Category Archives: People

Silence of the things

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Evrythng is one of those start-ups that have me torn into pieces. On one hand I like the idea of putting an augmented reality layer on physical objects and bring them to life in ways that are meaningful for the way they are being used. On the other hand it is exactly the thing that have me thinking that there is just too much noise in the world.

Building on the latter point you could start asking yourself, where you are ever going to get some piece and quiet. It’s hard enough to switch off your mobile phone and stay of the internet. But if I also have to switch off a lot of other things in my house to get to that much missed feeling of tranquility, it just starts becoming too much.

Of course it’s all a matter of how it’s being applied, and I don’t have enough fantasy to suggest that it will be pervasive in everything. But I still think it’s valid to take a small step back and think about whether this is actually an inherently good development.

Social getting interesting

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Yes, the interest graph is the new black. Bada-bing.

Thinking about the interest graph in relation to the social graph it seems peculiar that these trends are emerging in this order with the former being the latter and newest trend. Because my logic would have it that it’s always more interesting what we’re interested in than who we actually know.

In fact the only interesting things I can see coming from the social graph are rather shallow data on the connections you have and the indicators about you as a person that those signals might send to somebody mining that data. And arguably that is interesting in a lot of ways. I just think that banking on the interest graph is both more obvious and a lot more straight forward.

5 ways to go deeper into social

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Back when the internet invaded our homes, we all talked about how much we were surfing. We don’t do that anymore. Now we all talk about how much we’re on Facebook and Twitter. Therefore it can come as no surprise that we’re now starting talking more about all the niche networks and ways of being social without staying on the main street of the giants.

But if the social movement is moving towards the back alleys and such, what opportunities present themselves for companies wanting to get into this space and provide real value? Quite a lot I would think. But I also think that they will be driven by five fundamental things, you need to have an eye for:

  1. Do one thing, and do it extremely well: I happen to believe that most people don’t mind using a portfolio of sites and services as long as they can see how each single one of them provides value. Hence keep back on the features.
  2. Solve a real pain: It may be that Pinterest is all the hype right now, but I’m a firm believer in the notion that the ones who prosper on both the medium and the longer term are those that solves a real pain felt by the users. That’s what is going to make your service ‘need to have’. Everything else is purely ‘nice to have’ and will eventually whither.
  3. Be mobile: Forget about the web for a second. The mobile devices are the most personal ones, we have, and since you want to be both social and solve a real pain felt by users, you should make absolutely sure that your service kicks a** on mobile devices.
  4. Get your ambassadors: If you are to make a splash in a very dedicated niche oriented group of users, chances are that they will already have places where they flock and people they look up to. They will already have organized themselves around available means, and what you’re looking to do is to provide something that’s both smarter and of higher value to them. In order to get the message across you need to have ambassadors with a high standing within the community. Otherwise you may find it hard to break the habits already in play.
  5. Be visible IRL: I think this is often overlooked by many, but if you’re really in the market for solving a real pain and be a service, people with that particular interest can rally around, you also need to be visible where they are in real life. It may sound a bit old-fashioned, but I think that if you really want people to find your service to be credible, you need to have the audacity to be part of the public picture and stand out. Yes, you may take a beating or two, but if your service is valuable enough, you’ll win because of it. It’s real community engagement.

If you can nail these five things, I think you have a great chance. But you need to really nail them. And I would suggest you put a strong emphasis on 2, 4 and 5 because those will help determine whether you’re an instant one-time hit or you can create something that can last in the face of fierce competition.

3 questions defining new products

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In the media industry there is a tendency to know it all. Not only how to produce the best content and get it across and distributed in the right way. But also to create new products and services. We know it all, right?

Of course we don’t. But since we think so, we need to borrow heavily from the work of Clayton Christensen and force ourselves to ask three questions time and time again whenever we think of something new:

  1. What is it you want to help your customer achieve? And no, answering “Get more enlightened” or “Follow the latest news” isn’t enough. It’s about understanding the deeper need on a very personal level. How exactly are you trying to make your customer better off with your product or service than without it? If you can’t answer it straight away, take your time and ponder it until you come up with an answer. Because this is fundamental.
  2. Why haven’t somebody already solved this issue for the customer? Look at the competitive picture. Why is this hard to solve (if it is)? And how deeply felt a pain point is it really. This is really going to be your sanity check on the point above, aka is there really a problem that needs solving?
  3. What value are you creating by solving it? Something really tangible? Or something that’s harder to explain? If it’s the latter, my argument will be that you’re not really trying to solve a big enough pain point and you should step back to one of the points above, until you really nail it.

As for value you should also be mindful of how you turn that value for your customer into business for you. There still isn’t anything remotely like a free lunch, so you need to make money out of every effort. There are tons of ways you can do that by applying a – to my mind – healthy overall transaction view of things, and if you’re lacking inspiration, here’s a very good overview model to get you started and increasing the odds of you nailing this.

3 roads for media in the social era

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I got pretty inspired by Nilofer Merchants post on Harvard Business Reviews blogs about rules for the social era and started to think about what that second word ‘era’ mean in terms of a fundamental shift for media. Because it’s so much beyond social features and technology – it’s about a different operating mindset.

So I sat down and grid to map Nilofers different overarching points to a media context, and out of it came three roads, which I think media companies should figure out how to follow sooner rather than later. So here goes:

  1. Go for leaner, not bigger: There is a tendency in media companies that it costs a fortune just to get an idea. Simply because of all the people and parts that start moving by themselves whenever you start to discuss something, and because systems are built for scale and not for being nimble. Going for big from the get go in a social era is like trying to get a supertanker to fit in a bathtub. So media companies really need to figure out how they can go lean, still get to the market with great offerings but more  on a beta base and with such small costs that things can quickly be either killed (if they don’t work) or scaled (if they do work). We need a lot of experimentation and for that to work we need experiments to be lean, mean, cheap and fast.
  2. Break the chains and cater for the conversations: Even though most media companies are working to involve readers and users one way or the other through social media, there is still the overall understanding that creating media is a process that goes from A to B to C and beyond, and that nobody can handle that process better than journalists and editors and therefor nobody else should interfere into it. I think that needs to change to. There needs to be a lot more touch points between journalists, researchers and the prospective customers of the content, they are creating, while the creation is taking place. Stories and features need to come more to life and resemble some of the conversations that are being had on different social fora. Otherwise the content will seem stale, unappealing and thus without any value.
  3. Foster real sharing of values: Many think that liking something or being a fan of something is related very specifically to the product and not the values they exhume. This is wrong. Take me for instance. I’m fan (yes, sadly) of Blackburn Rovers in the English football Premier League. Not because of the brand itself but of what surrounds the brand; the idea of the upstart who (once) bit the big ones in the heels and became champions against all the odds – because I’m a big fan of the smaller one getting one over the bigger guys. And that sticks. I think media companies need to think the same way; customers are not becoming fans because of the way you do content versus your competitor (it’s more or less alike anyway) but because of what your brand stands for, it’s values and how that tie into the life of your customers. Thus media companies need to get to a much better understanding of what the actual daily lives of their customers are and find that fit. Because once that is found, there is the basis for a kind of symbiosis that new relationships and business can be built from.

No matter what angle you choose to view this from, I think one point is vital to understand: Social is not about technology alone. It’s not a feature that has it’s moment and then withers away. Social is an inherent trait in everybody, and now we just have the tools to facilitate being social in much more efficient ways. Thus social is here to stay. And with that comes the need to adapt to the new reality.