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As consumers, we use our cell phone to fast forward through boring or unpleasant situations to get to the good stuff. I'm building a platform that lets smaller organizations join in the mobile conversation.
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Reading the accounts of the days after 9/11 remind me of the sense of community in San Francisco after the Loma Prieta earthquake. People gave of themselves, selflessly.
You never know what people will do in a moment of crisis. Despite all the bile and rancor of our age, if you lived through the aftermath of those crises, you know hope survives.
Ten Years brings perspective
This year, more than any other, I feel incredibly protective over the memory of 9/11. I have been surprised by a feeling of anxiety and dread during the drumbeat leading up to today and have found myself getting angry at the inevitable media reflections and documentaries that were to come. Bu...
While the "Web" internet gave us document addressability, the "Social" internet gives us people addressability. (And, I suppose, the "X-10/NFC/RFID" internet will give us the Internet of Things. But I digress.)
The notion of "pull" leads us to a reimagining of "instant gratification" - increasingly, merchants are architecting their design to put consumers at the center of the universe, making the whole world into a kind of "celestial jukebox" that permits access to anything imaginable.
Your access/attract/achieve model mirrors what I've been thinking about this new celestial jukebox. New intermediaries are using flash sales and social addressability to negotiate exclusive pricing, privileges, and access on behalf of their members.
Yield management is being spun on its head to pivot between maximizing revenue, ego, or availability. Historians might look at the UK 100 years ago and see something similar. We are moving from the logistics of things to the logistics of ambition.
Anticipating the Next Wave of Experience Design
We live in a world defined by increasing time pressure and more and more things competing for our attention. In such a frenetic world, it is understandable that we place more value on the quality of our experience. We want to make the most of the time we have. Experience design has emerged in pa...
For an advanced case of persistent context, look at the "fantasy football" phenomenon - it takes a discrete event and gives users a way to meaningfully interact, not only in the regular season via league play, but in the preseason via mock drafts. Participants are more informed and there are both economic and ego rewards from performance.
As far as other influences -- I'm a big fan of the Urban Land Institute and its efforts in "New Urbanism", which provide a narrative structure for the places we live, work and play. And I'm also following efforts such as director Guillermo del Toro's new transmedia studio or Versace's vision of hotels -- as people look to spend more time in places they want to be, you're starting to see design influences from the design and entertainment worlds.
The Pull of Narrative – In Search of Persistent Context
We live in a world of ever more change and choice, a world where we have far more opportunity than ever to achieve our potential. That kind of world is enormously exciting, and full of options. But it is also highly disorienting, threatening to overwhelm us with sensory and mental overload. In ...
As a long-time observer and volunteer (I assist Jeremiah on his Corporate Media Strategists and Melissa Hourigan on Media On Twitter), I believe the nature of brand interactions are changing from long periods of quiescence punctuated by staccato exchanges to more continuous streams of structured communication, each packet branded with a web service that happens to fit the cultural zeitgeist.
The cycles are getting faster. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison remarked technology is moving faster than women's fashion. In such a world, product development has greater risk. Yesterday we could not believe in a world without MySpace. That's okay, because before that, we could not believe in a world without Pointcast. Or Excite. Or WordPerfect. I suspect future product development will look more like episodic TV, where you have pilots, formal screening processes with test audiences, and an upfront marketplace where partners can negotiate the terms of an early commitment. This last part is important: every brand is getting smarter about maximizing revenue at every opportunity, which is where revenue management comes in.
The nature of a Conversation Agent, then, goes from what we can imagine today, to a branded ambassador tomorrow, not unlike 'Consumer Recreation Services' in the Michael Douglas movie "The Game". You are either seriously outperforming your peers in your ability to engage your key constituencies, or you are slowly dying and don't even know it.
So where does this leave us? I've been quietly developing a kind of "@reply-as-a-service" that lets businesses quickly crowdsource opportunities; perhaps you'd like to prototype a "hey-here's-a-link-who-can-give-me-their-feedback-via-video, I'd like to choose from 5 replies" service that lets you quickly poll your advisory boards and get a specific response back. The problem we solve is how to elicit action in a way that ensures little wasted effort while giving you a fast indicator of who's available.
@connectme
What Would Conversation Agent Do?
I'm running a poll on Facebook to learn what topics are the most helpful to you here. Go vote now, if you want to weigh in. The road to my heart and to connecting faster with me is comments and discussions on this blog, which is my home base. After talking with and listening to many of you, I ...
The Netflix deal is a significant milestone as it establishes a new distribution window that includes app stores. Just as pay TV and international rights became major factors in helping otherwise marginally profitable entertainment turn a profit -- like @Eduardo's "MacGruber" example -- I believe Internet-enabled streaming can become a key window for Relativity and other forward-thinking studios.
Netflix challenging HBO and Showtime as it signs distribution deal with Relativity Media
If you can't join 'em, compete against 'em. With top pay-cable channels HBO and Showtime and upstart Epix largely refusing to let Netflix stream movies during the long periods that they control the rights, the DVD subscription service is going around them, starting with independent film finan...
Brian Hayashi is now following The Typepad Team
Mar 15, 2010
I seem to remember a recent study that showed that eternal gratitude was clocked at about 15 hours.
Google research shows people quickly scan the first three or four words in a paragraph. So the key is to constantly remind elected officials of the value being delivered, using short phrases of 5-7 words with leads no more than 4 words long.
My big concern is with all of the kerfuffle about a national tourism organization, that these selfsame elected officials should decide that with so much funding behind the national organization, why spend anything on the local office? DMOs must always be on the lookout on how to strengthen their relevance to the community.
The Cluelessness of Some
We expect our elected leaders to bail us out of incredibly complex situations. But why? Did we elect them because of their past experience in bailing us out of incredibly complex situations? No...we elected them because they made us feel good. Same with editorial writers. Do we believe the tri...
I think the opportunity today is to provide new ways to visualize information. Consider the gamecasts for sports sites: they essentially take text-based information (say, "CIN QB Carson Palmer hands off to CIN RB Cedric Benson for 17 yards from the CIN 40 yard line") and send that to its gamecasting application, which helps you visualize what's happening. Obviously there's a lot of precedent (and a lot of money) but I think apps like that foreshadow the future of media, even Twitter.
There is a tremendous delay in the original invention of these apps and their "commercialization". If you look at the page for NewsMap's inventor, much of this stuff was done 5 years ago.
http://marumushi.com/projects/newsmap
It's too bad there's little to no market for RSS, as shown by Dick Costolo's experience: after founding Feedburner, he went on to create a VC fund for RSS-related companies. When that didn't pan out, he recently became Twitter's COO. (And, if you read the leaked notes, Twitter isn't exactly a big fan of RSS. But that's another story.)
Consuming the News through Feeds, Rivers and Trees
Prior to Friendfeed, one of the easiest ways to follow a byzantine configuration of blogs and websites was to build a list of feeds in a newsreader like Bloglines or Google Reader. Friendfeed introduced the “river of news” concept. Some call it lifestreaming. OK, but doesn't life happen offline...
In a past life, I would evaluate the business models of information vending companies. One of the more memorable companies was TVGuide. From the outside, it looked deceptively simple to replicate.
Fruugo, like Hulu.com or Wine Logistics, is attacking the e-commerce opportunity from the perspective of expediting commerce using the nuances of law as a differentiator. Hulu.com provides a compelling user experience that respects the patchwork quilt of syndication deals of TV programmers, while Wine Logistics helps wine merchants navigate the complex tax structure that varies from state to state.
These businesses, if they reach critical mass, have the potential to become tremendous cash-generation engines.
Fruugo and Cross-Border Online Shoppers
By Zia Daniell Wigder Over the past year, many online retailers have looked to tap into global online shoppers by adding international shipping options. International shipping presents a relatively low-cost first step into global markets - it also allows retailers to tap into the increasingly...
This is one of the most intriguing aspects of social media: the capability to eliminate the middlemen who have traditionally brought news of the outside world to the enterprise.
This brings the next level of competitive intelligence to the forefront: the ability to secure data sources before the competition, which can only be led by the CEO.
I'm reminded of the first co-branded credit cards. Marketers scoffed at Shell, reasoning consumers would use their Shell credit cards to buy Exxon gas. That is, until they realized the insights Shell was capturing via transaction data.
The CEO's job
A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble's CEO (and now Chairman), penned an HBR article in May that I think best summarizes the job of the CEO. Get your assistant to buy it -- and you should read it -- very good stuff. To give a taste, here's my summary, plus a few of my favorite quotes. Lafley argues th...
Mean-spirited discourse and vitriol are tools on both sides of the aisle. Staging events is nothing new: it's a page out of the ACORN handbook, and even Cassius ghost-wrote letters that conveyed dishonest sentiment against Caesar to trick Brutus.
Maybe OurConvo can work, maybe not: but I think the basic premise is good and worth pursuing. To engineer these new systems, we all need to retain the ability to turn the other cheek and refrain from recycling histrionics. I'm excited about services such as those proposed by my old boss and mentor Britt Blaser that employ open standards, APIs and vetted data sources from nonpartisan groups like Sunlight.
I'm reminded of the dream of one Brian Lamb, who founded CSPAN in the hopes of opening up the staid Beltway culture to the entire country. Instead, it turned the floors of the House and Senate into performance theatre, as congressmen fell over themselves and each other to make statements to be filmed and then shared with their most partisan supporters.
First Look: Our Convo
Looking at the website for Our Convo it seems like just another online lightweight discussion forum, differentiating itself from Facebook groups as being more open and all strokes of the conversation available on a single page. Ok. But the email I got extolling it was odd: What we don't need, i...
GoSeeTell has published something similar on their blog, although it was limited to Twitter and the data hygiene was a bit spotty.
I think the biggest challenge is developing a "secret sauce" that provides reliable indices. Like hotels, DMOs will ultimately need to have a Six Sigma mindset when it comes to social media interaction, and accordingly, any index such as yours will need to relate to some real-world phenomenon.
As an example, does your index correlate to the likelihood that a visitor will get the answer they want via social media?
Ultimately, I think all visitors know what it's like to go to a place that feels "connected": everyone seems to know what's going on, people take responsibility for every interaction, and no one shrugs their shoulders. Perhaps that's still a pipe dream, but that's where I see social media's value for DMOs.
How Social is Your State DMO?
Over the past year, I’ve received countless questions about “Which tourism organization does the best social media marketing?” After reviewing the social media presence of many state, local and regional destination marketing organizations, I could never reach a conclusion on who does it best....
We all have positive aspirations in life. For every single one of them, there is a negative that some critic, some where, chooses to home in on. "College education"? "Marriage"? "Retirement"? ALL of these things could have negative connotations; it's all in how YOU choose to look at them.
At least you're being civil in your post -- no wonder so many contributors to the blogosphere are in support of some standards of conduct.
You have other, very thoughtful posts on your blog -- I hope the next person that comes by doesn't judge you solely by the acrimony that I thought I read.
And They Lived Happily Ever After
The English version of this brochure says "One Day I'll Have to pay for her wedding. It's part of a savings campaign at Wells Fargo. I contacted Wells Fargo and wanted to talk to them about this particular message. They graciously declined my invitation for an interview. Is it me, or does th...
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