Just remember, No matter where you go, there you are.

Multichannel, multichannel, multichannel.  For online businesses, it is simultaneously the New Promised Land as well as The Impending Doom.  I’ve discussed before how I think Amazon will ultimately see its greatest threat come from Walmart, and may actually acquire Target or Sears in order to pre-empt the risk of a competitor that can offer online deals as well as physical storefronts.  The same could be said for Best Buy over NewEgg.com, REI over backcountry.com, or even Dave & Busters over Gamestop.com.

Along the same lines, I think Facebook’s recent addition of ‘facebook places‘ isn’t merely trying to push out fourquare or gowalla for eyeball share– quite the opposite– they seem to be warmly welcoming  those partners into the fold.  All Facebook wants is everyone’s current GPS coordinates, regardless of who tricks the user into surrendering them.  Why?  Because once Facebook has your 10-20, it can turn around and drop a dime on you to all those potential location-sensitive advertisers.  Facebook has the opportunity to beat Google at it’s own game.  Think Multichannel.  Think Mobile.  Think Minority Report, much sooner and much worse than anticipated.

Google must realize this also, hence its mad rush to buy up some social network providers along with location-triggered services.  I fear it may be too late for Mountain View, however– everyone has their personal troupe/network built out on Facebook, and they’ll be loathe to do it again somewhere else.

The other risk here is that the proletariat may rise up in rebellion against constantly announcing their whereabouts, but if there are free lattes involved, I wouldn’t be surprised to see people surrender their bank card PINs.

Japanese twitter users at a football game. Source: theHindu.com (I see Ricky from "Better Off Dead" finally made it over to Tokyo)

I increasingly hear from people that they are “giving up” or abandoning twitter. Reasons given are the usual suspects: the signal-to-noise ratio is bad, no quality insights are possible in 140 characters, most tweets just look like shallow self promotion, product company spam. Indeed, there was a golden era (that lasted about 6 weeks) where one could tweet about a company, and receive a prompt response. Now that most companies have installed a twitter-monitoring robot, the service level is quickly degrading right down to the same level as the automatic email responders– or worse– the automated telephone system.

Twitter as a viable business tool is limited; as a marketing blurb tool it’s adequate, but as an ongoing small-talk medium it seems to do pretty well.

As I’ve picked up more and more Japanese friends on twitter, I’ve noticed that it seems to be doing relatively well in Japan (compared to the US market). Why is that? Is it just the stereotype of tech-friendly gadget-wacko Japanese? Or are there some other more specific factors in play? I have absolutely NO SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH to back this up, but here are my postulations. Perhaps someone out there can follow up with some actual useful information. I’m throwing this out now to get the conversation started.

Possible technology explanations for better twitter penetration into Japan:

  • Character/language density – One quality of East Asian languages that use Kanji is that many words can become pretty short. In English, “transport” is 9 characters; in Japanese it’s two: 交通. “Tokyo” is 5 characters in English, Japanese is two: 東京. Similar consolidations go for names, places, verbs, etc. Yes, Japanese grammar may get longer, but since when is proper grammar needed in twitter? It seems that the Japanese writing system has an inherent “density” advantage over English.
  • Input tools – Twitter seems tailor made for mobile devices: short, text-centric, quick input. For a networked society that already preferred the mobile phone-based Internet access, twitter drops right into place, often much handier than email. I’ve discussed this before.

Along with the tech explanations, however, there may be some cultural differences in play. These are kinda squishy, so please squint appropriately:

  • Inherent public posting – Most Japanese people I know guard their privacy pretty strongly, but no more so than Americans or Europeans, I think. However, there sometimes is a strong tendency to make idle chit-chat items public out to the group. Japanese people will usually not talk with strangers, unless someone breaks the ice with small talk about the weather or some ramen noodles. Then, the mode shifts to everyone wanting to build a connection with others, and everyone will pipe in their 2 cents. Mind you, this isn’t a political debate or anything concrete, just pichiku-pachiku. Twitter seems to facilitate this nicely. Let me put it this way: that signal-to-noise ratio that drives some of my American friends nuts fits in nicely with the low-level buzz that Japanese ping to each other to reinforce their relationships.
  • ongaeshi 恩返し — My wife (who is Japanese) dislikes instant chat with other Japanese, because of all the built-in politeness requires everyone to say “thank you” and “goodbye” at least 4 or 5 times before closing the conversation. For Japanese, a similar thing looks like it’s occuring in twitter, albeit in asynchronous slow motion: someone follows you, you actually have a bit of an obligation to follow them back. If someone tweets your name, you’ll RT a simple acknowledgement. Taken together, this may push enough people past that critical mass needed to keep a social network flourishing.
  • Lack of a Mixi / Facebook alternativeMixi is pretty noisy and cumbersome compared to Facebook, but has an interface completely native to Japan. Facebook, while cleaner, may be a little too “close” for the idle chit-chat that seems to go on in twitter (this is no different than the US: don’t you hate that guy on Facebook that has hotlinked all his tweets to show up in his friend feed?). Taken together, twitter gives a good outlet for quick updates via mobile phone in a text-rich environment (easily consumed on the train).
  • Son Masayoshi– The great thought leader of Softbank seems to be a prolific twitterer. Along with other leadingtech figures in Japan, Son seems to actually hold ongoing debates and policy discussions via twitter. This openness is refreshing if not counter-intuitive for Japanese business. Put together, twitter looks like the domain of the tech-forward progressives.

We’ve all heard that Google is abandoning development of Google Wave.  From what I know of my developer friends, however, it made a decent remote office co-development collaboration tool.  Will Google do the Right Thing and give it to us in Open Source form?

Doh.  This is not long enough for a blog post.  Too long for a tweet.  I should edit.

One of Kanye's better tweets, mashed with a New Yorker cartoon

My first brush with fame was shaking an astronaut’s hand when I was fourteen (Robert Crippen).  Since then, I’ve spotted movie stars in Park City, seen musicians drinking in bars, and actually discussed golf swings with the Prime Minister of Japan.  I mention these not to brag, but to say that my exposure to fame has probably been average.

Online, however, I’ve gotten much closer.  Ten years ago I became ICQ friends with Will Wheaton (Ensign Crusher), who had some linux support questions that I answered.  We traded geek creds, and that was that.  On facebook, I’ve got some famous friends; on Twitter, me and @MCHammer are tight (at least I think so, he never answers my pleading to not hurt ‘em).

The Internet and social media have made flash stars of some people, usually not of their own volition– from the numa numa boy to that idiot crying over a rainbow.  The instant connectivity to flash something all over the globe and the proletarian accessability to publishing can make anyone a star for about 15 seconds.  No duh.

Social media may be destroying the machine that builds fame, however.  If “fame” is the marketable asset that comes from being famous, then twitter is destroying value every day.  Here’s my thesis:

  • Actors used to be poor.  They could only impress and perform in front of a few hundred people in a given city, and even then, the theatre was long and drawn out.  High quality stuff, no doubt (for acting chops), but weak on the easily-remembered guitar licks.  Charlie Chaplin was the first major star, and it was a direct result of the medium of film, which could be recorded and distributed to thousands and millions of people.  Actors (successful ones) are rich because of the medium and distribution model which allows for small dollars from many many customers.
  • As actors and musicians became famous via a remote medium (film is one-way interaction, as is radio, records, tapes, etc.), an entire ‘fame’ industry sprang up to provide that proxy access that fans wanted to make the connection back to their idols.  Variety Magazine, Papparazzi, TMZ, et al, are all part of this machine.  Performers have a weird relationship with it– they say they despise the machinery of fame, yet they depend on it.  The successful navigators seem to balance what information and access they dole out sparingly.  Marlon Brando never attended the Academy Awards, there’s no way he’d have a twitter account.
  • Twitter now gives these performers a direct line to their fans.  Wait– no.  It’s the other way around: fans now have a direct line to the performers.  This circumvents the machine, and some performers are seeing their fame getting eaten away.

While Twitter is still technically a one-way medium (I can follow @JeremyPiven, he doesn’t have to  follow me back), the format is stripped down to a degree that allows very little of the fame machine to work its magic: no photoshopping of the photos, no glitzy typeface, no room for a publisher or PR handler in-between the performer and the fan.

Some performers have been able to do this well, mostly comics who are used to the short text of a joke.  Some are burning their capital, reduced to endlessly pimping their own book store appearances.  Still some others have suffered poorly for it– mostly the good looking ones we suspected were vapid shells all along.

There was a Vanity Fair article I read last week about Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, who seemed to be at the apex of the fame machine in it’s best golden era of the 60s, and when Pacino, Hoffman, and other “ordinary” guys started to fill the roles, ol’ Dick Jenkins (Burton) knew the game was changing, and that fame was past him now.

Known for his poetry, drinking binges, and temper tantrums, @RichardBurton would have been one helluva feed.

from the rightcliq website. What's up with the toolbelts?

Ever since Steve Jobs and Woz unveiled their little pet project to bring computing to the masses, we’ve had a debate about where the application should live: server-side or client-side.  IBM always argued that server-side is faster, cleaner, and generally more profitable for them.  Bill Gates made his billions bringing apps to the client-side.  Cloud Computing is really this argument wrapped in shiny new clothing– and has been blargged about ad nauseum everywhere else, so I won’t bother with that.

I mention that debate simply to bring up what might be a parallel argument that is forming now that many sites are becomming socially-aware.  Here’s the topic: is a social network invidivual-centric (client-side) or catalog-centric (server-side)? This isn’t a debate about where the actual software app resides, that’s pretty much invisible now.  For a social network, the core function is the graph– but where is that centered?  Is it centered around the individual (like facebook), or around the catalog (like amazon.com)?

An individual-centric graph has the person at the center, and she is free to add her friends, likes, dislikes, and catalog choices to her graph.  In this model, she will always want to log in with her personal network ID, and then interact or share with a given website.  Facebook is this way.  Pluck offers this kind of model.

A Catalog-centric graph has the products or new topics acting as the currency of the graph, and individuals may come and interact with them as they please.  The individuals may even use their Facebook ID for logging in, but the graph stays with the catalog and is structured in a way to build out the graph between those products, regardless of who or which individuals contributed any given part.  Bazaarvoice is a catalog-centric model

At first blush, it would seem that the individual-centric graph has run the table, but this may change. Faceboook offers a ‘like’ button just about anywhere (any major website) now, and people are certainly participating.  But those same individuals are starting to push back on the flood of information coming into their facebook feed.  Everyone is hungry for peer-driven invormation about products, but very few are willing to contribute content if it pollutes their friend feed.

Can a catalog-centric graph solve this concern for users?  Would you be willing to review more products or “like” more things if it could be somewhat anonymous?  What would you need in return?  Will you want to segment off your personal contacts (all your high-school drinking buddies) away from your shopping guru mentors?  Visa has announced Right Cliq, an individual addon that serves as the bridge between the individual graph and catalog graph.  Sure, we need another social network like another holein the head, but this may actually have some legs: consolidate your shopping peer-driven information with your purchase history, while segmenting it away from your personal contacts.

It becomes a catalog-centric social graph, but it belongs to Visa, not to the vendor.

p.s. if you like this article, please click the ‘like’ button in the upper right. :-P

I’ve often described social media as a cocktail party– there are various types and levels of interaction, and there are some basic rules of etiquette.  As host of the party, facebook has a tough balancing act: give out all that functionality for free while keeping the lights on. Well, it looks like they just sold the guest list.

We’ll see what effect this has, but I think it will be marked as an error after a while. I’ll have to think on this one some more: it’s a step toward a more connected intarwebs, but it also exposes the relationship between company and person. It all comes down to your personal delusion of privacy.

Thanks Harry for the link.

Cocktail party by Mike Jones

When you’re at the pub, what do you talk about?  Your car? Your weekend?  Your golf game?  Your new tasty favorite indie band?  FSM help you if you talk about work– boring.  When you’re online, what do you chat/write/blog/tweet about?  Sure, we geeks talk about the biz and tools and sites and Steve Jobs gossip– but that’s part of our job.  If it really were free time, what would you really write about?  And where would you write it?

Watching the online online communities mature, I’ve noticed that people progress along a path:

  • First, they blabber anything just for the sake of blabbering.  This is really just experimenting with the toolset for most.
  • Second, they share everything they see and read and link, until they realize that everyone else is linking/sharing the exact same stuff.
  • Third, people settle into their “thing”: constant updates of their children, their home business, political rants, mindless blogospam.  Here’s where people’s idiosyncrasies start to show up.  To quote John Worfin, “Character is what you are in the dark.”
  • Eventually, people resort to the same topics they like in the pub: politics, their children’s sports, luxury vacations, and making up historical  facts.

That covers Facebook and twitter for most people (twitter is more gossip-y, but whatever).  But what about an online community based on a catalog ecommerce site, or a specifically-themed site?  The one thing all the visitors to that site is the stuff that’s for sale, so this becomes the dominant topic for the online community.  At some sites, this works, other sites bomb miserably.  Why?  What is the difference?  Where is that line?

Likely:

  • Woot.com – wins because all visitors are bargain hunters, and are happy to share juicy details on the deals.  We see this in real life where people brag about the coupons they clipped or the steals they got at Try-n-Save.
  • SteapandCheap.com – wins because of the same reasons that woot.com wins, but even better because these people all share a leisure activity: they ski (or snowboard or hike… er… they go outdoors)
  • Any catalog that is basically a technical sale: consumer electronics, exercise equipment, software, new cars, gardening tools.  If you think you’re the neighborhood expert, congratulations on becoming the new King of the Online Community.  Online dashboards are great for this.
  • Politico.com – wins because all those ranters who alienated their friends on facebook with their hatred of Presi-senato-gressman Blankenstien now have a home where they can win Free Internets with the other crazies (just like the bars in Dupont Circle)  Online dashboards are also great for this, but only to show who is the biggest d-bag.

Not Likely:

  • VictoriasSecret.com – Who wants to brag about their lingerie?  TMI.  Questions & Answers generally wouldn’t work for personal apparel.  The most obvious question “will this fit me?” has the most obvious answer: “I have no idea who you are, so how the hell would I know?”
  • Vehix.com – mostly used cars, which means that deals are not repeatable– it does no use bragging about your good deal, no one cares. The same goes for any one-off item.
  • fandango.com – tickets to movies (which people _do_ discuss at length in pubs), but Fandango is a ticket site– nobody has seen these movies yet, and they certainly don’t want to hear the ending.  BTW, Inception is all inside Leo DeCaprio’s head because he’s insane!!

So, will your website be able to build a community successfully?  Will you really be able to plug it back in to increased user-generated content about your products?  I would suggest that the ‘tell’ is rather simple: would people talk about your goods in a pub?  Would they mention your stuff at a cocktail party?

Last week, I did a little Spotting for the company.

Just search in Katakana

UPDATE 4JUL2010: The ICANN board has now approved Chinese character URLs. I doubt this will change the marketing strategies for Japanese companies, however.  I think we’ll just get a bunch of redirects.

Americans invented the Internet, and it’s going to stay nice and readable to Americans as long as they have anything to say about it (daggumit). Most people in the Americas, Western Europe, and Australia are blithely unaware that a battle has been raging for several years among the internationalists over the format of the URL (the web address you type to go somewhere on the web). Why? Because these countries all use the roman alphabet. Our slavic friends would love to use cyrillic URLs; Chinese want Chinese characters, Koreans want hangul, etc. The ICANN (the international standards cops) are still only testing and allowing non-roman alphabets in limited trials.

Last month in Tokyo, I noticed something about all the adverts on the trains: the Japanese companies have found a way around the common restriction: they simply tell you (the customer) what to search for, using Japanese kanji and gana, nevermind what the actual proper URL may be. I’ve highlighted two examples here (forgive the low photo quality– lighting on subways isn’t so bright).

On the good side, by asking the commuter to search for a specific keyword, they’ve immediately screened out all the content from the English-language Internet (which can be overbearing in volume). Every mobile phone has this rudimentary web search capability, so the call-to-action is immediate.

Solar backpacks-- just search for

On the bad side, however, this strategy assumes some risk: if I ask for my customers to find me by searching for “スマート外国人” (smart gaijin), what happens when someone else comes along with a better SEO value for that term? All my advertising now goes to benefit someone else.

Mitigating this risk are three factors: 1) campaigns on the trains cycle pretty quickly, so keyword hints can be updated often; 2) the keywords are pretty specific, and the campaigns only bring more traffic, which then reinforces the lead position; 3) Rakuten has an almost monopoly-level stranglehold on web publishing in Japan. If two companies conflict over a desired keyword, Rakuten can probably work it out between them (ah, the Japanese sense of controlharmony). It’s kinda like when AOL or Yahoo could get away with this back in the day.

42

Nice answer. Do you know the question?

Okay, I’m likely going for triple-word-score here, but I’d like to discuss what I call “Qualitative Feature Polarization” in terms of how to read data.  I’ve talked about this before in the specific case of how to rate a sushi restaurant, but I think the principles apply to any situation where people are asked to make a judgement/evaluation.

The problems with most evaluations are as follows:

  • ranking things in a straight good-to-bad list throws out too much information
  • all data points are contextual, but we rarely understand the context
  • the real question– and therefore the real answers– are often not present

That last point is perhaps the most important: many times we are asked to make an evaluation from data that is based on assumptions in the goals or undefined context in the business model.  For example: If Zappos were to match its prices against WalMart, it would “lose”, but in terms of service, it would “win”.  Conversely, wait times on the customer service line to Zappos are “much better” than when I call WalMart.  In an evaluation of customer service level, which one is correct?  It depends on the business model, and on the context.  In Vietnam, the US Army killed bad guys the enemy at a rate far more than our own casualty rate.  Wins used to be defined by simple body count, but we saw how that turned out.

The effficiency expert Pete Abila points out the Toyota quality method of “5 Whys” to try and find the real question (in hopes seting up an alanysis to find the real answer).  By simply asking the question “why?” at least 5 times, we can often get to the heart of the real problem, and strip away any assumptions or differences in the models we have put around the data results.

So, how to run an analysis that can provide sufficient context while also attempting to find the real issue? Whenever possible, I try to run all data in a method I call “Qualitative Feature Polarization”.  This method runs on some basic rules (which echo the problem points above):

  • Smash data sets together to see if any patterns arise (but remember your college statistics prof warnings about causality and correlation).  This is the serendipity part– the chance for an “a ha!” moment that might lead to a further inquiry or data set
  • Whenever possible, frame your data in left<–>right, blue<–>red, service<–>cost.  Applying such a framework to the Zappos vs. Walmart comparison would then lead you closer to the real issue: the business models are fundamentally different.
  • Whenever possible, highlight the specific areas that the results and evaluation have NOT answered yet.  In other words, show that the evaluation has uncovered some results, but that the reader/listener (your boss) should specifically NOT jump to some conclusions  (unless he has a mat) based on the data.  This isn’t because the data is incomplete, it’s because the data was investigated to look at a specific issue.  Thou shalt not extrapolate your summary.
  • Structure your analysis that leads you to a contextually-rich, polarized set of numbers.  These numbers should then guide the next choice of left or right, not good or bad.

Receptiveness to this analysis is a mixed bag.  If your audience is a fairly flat organization and the geeks are on equal footing, then qualitative feature polarization works well.  If the organization is fairly vertical, they likely just want “the answer.”  A good way to guage for this is the degree to which the org uses PowerPoint as a communications mainstay, and the level of complexity in the metaphors you spin out.

© 2010 Dave Jenkins contact me via twitter @davejenk1ns or via email blog at davejenkins dot com Suffusion WordPress theme by Sayontan Sinha