobile platform, it is still not as fully embraced as the PC is. During a keynote address at the Mobile Ad Summit at New York’s Times Center, stress was placed on full marketing integration to truly kick mobile into high gear.

“Is this the year of mobile?” asked Brandon Berger, head of digital innovation at MDC Partners, Toronto. “It’s really not the year of mobile marketing, but certainly we can really look into what a wonderful year it was full of huge leaps in mobile.

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“I think this has been a great year for mobile but the reality is, we need to stop asking i’s this the year of mobile?’ because this is one of the years of mobile,” he said.

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This is a great blog posting about the people behind the most popular social networks.  A great resource of data and stats!

Social Network Statistics | Brian Solis – PR 2.0

Revealing the People Defining Social Networks

Social Networks are among the most powerful examples of socialized media. They create a dynamic ecosystem that incubates and nurtures relationships between people and the content they create and share.

As these communities permeate and reshape our lifestyle and how we communicate with one another, we’re involuntarily forcing advertisers and marketers to rapidly evolve how they vie for our attention.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yelp, and other online communities transformed the regimen and practice of marketing “at” people into an opportunity to engage and interact with us – on our terms. It is the zeitgeist of socialized media and it’s manifesting into an obsession for branding, advertising, “viral,” marketing, and communications experts and professionals worldwide.

But, the people who define each network are reticent to the hollow attempts of faceless friending and in-network marketing. Many businesses are building social channels to broadcast messages in a one to many, top-down practice that not only prevents relationship building, but impedes any hope of cultivating communities and empowering brand ambassadors.

As marketers, it’s your responsibility to peel back the layers of each network to observe and eventually interact with the very people you wish to reach. Each network possesses a vibrant culture and ecosystem that is powered by context and connected by influential social graphs.

While nothing beats anthropological fieldwork and observation, let’s take a look at numbers behind the top social networks to get a better picture of network engagement and user demographics

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