WordFrame Blog

In Search of the Obvious - cutting through today's marketing mess

David Terrar — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:52:20 GMT

When I first tweeted that Jack Trout's new book "In Search of the Obvious" had arrived from Amazon, my mate @euan suggested his (excellent) blog is actually easy to find. He called it "The Obvious" because when he started writing about the application of new technology and social media in organizations, he felt that, actually, he was saying pretty obvious things - even though they are important, and often missed by the many. Jack Trout's book has a similar theme around today's complex marketing mess and era of killer competition that we now live in. A good marketing strategy should be founded on an obvious idea that makes common sense, when too much of today's marketing messages try to be clever, and complex, with advertising that is more like entertainment.

If you haven't read Jack Trout, you have been missing something. Jack Trout and Al Ries have written some of the best and most influential marketing books of the last 25 years. They wrote Positioning, and Marketing Warfare, and the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Al went off to write some excellent books with his daughter Laura, and Jack carried on with things like Differentiate or Die. A lot of the key themes and case studies here in The Obvious come from, or are an extension of what Jack wrote in the earlier books. If you haven't read them, then this book would be a good place to start and get a refresher on the laws of practical marketing. If you have read some of the others, this is still an excellent and entertaining read. He has related the messages of focus, leadership, resources, category divergence, and differentiation to the main theme - your strategy should be obvious and full of common sense. He quotes Robert R. Updegraff writing in 1916 to set the scene in the first chapter:

"The trouble is, the obvious is apt to be so simple and commonplace that it has no appeal to the imagination. We all like clever ideas and ingenious plans that make good lunch-table talk at the club. There is something about the obvious that is - well so very obvious!"

The book expands on Updegraff's straightforward messages from all those years ago, and Jack's earlier ideas contrasting the clever and entertaining ads that might be very memorable (but do you remember the product?), with the boring or even irritating ads which definitely leave you with the product in mind. He shows same great examples of confusing and wordy mission statements that are so generic, they could be any company doing anything. I wrote earlier about one section on the law of the ear - does a picture paint a thousand words? The book is full of good case studies, and spot on analysis of the current state of Wal-Mart, Coke, newspapers or the beer business. It has some great guidance on how you should be thinking about getting back to basics, and constructing sensible and obvious strategies. I think it is a great antidote to some of the current muddled thinking that you see from some marketing departments - an entertaining read that is well worth tracking down.

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Social Media in the Enterprise - event report pt 2 of 2

David Terrar — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:14:37 GMT

Yesterday I blogged part 1 of my report on the Social Media in the Enterprise event that Alan Patrick and I cooked up (at Tuttle) to inject some enterprise related content in to this week's "London Social Media Week". We had 8 speakers (originally 10, but Will McInnes of NixonMcInnes had travel problems, and Dr Shefaly Yogendra came down with a migraine).   Most "Enterprise 2.0" and "Social Media" events these days tend to cover social media for consumers, B2C marketing to consumers, and even for government services to "consumers" with the majority of the speakers being marketing and media types. We hear far less about the application of these tools by Enterprises to re-engineer themselves,, or their use in the B2B value chain, or how they are being used to create sustainable business value.

When we do hear about enterprise use, we don't see much about the difficult stuff - how to integrate to existing heritage systems, how to handle security issues, or whether a flat social network structure can work in a firm with a traditional hierarchy. You don't usually get presented with any hard evidence of the potential Return on Investment. Each one of us had 10 minutes and no more to give our views and examples - to look at this unmentioned "Elephant in the Ecosystem" from 8 different angles.

Alan Patrick (@freecloud on Twitter) set the scene for us by talking about the business application of social media to give sustainable value with continual innovation, operational value and rapid response. He talked innovation in terms of crowd sourcing, buzz tracking, data mining or Delphi Online. Operational value could be in terms of sales, improving the operational budget or reducing capital expenditure. He talked about applying rapid response, agile and just in time thinking to social media. He also positioned this as early day technology with the attendant security worries.   Social media for business is high on the hype cycle, but we have to consider ROI (or is it ROi) and the impact on organizational design.

Dr. Sue Black (@Dr_Black) of the University of Westminster talked about her experience of using a social media campaign to promote Bletchley Park - the home of the Enigma machine, and the code breaking effort that saved millions of lives in WWII. It was mostly a Twitter campaign, and she enlisted the help of @sizemore and @documentally from the London social media scene. She saw how Twitter flattened the traditional chains and hierarchy, allowing her to reach and get help from likes of @stephenfry to amplify the message - that day her blog audience jumped to 8000! She commented about the passion required to make this kind of thing work (the same you need from any community manager). She didn't do this in the traditional way of writing a proposal and making a business case. She just started the project and the community and they made it up as they went along. She talked about the usefulness and downright weirdness of social media.

Bejamin Ellis (@benjaminellis) of RedCatCo and SocialOptic had fun grappling with a presentation converted to PowerPoint, which wouldn't stop auto advancing. It gave his session a kind of "waltz time" dance, but it didn't get in the way at all. He talked about human capital being the key component of any business. He explained businesses don't like the social word, but that they are about being capitalist. He asked if business is unsocial? They do tend to focus on the numbers, but he talked about his time in the corporate world and the number of business cases he'd seen where ROI really stood for Randomly Oriented Integers. He suggested that, if you're not careful social media tools can reinforce the organization's problems and fiefdoms. Information ownership can be used as a weapon. A social media approach can definitely help, but the tools have got to be easier than email.

Umair Haque (@umairh) of Havas Media Lab zoomed around with Prezi suggesting that the real question we should be asking is how can we make organizations more useful? He talked about a global crisis of organization and governance and suggested that in a sense we've reached peak organization. The world is too rigidly organized, but social media creates a new paradigm of self organization. We need to work at making usefulness happen. The problem is "what is the new organization". The tools enables those that want to to take the lead, and some people will want to just follow. In the end he wondered whether we need leaders? That worried me and I wanted to debate that, but the draconian 10 minute time guillotine came down and we had to move on. I'll have to follow up with him on that last thought.

Adriana Lukas (@adriana872) of the Mine! Project and VRM used the wine industry as a metaphor for Social Media's game changing effect on business. She went back to the 1976 blind tasting of California wines versus French wines, in the home of wine making. When California came out on top it changed the industry, and led to an explosion of experimentation and production in California, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America and elsewhere.    These other countries were suddenly capable of matching the French wines on quality, and often at lower cost. There was a new mix of approach and components to produce good wine. She used the hierarchy, wirearchy Gaping Void cartoon. She talked about taking the social media tools (the grapes) and balancing out the rest of the ingredients in the business. Her approach is to support this new technology completely independently of the IT department - skunkworks, with servers under desks, keeping them away from existing business processes (something which I completely disagree with, but more of that later). She suggests that you should make sure the social media approach doesn't get devoured by the existing processes. She wants to wave goodbye to business cases, and say hello to case studies. She suggested that this is like a revolution, but upside down - she said "It's not those that want the change that are building the barricades". I have to admit I like that comment!

Mat Morrison (@mediaczar) of The Magic Bean Laboratory talked about the social media ecosystem in terms of knowledge, bookmarks, networks, news, publishing and network cohesion. He showed some slides of network connections from his research. He explained that the reality is that Twitter is a tool for talking to the world. Does every business want that kind of radical openness? Actually most businesses are inward looking, but that we now live a new world where there are no longer jobs for life. He talked about the usefulness of email. He explained some of the mashups he had put together for organizations, but that when he presented what he was doing to the senior management how the traditional IT department's attitude was "you're not my CIO!". They had asked him whether he had considered security properly, and his response had been to liken what he was doing to a school of fish - there lots of us out there, so we should be safe. He talked market norms versus social norms and about employee social capital being for the good of our business . Businesses need to take care. We can't just ask our people to Tweet about our products, although they can and should if the want to. Then how do we figure that in to our balance sheets?

Euan Semple (@euan) of The Obvious suggested that rather than talking about the Elephant in the room, he'd thought of calling his presentation "Trojan Mice". The successful incursion of social media tools in business that he sees are always incremental and slow moving. He blames the protestants for our belief in the work ethic, but he highlights that, actually, people want to do useful stuff. Both our education system and the traditional hierarchy of our organizations and institutions beat the creativity out of us. He told the story of helping his daughter putting on a tie for her first day at a new school - "So much for individuality - eh Dad?". He talked about starting one presentation just chatting about the topic from within the audience, when the expectation was for a guru pitching on the stage.   Most have us have been brought up to expect the bosses to act like bosses. There is a revolution happening, but you can't use those words. He talked about just wanting people to think and about small pieces loosely joined. He suggested the social media in business is not disorganized chaos, but that a lot of traditional management thinking is actually about tidying up. But maybe you want thins to be messy. He talked about the usefulness of tools like Twitter, but that he hates the people who talk at him in 140 character press releases. People have called Euan an organizational anarchist, but now everyone has the potential for influence. In traditional organizations of course there is fear and reticence, but they're taking social media seriously now. He talked about saying what you think and then quoted David Weinberger suggesting that the thing that makes the Internet hang together is love.

David Terrar (that's me! and I'm @DT) - I did a longer write up and published my slides over in part 1. One of the things that surprised me was that I was the only speaker to use the enterprise 2.0 term, and talk about examples of how the "social media" toolset has been successfully applied inside substantial businesses like Swiss Re, Cisco, Wachovia Bank (now part of Wells Fargo) and the ICAEW. As several of the others mentioned, using the "social" word is one of the frightening problems for the enterprise, even though we've been collaborating to get things done in socially complex ways since the stone age. I talked about my suggested approach to a successful implementation by starting with getting your objectives completely clear (rather than beginning with technology and just deploying a wiki or a blog), but then making sure you answer the question "what's in it for me?". Your audience, team, collaborators, co-workers need to get something valuable out of the social media solution you are implementing, otherwise it's doomed to failure. I wish I'd said more forcefully on the night how important community management is. I also talked about the 2.0 Adoption Council - a forum for practitioners to share their experience, as well as a mechanism for building more case studies of how this stuff really works and adds value.   As I blogged yesterday, one of my key messages is totally at odds with Adriana's approach mentioned above.   I believe that these tools need to work with, enhance and improve the existing business processes, not go around or subvert them.

So we had 8 different perspectives on social media applied to business but with some common themes. It's clear that we are at an early stage of using these tools in the enterprise with a few good success stories, and plenty of different approaches being used successfully - bottom up, top down, and everything from guerrilla style stealth works, to the more traditional implementation approach that worked for ERP in the past. However, it's clear that they work and that there is a change happening. As has been said before, the new entrants coming in to the workplace today use tools like Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging to communicate with their friends, and so they expect the same tools to be there in their new place of work. As Patrick Hadfield blogged, many of us are using consumer oriented social media tools to connect with our friends and colleagues in any case. The most significant discussions on the night were to do with the way these tools subvert the natural hierarchy that most businesses have grown up with. The structure of our organizations is changing, and these tools will become commonplace overtime, although Euan commented that it might take 10 or even 50 years. There was discussion about the size and structure of organizations being driven by transaction cost or the Dunbar number. One of the key factors is the culture of any organization - will this new way of collaborating be encouraged or frowned upon?

There was quite a buzz of passionate discussion over a few glasses of wine afterwards. For me the two messages I take away from the aggregated content are that these new tools will flatten the traditional hierarchies and change organizations to a more networked structure, and that the smart companies are the ones who are getting on board and adopting these tools to help get things done now.

I'll add links here to other posts about the evening as I find them:

Alan Patrick's view
Patrick Hadfield's first thoughts
Patrick Hadfield's second thoughts
Benjamin Ellis photos from the night (coming shortly)

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Social Media in the Enterprise - event report pt 1 of 2

David Terrar — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:05:40 GMT

I blogged that Alan Patrick and I were running the only enterprise related event as part of this week's "London Social Media Week". Considering we only had the idea a week last Friday at Tuttle, and only promoted the thing with a few tweets, I'm both impressed and surprised that we had around 50 attendees (paying £10 entrance fee to cover coffee, booze and nibbles) and 8 speakers at last night's event. The attendance, and the fact that people were volunteering and making themselves available to come and talk, speaks volumes for the demand to hear about applying these new emergent tools to business, as well as an appetite to understand the organisational implications. We already have plans for follow on events and activities.

So this is a two part report. Part 1 covers my own pitch on the night, and a video podcast of Dennis Howlett, that we finished but didn't manage to show at the event. Part 2 will report on the other 7 speakers and some conclusions about the 8 different views on offer.

During yesterday afternoon Dennis skyped from Spain and suggested that we should record a video podcast for part of my session. I'm an evangelist for all things enterprise 2.0, and Dennis thinks it's a crock! That makes for a good dynamic, so we spent 5 minutes riffing a little on that. The mixing quality isn't great (as Zoli pointed out on Cloud Avenue), but you can hear Dennis's views coming through loud and clear:

The video wasn't actually finished until shortly before the event. In true "corporate" fashion, the Cass Business School (our venue) has no open wifi, and an IT department who need to take away your PC, check it and do unnatural things with it before they'll let it anywhere near their network. My 3G mobile broadband couldn't get a good enough signal to download the video file in time, but at least Dennis's thoughts have now been published here and on YouTube.

One of the things that surprised me about last night was that I was the only speaker to use the enterprise 2.0 term, and talk about examples of how the "social media" toolset has been successfully applied inside businesses like Swiss Re, Cisco, Wachovia Bank (now part of Wells Fargo) and the ICAEW. Of course using the "social" word is one of the frightening problems for the enterprise, even though we've been collaborating to get things done in socially complex ways since the stone age. The tools have changed, particularly in the era of communication, when we've moved through paper, printing press, telegraph, telephone , fax, e-mail, groupware collaboration to the current web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 tools. Whether you call it social or not, people need to communicate and collaborate to get things done, and our topic is simply about getting things done more efficiently and effectively.

Although a lot of my social media colleagues favour a bottom up, disruptive or even "skunk works" approach to implementation, which can all work… the old rules of project implementation still apply inside the culture of many, or even most, businesses. Swiss Re is a perfect example of how you get senior executive buy in and sponsorship to ensure success, and then spread the word to 11,500 employees. It was the way we used to get a successful ERP implementation going, and it can be done for the change management required for implementing these sorts of collaboration tools too. One of my key messages is that these tools need to work with, enhance and improve the existing business processes, not go around or subvert them. Companies like Salesforce, with their Chatter micro-blogging tool are leading the way in how companies (and software vendors) need to be thinking.

One of our weaknesses as an "industry" at the moment is the lack of good case studies to bring the story to life for those businesses that are struggling to see how they would get value and make this kind of thing work for them. There are about 100 stories we can use today, but we need many more. That's one of the aims of Susan Scrupski's 2.0 Adoption Council. The second part of my 10 minute pitch was an introduction to the council, an explanation of yesterday's announcement of a strategic partnership with SAP, as well as a call to arms for more members this side of the Atlantic. Only practitioners from inside companies doing an enterprise 2.0 project can join the council, although there is an associated 2.0 Adoption Community (that we run in partnership with Susan) where consultants, software people and any other interested parties can join the conversations about adoption and best practice. Take a look at the slides (with notes on slideshare):

Social Media in the Enterprise
View more presentations from David Terrar.

Part two, including links to the other blog reports of the night, coming shortly.

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links for 2010-02-03

Des Walsh — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:16:35 GMT

Is "Ethical Internet Marketing" an Oxymoron?

New Third Tribe community offers an interesting option for online marketers. Note the charter membership until Feb 5th and then the price doubles.

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Three Excellent Books on Social Media

Des Walsh — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:49:03 GMT

A Triple Book Notice Because I Haven’t Yet Reviewed These Books and I Feel Remiss About That

It was actually a resolution of mine well before New Year’s Day, to review all the books that have been piling up alongside my desk, mostly books on or relating to social media.

But New Year’s Day came and went.

So this is a notice as a precursor to the review I still plan to do of each of three of those books.

And while I have read only one right through, I have read enough of the others to be able to recommend all three wholeheartedly.

Without further ado, they are:

Paul Chaney’s the digital handshake – seven proven strategies to grow your business using social media

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crushit! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion

Shel Israel’s Twitterville – How Businesses Can Thrive in the new Global Neighborhoods

Paul Chaney, whose book provides an incomparable overview of the social media phenomenon, is highly respected by his peers and is an all-round nice guy to boot. He is one of my most valued friends – interestingly most of our communication has been virtual, partly because there is this rather large ocean, the Pacific, between our two countries. From explaining the new communications paradigm and why that should matter to anyone in business, Paul guides the reader through a complete strategic framework to employ social media to build any business.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a force of nature, a man of great passion for what he does and a truly impressive record in business, by any standard. I had the privilege of hearing him speak at the BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas in 2008. He is the real deal and his book is a great read about branding and about social media. It is also a sometimes confronting challenge for all of us to look seriously at what our true passion is and then to align our business and our life with that.

Shel Israel is a standout observer and commentator on social media, not just because he has long experience as a practitioner in and writer on communications, but because he takes a global view. He also has a wonderfully lucid, highly communicative writing style. Over the past few years he has interviewed many people around the globe on blogging and other aspects of social media, so his take on social media is as highly informed by his knowledge of how things look in Beijing and in Adelaide, Australia, to mention just a couple of places, as it is of how they look in San Francisco or New York City. His examples of how Twitter is being used by various businesses large and small – and in some specific instances not used, foolhardily as he shows, by some other businesses – are priceless.

Three very different books by very different men. One thing these three man have in common is that they are generous with information and insights. I learn from each of them every time I read or hear what they have to say.

By the way, each its own right is a good book to give to friends or associates or family members who say: “I don’t get why you are so enthusiastic about/ interested in/ curious about (Twitter, Facebook, blogging, YouTube, LinkedIn, social media – check the one that applies)” and you then spend half an hour or so trying to explain, until you notice that their eyes are rolling back in their head.

On second thoughts, maybe not family members, if you don’t want to waste your money). But do get your own copies.

Picture credit – my pic.

Disclaimer: the links are to my Amazon Associates account, so if you click through and buy them there I will benefit (about one cup of coffee, tops, I think): but hopefully good bookstores will have them too. I bought my copies of Crushit! and Twitterville respectively: Paul Chaney kindly gifted me a copy of his book.

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Is the iPad a big iPod or is it the new Newton?

David Terrar — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:34:15 GMT

The first thing I've got to say is the title of this post was supplied in a tweet from Alan Patrick (@freecloud), but it perfectly encapsulates the controversy going on in the geek world around the new Apple tablet device announced on Wednesday. Is it going to be as successful and "game changing" like the iPod and iTunes, or a flawed failure like the Apple Newton? I believe it will be very successful as an e-book reader, for news consumption and Internet access, but also in bringing a whole new audience of technologically challenged people for whom a laptop or a netbook are just too complicated to own and carry around.

It was fascinating to hear how Steve Jobs was positioning both Apple as a manufacturer of mobile devices larger than Sony, Samsung and Nokia in that context, and then the iPad as a new category of product in opposition to the netbook. It's well worth listening to the keynote, and watching the slick demonstrations. For me iPad follows two important paths. The first is simple user experience and the second is Darwinian divergence in product categories.

On the first path, the iPad uses the iPhone operating system with a gorgeous looking 9.7 inch multi-touch screen, 16-64GB of storage, Wi-Fi, 3G, the standard iPod/iPhone 30 pin connector and not much else - go here for more explanation and tech details. It's a device very much oriented towards consuming content from the web, your photos, video and e-books. I called up David Jennings who wrote the excellent Net, Blogs and Rock and Roll to ask him about the significance of the iPod when it first came out, and what he thought of the iPad. He was quick to point out that the ergonomics of the iPod and iPad are different - you can walk down the street listening to music, but you aren't going to be walking round much with your iPad. However, we both reminisced about the point just over a decade ago when portable mini disk players and the early MP3 players started. There were plenty of devices from Sony, RIO and Creative, and they just started to get really useful when the capacity jumped in to Gigabytes and you could take a huge chunk of your song collection with you rather than having to make painful choices for each trip. I remember buying Creative MP3 players for my nephews, but not thinking of one for myself because they seemed just too clunky and full of features. Just at that time Apple comes out with the iPod and simplifies the player's operating system to just the few things that are useful, and creates iTunes which was significantly easier to plug in to and use than the media players used by the rest of the market. So it was combination of elegant design, simple user interface and timing on capacity (the first iPods had 5Gb) which helped iPod define the category and then take off to get the enormous market share they now have. I jumped in at the third generation and have had an iPod strapped to my belt ever since. David thinks he'll get seduced in to an iPad, but probably not until the second iteration.

When I look at the simplicity of the book interface on the colour multi-touch screen, combined with what they are doing with the iBooks store and adopting the EPUB standard, I'm convinced this will be the product that takes the e-book/reader concept mainstream. The simplicity of the limited set of functionality will appeal to the technologically challenged who think about using a netbook or a laptop to consume the Internet on something much bigger than their mobile phone, but just don't want the hassle and learning curve of getting to grips with a PC or a Mac. My technophobe wife is already interested, so I think there is going to be a broad appeal amongst that new techno challenged demographic who want to mostly consume with a little creation, and don't need all the power of a PC.

There are plenty of people out there who have written about the missing features that they reckon will come in the second and third generation iPads when the first one fails. Joanne Jacobs tweeted to me yesterday what she wanted as extras:

I understand where Joanne and the others are coming from but they're missing the point. I can see that something like EU legislation for mobile devices might eventually force Apple to add micro-USB for charging, and I'm sure the Apple/Adobe politics of Flash support will get sorted out at some point, but all the extras they are after would just turn the iPad in to a netbook. Here is were we come on to the second path. I firmly believe in divergence rather than convergence. Convergence doesn't happen in nature, and it rarely works in product categories. I carry a phone (Blackberry) that is also a great email device, which records, takes photos, video and plays music too. But I also have an iPod, a Canon digital camera and an Olympus digital recorder with me most of the time. I don't have a Flip Camera for video yet, but I've been thinking about it. Specialization in products works. Trying to do too much and being well ahead of its time was what put paid to the Newton. I've got a Swiss Army knife I keep in the car, but I recognize it's more fashion item than something really useful. This iPad, like the iPod for MP3 players, will help properly define a tablet category between netbooks and smart phones. I don't think Apple will add things like a camera, microphone, multi-tasking or real USB connectivity. I see the point of the keyboard dock for extending the "good enough" feature set to note taking in meetings, but like I said before - doing the rest just turns it in to a netbook. The other ace in Apple's hole is using the iPhone operating system and the AppStore. Do you know of many software vendors who don't have an iPhone app available now, or in their product roadmap? I don't. Maybe it's fashion, and it doesn't quite make sense that iPhone is always first on the list for developers when you see that iPhone's market share is below Blackberry, and well below Nokia Symbian based smart phones. But that's the reality - having an iPhone App in your product portfolio is hot. Apple start the iPad ball rolling with 140,000 applications that work on this thing, with a queue of vendors joining in, and then a scramble while the current crop adapt their applications to make use of the extra screen real estate. It's obviously going to be a big success.

It will be fascinating to see where we are in 6 months and a year, but Anne K Petterøe (@yojibee) showed me this link from around the time of the iPod launch. Plenty of negative comments from the geeks, just like this time around with the iPad - listen to Santayana, because you need to learn from the past. I firmly believe iPad will be a success exactly because, not in spite, of its limitations.

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Successful presentations? - go back to basics

David Terrar — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:20:52 GMT

Some of us of a certain age come from a time when presentations weren't created directly on the PC (or Mac) with PowerPoint (or Keynote), or with cool new online tools like Prezi. Back then before laptop PCs and low cost flash drives, if there was plenty of money in the marketing budget, and the presentation was really important you might create photographic slides, but usually it was paper on a flip chart stand, or more likely foils and an overhead projector (and you could write your notes alongside on those cardboard frames - oops, definitely showing my age!). With all of these approaches, you would sit down and write the presentation first, and then transcribe the final version to the presentation medium. These days it's just too easy to go straight in to the technology, because of the ease of shifting things around and making corrections as you go. I regularly get seduced in to diving in to the detail, opening PowerPoint and starting at slide 1, when I should be taking a mental step back and going back to basics.

I've blogged before that my favourite book on this topic Is Presentations Plus by David A. Peoples from 1988. David was a "Consultant Instructor" at IBM, and the best presenter I've ever seen - he could certainly tell a story. The first chapter of the book is titled "What's in it for me?". Whether it's a book you want people to read, a presentation you want them to sit through, or a community you want them to join, the place to start is putting yourself in the shoes of the audience and asking that question. The second chapter of the book details David's blueprint for a successful presentation. I found myself this week going back to his checklist:

What is my objective?
How will I close the presentation?
How will I open the presentation?
How will I organize the body?
How will I keep their attention?
How will I keep their interest?
What questions will I ask?
What questions will they ask?
What visual aids will I use?
How will I tailor the presentation to the audience?
What notes do I need?
How many times should I rehearse?

Notice that the presentation medium doesn't come in until number 9. And that one at 12 - rehearse…. how often do you do that? Thinking about how you should close the presentation comes right at the start. This checklist is an enormous help standing alone, but the book is well worth tracking down - it's a goldmine of old ideas and techniques that are still great ideas and techniques.

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EuroCloud UK members making sense of Cloud standards and security

David Terrar — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:13:48 GMT

The newly formed EuroCloud UK group held their first member meeting a week ago at the Thistle City Barbican Hotel - a panel led group discussion on Cloud standards and security. Chaired by Phil Wainewright, the panel experts were Dr. Guy Bunker, independent consultant and blogger, formerly Symantec's chief scientist and co-author of ENISA's cloud security assessment document, Ian Moyse, Channel Director of SaaS provider Webroot, and Adrian Wright, MD, Secoda Risk Management, formerly global head of information security at Reuters.

In the spirit of cooperation we had invited Lloyd Adams from Intellect and Jairo Rojas from BASDA because we want to ensure that the three UK Cloud and SaaS vendor groups keep in close contact and try to coordinate their various deliverables and activities as much as is practical. In addition we invited Richard Anning who heads the ICAEW's IT Faculty. As I've reported before, Phil, Jairo, Richard and I have been in discussions, triggered by Dennis Howlett, about trying to achieve some form of pragmatic standard or quality mark on security and best practice. We decided to use this discussion to identify if there are any sensible, existing standards or initiatives that we could adopt or incorporate in to our thinking.

Philip framed the discussion in to three areas - operations, security (including risk and governance)and interoperability. As is often the case with the current status of the Cloud topic the group started on definitions of what is or isn't SaaS, as well as highlighting the different issues and elements that come in to play with infrastructure (IaaS) and platform (PaaS) solutions. In the early part of the discussion two things became clear. The first is that there are some standards like SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standards No.70, which is an internationally recognized auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in 1992) which may be appropriate for some vendors to enhance their credibility, but that's just one of many competing standards initiatives. Even with SAS 70, the worry is that the cost of accreditation means that many smaller vendors would be excluded, even though they may have excellent quality, perfectly viable and lower cost solutions. The second is that, in most cases, the customers and buyers don't actually know the kinds of questions they should be asking their potential SaaS and Cloud vendors.

The discussion covered topics like vendor lock in, how to get your data out if the supplier goes bust, should you worry about Escrow agreements. At one stage somebody talked about the fact that there was no significant Microsoft equivalent to set the standards yet, but surely that's simply vendor lock in of a different kind. Richard talked about ICAEW members worrying about availability, and what happens if your broadband goes down. One good sequence of the meeting covered the Data Protection act and the fact that issues to do with data location have become a potentially serious offence. It was mentioned that Salesforce, one of the major Cloud providers, have two data centres in the USA and now one in Singapore, so where does that leave a European customer with the current legislation?

Phil talked about online banking and the fact that the public Cloud can be firewalled, and made more secure with encryption and use of card readers, or SMS tokens sent to your mobile phone. In complete contrast, people regularly send confidential data in emails across the Internet, which is hardly very secure. There was a point in all of this discussion when you might begin to get disillusioned with the whole security topic, but it is clear that standards are being talked about and that best practice is emerging. Companies need to have good processes and remedies in place. As an industry we need to show what people are really doing as an antidote to the occasional SaaS and Cloud scare stories.

Ian Moyse talked about the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) who are trying to produce a form of "kite mark" or a code of practice - something which covers transparency, capability, and accountability. Lloyd from Intellect highlighted that there are already checklists in existence, like the one on page 16 and 17 of Intellect's own Business Case for SaaS. However, what the CIF are doing has significant overlap with the Standards initiative that we were hoping the ICAEW would help with. They see the possibility of two levels - lower cost self certification, and then a more comprehensive and expensive compliance or accreditation procedure, but that would need some form of accountability or an ombudsman. Their initiative looks very promising, and we're certainly going to find out more detail before our next step. Watch this space for more on this soon.

To give you a flavour of the event, take a look at CloudVision's edited highlights:

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Social Media in Enterprises - the Elephant in the Ecosystem

David Terrar — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:01:42 GMT

What is it?

As our contribution to London Social Media Week we are putting on Social Media in Enterprises on Tuesday Feb 2nd from 6 till 9pm at the Cass Business School in London (map is over here). Why? Well, at Tuttle last Friday Alan Patrick and I realised that there was no event for the more B2B (Business to Business) and value chain based aspects of Enterprise/Business aspects of Social Media. This is the "Elephant in the Ecosystem" - a huge arena, but hard to get your head around easily and see clearly. So, being us, we decided to put one on - and this is it! The aim of this event is to look at this unmentioned "Elephant in the Ecosystem" from lots of angles, so we may get a better view of what it is. So, what we thought we would talk about is how Social Media can be used by: - Enterprises: How can use it internally to re-engineer themselves, - Supply and Value Chains: How does it restructure a B2B value chain, which can be complex and global - How to create sustainable business value, not an easy to replicate one-off. Also, we want to touch on the Hard Stuff that is brushed under the carpet, for example:

how to integrate into existing heritage systems,

how to handle security issues,

whether a flat social network structure can work in a firm.

And that's before we start talking about potential Returns on Investment. The idea is to have a number of short talks from a variety of people with various angles on the subject, and a Q&A session - and then break for drinks and informal discussion. Speakers (and rough areas covered) are:

Dr Sue Black, University of Westminster

Benjamin Ellis, RedCatCo

Umair Haque, Havas Media Lab

Adriana Lukas, VRM Labs

Mat Morrison, The Magic Bean Laboratory

Alan Patrick, Broadsight

David Terrar, D2C

Shefaly Yogendra

We will be adding details of what people will be talking about so watch this space. and check back here regularly. That should get everyone's pulse racing - and to make it even better, we are going to Charge You Money - no FreeConomics here - to cover the costs for the tea, coffee, biscuits, nibbles and alcohol you will consume. It will be a tenner (£10), as you can see no expense has been spared :)

Booking for the Event So, do not delay - go over here and book now!

Any spare funds at the end of the night will be spent at the pub afterwards....

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Pope to Priests: Get Blogging!

Des Walsh — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:47:40 GMT

Enough to Hold Their Own Blogging Convention

In his message for World Communications Day, May 16, 2010 – getting in early – Pope Benedict XVI has issued a challenge to priests to become serious users of digital communications, including blogs (via Mashable).

With some 406,000 Catholic priests around the world, there would be more than enough to hold their own blogging convention.

We should not hold our breath.

Because, thinking about how some people “get” blogging and others don’t (or won’t), and then about how many start out but do not really persevere, you would have to wonder how many of the clergy will take up the challenge in any serious way and how many of those that do will stay the course.

A relatively small proportion on both counts, I dare say.

Not because of any wish to defy or even just ignore the Pope, but because this is a really tough challenge.

It is nothing less than a challenge to get serious about digital media and to engage with the world via digital media, not just in old analog ways.

The Pope’s message, sub-titled “The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word”, spells out just why priests need to become active in using digital media – as we might say content creators, not passive observers.

The spread of multimedia communications and its rich “menu of options” might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web, or to see it only as a space to be filled. Yet priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different “voices” provided by the digital marketplace.

Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.

Some will surely find the challenge too difficult

I have to say that, if I were a betting man, I would lay odds that either from the outset or after a bit of experimentation, many clergy who take heed of the Pontiff’s instruction and get started with blogging will not take on the challenge with total gusto or will after a short period of experimentation stop blogging, for one or more of the following or similar reasons:

fear of having to engage more directly and instantly with people,
worry about not understanding the technology,
feeling they don’t have enough time,
not knowing the “rules of the game”
being worried about getting offside with authority (the bishop or religious superior, even the Vatican)

In other words, many priests who take heed of the Pope’s call, will nevertheless behave much as others do, in business, government and the not-for-profit sector when the notion of communicating via blogging is instituted or encouraged from the top in any organisation. They will either find excuses not to start or, if they start, will be vulnerable to being discouraged and giving up.

And even among those who want to take action there will be a temptation to reach for solutions that on the face of things look easier, especially delegating the task to someone else, such as by handing over the process to someone in the parish who seems to “get” the technology, or perhaps a firm that offers outsourced blogging.

Actually, I can see a whole subset of the burgeoning social media outsourcing industry in the predominantly Catholic Philippines taking hold here (I’m only half joking ).

But I applaud the move

Basically I believe this is a very good move on the Pope’s part. I’m such an evangelist (interesting word in this context) for blogging that I’m always enthusiastic when I see different sectors of society start to grasp how powerful blogging can be and when leaders in various sectors advocate or at least support initiatives for blogging and other use of social media.

I have a few more thoughts on this and some examples of clerical blogging, which I will share in a subsequent post.

For now, here endeth the day’s post.

Image credit: Pope Benedict XVI, World Youth Day, Sydney 2008 Visit, samherd, via Flickr Creative Commons license

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Does a picture paint a thousand words?

David Terrar — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:07:50 GMT

I've been spending a lot of time in the last few weeks thinking about the basics of presentations combined with how you get the positioning and messaging for your product right. To help I've been reading Jack Trout's In Search of the Obvious, a marketing book which is all about making sure you focus your strategy on what is simple and obvious rather than clever and ingenious. We are bombarded by clever and entertaining advertising these days, but does it really sell the product? I'll do a review of the book here shortly, but it's good.

So two things jumped out at me this week. The first was a section in Trout's book about the proverb "A picture paints a thousand words". The second was a post highlighted to me by @solobasssteve from Mike Smith - "Narrative is important in technical presentations". It reminded me telling a story is important in any presentation. Trout, on page 129-131 of the book suggests that actually, the ear is more important than the eye in picking up the message, and that this saying from Confucius is a popular but misguided preconception most of us, particularly in marketing, have. He rightly points out that if you took away the words or sound from most print or TV adverts, you wouldn't know what was going on, but if you just left the words or sound alone you would probably get the message. That's not to diminish the power of a good visual to support your case, but he has a point. He amplifies the point with some analysis of past positioning programmes, none of which were exclusively visual, and by saying they went back to the original Chinese characters and found that a better translation was "A picture is worth a thousand pieces of gold", not words!

Now that's a great revision of the message, but I decided I wanted some corroboration and a good link for this post, so I started Googling to find any further references. Well, confusingly, I couldn't find the saying amongst any of the lists of Confucius quotations. Then I found the Wikipedia entry which says:

"It is believed that the modern use of the phrase stems from an article by Fred R. Barnard in the advertising trade journal Printers' Ink, promoting the use of images in advertisements that appeared on the sides of streetcars.[1] The December 8, 1921 issue carries an ad entitled, "One Look is Worth A Thousand Words."

Another ad by Barnard appears in the March 10, 1927 issue with the phrase "One Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words," where it is labelled a Chinese proverb (畫意能達萬言). The Home Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Familiar Phrases quotes Barnard as saying he called it "a Chinese proverb, so that people would take it seriously." Soon after, the proverb would become popularly attributed to Confucius."

The irony that this was actually a marketing slogan to begin, complete with a fabricated narrative history to provide authenticity is priceless. I now expect Stephen Fry to use this in an upcoming QI, but this popular myth amplifies the two points. Actually, when it comes down to it, the words are the message, and they can be amplified by a good supporting, narrative story.

(Follow on post, coming shortly, will be about the blueprint for a successful presentation.)

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links for 2010-01-13

Des Walsh — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:50:44 GMT

Corporate Bravery from Google

Scoble on the corporate bravery of the momentous decision by Google to lift its voluntary censoring and if may leave China

(tags: China Google censorship human+rights Scoble)

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Learning How Twitter Lists Work: Part II

Des Walsh — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:20:44 GMT

Thingamy with ESME points to where enterprise 2.0 is heading

David Terrar — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:45:42 GMT

Yesterday I got the "lowdown" on how Thingamy, which Sigurd Rinde describes as a "Work Processor", has just been connected to ESME, the microsharing and collaboration platform. I believe the combination is a big step forward for Sig's solution, as well as representing one of several approaches that signpost the direction of enterprise 2.0, or enterprise collaboration for 2010. It's all about linking collaboration to process.

First let me disclose that, although we don't have a contractual relationship, we're big fans of Thingamy, we've been playing around with the product for years, and we're on the look out to help and support Sig to find potential clients here in the UK. Although the basic concept of Thingamy remains the same, the user interface and way you use and deploy the product have steadily improved over time making the product much easier to grasp than when we first met Sig back at the start of 2006.

So what is Thingamy? It's a product that addresses all of the things that any organisation does which are NOT handled by their conventional business process based systems. Sig calls these Easily Repeatable Processes - the ERP, CRM, accounting, or HCM processes usually handled by a huge variety of standard SME or enterprise level software products we all know and love (either SaaS or on premise). Depending on the industry sector (making cars, book retailer, web design agency) those products will handle more or less of the value creation of the company, but there is huge percentage that isn't covered - Sig suggests 2/3 of World GDP. Well, we can argue the figures but these unstructured "Barely Repeatable Processes", as he calls them, probably cover over half of what most companies do. Over the last 15 years some of these tasks have been handled with email exchange, passing round documents, and many of the data related ones have ended up with some form of messy Excel spreadsheet based "system". To make it specific for one big company you'll recognize, covering just the search and discovery part of what knowledge workers do, Laurie Buczek of Intel says:

"The average Intel employee dumps one day a week trying to find people with the experience & expertise plus the relevant information to do their job. We have calculated some of the $$ impact due to lost productivity & opportunity. Let me just say that it is motivating us to take action."

Enterprise 2.0 is all about the use of emergent social media tools to address this problem. Things like blogs to support conversations around an idea, or wikis to collate, develop and share information, people profiles to help you find the expertise you need to do your job, or micro-blogging tools like Twitter and Yammer for more efficient team communication. These tools can definitely help and take a data centric approach to finding people and sharing knowledge and up to this point have worked disconnected, in parallel or asynchronously with the conventional business processes of the organization. But Sig's product is all about process. In theory you could use some sort of standard workflow tool and create a 2 dimensional process flow with decision points to cover all of the myriad tasks and different decision paths you go down every day to do your job (or even get up and get to the office). In practice, that would probably be just too complex and time consuming to create. Thingamy uses some basic workflow "snippets" that you use and re-use to manage and trap how you handle a particular idea, issue or request. It helps you join up the dots of your daily workflow, and keeps track of the objects and people that you work with or delegate tasks to. You model your business processes as you go. The system makes you more efficient the next time through, retains the history of what happened, but allows you to adapt the process as things change (because they always do). It will all become more clear when you see the example below. However, between Christmas and the New Year Sig and his team connected Thingamy to ESME using their API and by adding an ESME style client within the Thingamy interface. ESME is a Twitter style internal micro-blogging application used for team communication and information sharing. It means that the conversations that you have around each task are now captured and linked to the relevant, object, person or specific process step inside Thingamy. It adds another level of usability to the tool for all sorts of knowledge work. Take a look at Sig's demo, and you'll begin to understand.

So whether it is ESME being linked to process inside Sig's BRP tool, or Chatter linking to Salesforce's portfolio of standard and partner applications, or SAP looking to link 12sprints to their applications, this is where enterprise 2.0 is heading in 2010. Essentially I'm agreeing with Dennis's two posts on "Enterprise 2.0: it's not about people it's about process". It's all about people and their unstructured knowledge and data properly linked to business processes that adds value. And Thingamy is well worth looking at as a generic "Work Processor" too.

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Will Social Media Week Move Further East in 2011?

Des Walsh — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:45:30 GMT

If you are going to be in or near Berlin, London, San Francisco, São Paolo, New York or Toronto in the first week of February and you have an interest in social media, you need to check out the program in the respective city for this year’s Social Media Week. This will be the second such event.

Looking at the lineup of cities participating in this second Social Media Week, I’m

impressed by the fact that in one year it has gone from being in one city, New York, to being in six this coming February, and – no doubt a tad selfishly -
wondering if the event in 2011, assuming there is one, will add more cities in the Eastern Hemisphere.

From the website:

Social Media Week conferences take place simultaneously in multiple cities around the world. The aim of each event is to advance the use and understanding of social media in the corporate, public and non-profit sectors.

The first such event was held in 2009 in New York City and according to the Facebook site attracted some 2,000 people to 35 events, with another estimated 5,000 participating virtually, via the web and specifically via Twitter and Facebook.

It’s good to see the Eastern Hemisphere represented by Berlin. And it would be good to see in 2011 some representation further east of the current centers. Looking at the country usage for “global headline sponsor” Meebo, there may not be a huge incentive from their viewpoint to add centers further east, but India is better represented in those stats than the UK, and the Philippines not so far behind.

For some other current sponsors there is an understandable New York/ US weighting of interest, but one would have thought that IDEO would have an interest in, say a China node for the event in 2011 or subsequently.

It’s not as if there is a lack of interest in the topic in this part of the world. In precisely the same week appropriated as Social Media Week for the six city event in the US, Canada, Brazil and western Europe, there will be a simultaneous two day event, dedicated to social media marketing, in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Maybe trying to encourage the event which started in New York to “think East” is too much of a challenge. Would it be smarter to think about an event which starts here in the Eastern Hemisphere? If so, where would be a good place to start? Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Delhi, Bangalore …? Suggestions, anyone?

Image credit: Hemisferio Oeste, by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez – via Wikimedia Commons

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WordFrame Blog

In Search of the Obvious - cutting through today's marketing mess

Social Media in the Enterprise - event report pt 2 of 2

Social Media in the Enterprise - event report pt 1 of 2

links for 2010-02-03

Three Excellent Books on Social Media

A Triple Book Notice Because I Haven’t Yet Reviewed These Books and I Feel Remiss About That

Is the iPad a big iPod or is it the new Newton?

Successful presentations? - go back to basics

EuroCloud UK members making sense of Cloud standards and security

Social Media in Enterprises - the Elephant in the Ecosystem

Pope to Priests: Get Blogging!

Enough to Hold Their Own Blogging Convention

Some will surely find the challenge too difficult

But I applaud the move

Does a picture paint a thousand words?

links for 2010-01-13

Learning How Twitter Lists Work: Part II

Tag cloud provides an easy way to see something of how you are perceived on Twitter

Thingamy with ESME points to where enterprise 2.0 is heading

Will Social Media Week Move Further East in 2011?