AlexSchleber’s Quick Hits Business Mindhacks

UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small believes our new methods of communication are permanently altering our brains. “Perhaps not since early man discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically,” he says. “As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills.” See? Your social skills suck.

Two girls having a fabulous night out together (photo courtesy Tantek's Flickr stream)

Too close to home for most Twitterholics?! :)

... But the invention of the book was world-changing not because it made possible the kinds of extended thoughts that fit that shape... but because it gave them a radically expansive new form, allowing us to mass-distribute, study, catalogue, cross-reference, and otherwise get them out of our heads and into the world in powerful ways not previously imaginable.

And just so, too, by forcing users to commit their thinking to the bite-size form of the public tweet, Twitter may be giving a powerfully productive new life to a hitherto underexploited quantum of thought: The random, fleeting observation.

What new cultural forms and institutions may emerge from this development could be as hard to predict as all the consequences of the book have been. But for one of the more intriguing examples, consider the emerging Twitter practice NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls "mindcasting."

It may begin as just a seed of an idea... tossed out into the germinating medium of the twitterverse, passed along from one Twitter feed to another, critiqued or praised, reshaped and edited, then handed back for fleshing out on a blog, and... perhaps, in a book. It's not that tweet-size sparks of insight haven't always been part of the media ecosystem,... It's just that Twitter now has given them a vastly more exciting social life.

And that may be all the point that Twitter needs.

My BOLD highlights.

I would add that Twitter's 1) Simplicity, 2) Velocity, and 3) Open follower model (which partially seems to cause 1) and 2) ), are the key reasons why Twitter is different, and the potential so great. Facebook, for reasons I've described often in recent months, has a hard time matching these distinguishing characteristics, because it started from a different place of privacy, and "Walled Garden" real-life friendship.

It has simply never before been the case that your ideas could be broadcast nearly instantaneously to thousands, even tens of thousands of people AND for them to actively respond or react in one way or another.

This includes the powerful social recommendation behavior of the Retweet. There simply hasn't been anything like it for other 20th century mass media up to this point. You can't watch e.g. a TV ad, and then forward it on almost instantly to other TV viewers for their review.

Email forwarding may have represented a form of approximation of this before Twitter, but the problem of inbox overload, spam, and limitations of email distribution lists on non-commercial Email clients and ISPs made it unlikely that you would forward certain thoughts, quotes, or blog post links, etc. to thousands of people, SEVERAL or even dozens of times per day.

There is currently nothing that matches Twitter's velocity and (potential) reach.

By Alex Schleber on Jun 2, 2009

Your post assumes too much about Google missing the boat, when in truth they have shown to act faster/more decisively than either MSFT, Yahoo, or most others:

1) Google bought YouTube (”the Web”) when it became apparent that it was the next big wave. While they are still getting dinged for not monetizing it enough, YouTube already has more SEARCHES performed on it than No.2 search engine Yahoo! So when in doubt, they can buy ("and hold"!) what’s next on “the Web” (and they are typically less clumsy about absorbing than others).

2) While MSFT and Yahoo were wasting most of last year with the Micro-hoo saga, Google has kept tweaking /executing in search and elsewhere with fearsome discipline (see: http://businessmindhacks.com/p.....s-prick-up ).

3) Google is reacting rather rapidly to the rise of the real-time Web/Search as exemplified by Twitter: The first tweak with (recency) Search Options is already in the books for Google, and in fact it’s occuring to me just now that this is a major omission for MSFT’s just released Bing that it is missing a similar RTW feature.

And of course Google may yet buy Twitter (plus I think Twitter would culturally be more inclined to sell to Google than MSFT, provided that the offer is matched sufficiently closely, plus Google stock should be more dynamic than MSFT stock from here).

4) So no, I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon…mostly because Google embraces the Web, while MSFT still secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) longs to marginalize/cripple it.

Here's how scary the times are in the technology industry: Nobody, not even the visionary, congenitally optimistic smartypants who invent the technological future, has a clue about where we're going next.

The Twitter guys don't know how they're going to make money. AT&T doesn't know how the ever-increasing universe of smart phone operating systems will consolidate. Yahoo (still) doesn't know who it is. Even John Malone, the veteran innovator of the communications business, isn't sure how producers of content will get customers to pay them for their wares.

A step back. The scene is the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD conference near San Diego...

Take, for example, Twitter the "it" site of the consumer-technology world, which also happens to be the pinata of techdom. It's popular because people love the immediacy of sharing 140 characters worth of information with friends and strangers alike. Yet Twitter is under attack because there's no visible strategy for the young company to make money. (See: Twitter: Buzz first, profits later)

Founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone had a wonderful answer to their badgering interviewers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher... as to what Twitter will do next and when it will make money: "We don't know." What was cool about Williams and Stone is that they didn't seem to care what Mossberg, Swisher or the high-falutin' tech audience thinks about their progress.

While it may be cool, it also IS a very weak response by Ev & Biz. Great ideas for improvements to Twitter abound, and worse, other companies like FriendFeed are continuously updating their functionality to allow for an improved Twitter experience via importing/filtering Twitter updates in some way.

(E.g. see http://friendfeed.com/lewmoorman/cb49e996/friendfeed-path-to-relevance )

They may act like they don't care, but at some point, they will need to make decisions to improve things in meaningful ways, and also begin to monetize. Else Twitter will become another YouTube, with exploding infrastructure costs, but very limited to no revenue.

More importantly for the users, if they adopt various 3rd party tools to improve their Twitter experience/its usefulness, massive, later changes to the basic architecture by Twitter that might make those habituated methods obsolete, would be very likely greeted by strong user outrage (see the recent @ reply PR disaster, that I covered here: http://alexschleber.posterous.com/my-comment-on-this-excerpt-from-twitter-blog ).

So no, it's ultimately NOT cool that Twitter's founders don't have a better answer than they did. Even if they were mostly only playing coy, they could have taken a hint from the Apple playbook and at least planted some sort of hint to keep the rumor mill churning, rather than to invite the kind of perplexity expressed in the above article.

In general, why is this creeping commoditization happening? Because marketers are acting in ways that are diluting brands instead of building them.

First, they’re relying too heavily on promotional programmes. Panicked by demands from sales departments and big retailers, manufacturers have shifted money away from brand building and into price-oriented promotions such as coupons and giveaways, that make distributors happy. The more you focus buyers on deals, the more you distract them from the brand.

Second, marketers aren’t reining in their ad agencies’ bad instincts. Instead of concentrating on how a product differs from (and outperforms) its rivals, the agencies fall prey to what we call the two curses. In the curse of the clicker, agencies are so anxious to prevent TV viewers from channel surfing during their ad that they focus on production tricks such as eye-popping graphics or strange situations to keep viewers’ thumbs off their remotes.

The curse of the Clio, meanwhile, drives agencies to create clever, funny, and entertaining ads in hopes of nabbing the coveted award. What we don’t get is a distinct message that helps consumers tell one brand from another. A case in point: Another well-known research company, Copernicus, researched 340 commercials shown in prime time and identified a differentiating brand message — that is, a clear positioning — in only 7% of those ads.

1. Create more value than you capture. This is not about what you can pull out of a stream of ideas, but what you can put in
2. Amplify others. This is not about you. It’s about the best ideas – and bringing them to the surface, for those who care about the subject.
3. Pass it along. Act as a curator of what’s important, funnel the best links and messages from people “who have something to say” to your followers. And you’ll probably get more followers. Because you’re a Tweet stream editor, now.
4. Status comes from what (and who) you pay attention to. Not just your own voice.
5. Queue up your tweets. Don’t just fire away. Keep a Word doc open where you compose and tweak your Tweets. When they’re really on point and useful, then send.
6. Space them out. A corollary. If you have a fresh good tweet to send, send it. Otherwise, pull from the queue. No one knows it’s old, if you haven’t sent it yet.
7. Check stuff out – before you send. That great new form of wind power just might not work. What you are seeing might really be just a great piece of Photoshop work. Don’t be suckered. Or you’ll lose credibility.
8. Consider this “mindcasting.” And whatever you send, reflects on your mind.
9. Repeat yourself, with a twist. Most Tweets only get attention for five minutes, then fade away. Find a way to update or refocus attention on an idea or link, more than once, to get broader audience.
10. Share stuff that matters. Otherwise, Tweets will fall and fail under their own weight. During this one-hour Webinar, there were more than 600 Tweets about it. Who can read them all?

And when it comes to business use, try these tips:

1. Don’t just blast out press releases and promotions. If everything you send tries to sell something, you’ll be ignored.
2. Instead, interact with customers. Ask for feedback on something you’re company has done. Respond to customer problems. Establish personal relationships.
3. Ask: How can I help? Turn the tables. And, who knows, you just might end up with a sale. Or at least, a loyal customer.

Points well taken and worth repeating (to yourself and others) often...

(BTW, 5. and 6. in combination can make for a useful business idea, similar to TweetLater, but going much further.)

Inevitable comparisons are made between the hugely enthusiastic developer response (including from us at Zoho) to Google Wave yesterday with the relatively tepid reponse to Microsoft's new search engine Bing. The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement. 

It is easy to dismiss all this with "Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft," but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google's innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight? 

It comes down to one word: karma. Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything. Take Silverlight: Microsoft pledged that they will always support Silverlight on Mac and Linux, and on browsers other than IE. Do you really, really believe their promise? ...

...
What could Microsoft do to earn our trust? For starters, they could really support all the web standards on IE.  IE is increasingly an embarrassment of a browser and a pain for developers to support. The only reason IE is making any progress at all is the competition from Firefox and Safari and Chrome. I know, IE was once known for web innovation, including AJAX - but that was the time Microsoft was really trying to catch up and beat Netscape. Fair or not, the impression independent developers get is that Microsoft would prefer the web to stay crippled, so pesky applications that challenge their cash cows can stay frozen as "online Wordpad", as Bill Gates put it. 

MSFT's behavior over the years (I've called it "bullying of all and sundry" before) has firmly established it as "The Powerbroker" archetype in everyone's mind. Some might even add a bit of "The Anti-Hero" in terms of its "sharp dealings" and generally unrepentant, callous attitude (some call it the "Evil Empire" after all... Empire = The Powerbroker, Evil = The Anti-Hero).

It has therefore been exceedingly hard, if not impossible for their branding/marketing efforts to loosen up this perception, even if one were to give the benefit of the doubt and assume for a moment that some of the more recent projects' intentions were entirely new/open/honorable.Their string of "flailing"/unfocused ads over the last 6+ months is testament to this predicament, and Microsoft's general branding confusion.

More details here:

http://businessmindhacks.com/post/microsofts-recent-ads-branding-confusion-squared

...It’s interesting that neither Kara nor Walt show up very often on friendfeed, which is the best example of the 2010 Web right now. Kara Swisher has made a total of five comments there. Walt is even worse, doesn’t bring any items in there, and only has six comments. How can you know what the 2010 Web is, if you don’t use it and don’t participate in it?

The Web does NOT have version numbers. Naming what was going on in the last eight years “Web 2.0″ did us all a large disservice (Tim O’Reilly did that, mostly to get people to see that there was something different about the Web that was being built in 2000-2003 than what had come before).

But by naming it a number, I believe it caused a lot of people and businesses to avoid what was going on and “poo poo” it as the rantings of the new MySpace generation (which was just getting hot back then).

See, the Web changes EVERY DAY and a version number just doesn’t do it justice.

Not sure if the Web2.0 term really did anyone "a large disservice". Things have progressed anyway, and many people and organizations were going to resist that change anyway as well...

I think the real key Robert is pointing out is PARTICIPATION. You cannot know what is truly going on if you don't participate in Web "Waht-ever-you-call-it". In fact, you could get even more granular and say that you cannot know what is going on in any one Web community if you don't participate in it.

Don't delude yourself that you know about something once you've read an article or three about it (this is the illusion of closure). To know what is changing from week to week, month to month, you need to be in the game and have your ear to the ground...

Naming something can be powerful, because it allows us to talk about it. But at the same time, the abstract name most often does not do the complex phenomenon it is meant to evoke complete justice. Since things are in flux, names can often deceive us, and add to the above-mentioned illusion of closure.

TechCrunch has edged into the syndicated research business, the traditional turf of analyst firms such as Gartner, Forrester Research, IDC, Burton Group, et al. The idea behind TechCrunch Research is elegantly simple: package up quarterly reports based on the open source CrunchBase wiki database, sell the reports at economical price points and promote the service across the TechCrunch media network.

What are the implications for analysts and influencer relations managers? Hint: This isn’t about the upfront revenues from selling research reports, or annual subscriptions.

The implication for analysts who cover tech and mobile start-ups is serious new competition for the coveted role as a trusted and well-known expert. TechCrunch Research is promoted across the TechCrunch network — a network that garners 5.5 million unique visitors each month and is wildy popular with VCs, start-ups, early adopters and C-level tech execs. Name an analyst firm that can compete with that kind of audience on this particular market segment. In an attention economy, TechCrunch Research looks like a winner.

My BOLD highlights. Click through to the whole article, more smart stuff about how TC is showing the way how to intelligently profit from open-source content.

This is right up the alley of what I described here:

http://businessmindhacks.com/post/is-advertising-failing-on-the-internet

Tweet Nirvana

Anyone else find it ironic that Twitter is crashing hard today, as the #140tc Twitter Conference 2009 is happening. Perhaps Twitter's API lead should have stayed at the helm today... "Give her all shes got Scotty!"... "She cant take much more captain... ah..."