I was surprised and saddened to hear about Nortel's bankruptcy on the radio this morning. Not because I thought they were particularly healthy, but mostly because they were such a big firm, were such an key customer of mine at a couple of past employers, and, most importantly, were such a great equipment supplier for decades.
I read an article about their failure in on businessweek.com, that basically states that Nortel's attempt an innovating away from their past reliance on core carrier equipment was too little, too late and and that they chose the wrong products to develop. One comment caught my attention, however:
Roese used a public blog to communicate with customers and attempt to re-establish Nortel as an innovator.
This is clearly a problem. One key success criteria for this kind of public conversation is credible honesty. I didn't read the blog, so I can't comment on it specifically, but it would have been valid to discuss how Nortel is attempting to reinvent itself and becoming more innovative. Describe that process or journey, and the unique challenges that you're experiencing, but don't jump straight to a presumed conclusion that you have arrived as an innovator.
The 'death' of Nortel happened to occur on a day when we lost another great icon: Khan (Ricardo Montalban). Khan delivered one of the great movie lines of all time in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, when he quoted Melville's Moby Dick:
To the last, I will grapple with thee... from Hell's heart, I stab at thee! For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee!
OK, soon I'm going to jump to another topic, but I just found two more interesting items on the topic. First, here's a fun little video from a German ad firm illustrating the challenges that social marketing is trying to address:
Second, John Kembel of HiveLive posted his thoughts on what's in store for enterprise communities in 2009. I tend to agree with his comments, but I would add one more trend:
6. Social marketing companies must make money.
In the current economic climate (and related venture capital environment), marginal business models will perish. This situation will not change dramatically any time soon, so social marketing companies must prove that their firms are sustainable. In other words, they must make money. I would not be surprised if half of the social marketing companies currently in existence are no longer around in January 2010.
...more than half of the marketers surveyed said their budgets will be cut in the coming year, and another 44% said they'll cut or freeze hiring.
Again, clearly I get that.
It does identify some "Pockets of Optimism," however. But not listed among those pockets are social networking and media. In fact, they state that:
Buzzword fatigue has also set in more firmly on an aging set of digital terminology, including "Web 2.0" (19% said they were tired of hearing it); "social networking" (12%); "social media" (11%); "blog" (8%) and "viral marketing" (6%).
Now, I look at those numbers and see that social marketing only has a little more than 10% of the respondents claiming weariness. That doesn't sound very high to me for trendy items like these. In fact, they go on to state that:
However, that doesn't mean those digital ideas aren't important anymore, Mr. Anderson said. "In fact, each of those ranked as a bit more important this year," he said.
Given that I have already stated that I'm a fan of these marketing techniques, I have to say I'm pretty encouraged that they're growing in importance, even if only modestly, in this environment.
Gina and I are taking the family to Costa Rica in a couple of weeks, and we have a lot to do to prepare for the trip. Gina suggested that we should create an online collaborative space in which to share ideas and to-do lists. Her idea was to use a wiki.
I currently use a great little application, Evernote, for my own to-do lists, notes, saved web pages, and many other kinds of content that I want to capture, access, and edit later. It runs as an application on my Mac and on my iPhone, and automatically synchronizes the content between the two platforms. I have thoroughly enjoyed using it.
However, for the Costa Rica shared to-do list application, it has two shortcomings:
It doesn't run on Mac Tiger, only Leopard, and Gina's Mac OS is Tiger. (She runs Evernote, but her laptop access is web-based, rather than via their installed application.)
It doesn't allow private sharing. It does allow content to be shared with everyone (and indexed by search engines), but not shared privately with specific individuals or users.
I recently received an email from Evernote describing their feature upgrade plans for 2009, and one of the items involved improved sharing. Here's what they said:
The public notebooks functionality that we launched in 2008 was a timid, first step in our ambitious plans for making Evernote a great tool for sharing your memories and collaborating with your friends and coworkers. In 2009, we're going to greatly expand what you can do with your memories, documents, files, photos and anything else you throw into Evernote. If you're the social type, we're going to grow up from being your external brain to being a telepathic-mutant-super-brain, but with good manners. Of course, you'll always have the option to keep any or all of your info totally private.
Obviously, they're being deliberately vague on their exact upgrade plans, so I built a wiki on PBWiki that we'll use for now. PBWiki is a traditional hosted wiki application, but it doesn't have an iPhone app to allow mobile access.
A search of the iTunes iPhone app store yielded nothing. Any suggestions?
Wow, no sooner had I provided a brief shout out to Room 214, and what they're doing in social media, did they step in their own pile in social networking circles.
To quickly summarize what 'appears' to have happened, one of their employees contacted the owner of the Tweeter username @room214 asking if he would be willing to give it to Room 214. The user then forwarded the request to Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, asking for advice or help or something. Kevin then provided that advice via a posting on Seesmic:
That's when it all exploded, with various opinionistas providing their generally-negative two cents on Seesmic, Digg, and other media, calling Room 214 corporate bullies and saying they're surprisingly clumsy, naive, or stupid for mishandling a social networking situation. James Clark, Room 214 founder, has now gone on Digg and his own blog to post apologies and to try to diffuse the situation. All of this appears to have happened overnight from Saturday night to Sunday morning on a quiet, holiday weekend.
I say 'appears' because, like everyone else not directly involved in the situation, I really don't have all the facts. But in the social networking world, it's quite common for that ignorance to be glossed over in the postings of the aforementioned opinionistas because that would tend to discount the validity of their posted rants.
Because I don't know the accurate details, I am not going to comment on what happened, or did not happen, between Room 214 and @room214. But what I find fascinating about the broader situation is the speed and severity of the response, and the implications for Room 214.
Out of the blue, Room 214 now has a multifaceted challenge on their hands. Not only do they have a bit of a corporate image problem in the social networking community, but the situation presents potential implications for their corporate clientele (not to mention the employee-relations issues with the unnamed original protagonist). James Clark has gone a long ways toward addressing the community, but it's the client relations that I find interesting.
I presume that Room 214 offers to help their clients establish and execute social networking strategies, such as establishing Facebook fan groups, MySpace pages, Second Life storefronts, or various other, more intricate campaigns. Their website lists among their current clients the Travel Channel, the Denver Broncos, Alltell Wireless, and Rally Software. A recent press release announced that the Travel Channel just renewed their contract with Room 214 for 2009.
What should Room 214 say to their current clients about this situation? Should they say anything? Should they wait for their clients to stumble across it?
What about prospects that they're trying to sign? Presumably, these prospects will do a minimum amount of due diligence on Room 214 and are probably more likely to stumble across it than even their current clients are.
Here are my thoughts. I would turn the whole experience into a good, solid case study. James Clark mentioned in all of his postings the need to act humbly and honestly, and a case study is the logical extension of that. Admit that a problem occurred, analyze why it occurred, what was done to resolve it, and how it can be avoided in the future.
The process of creating this case study is valuable for many reasons:
This whole thing occurred for a reason, through some lack of company policy or poor communication of that policy or something. Fundamentally, the cause needs to be addressed.
The process of analyzing root cause of the problem and trying to prevent similar occurrences will be valuable for the Room 214 team, building teamwork and strengthening the firm.
Nothing would be more believable and powerful as a marketing piece for current and future clients than an autobiographical case study that effectively says: "Social networking is a powerful tool that, if not carefully wielded, can cause considerable damage. We know firsthand, and we're better equipped to help our clients because of that firsthand knowledge."
The company has the opportunity to become stronger for having gone through this situation. At some point, their clients or prospects will discover the whole thing. Room 214 doesn't need to proactively tell clients about it, but should at least be prepared with a thoughtful response based on critical self-examination.
The boys and I played it this morning and, for a science game, it's pretty fun. Lots of fun science trivia, like the fact that a tick only eats three times in its lifetime, or that frogs close their eyes to help them push food down when they swallow, and just enough actual gross stuff to keep the boys entertained. Good Big Science Saturday stuff.
Earlier this week, we celebrated my son Ryan's birthday at a local restaurant. Ryan's turning 10, and we had a small gathering of his friends and family members. Of the gifts that he received, probably 2/3 of them were science related, either science kits or science-related games.
Of course, the reason he's receiving all of these science-related gifts is because of me and my whole Big Science Saturday thing. We've been doing BSS for years, though now it's pretty infrequent. But everybody in the family and everyone in the neighborhood knows about BSS, so they assume that the kids love science.
The truth is, they have no more or less interest in science than any other kids. They're just stuck with a dad that thinks that science, or at least the structured problem solving associated with the scientific method, is a pretty important thing.
So, both the boys get a bunch of science-related gifts. They don't seem to mind, though, and it gives us a bunch of new BSS material for the next several weeks.
And I made sure that his mom and I got him something far more frivolous, a pair of Heelys.
