Wednesday, July 8, 2009

SliceHost... !

Just make a quick pause to recognize the good work of this guys. I hired their services from Chile, using my chilean credit card. After about 20 minutes of getting my account, The billing system flagged my account, and they suspended it and told me that i would need to supply some info, including phone number.

I kindly answered all the questions and provided all the information required, plus a little more to make them sure that they know that it was me on the other side, and told him that it was kind of rude to suspend the account, just to test the support reaction. The answer that I got nicely surprised me. Here is a small quote:

"I do apologise for any inconvenience or offence our system caused. We work very hard to protect the security of customers - new and old - and hope that you appreciate the level of care we put into keeping you safe."

That's exactly the kind of service that I would look forward in a service provider. Solving the problem as soon as possible, and turning over the bad situation into an opportunity of taking their good qualities into the table.

The company is www.slicehost.com. I'm not sponsored, and not even using the slice yet, but it really seems that will be a good experience working with them. Otherwise, you will know about them :)


Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Friday, July 3, 2009

Things Happen for Something

This phrase has long been used in many situations to be considered a cliché, but this time, I'm using another point of view.

Usually, people use it when bad things happen trying to say that better things will happen in the near future, or in they could replace it for "God knows why he do things". But this is not the case.

In the last few months, a lot of good things have happened to me in the professional area that of course is product of hard work, good mentors and decent management of the opportunities. But looking back and following the threads that leads to all this good things, there's a lot of bad things like financial disasters, unfair situations at the University, depression and other disorders, failure at several proyects, either commercial or personal, etc... But none of the good things could ever be possible without that bad situations.

On the past, probably i would thought in coincidence, but it's too much coincidence. Providence is also out of the equation, since God is not an option for me. But what is really different then and now is two things. The first one, is a lesson learned from Tribes: We need you to lead us. Faith is the most important human characteristic. Not blind faith but conscious, righteous and fiery faith. No matter if you need a god or a church between you and your faith, but that needs to be there, supporting what you believe on, your acts and giving you strength while facing unbearable challenges... with faith, there's no such thing.

The second, is that every situation, no matter how good or bad it is, is an opportunity. Apes didn't turn into humans eating bananas in their trees, and the ones that didn't see the oportuniy in his misery, died. No matter how bad a situation is, it can always mean a good thing, and accepting as God's will is the wrong way. Fighting against it and taking as much as you can from it always, and i mean ALWAYS give profits.

With this two points on the table, "Things happen for something" completely loose his sense, since once things happen is when you make them happen for something, and can completely change your life and your destiny. Actually, sounds weird, but getting profit from bad things, after failing on things that were supposed to be right, makes me want bad things to happen... of course not literally, but something like "If it's gonna happen, let it happen soon".

So as punchline, i would say... When bad things happen, you, and only you have the power to take advantage of them, use that power!

Regards and probably you will keep hearing from me in the near future.

Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Preparing some content.

Since it's half of the year, I'm going with a little recap. Probably I'll start posting some interesting things on the near future since I've realized that I didn't have much to share, so used this time in making myself more interesting reading a lot and planning some work, what is alraedy on their way. It's kind of secret, but the launch date is near, so there should be news soon.

Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Monday, June 1, 2009

Brand Tags

I was working on a project report, and @Jowyang twittered about this wonderful site. BrandTags. As with most of links from Jeremiah, I decided to take a look, and was one of the moments when you say... why didn't i think about this?. An extremely simple but powerful idea in a pretty simple engine, that uses technology from a few years ago to make an awesome system.

The mechanics are simple. You watch a logo and write whatever comes to your mind. After a few tags, you can check what people is tagging about the brands on the site. Definitely a win win situation, where you change a few seconds of your time tagging, to let you spy what other people is saying about the brands you may be interested in. Brilliant!.

Liked it? Twitt about it:
#BrandTags: check what community says about your favorite brand http://twurl.nl/h0j4xh

Or Twitt it in RT mode:
RT @edavaria: #BrandTags: check what community says about your favorite brand http://twurl.nl/h0j4xh
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Friday, May 29, 2009

Leadership, Politicians and 2.0.

In Chile, we are close to elections. Both presidential and parliamentary. Since is our 1st election after the Obama's great success, and after being reading a lot about communication, web strategy, social marketing, massive collaboration, leadership, and so on, it makes impossible to not to recall all the articles ever read about Obama's strategy, and read about the post war analysis, so we can get a nice critic view of what is being doing locally, and how good or bad are the results.
So far, the low quality of the webpages, and the zero understanding of social technologies is the rule. Seems pretty much like the so called "Dot com revolution" when people thought that only raising a web page will make their bussiness sky rocket. Sadly, the same phenomenon is happening with people trying to start their very own world wide rave, but without wanting to leader it. We have the tools, the people, the (misguided) willingness, but we have no leaders at all, and the politicians, that should be natural leaders and jump into the new challenges to make the country a better place.

Searching for the official web pages of the candidates, one took just one "I'm Feeling lucky" seach. The second one took me 3 searches, and the last one, took me full 60 seconds of search with no result at all. Guess something is wrong... espect me reporting about this in the near future.


Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Back on Posting

It's been a few weeks since my last post. I've been solving some really important issues. Things like the way my career should go, how to make money for my personal projects, how much academy and how much business and a lot of things more, including studies... a bit of Artificial Intelligence, some Business Intelligence, a lot of marketing and enterprise creation.
Of course I haven't forget about my beloved books. Wikinomics was finished more than a month ago, and Tribes: We need you to lead us was after that. Of course I'm posting my very own review of both pretty soon.

Right now I'm defining my next project. Have several good choices, every one of them as good as the former, but with different aspects. That's the problem. Hope to make my mind soon and be back on the hardcore posting. I guess that tomorrow will be up the Tribes' review. A pretty good book, short and neat that absolutely deserves a comment.

Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Outliers. I'd say, Identifying Ingredients of Success

It's been like a month since i finished reading this book, and couldn't come with an original satisfactory idea about it since now. The first post impression is that it's a success recipe book, that tell you how to fix your life, and persuades you that you actually can, but that approach is completely wrong.

Let's try a quick exercises to try to reproduce what Outliers does... Think in a sweet apple pie in your preferred crust type. At the perfect temperature and with the perfect smell, it hasn't been long since it was baked. Nobody can say that this is not a success, but what was the recipe, or more specific, the key ingredients in that success?

Well, we used apples... but there's a citric flavor there, it was green apples... it doesn't matter how perfect the apples were, but were green ones... same with every other ingredient, it just need to be good enough to fit in the recipe's needing. But when baking, that's other story... you need the perfect temperature to control humidity, ripeness of the fruit and crunchiness. Also you need the right time to take the flavor out of the cinnamon and other spices, and so on.

What I'm trying to say here, is that every success story had a recipe behind, but the success itself doesn't come from the recipe itself, but from the conditions that made that recipe a winner. This paradigm shift is what Malcom Gladwell is trying to do here with several real life examples, showing you what ingredients were important into certain degree (they needed to be present but only above a certain level), and what ingredientes were ky to the success.

At the end, one comes with the conclusion that being extremely skilled or intelligent, or tall or whatever is not as important as being at the right place, in the right time and with the right recipe, and be able to take advantage of the situation... some people will never have such opportunity, but you need your arsenal of skills ready every time to shoot when you spot that very unique opportunity.

Definitely a must read that make you change the way you see the life. Sepcially tailored for those who (like the former me) think that they can do everything with just proposing it and no mountain is too high to be climbed... that's certainly true, but nobody will climb it alone.

Like what you just read? Twitt it:
Brief review of Malcom Gladwell's Outliers: The story of success http://twurl.nl/gbrgvc

Or Retweet it:
RT @edavaria: Brief review of Malcom Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success http://twurl.nl/gbrgvc

Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Comments on the ECM Maturity Model, towards a Social Maturity Model.

Just received this article in the context of the work I'm (probably) about to start on Social Maturity Model. This work is called ECM3, or to be more precise:

ECM3 Maturity Model: Taming Enterprise Content Management Challenges

It's a exactly what i want to develop for the "Socialness" of a company, of course addressing different characteristics, but is a neat 40 pages long document with enough information to fill 400 pages, but perfectly organized to transmit the message and allowing the decision makers of the companies to evaluate the current status of their ECM and plan the next steps accordingly, what is kindly suggested into the paper, towards the next level in each area.

The only issue i can find is that the objective for ECM software are defined and measuring them is easier than the Socialness of a company, also, ECM is almost alwats strictly additive. Is hard to harm a dimension improving the other doing things well, but with the Social Behaviour, is almost sure that you will have knockbacks while trying to improve something. I guess that this issues can be addressed with more analogies than formal definitions, so people can adjust it to their own reality. Something like transmitting the intent instead of giving the recipe.

The Social Maturity Model sounds every day better, the final word has not bein said, but it's closer.

Like what you just read? Twitt it:
Comments on the ECM Maturity Model, towards a Social Maturity Model, or ECM3 http://twurl.nl/s4nxk7

Or Twitt it in RT mode:
RT @edavaria: New Blog Post - Comments on the ECM Maturity Model, towards a Social Maturity Model http://twurl.nl/s4nxk7

Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Monday, April 6, 2009

Great story for stickyness.

Yesterday, in a (real) social meeting, while some were playing Guitar Hero: Metallica, we were having some chit chat, and i was trying to explain a little about stickiness. This was my fire trial, since i was trying to communicate the idea to people that don't know, in an ambient far from the ideal. Addig some alcohol, could be a hard task. Short story, after a while, when i was trying to make an example of sticky story, this story from 8 months ago came to my mind.

Any story that survives 8 months should be sticky. For those who are intrigued (i know you all clicked the link :P, that information gap surely was too painfull to not click), is the Michael Phel's eating routine story. How he eats like Manuel Uribe having munchies and still have a perfect body and managed to get several gold medals at the last olympic games ( dopping story set aside).

The story is just sticky. It breaks your schema of eating and being healthy, it makes you want to know exactly what he eats, it can't be more concrete, and of course, is simple enough to be recalled with a few words. It's definitely about a hero, and have a lot of emotions involved, specially if you are american. It makes you wish to be like Phelps. The credibility may be an issue, but coming from NY Times it can't be false.

That's simply a story that is here to stay, and is an awesome tool for making points. Just letting you know that here is a very powerful story to be used in the future. This was just an excerside for me, hope I can spot the next Phelp's story as soon as I see it. Good hunting spotters :)

Like what you just read? Twitt it:
Sticky story to add into your stories arsenal http://twurl.nl/7gxuc8

or Twit it in RT mode:
RT @edavaria: Just spotted a nice story... from 8 months ago, but stickier enough to survive http://twurl.nl/7gxuc8

Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Friday, April 3, 2009

Where to spend 600 hours of work in the newst few months?

Time is running out and need to define my graduate work. Of course it wil be in the social web area, opting for the Civil Informatics Engineer (feedback on how this is called in english would be nice. It's a 6 year career, obtaining the bachelor on 4th) title. I have 2 good options, and need to set up my mind for one that helps me best on my Web Strategist begining career, and of course, what wouls have more interesting feedback on this blog.

The 1st theme is the design and developing a comunity for the Tutelkan Project, which is a process optimization rig for people to share experiences and help others implementing good processes and practices aiming towards certifications, including ISO and CMM. It is oriented to the software development area, and includes a full already in late development system for the actual process tracking and improvement. What needs to be built is the comunity system and the interaction with the available social tools to make the project actually being used and take it into the socialverse.

The 2nd project, is a little less systemic since I'll have to start from the scratch, what makes it a little less interesting projecting it into the future, but it's also worthwhile as i see it. The idea is to develop a Social Maturity Model using checklists, aiming to evaluate small, medium and big companies according their social practices, aiming on marketting and customer feedback, but including internal practices. This is to be applied in Chilean enterpises trying to make them realize how the world is spinning without them

Would be really nice to have comments on what project to take. The develop time is about 600 hours and the results are completely open, as well as I will be posting any major advance here. Please, very please comment on your view.

Also would be nice retweeting it:

RT @edavaria: What project seems more interesting? please write your honest opinion. http://twurl.nl/4xhbdq

Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

What's the next shape of the world?

According to Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, the world changes and only the people who is at the right time, in the right place, and with the correct competences have the opportunity to truly shine. The case of Bill Gates and many others.

Seems that the so called Social Revolution already got their shiners, from Obama to tinyurl.com, and from now, only guest stars are invited to the party, and of course, there will be a lot of casualties, from the already hurt newspaper business to the Universities as don Tapscott kindly predicts it here.

[ What kind of technology is about to be discovered is certainly not known, but there's a little light on what could be researched...]

A little self thinking made me think that the next shape of the world is definitively the physics. Over the past 60 years there has been only theoretical physics, and almost zero empirical results. That cause humans don't have the technology or the energy to take their theories to the real world, but with cloud computing and the huge facilities that are already built and in process of building, is a matter of time to have the firsts results and start a new revolution, just when the semiconductors were discovered leading us to the world as we know it in the area of computers.

What kind of technology is about to be discovered is certainly not known, but there's a little light on what could be researched... It has to do with time/space traveling, developing work without energy, transmitting energy without using physical mediums or maybe a new way of computing or networking that let everything we know obsolete... just like the transistor let the tube in the past being better in every single aspect (not every single but in 99.99%).

It's hard to say if we can prepare for this change... we could since we can have enough time to get our 10k hours in, but what's the proficiencies required? maybe the shiners will not be physicists but people that actually work with the results. Just like Sony did in his early stages doing the 1st "pocketable radio" in their words, when a radio was a piece of furniture.

[No matter what shape the world takes, we have to be shining in our areas and hope that it turn our way]

So being prepared for the next change is almost impossible. It comes to a "right place at the right time" situation where mostly luck is involved, but certainly there's only a few pieces of the pie, and taking one will be only for the best prepared and fast reacters... so, no matter what shape the world takes, we have to be shining in our areas and hope that it turn our way.

Like what you just read? Twitt it:
Are you prepared for the (not so) brave new world? http://twurl.nl/dkcwct

Or Twitt it in RT mode:
RT @edavaria: Are you prepared for the (not so) brave new world? comment please http://twurl.nl/dkcwct
--
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Is the lureness the way to go?

On yesterday's post I wrote a lot about some "Twitter marketing", but searching over other authors, there seems that the universal approach is not to add marcketing strategies at all.

They don't speak of stickiness, nor lureness or anything but being you. Showing the human side of the guy behind the PC seems to be the way to success while connecting to your tweeps (followers). Of course, neing yourself and showing your social side is always good, but other than sharing your honest opinions on other's people tweets, and sharing a personal interest link one or twice, I still believe that the messages should be a hook for retweeting, no mater if the content is yours or not, but it shuld lure the click and aim to the RT.

Maybe once you have a certain number of followers (certainly more than 30) the strategy should change, so RT is not as important as delivering true and honest opinions about content. Of course both points are extremely important, the issue is how to leverage both sides of Twitter depending on your current status. Please comment, I'm really looking forward to your feed.

Like what you read? Twitt It

Wondering what's the best strategy for tweeting. Please comment http://twurl.nl/pl3zkh

Or Twitt it in Retweet mode:

RT @edavaria: Wondering what's the best strategy for tweeting. Please comment http://twurl.nl/pl3zkh

--
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Monday, March 30, 2009

Adding some stickiness to your Twits.

By now it's well known that Twitter can be an awesome tool for promoting your blog, but in a more general way, it's a tool for sharing your ideas. It's also part of his essence the fact that you can only tweet 140 chars, including links, tags and other people's ID when answering or retweeting. That let you with even shorter space to actually share your idea.

[We need an adapted version of the SUCCESs checklist that make us sticky communicators at the 100 chars threshold]

That's when you need stickiness to kick in. You need too accomplish a lot of objectives with your messages, including grab your follower's attention, make them care, make them remember, make them believe, and of course, share your core message. That's a lot for 140 characters. And if add into the recipe that you need your followers to retweet you and share by word of mouth, the tweets better be sticky.

[Twitter's quintessential is the volatility of their messages, but you can use them as powerful lures to force people bite your hook and lead them to the flypaper, the one that holds your idea.]

So we need an adapted version of the SUCCESs checklist that make us sticky communicators at the 100 chars threshold. This is my approach:

Simple: The message you are trying to share will always be too big to share, so you need to grab attention to make your followers click your link. You won't actually share your idea, but something that your followers already know, making sure that you left enough gaps in the information to force them to click. Be sure to fill those gaps in the link you are sharing. Also avoid abysses instead of gaps.

Unexpected: The idea shared is somehow related to the actual content, but applied in a way that needs a little thinking to make it fit, or maybe needing some more details to make it actually fit. This is great for sharing images.

Concrete: In Tweeter people tweet about nothing and everything. This point is mainly for remembering. Concreteness is not a crucial fact in tweets, cause you don't want your tweet to be remembered, you want concreteness in you message, after you got the precious click in twitter. Anyways, when possible, try to draw a clear image in the tweet that can be imagined by your followers and foreseen, or maybe try to recall something naturally sticky like "Oscar Mayer wieners" or the some old proverb "Bird in Hand"ish, Remember that spotting is just as good as creating, if not better.

Credible: Not much to say here, you wont get a click on An alien invasion radio broadcast these days, and if you get it, you probably gonna be "crying wolf" and will be unfollowed soon. Just keep it on rational limits where some thinking can make a good relation between your tweet and the title of your link.

Emotions: Try to hang from established ideas that make people feel something. Try to spot (or create) a good concept and relate it to your idea in some way. This is what will make people care. This is one of the most important things on tweeting. If you can make your followers care, you will get that click on your link. Usually spotting a nice article in their area of interest should be fine, maybe the best thing here is to know your followers, know what they care.
Stories: You simply don't have space to tell a story, but you can, again, hang from well known stories to make people care. Fables, popular ads, proverbs, famous or recent quotes are all good candidates. Again, the power here is more in spotting than in creating.


This is how i see, the SUCCESs list apply to twitter. In short, stickiness comes to a 2nd plane, after all, you can't expect people to remember something said on Twitter as it were a spot. The quintessential of Twitter is the volatility of their messages, but you can use them as powerful lures to force people bite your hook and lead them to the flypaper, the one that holds your idea.
Unsurprisingly, the SUCCESs checklist still 100% valid, the only modification is that you need to weigh things in a little different way. In this new scheme, the list is reversed. Delivering a core message is the less important thing to do, since we don't even have to have a message at all. Being clear isn't a good deal neither, sometimes a little blurriness can force some curious guy to click your link. But grabbing the attention of the reader is a must, keeping is not a huge deal in 100 characters, but getting it is the 1st mayor step. After getting the attention, you need your subject to believe, and here is your future credibility involved also. And after that, you need them to care about your message enough to make them click and start reading. Here's when the stickiness of your real content comes to play.


You like what you've just read?? Twitt it!

Bring a little stickiness to your twitts, or should i say lureness? http://twurl.nl/tmkpg6

Or Twitt it in RT mode:

RT @edavaria: Bring a little stickiness to your twitts, or should i say lureness? http://twurl.nl/tmkpg6
--
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Friday, March 27, 2009

The Stickiest Book Ever.

Hi all. After a week full of work, I've finally made some time to post. Also managed to finish the book Made to Stick by Criph and Dan Heat. It's a book from 2007. In today's standars can be called old, or at least not on the cutting edge, but it's contents are completely timeless. It's so sticky that it's sticked into the cutting edge.
At some point the book loose it's interest, cause it need to make a lot of points, loosing simplicity, but the golden brochure makes you remember every single situation and give's you the why of every single word in the whole book.
Once you start reading it, it sounds like every other success story telling book, but it's actually the opposite. It's like revealing the magick tricks secrets. It tells you a story that you probably have heard before, or some that you would probably hear in motivation talks or productivity speechs, but exposing all the "secrets" and telling you the way to build them or to spot it when you see it in your everyday life.
This is a book that simply cannot be resumed or told. I can told you in 20 lines what the book teach you and what's the checlist for Success, but the actual value here comes from the journey of reading it more than the actual conclusions.
A quick application of the SUCCES checklist into the book would be like:

Simple: not really, has a lot of topics that needs to be communicated. Even the core idea is clear... stickyness, need to deal with the SUCCES list, the curse of knowledge, burying the lead and others. Even it's not simple as one can wish, is hard to make a book simpler.

Unespected: Yes, it breaks your patterns of learning from books. The schema used is somehow standard, but makes interesting what should be boring and definitely suprises you every know and then with strange situations and nice stories.

Concrete: The book is all about concreteness. Everything is real life case studies, things that we all have in our minds, some numbers or stories gotten from other sources like Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Credible: Everything is presented in a logic way and usually with background from important sources and names. It has also passed the "test of time" at least during his first year with a huge lot of 5 stars reviews. May not be credible at first glance, but has "experts" backing it up.

Emotional: All the stories and situations are presented in an emotional way. It make you feel like the protagonist, and always reffer to their names. The name mean nothing, but makes you feel like it can be you. Also when he reveals the misteries of the stories, make you feel that "oh" that only a few can. Pretty emotional.

Stories: This is what the book is all about. Stories are what make you remember, and in the final chapter, when you are faced to the torrent of technical information and guidelines, is nice to feel that only the reference to the story can make you remember all the situation and how you (and not the author) made yourself into this point into the "rule" that is needed for stickyness.

This is what i can say about the book. I'm a begginner in the stickyness bussiness, so don't trust my word. Get your copy (or the audiobook as i did) and take this awesome trip. You can also read the excerpt at http://www.madetostick.com/ that has the begining of the book. I certanly let some gaps into the review trying to make you feel more interested. Also I'm pretty sure I'm suffering from the Curse of Knowledge as I'm writing this, but this is what this blog is all about.

--
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Friday, March 20, 2009

Recession impacts posting

No new content yet. I have some posts half written, waiting to be finished, but some projects emerged and they looks promising... one of them involves some social networking, so could be a nice clinic for the learnig trip i began a few months ago...

Stay tuned cause I'm posting about Malcom Gladwell's masterpiece Outliers and something about Social ROI pretty soon...

Also I'm halfway over Made to Stick, so we should see at least a commentary posted on the site in the near future... and the next title is defined... will be Wikinomics. Any suggestion or commentary is pretty welcome.

--
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

The world is changing it's course, it's our task to keep our foots on it.

Every now and then the world suffer big changes. Now we are on the middle of one of them, just as the world suddenly became smaller with the radio, or lives easier with personal computers. Our world is becoming social, and in a way we could never imagine. People has been writing blogs and forming communities for a while, sharing their experiences and feelings, but that didn't worth the attention of big companies since they markets were in the real world. Now, there's finally something that big companies can't ignore. The Social Web.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." - Charles Darwin


The Social Networks are here to stay, and they are becoming an integral part of our lives in the way we communicate. There's nothing more interesting to companies that communicating his ideas to the correct people... That's when communities enter into the business. Thanks to tools like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and many others, now the communities are starting to shape the way that companies interact with people, either the products they design, the experience that the consumer gets or the marketing strategies used. That's why companies needs to evolve with people and make wise decisions to survive. This is evidently shown in the power that an unhappy customer have to let the community know about his bad experience and get a hit on the company, no matter the size of the business.

Since (at least some of ) this communities has been here for 10 years or more, can be saw as a phenomenon more or less mature, that companies can't influence, or not as much as they want, so the only choice left is to adapt themselves to the forming and growing communities instead of doing what they have been doing with conventional advertising... making campaigns that identify people and gathered people attracting their attention around a single point of interest... the idea they wanted to share. The case now is completely different, where the ideas has to be born on the communities and companies need to share this idea in a way that it get accepted, since an early reject can lead to very poor penetration... although, this can lead to a unique opportunity to get early feedback and counteract, possibly generating even better result.

"In this new world, spreading an idea is not a matter of how much money you put on it, but the triggers you create to make people spread it"

This new form of communication relies on people communicating with people, and making every node of this (social) network a potential content feeder that will share their experiences and thoughts. This unleashes the power of the ideas to spread not only directly from the source, but get into the brains and crawl back into the network into a new form, the idea is not anymore a way of promotinc certain idea, but a honest communication from a person i care of what he has to say, may be a friend, someone that i follow, some guy that I admire for his achievements, a familiar, or even a random guy... even not having involved interest is a plus to a speaker when transmitting an idea. In this new world, spreading an idea is not a matter of how much money you put on it, but the triggers you create to make people spread it, and the very best of it... it's free, just as free as it is the spread of a negative comment on your idea, so you better take care of what people is saying instead of focusing on what i'm telling to people.

This implications on don't stop on the marketing, but in every way that people inside the company communicates, even between workers, with suppliers, with competitor companies, or more dramatic, to know crucial facts about the (probably private) life of a worker to take proper actions at the workplace (like firing him). We have seen this on the news a few times, but surely can be used for good things like letting a stressed worker go early, or simply asking him about his situation to make him feel the boss' support.

"When the world changes and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for those who are prepared"-Malcom Gladwell

Of course the implications don't finish here, but this 3 points are the most important from my point of view, and what really will make the difference in the near future. This difference will be undoubtly user driven and the best that we can do, is to get ready to it, no mater if we are users or companies... as Malcom Gladwell wonderfuly says in his book Outliers, when the world changes and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for those who are prepared. Probably we don't have time to get the ten thousands hours that he says we need to make full use of this opportunity, but certainly every single bit counts towards the survival of the fittest.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Facebook failing at reading your mind.

On the past few days, we saw a “strike” from the giant facebook that was supposed to hit twitter. Adding it’s full functionality, making twitter not useful anymore if you have your facebook account. Or not?

“Nobody wants to hear twits from friends… I want to hear twits from the people that I’m following. Is a matter of roles.”

I can see where this move comes from. The question “What are you doing?” don’t lead the user to the right use of twitter. Probably developers didn’t even think of it, and the tool was intended to be other than what it is today, for sure! But the success of Twitter is based on responding the question ”What’s important to my followers?” as Jeremiah says in his Twitter FAQ. Since it would be a little sophisticated for most casual users, “What’s on your mind?” seems to be a good simple and concrete choice… but not for facebook. Facebok should ask “What’s important to my friends?”, and there lies the center of the flaw in the logic. Twitter success is not based on what it does, but in what it doesn’t. It don’t allow you to keep a friendship relationship alive… it allow you to form and keep a follower-followed relationship. Nobody wants to hear twits from friends… I want to hear twits from the people that I’m following. Is a matter of roles.