Ten best secret mobile killer what?

You know, you don’t have to read articles like this. They aren’t about you or your device or what you should really be doing right now.

Moreover, they won’t guarantee your content will go viral either. Also, so what if your content “goes viral?” Lots of people will see it and maybe that’s good. Or maybe it isn’t good.

Or maybe it doesn’t even matter. Think of the last cool “viral” thing you did or saw? Did it influence you to do something? Did it influence anyone you know to do something? And “do something” I mean more than “share” it or “like” it. I mean, “did it have a meaningful impact on your life?”

Stop reading articles like this. Instead, read things that are helpful for you. Or better yet, stop reading stuff like this and instead go out and meet with people or talk with people. That way you’ll have a better foundation for making content that is good. Content that helps your business and helps your readers.

And it won’t matter whether it goes viral or not.

I encourage you to read Matthew’s post “On Reading.”

@respres @gahlord 'Ten secret killer apps to download now that are guaranteed to make your sources go viral'

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@Corcoran_Group

Matthew Shadbolt

Image via Wikipedia

Strategy is one of those words that gets abused. People use it all the time when they mean something else, usually a plan or tactic. This edition of “three views of a secret” presents some different takes on what strategy is or isn’t.

Social isn’t a Strategy

A post spurred on by an online conversation between myself, Jeff Turner and Derek Overbey. In it, I include a definition of strategy and an example of how it works.

Strategy And Conflict: In re Gahlord

Rob Hahn, one of my favorite people with whom to argue about discuss these kinds of things, takes issue with the fact that my definition of strategy doesn’t rely on the existence of conflict or competition. Rob lays out a modification of my definition to create a competition-focused definition of strategy. His addendum is especially useful to review. His discussion of social capital is also useful but I think the result me not clarifying what “social” is in my original post.

Say WHAT? A Five Star Yelp Review for a Competitor?

Phoenix real estate broker Jay Thompson describes his thought process in taking a specific action using online social tool Yelp. My guess is that if we were to ask Jay whether he had a particular strategic motivation he’d say “not really.” However the thinking and actions are very relevant to the concepts of strategy, competition and social tool use.

As the shine of social media dulls ever so slightly and we begin to examine it just a little more closely, there are ways of considering and using the tools that go deeper than “10 tips for Facebook” or “Best practices of Twitter.”

There are strategic considerations, sociological considerations, marketing considerations. Here are three articles that examine aspects and approaches to social media that I think you’ll find relevant, thoughtful and useful.

Your Facebook Friends are not Really Listening

In Jeff Turner’s request that the hype nozzle be squelched a bit, he applies some fancy math and some common sense to  some of the social metrics and measures that are getting tossed around.

On Colony Collapse

Matthew Shadbolt challenges the concept of the “strength of weak ties” in this essay that covers social tools, biology and the nature and meaning of human connection.

Stop Trying to Engage Your Audience

Included not only because I want to list my own work alongside the previous excellent works, but because it outlines a method for action and behavior in the social space.

Everything that can be measured, will be.

I was introduced to the concept that “everything that can be digital, will be” in  Nicholas Negroponte‘s 1995 book Being Digital.

While a read of that book today will be humorous for the pantheon of companies that self-immolated in the big dot com blowout of the early naughts, the concepts introduced have pretty much all held.

Lately, I’ve been mulling over a corollary to “everything that can be digital, will be” that is making itself apparent: Everything that can be measured, will be. As human interactions become increasingly digital, there are–by default–data points being generated on all of our interactions.

Social technologies are accelerating the availability of data and the kinds of data available to measure.

Measured: physical presence

Mobile technologies make it fairly simple to measure where someone is using GPS and WiFi. As people are typically more guarded about their location, the incentives required to get people to volunteer that data are trickier.

However, arbitrary social incentives (such as Foursquare’s badges and “mayor” status) and real social incentives (knowing where your friends are so you can join them) break down the barrier to volunteering location.

In addition, commercial endeavors like deal services provide a “rational” reason to volunteer physical location for measurement.

Measured: relationships

Facebook, Twitter and any other social networks out there combine these data points to measure our “social graph.” Our relationships are being measured. There’s even a metric: “friends” or “followers.”

(As an aside, the above video is from 2006–any changes in social media since then?)

Measured: sentiment

As we volunteer information on sites like Twitter, our sentiment about a variety of topics can be measured. Since people tend to like to have their tastes and preferences about some things known, voluntary expressions of sentiment are not especially difficult to gather.

Existing methods of sentiment analysis are certainly rough around the edges. But an entire field, text analysis, is embracing this problem. I would expect our ability to measure sentiment in a meaningful fashion will increase significantly in the coming years.

Efforts are under way in medium to large organizations to quantify and qualify sentiment analysis into meaningful metrics.

The disruption of being digital

There were a variety of responses in the late 90s, as industries began to realize the disruption potential of statements like “everything that can be digital, will be.”

Some organizations stuck their head in the sand and waited for the fad to blow over. Some organizations blindly thrashed about with digital technologies until they either learned new skills or expired. Some began to make use of legal power while others worked to innovate around legal power.

That first wave of the web, getting everything that could be digital to actually be digital, was disruptive. It left more than one large, well-established industries in disarray.

As organizations and industries have adapted to being digital, new skills have been learned. New language, technology and strategies have been added to the skillsets of employees and business leaders.

However, this “digital revolution” was primarily a workflow and distribution disruption. Learning how to create things for a digital world and how to distribute things for a digital world.

The disruption of measure

I suspect that, like being digital, there will be disruption associated with being measured. There will be new skillsets that will allow organizations to prosper or continue long enough to adapt to changing competitive pressures. These skillsets will not be limited to departmental silos, specific layers of corporate hierarchy, or outside vendors.

Just as all people engaged in business today need at least a foundational level of internet understanding, we’ll see the requirement of a foundational level of measurement understanding.

The nature of the disruption posed by a “measurement revolution” requires more than simply learning new processes and manipulating new toys and infrastructure. Learning to understand data and derive meaning from it is a more involved task that requires a different level of cognition.

It will also require different human skills for living in an environment of constant change and overwhelming specific data.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi (photo by Nic Fillingham)

I recently watched Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s TEDxTokyo talk from May 21, 2011. His presentation had some great points that apply to not only the world of games, but the world in which we all live. Specifically, in one part of the video Tetsuya Mizuguchi touches on the topic of location based games. This is something Gahlord and I have been thinking and talking about lately.

Mr. Mizuguchi talks about a game in development entitled BANG: 100 Million Mines. BANG is being made by the company Zeptotools in a partnership with Dentsu, a Japanese advertising agency. The premise of BANG is to use your smartphone to travel to different locations and remove the digitally placed mines. After a mine has been removed, players have the chance to donate money to help remove the over 15 million active landmines in Cambodia. BANG helps bring awareness to the Japanese population about the problem in Cambodia, and it helps the relief efforts there to disarm the real mines.

As the smart phone install-base continues to grow, games like BANG will only become more popular, powerful, and useful. Mobile gaming is the only technology that comes close to involving the player in the real world. In Zeptotools’ blog post on BANG, they refer to this process as “gamification.” The technology behind location based games will empower developers with the chance to create a new form of gaming. This form of gaming will have the power to help others, raise awareness, and bring hundreds-of-thousands, if not millions, of people together.

A little bit about who Tetsuya Mizuguchi is: Tetsuya Mizuguchi makes games and music. He’s worked on a lot of successful titles such as the following: Space Channel 5, Rez, Lumines, and Child of Eden (the most recently released, see gameplay in the video embedded below). Mr. Mizuguchi has been making games for over two decades. Formerly a Sega employee, he left in 2003 to found Q Entertainment. He also plays in the wonderful band Genki Rockets.

You can watch Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s TEDxTokyo Speech, entitled Positive Power of Games below:

Image by SplutterBug via Flickr

Today I was assigned a task by Thoughtfaucet apprentice Brett Chalupa to watch a video about Mojang, the company that makes the game Minecraft. Brett wanted to know what I thought was the most important thing in the video. This post is my response.

Change and control

The video contains a number of useful insights on business, team building and creative control. But the thing that kept coming back to me while watching and while reviewing and doing some light editing on the mindmap (which, if you’re in a hurry, you can find by scrolling to the bottom of this article) was the distinction between making and production.

You can see a convergence in the mindmap around ideas of change (gaining momentum, adding team and facilities, sharing control, improving the game). In the midst of the change there are issues of success and failure, people liking something or not liking something.

In this case, there are the issues that Markus “Notch” Persson has with liking or not liking the work of his team mates after having always been in control of the game. And there are also the issues of whether or not the game’s fans will like changes that are implemented.

It would appear that Mojang is working to manage the stressful nature of change through their core company culture.

Making vs Production

Each time in the video when issues of success or failure comes up, the standard rules of engagement for the individuals in the video seem to be that they need to do what they feel is right, what they would enjoy the most. This approach is at odds with many of the standard “production-based” creative (and non-creative) organizations.

The goals of the people at Mojang appear to be to make something they like and not to produce something that fits within constraints (time, finance, audience response). Certainly they want their work to be commercially successful and they want it to be enjoyed by others. But they have made an organization which allows them to pursue those ends by means which allow them to make choices they are comfortable making.

Their organization is about making things. It is not about producing results.

The future belongs to the makers, not the producers

Creating an organization that is not centered around production or producing results probably seems absurd to any “results-driven” professional or company. But the future belongs to those who can successfully ignore the “results” long enough to create an environment where making things is a fun, enjoyable and worthwhile experience.

The values-driven sideshow?

We see this a bit in the discussions about “values-driven businesses” that take place in magazines and blogs and conferences. The idea that there is something other than or in addition to the profit-motive. It’s an important movement because it starts to align humanism with capitalism. But the “value-driven” approach may not go far enough.

For one, if the values aren’t honestly and actually the values of the people in the organization then it’s just putting a different coat of paint on the same old fence. And second, having shared values alone doesn’t speak to how the organization is helpful to the audience. Not by default anyway.

For Mojang, the video presents how values are aligned and a focus on making, not producing, is occurring within the company. There is a conscious effort to create the kind of company they want to work at for some time. Businesses like this also find it easier to resonate with an audience because they are clearly focused on making something enjoyable. Even when they miss, their heart is in the right place: make a game that they enjoy.

I suspect that the approach of making something has some strong advantage over producing results:

• More risks can be taken because everyone is working towards a shared value, not just a shared goal.
• Greater willingness to contribute fully because a team has values, not just shared financial hopes.
• Greater resonance in the marketplace with audiences who share the same values.
• It’s easier to share something you believe in, something that expresses your values.

As I go through that list I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with my college music advisor, Stan Charkey. We were discussing the something about how some people appear to be making music for “the Music” or “for Art.” But that really, it’s about people. People make music. People make art. A double-bass is just a piece of wood until someone picks it up and makes some sounds with it.

I believe it’s the same with “results-driven” organizations. The results are just an idea in some person’s mind. I think the same is true for weak approaches to a “values-driven” organization.

Only a few strategies come to mind when attempting to resist the inevitable commoditization of products that happens in a production-oriented business environment. One of them is to build fierce loyalty to the organization both with your audience and with your staff.

How Mojang creates a maker’s environment

The nice thing about this simple, handsome video is that it provides a tangible case study window into a company that is dealing directly with ideas of values, production and making. Even better in that the video approaches these concepts obliquely, perhaps without even knowing it.

Here are some specific things happening at Mojang that create an environment where makers can thrive:

• Company leadership is not focused on short-term financial gain or growth.
• Company is self-funded, thereby having the freedom to pursue values and make things aligned with those values.
• Leadership empowers staff to make things and is self-aware re: how to make that easier, emotionally, for all parties (For example, see game changes in action, not just in conversation/documentation)
• Values of play, exploration and a genuine concern for their audience are shared among the staff.
• Physical space is open and connected.
• Agile coding practices have been adopted (a process related to “lean” processes and the OODA loop)

By watching the video, you can see a bit into how the organization is living their values. I suspect they don’t view it in such a formal or corny way. In fact, I’d be pretty surprised if there was a company handbook at all. But the shared values and shared ethic of being makers supersedes that anyway.

For the results-minded here are some numbers. For everyone, consider your current approach and results and see how you stack up. Note in particular the evidence of audience engagement.

• Minecraft sold its 1,000,000th copy in January 2011.
• Minecraft has over 10,000,000 registered users.
• Crowdfunded documentary about Mojang had more than 3,000 donors.
• Crowdfunded documentary about Mojang raised more than $200,000.
• Mojang has no advertising spend.
• Minecraft has inspired community-built forums in more than 4 languages.
• Over 1,000,000 likers of the Minecraft Facebook page.
• Company founder has over 200,000 Twitter followers and is listed nearly 4,000 times.

Mindmap of a video about the making of Minecraft

The image below is the mindmap I created while watching the video. I spent a few minutes cleaning it up and making some arranging adjustments so that it more accurately represented what was in my head, having seen the video. Click the thumbnail for the larger image.

Mindmap of "Minecraft, the Story of Mojang featuring Markus

Here's the outline of the Minecraft documentary mindmap.

It seems only right that I embed the 20 minute Mojang documentary as well. It’s very handsome, with a pleasant score and makes me want very much to ski. If you made it this far through this article then I’m sure you will enjoy it. Do yourself a favor and watch it full screen once the advertisement (not mine) is done.

And how could I resist?

Lament for the Makers

I’ll put in some outline thoughts later but wanted to push this out for now.

Mirroring the language of those around us is a way to grow closer together. Marketers have used this to advantage for some time. Online is no different. Search engine optimization is perhaps the most focused and science-like effort by business owners to mirror the language of customers.

Let’s look at the real estate industry as an example. In the chart below, 2008 is the year in which more people were seeking a house for sale than a home for sale.

2008, especially the end of it, was a pretty traumatic year in the United States. The housing market, at the center of the collapse of a financial bubble, was especially traumatized. There are a variety of search and website behaviors which have changed dramatically since 2008. The words used to describe the place we live may be one of those changed things.

I guess the old saying “A house is not a home” is now reversed.

If you want to know more about social media breakfasts, look at my past post. It briefly explains what they are.

Two community mangers presented their thoughts and strategies on how they manage the communities built around the businesses that employ them. Sara Steele-Rogers, from Boloco, and Anthony Quintano, from NBC News, presented about what lead them to their current positions, but also how they have defined their positions as community managers.

During their presentations I made a mindmap of the points I felt were the most important. Both Sara and Anthony offered advice about running an online community. Whether it was the community around the smaller, Boloco burrito shops or the large TV station, NBC news, there are aspects that apply to all online communities, regardless of size.

Click for the larger, readable, image.

• Anthony Quintano – NBC News
  • Passion
  • Why do social?
    • Be where our audience is
    • Listening to feedback
    • Interact with viewers
  • Know the community inside & out
    • Don’t feed the trolls!
  • Use online to give a little something extra
    • Give the community a reason to follow/friend you
  • Take advantage of your other skills
    • Incorporate them in to your community management
  • Every community is different
    • There is no right way to manage all communities
    • Use common sense
• Sara Steele-Rogers – Boloco
  • Take the relationship offline
  • Everyone deserves a response
  • Social Media
    • Twitter
      • Quick
      • Listen
      • Engage
      • Helps put a face to a name
    • Facebook
      • Deeper interaction
    • Yelp
      • Free market research
  • Making things better
    • Tweet-ups
    • Turn negative feedback into positive feedback
    • Listeneing to ALL of the feedback
    • Timeliness is key
  • Getting involved in other communities
    • Non-profit
    • Cycling
    • Vendor
    • “No one ever got poor from being generous.”
    • Student communities
  • Being effective
    • Listen and respond
    • Make fans feel valued and involved

You can find a blog post by Zack Luby, which gives his details and opinions on the event, here.

For a look at a cbernier’s thoughts on his first social media breakfast, you can look at his post on his blog.

Overall, the two presentation and the Q&A that followed were great. Both Sara and Anthony manage two pretty large communities, and they know what works and what doesn’t for their respective communities.

Image by quinn.anya via Flickr

I’ve had a several conversations about marketing on Facebook lately. They usually go something like this.

Business owner: Can I just use Facebook instead of a website?

Me: Sure, you could scrap your business website (or for new entrepreneurs not get one in the first place) and just use Facebook. I wouldn’t recommend it though.

Business owner: Why not?

From there our discussion veers into issues of search, findability, meeting new people online, control of your destiny and so on. But I’ve begun to wonder really, why not?

This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about an entirely distributed web presence, where you scrap your website in favor of an entirely social media presence. In fact, I first wrote about it almost exactly three years ago. And companies, typically agencies, have given this a try as well. I’m certainly not alone in talking about this.

What’s new is that this conversation is being initiated by business owners. And not business owners who are necessarily looking to be on the cutting edge like Modernista or Dachis Group or Zeuss Jones.

I’m hearing this conversation coming from mom and pops, real estate agents, local businesses. These people aren’t trying to win awards or land high-profile accounts. They’re trying to make the next sale.

I still think the “Stepping into Traffic” strategy is usable for an organization that is prepared to go through with it. But today I want to look at the issue from another angle.

Why are business websites so broken that business owners are willing to hand over their access to the market, their customers and their operational capability to a guy who has demonstrated schiesterly traits throughout his business career?

If I were to walk up to someone who had a retail storefront and ask them to locate to a mall that:

• requires shoppers to be members in order to enter any of the stores
• doesn’t share that membership information with any of the stores
• has very strict requirements requiring all stores to look very much the same
• changes rules and policies frequently and without warning
• doesn’t let you address any of the shoppers directly
• has such an engaging center court that shoppers may not ever really want to visit the store at all

I think the store owner would think it through very very carefully before moving locations.

That is, unless the current landlord wasn’t much fun to work with.

Answer: Building, maintaining and managing business websites is too hard for business owners.

I believe the reason that business owners are starting to seriously consider a fully distributed web presence is because their current situation is untenable. They’ve paid significant sums of money and spent a lot of time making websites. These sites are often not being measured for performance.

Since these sites aren’t being measured for performance business owners don’t know if they work better than Facebook–but they do know the website costs more.

There’s a lot of problems and fingers to point here. None of these examples are you, gentle reader, they’re someone else you know, perhaps a very close friend:

• The people selling the website promised a “build it, they will come” scenario
• The tech-enthusiast who recommended the content management system insisted it was “easy enough that her mother could use it” (without mentioning her mother was a computer science PhD)
• The business owner demanded being involved in every minute pixel shoveling during the web design process, but never considered business goals of the site
• The employee of the business who researched what to put in the RFP read every blog and web article on web design requirements–including some that are from before 2004

The end result is that business owners primarily only know what their website costs and the amount of time and pain that are involved in making a change.

Even if a site is designed on a supposedly user-friendly (you’re the “user” by the way) content management system like WordPress it’s still too hard to manage.

If you disagree, please leave your explanation of the difference between a WP page and a WP post in the comments below or how a WordPress theme has an impact on search engine rankings.

Don’t get me wrong here. I like WordPress and all CMSes a great deal. They saved us from doing manual updates and other crazy things. But ultimately, they just outsourced the hassle of maintaining a website onto the business owner.

Websites that are fully in the control of the business owner are great for everyone in a lot of ways (no more 2am calls to do a “minor” update on the website). But they are not so great in others (the business owner already has a full time job).

People who design and develop websites need to be more honest about what is required in operating a website on a day to day basis. They also need to be honest about making sure site business goals are accurately reflected in the finished product.

Business owners need to be more honest about having a business reason to be on the web in the first place. They also need to be honest about how much time they will devote to their online efforts.

Perhaps new skills are required

The way business operates today is different than it was even just ten years ago. There are new ways of reaching customers. The old ways of reaching customers has changed. And the pace of change doesn’t seem to be slowing.

Business owners are in an environment of constant change on the web. Costly constant change: switching costs, CMS costs, content costs, training costs and so on. In the face of that, no wonder they look at the relatively static and pre-determined experience of Facebook as a serious way to get out of all those costs.

There are old processes, from the mid 20th century, that are still prevalent in many business organizations. Silos. Waterfall. CYA. Specifications gathering. Core competencies. Standardized toolsets. None of these things fare well in a constantly changing environment. Not that they should all be thrown out, but their value to the business organization must be fully understood and if there is no value perhaps they need to be thrown out.

Perhaps business owners who are not willing/able to develop new skills and processes that are able to thrive in an environment change will be better served by exiting the open web and going to Facebook–where someone else manages change for them.