Churbuck.com

Inside the Box » Blog Archive » The Most Useless Feature on a ThinkPad?

This has been a good day. We launched the second “official” Lenovo Blog — Inside the Box — with Matt Kohut, our worldwide competitive analyst at the helm. This marks the debut of the corporate blog template and the debut of our corporate blog aggregator at http://www.lenovoblogs.com.

OgilvyPR — John Bell and Veronica Oleynik — made the design and hosting happen. Without them …. we’d be using Blogger or WordPress.com and not living in the slick world we do.

Knowledge management is a fuzzy IT challenge that feels like it will soon become as tired as Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems, but finding new life online under a few new labels, such as co-creation, collaboration, and innovation networks. What I know about knowledge management systems and tools comes from my participation in McKinsey’s Business Knowledge Services initiative in 2000-2001, my strategy consulting with Richard Lusk in the go-to-market strategy at the online collaboration company, Foldera, and reading of Thomas Davenport’s Working Knowledge and Thomas Stewart’s The Wealth of Knowledge and other desultory scans of the business theorists.

I’m going to focus the next few weeks on the concept of external knowledge management — the practice of seeking and managing intelligence from the market versus managing what lies within the organizational wall. I wrote an article in 2004 for Forrester Magazine with Navi Radjou on his research into corporations that constructed networks within and outside those walls to increase their time to market and improve their portfolio of innovations (I hate the term innovation on principle, having seen the term abused by makers of everything from candy to pickup trucks. I define “innovation” as invention made commercial). Those networks have tended to emphasize the connections between an organization’s internal resources and contractors or partners.

The extension of knowledge management to include outside contributors and participants leads to the point of this post: what tools can facilitate the collaboration? The old models of using enterprise solutions such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange have crumbled under the rise of PHP forums, commercial (and open) wiki structures such as JotSpot and MediaWiki, and now Office 2.0 plays such as Zimbra, Foldera, and 37 Signals’ Backpack, and Google’s moves into online applications such as spreadsheets and word processors.

IBM’s announcement last week that it was moving its online innovation activities — such as its lauded “Innovation Jam” — to Second Life sparked some interest, but I remain reluctant to endorse Second Life due to the more significant account set up issues that confront new users. Some press beefed about the PITA factor when a competitor of ours held a press conference in Second Life, but I can’t completely throw the metaverse play to the dogs just yet, even after spending an hour in “Amsterdam” yesterday ogling the virtual hookers …

But I digress. Online collaboration tools seem to be focused on point to point collaboration plays such as 37Signals which extend an organization’s reach beyond the constraints of its enterprise tools – aka Lotus Notes. Opening a Notes account or granting a non-employee VPN access into a corporate knowledge management system is much more trouble than its worth, so solutions such as Basecamp are filling that niche. Foldera’s tool offers a lot of promise and when it comes out of beta next year, the proof will be in its adoption. I have not played around with Zimbra, but my buddy Dan Lyons at Forbes has been experimenting with it and gives it high marks.

For public collaboration — inviting the masses in to comment and play — there are of course blogs and their comment structures, but as I have noted in an earlier post on the mechanics of blogging and community development, they ultimately give too much amplification to the power of the blogger’s voice and little to none to the commentary.

That leaves wikis — a solid platform for collaboration as the Wikipedia attests — but not one without a significant amount of parliamentary processes to control vandalism and defacement.

And so I shall experiment, downloading the installer for MediaWiki and building out an instance here on Churbuck.com.

This week’s theme seems to be developing into the metrics of “engagement” and the rules of thumbs to describe participants, lurkers, and fanatics. Since opening my first Blogger blog in the spring of 2002 (which quickly went dark as I tended to run my mouth off and was horrified one of my reserved Swiss employers would freak out if they read it), I’ve been looking at the differences between blogs and forums and the impact they have on that fuzzy liberal-tinged buzzword: “community.”

Community, for those of you born after 1998, was the power word of the first web revolution. It always conjured up images of community gardens, Morris Dancing festivals, church bake sales and youth soccer tournaments, but I digress.

Community was theoretically engagement in the form of a dialogue between the reader and the publisher and readers and other readers. I got into it as an operator in 1995 when Thorne Sparkman and I decided to launch an online magazine for saltwater fly fishing called Reel-Time. Thorne found an email list archival tool called HyperMail and had it hacked to serve as a crude threaded discussion platform. One of those discussions was named “BBS5″ and it was very popular. I won’t go over the whole tale of Reel-Time — it’s over ten years old, has tons of traffic, is ranked first in Google for its key terms, and has a devoted “community” of people obsessed with saltwater fly fishing. There was an article written about one of our attempts to get people to meet face to face — on a beach in the middle of the night in October — that is pretty funny. You can find it here.

Reel-Time embodied a threaded forum, or BBS (bulletin board service, a hang-over term from the days of dial-up community when someone would run a community on a PC and people would dial into it one at a time). This is the format made infamous by USENET newgroups, and the basis for such legendary communities as the W.E.L.L., The Source, CompuServe, etc.

The interesting thing about a threaded forum is that it is a Maoist construct where everyone is on equal ground. Sure, contemporary software can grant different levels of power to different classes of users, but the content is pooled as opposed to “pulpited.” Meaning, anyone can start a thread or discussion, anyone can contribute, and no one’s postings is given prominence in terms of display or prioritization.

The first threaded community constructs were completely classless — the tools lacked any semblance of moderation capabilities, so me, as the “moderator” had to manually go in and surgically delete offensive remarks with no powers to ban members of the tin-foil hat league. Trying to run a community with no “god” powers was like trying to run a Vermont commune full of peaceful hippies with a few Charles Manson’s mixed in. BBS-5 eventually collapsed under the weight of anonymous flamers, forged identities, and general mayhem. So we migrated to another commercial platform which royally sucked and drove most of the committed posters to another site, where the same issues reemerged.

Eventually, thanks to Mark Cahill at Vario Design, we moved to a php system, VBulletin, and everything has been good ever since. We designated about ten “super” users as moderators, giving them some administrative powers so they can move spam posts into a rogue’s gallery, and keep the garden, as J.P. Rangaswami refers to it from the Chris Locke days (Reel-Time was born out of a project I collaborated with Chris, aka RageBoy, back in 1994 at InternetMCI).

Here’s the money graf: blogs are not communities. While there are comments and trackbacks they are not the place to build communities of engaged participants for the simple reason that the blogger, not the commenter, owns the pulpit. While there are group blogs where multiple writers share the same space (Boing-boing is the model there) there are no massive group blogs where 10,000 users vy for attention. In fact, the snake-display model of a blog — with comments hidden until one clicks through the headline to the permalink — is totally opposed to the thread and post model of a forum.

I write this as I:

a) look at forum technologies for a corporate project

b) think hard about Reel-Time and our fail efforts in offering our most active participants blogs (which we called Flogs — for Fishing Logs).

c) wish there was a better format for displaying comments in line or at least more visible in the context of the master post. (there is, I am too stupid to implement it.)

Confused Of Calcutta » Blog Archive » None of Us is As Smart as All of Us

J.P. Rangaswami has a great formula for engagement and participation:

“I’ve always believed in a simple rule-of-thumb about opensource communities:

* For every 1000 people who join a community:
* 920 are lurkers, passive observers
* 60 are watchers, active observers capable and willing to kibitz
* 15 are activists, actually doing something
* …and 5 are hyperactive, passionate about what they’re doing, almost to a point of obsession”

This maps pretty closely to the experience I’ve seen at Reel-Time since 1995.

The Third Moment of Truth

Pete Blackshaw is smart:

“Take the idea of opening up literally: open the brand door and put out a friendly welcome mat. Make every consumer who knocks on the door feel important and empowered. Co-create a response in the form of an answer, an acknowledgement, a thank you, a solution, or, in some cases, a form of compensation for their willingness to share their ideas and suggestions with you. Do this even if there’s a wee bit of incremental cost in making the effort. Trust me, it’s more efficient than the way we throw paid media at consumers, and it targets efficiently against influencers.”

Lots of blather and navel gazing has been expended about proving a blog’s ROI to one’s corporate overlords. Emotional appeals founded on Cluetrain sentiments: “But it’s the right thing to do!” or “We’ve got to adopt a conversational marketing model with our customers” aren’t going to win one high marks in the current culture of Measure-It-to-Manage-It.

How can one position corporate blogging as a crucial part of a company’s overall strategy? Let’s put aside reputation management, and focus on the relationship of a blog to a company’s web strategy. In my case, that strategy is to sell stuff online. Sales and blogging seem highly incompatible and counter to the general ethos of Blogistan. As ads creep into some blogs, the economic imperative becomes less jarring, but using a blog to forge a relationship with an audience and then slam that audience with “Buy Now!” starbursts is not generally regarded as a cool thing to do.
In July Lenovo launched its first blog: Design Matters. It is about design, industrial design, technology design, the design heritage of ThinkPads, and the new design principles behind Lenovo-branded products. We think design is our strength, the point of differentiation from our competitors in a vicious commodity market, so the thinking was to blog about it because it might spark a conversation with our fans.

It did. I won’t go into how I built the traffic for the blog, but let’s say it was purely organic for the most part. No ads were bought, no press releases released. It received some homepage linkage from Lenovo.com for a little while, but didn’t take off until the fans at Thinkpads.com and Notebookreview took notice of its existence.

Okay, so on October 5th, our chief designer, David Hill, tells me to look in the drafts folder in the blog’s WordPress dashboard at a post he’s written about a new USB camera. We’re talking about an accessory. A $79.95 device that clips onto the top edge of a monitor or laptop screen and captures video and audio for teleconferencing. Whoopee, right?

Actually, the device is pretty cool; looks like an old Minox spy camera. A nice departure from the usual Orb-Ball. Couple pictures to whet the blog’s readers’ desires, some commentary by David, a link to the Minox site, and we’re done. Wrong. Let’s put it into perspective. This little accessory never got so much exposure in its life. It didn’t get the homepage of Lenovo.com. It didn’t get a massive press rollout. It’s a nice camera, a $80 (why do we continue to inflict $0.95 pricing on our intelligent customers?) add-on, nothing like a $3,000 ThinkPad.

Let’s look at what happened.

First; the blog’s traffic through SiteMeter shows no significant spike due to the posting. The post garnered 17 comments (including two by David and someone on his staff) over five days. Not bad. Fourteen reader interactions. As of today, it is the third most popular post on the site in terms of first page viewed, which means the post is getting some linkage as the eyeballs aren’t going to the homepage first. The blog’s traffic spiked on Friday, when I started to detect a lot of inbound links from other sites. Here’s the chart:

… so turning to Technorati, I ran the search “Lenovo AND Webcam.” This gives me a buzz indicator. Did the blog post move the needle in terms of the pre-post chatter about Lenovo webcams?

I’d say so. And a scan of the verbatims indicates lots of nice commentary. Remember, these are posts, not posts and comments, so the overall chatter is doubtlessly higher.

Now, comes the “BFD” question — big frigging deal. Did you sell any? This is where I turn to Omniture SiteCatalyst, our high-powered metrics and analytics engine to see if we actually sold any
Omniture tells me, thAT of all units sold between Oct. 5 and the 10th, the “40Y8519″ was the 17th best-selling item on Lenovo.com in the U.S. and racked up 23 sales. Okay, so we’re not talking billions served. But still, a look at most popular pages on the U.S. site shows that the little web cam was in the top 100 pages viewed, with more than 1,500 views (yes, I formatted a link to the product page in the original post). Furthermore, I learn, that the top referrer was Engadget. By a mile, with nearly 70% of traffic coming from its pickup of David’s post. Sales, globally, are probably double, so I can make the case that the blog pushed some sales, but more importantly, that by blogging about a specific SKU we were able to plunge a spoke of traffic deep into Lenovo.com, bypassing usability and navigation architectures, bypassing change-requests and stodgy content management systems, bypassing legal, PR, and everyone business undevelopment operation in the business (no aspersions to Lenovo’s teams, I speak in general cynical terms).

In retrospect, I blew it by not offering David’s audience a specific reason to buy one. Beauty and cool factor aside, they aren’t getting a reward for their attention. A discount or special offer needed to be provided, some prize inside the post to thank them for their attention. After all, no where else is there such a public manifestation of ThinkPad fandom than in the comments of the Design Blog. We owe them something for that.

Jack Slocum’s Blog » WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI

My post over the weekend about missing some vital Lenovo mentions in the comments of blogs that I track yielded some excellent suggestions from faithful readers about various plug-ins and options to gain better insights into the sentiments of peanut gallery. Rick Klau at Feedburner, Mitch Ratcliffe at BuzzLogic, and Chris Murray, ex-of-CXO all chimed in with good pointers.

Then I find this baby. Jack Slocum took advantage of Yahoo’s open architecture and built a comment tool for WordPress that is to blogs what David Foster Wallace is to footnotes. Check out the expandable nav bar on the left. The ability to drop a comment on a specific point in a blog post. I am totally freaked and want it.

Funny how suddenly Austin, Texas has surpassed New York City and Durham, N.C. as the place sending the most traffic to this blog. The volume of traffic coming from Dell has been stepping up since last month’s proactive support post and with the launch of Dell’s blog earlier this week, as well as its stepped up activity in the blogosphere, I guess I now know why. Stay tuned for Lenovo’s blog play. Let’s just say it will be different, not built atop Telligent, and focused on a different mission. It should have gone out the door sooner, but let’s just write the delay off to my turning into Massive Headwound Harry after the Memorial Day bicycle incident.

On my way back to Cape Cod now. EVDOing from the Southwest lounge at RDU airport on my X60s, back to RTP on Monday, where the state pastime is perspiring.

Media Nation: Toward a New England Common

“Part of why we’re different, I think, may be rooted in a cultural desire for control and for the old way of doing things. Even when something genuinely new comes along, it’s quickly incorporated as the new old, and change is resisted for fear of losing control.”

Some good points. Chris Lydon has been doing great radio with OpenSource, but New England doesn’t have an online power like Salon or for that matter, any sort of confederation of bloggers. I know of a blog of blogs here on the Cape, and sure there are others, but …

thanks to John Bell for alerting me last night that Microsoft uber-blogster Robert Scoble is moving on to a startup. I have no hands to wring or thoughts to cogitate on his decision, but Microsoft will suffer the loss of a highly visible ambassador that won’t be easily replaced by an expensive Spencer Stuart executive search.

This opens the question of how valuable a corporate blogger is in the market today as the medium becomes au courant with every company under the sun getting the advice to start blogging. I believe the best corporate bloggers emerge organically within the organization — not a hired gun riding in from the outside — which would dash the notion that there is going to be an active free-agent market of hot bloggers going to the highest bidder.
It’s also crucial to note that Scoble was not Microsoft’s official, nor certainly Microsoft’s only blogger. He was an evangelist and primarily focused on Channel 9 who happened to run his own personal blog on the side. The fact that he was an extrovert who was adept at wading into the sometimes savage world of Blogistan stood him, and by extension, Microsoft in good stead. But he was not the holder of an official square in the MSFT org chart.

Now, with PR firms recommending that a company get on the blogging band wagon, the notion of opening searches for effective bloggers to ride in and start a strong program seems a bit doomed. The companies that are known for good blogging practices rely on grassroots voices to emerge from their ranks.

Uncle Fester points out in a comment to Second Life – Get-A-Life that there is sex on Second Life.

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3149323&did=1

This proves the Baldwin Maxim (after Bill Baldwin, editor of Forbes) that if Churbuck thinks of it, someone else has thought of it already.

I plowed through Shel Israel and Robert Scoble’s Naked Conversations on the plane ride down to RTP this morning.

• If you blog and you have a day job then most of the book is old news.
• The most useful application of the book is as a gift to your boss.
• Read the last half for the useful tidbits, especially how blogging freaks out some command-and-control PR and corporate gatekeepers.

This book has to have been a moving target for the authors, something they acknowledge. The landscape is simply churning too fast to capture on paper. Punchline: get blogging and embrace the good old Market-is-a-conversation ideal of Cluetrain.
For anyone in the firing line of being a corporate blogger, it has some good elements of a manifesto.

When people get going on the word “mash-up” they generally point at the things being done to Google Maps by services that use the Google APIs to map everything from crime statistics to apartment classifieds.

I’ve used some great, and useful Google mash-ups. My favorite is the GMap Pedometer  which I use to build bicycle route maps for sharing with other riders.

But along comes Frappr — basically an attempt to build some community around the maps, adding physical presence to the notion of social networking. Roadbikereview — a vBulletin based forum favored by cyclists — has a Frappr group. I put myself on there a couple months ago and have never been back.

Yesterday, Rage Boy, aka Chris Locke, sent a Frappr initiated invitation, finding my Roadbikereview handle — Cape Cod Dave — and asking me to join his network. I did, I now see Chris and his buddies, but in the end I’ve gotta ask the question:

Why do I care about where, on a map, other people are? 

There’s no payday. Sure, we can babble about Web 3.0 and the airy-fairy notion of presence-enabled web, but I don’t want to have a GPS implanted in my head so people can see “where’s Waldo” as I move around the globe.

I think physical presence information is highly overrated. If I’m in Taiwan I’ll let you know so you can schedule the conference call. Or I’ll share my calendar — if the world ever gets calendar sharing fixed — but will I ever use Frappr to confirm that you are in Timbuktu?

I dunno.

PaidContent.org: February 19, 2006 Archives

See my earlier post — “Sometimes I miss the W.E.L.L.”

Wow, how sad. Paid Content reports:

“Salon.com-owned The Well, the pioneering online discussion forum, has not yet found a buyer, according to Salon’s latest 10-Q filing. “Salon has not found a suitable buyer for this asset, which has a book value of approximately $0.2 million, most of which is goodwill. The potential sale of The Well is not primarily driven by a need to generate cash to finance Salon’s operations, but is primarily intended to free management to concentrate on Salon’s core operations.”