Posts
Nov 18
A quick scenario to show how the 5 steps of design can be used to choose the best options for an everyday chore - Doing laundry.
Nov 15
A refreshing take on presentation skills. Organize a Pecha Kucha Night in your town soon!
Created and Narrated by Ben Ullman. Special thanks to D.J. PurposeMaker Kyle Tait for Audio guru-ship.
Nov 14
As I move through the process of helping my day job develop a community strategy, I’m trying to tease out the kernels of unique truth about “social media”. There are many facets that people are grappling with, some technological, some sociological and a few economical. Interestingly enough, the politico’s haven’t entered the arena yet, and quite the opposite, social media is giving rise to methods of circumvention within oppressed cultures like mainland China.
This is all good, but what’s unique about it? What will “stick”, because evolution demands endurance. Most everything people voluntarily spend their time on is justifiable as relevant. When those people are, on the average, intelligent, they their justifications sound more relevant.
Since computers fit so well into the business sphere, the benefit of a new phenomena (like CD-ROMs, or Shopping Carts, or distributed ID, or Social Behavior) is most frequently cost justified in it’s benefit to business - this fits well with the Enthusiast/Professional/Lay-person adoption trajectory which most technology products go through. What’s really the case, is for business to benifit, they have to create innovative ways to bridge the early adopters sense and the mass market demand.
So, to have endurance, a capability (I’m calling Social Media a capability, as it’s everything from software to behavior) has to eventually be generalizable to the broad, non-technical population, because for the vast majority of humans, computers are vastly unsatisfying places to spend time.
So, towards identifying some of the bridges between traditional methods of social behavior, and this new stuff, I’m just capturing some notes for my analysis stage:
- People have always created media: Photos, home movies, poems, invitations, thanks you cards.
- People have always exchanged small messages: “small talk”, sound bites, cocktail party chatter, all the way back to notes passed via foot messenger.
- Most of what is created by individuals is not worth consuming: this goes for music, the written word, food, paintings, etc. People do much of these creative efforts for self expression, therapy and numerous other personal reasons.
- As with Spam, as the cost of production goes down, quality will drop in direct proportion and expectations will be met less often.
Case Study: in the days of hand written Christmas cards distribution was limited and responses were understandably infrequent. Follow-up was in the form of reciprocity and might have a cycle of a year or so. I believe this is what used to be called personalization
- As input channels multiply, peoples ability to manage the information inflow will be more and more challenged and they will be forced to triage in relation to their need to juggle their other day-to-day obligations.
This is nothing but notes… observations. it should just be up on a wall somewhere, but for now, this is my wall, and you are welcome to help me analyze it.
Nov 09
SYNOPSIS:
Is the phenomena known as “Social Software” ready to be decoupled, or opened up? I’ll go on record saying “No”. Why? Well, for one, because everyone else is saying yes, and I like to be different, but more importantly, because “The Theory” leads me to believe that.
I could be wrong, and that’s OK. I may even be trying to apply the wrong theory to this particular phenomena. I want to inspire thought and conversation here.
One reason I may be wrong, is that software is much better understood then it was just a few years ago, and is behaving much more like modeling-clay in the concept car studio, (thanks in part to better software management and thinkers like Joel Spolsky and others) so a software capability may be able to decouple parts of the value chain while leaving other parts available for optimization.
So give this a read and join the conversation in the Comments section at the bottom. Continue reading »
Nov 06
Echoing what I’ve been preaching for years now around my day-job, firms that are seen as customer advocates will reap rewards in measurable increased wallet share. This takes “soft” business cases built around “blue dollars” and adds real substance to them.
This also extends into the Community play of for transparency and value to the customer, as nicely codified by Geoff Livingston in his article on “The Seven Principles of Community Building”
In addition, it’s really nice to see a company like Forrester using YouTube to distribute their talks.
Oct 24
If you’ve ever struggled to make a decision … you’ve engaged in the design process, though you may not have even known it.
In the next 5 chapters I’m goign to describe the 5 phases of design: Discovery, planning, design, execution, and follow-up.