flights

The Business Technology blog over at WSJ reports on a recent study of more than 100 corporate social networks. Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant, found that:

Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects.

Moran’s conclusion is that companies get seduced by the technologies involved without understanding the terrain. These sites fail, he believes, because companies don’t invest enough money or manpower in supporting them, and because the things the companies measure don’t really align with their professed business goals.

The title of the article - “Why Most Online Communities Fail” - is misleading, since Moran is talking specifically about corporate social networks, and the very premise of these sites is flawed if you ask me. I haven’t seen the list of companies he looked at, but I would guess that most of them actually have thriving online “communities” whose activities just happen to be distributed across the Internet. People are twittering. They’re posting about those 100 companies on their blogs and MySpace pages.

I understand the urge that companies have to contain this activity, but it’s a pipe dream. You can build the snazziest playground in the world, and most of your community still won’t show up. If you want to connect with them, you have to do it on their turf. If you want to quantify their effect on your brand perception or your sales numbers, you have to find tools that can do that.

That’s what my most recent venture, Scout Labs, is aiming to provide, and that’s why I believe in their product. Companies are willing to spend millions on the fantasy that they can bring their communities to them because they don’t have very good ways of tuning in to the communities that are already out there.

But that’s changing.

Please indulge a moment of self-pity…

I know a designer’s job isn’t rocket science, but that doesn’t mean everyone is qualified to make design decisions. Unfortunately for me, that doesn’t ever seem to stop people.

Why do they call these things “circulars?” The word makes me think of my mom, clipping coupons from the Sunday paper for the weekly trip to the Shop-N-Bag.

Anyway, this one came in the mail from Target. I usually toss these things right into the recycling bin, but I thought it was pretty clever.

I used to love flip books as a kid. I even made one once, as a Christmas present for my younger brother - a mix-n-match sports thing where, for example, you could put a football player’s head on a baseball middle and a pair of hockey legs.

Anyway, kudos to Target for having fun with something so everyday. You actually got me to look at all the coupons as I played with different face combinations.

I’ve been stretched too thinly across a few big projects and trying for nearly three months to find a couple of qualified people to help me on the work I’m getting through EVB. Right now the market is hot for UX people, and the only ones who seem to be available are the totally un-hireable. I’ve interviewed some doozies.

Well, last week I finally found a couple of qualified, seemingly normal people who aren’t currently booked. We made them verbal offers and they accepted.

But one of them had some issues with the EVB contract. EVB went back and forth and back and forth with him for a week until they had enough.

It got me thinking about how some people seem to approach life with a ‘no’ attitude. They scrutinize things and question things as if the world is on a mission to screw them.

My job has sent me to Amsterdam for the week, and when I went to the Continental Airlines website to check in for my flight the other day, I was presented with the option to buy carbon offset credits - powered by an organization called Sustainable Travel International.

The whole idea of carbon offsetting is met with some harsh criticism. Skeptics argue that it’s just a way to help people feel better about themselves without having to change their consuming, polluting lifestyles…

But there’s no reason why purchasing carbon offsets can’t be just one part of a person’s overall change in lifestyle, instead of an alternative to change. And the truth is the money spent on carbon offsets does make its way into projects like wind farms and reforestation initiatives.

It might be better to avoid air travel altogether, but of course it’s unrealistic. I’m happy that the airline industry is promoting not only awareness of the issue in general, but a quantification of my own individual contribution. And I’m happy that they point me to one way of mitigating at least some of the damage.

It won’t save the world, but it’s better than nothing.

I was doing a little housekeeping the other day, and I found a packet of cream-colored, cotton fiber resume paper that I must have bought a long time ago. I remember painstakingly laying out my resume in MS Word and printing it on this high-quality stock, then tucking it into a matching envelope with a cover letter and dropping it in the mail.

More recently, I’ve sent soft copies (pdf or Word) of my resume via email, where the body of the email is the cover letter.

As a side note, maddeningly, I’ve had more than one company make me fill out a standard in-house form with essentially the same information as a bureaucratic hurdle, once I’ve actually been hired.

Now that I’m entertaining freelance opportunities again, I’ve had a few recruiters ask me for my resume, and perhaps because business is good right now, I found myself refusing. I haven’t assembled a formal resume in a while, so I told the recruiters to use my LinkeIn profile instead. The profile includes pretty much everything I’d put in a resume, along with a link to this blog. Plus, it’s up-to-date, so I think it’s more than sufficient.

Seth Godin said a while back that “if you’re remarkable, or amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.”

Instead, he suggests that some credible and compelling letters of recommendation, or an actual project that people can see or use, or a compelling and insightful blog - or a combination of these - is much better for evaluating a person’s strengths and aptitude for a job.

I won’t presume to call myself remarkable or amazing, much less spectacular, but I totally agree that if you want to position yourself as a good candidate for anything, then a resume is a pointless formality that needs to die.

After a mostly fun eighteen-month ride, I decided to leave Scout Labs. As part of the founding team, I played a big part in defining the initial vision for both the product and the company, and I got a profound education in startup life. I got to work with brilliant people, and I’m forever grateful for the experience.

I’m also a bit sad about leaving, because I still very much believe in the opportunity, but I know I made the right decision.

I left with no particular plans, not much of a cushion, and vague dreams of travel in foreign lands where the dollar still goes a long way. But I was out of work for all of about 30 minutes before a couple of big freelance projects fell into my lap.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past month, and I don’t plan on looking for anything permanent any time soon.

…and not just because my recent investment in oil futures depends on the price continuing to rise.

The sudden upsurge in the price of gas has been the top news story for the past few weeks, and there doesn’t seem to be any relief in sight. Oil is a finite resource, and as China, India and other developing nations have… well… developed, the worldwide demand for oil has shot up. As Americans turn to the government - and the three people campaigning to be the next president - for a solution, it seems amazing that no one saw this coming.

Of course the US leads the rest of the planet by a long shot when it comes to oil consumption, thanks to a combination of massive suburban sprawl, the popularity of gas-guzzling SUVs and a system of government subsidies that keeps our gasoline cheap compared to the rest of the world.

Progressives have lobbied the government for years to raise the mandatory average fuel-efficiency requirements of American cars, and the government’s response over the last eight of those years - especially from that bunch of oilmen in the executive branch - has been predictably dismissive.

The normal Republican philosophy regarding such things is to let the market take care of it. Keep the government out of it, they say. In an ideal world, I totally agree. The government is bloated and slow and bad at getting things done. In reality though, the problem with the Republican hands-off philosophy is that Republicans are totally disingenuous about it.

If the real price of gasoline was actually reflected at the pump, then people would stop using gasoline simply because they couldn’t afford it. People would stop buying gas-guzzling behemoths in favor of smaller cars. People who work in cities would stop moving into houses way out the suburbs, and people who already live in the suburbs would start carpooling or taking public transportation (if it’s even an option). That’s the market at work. We know the market would do its thing because it’s exactly what happened in the past when gas prices shot up for any length of time.

And it’s happening again. Even the modest rise we’ve seen over the past year or so - and it has been modest for Americans, no matter what it feels like - has sent a surge of riders to mass transit, according to this recent article in the New York Times. The difference this time is that given what’s happening with China, India and much of the rest of the developing world, oil prices aren’t likely to level off again… ever.

The bottom line here is that the Republican philosophy works. We just need the courage - yes, courage - to let the market actually do its thing.

Of course there’s another part of me - the part that loves to travel - that’s afraid to see what all this will do to air fares.

The big athletic footwear companies have built their marketing campaigns around aspirational themes and creating connections between regular sports hobbyists and elite athletes. If you work hard, if you show character and passion - the message goes - then you are like them.

I saw this clip from Nike today, and I think it does an especially good (and literal) job of putting the viewer in an athlete’s shoes…

Back in my agency life, clients were always asking us to create “viral” campaigns that would get the attention of the digital youth. Our inside joke was that there was a simple three part formula…

• Create a MySpace profile
• Enlist the Black Eyed Peas (they were especially hot at that time)
• Put some videos on YouTube

Then… POOF! it spreads like wildfire.

Now, reading the pitches from the current lot of would-be gurus, it seems things haven’t changed very much.

The basic pieces of a social marketing campaign today seem to be…

• Create a profile/group on MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/Jaiku
• Launch a blog advertising campaign
• Create a contest that has some viral hooks

This formula is attractive because none of these things necessarily requires much effort on the part of the company. It might get kudos from the Madison Avenue crowd and a few marketing pundits, impressed by your “revolutionary” foray into the frightening universe of social media, but the long term rewards from real people will be thin and fleeting unless you do a little more.

Give something good away.

I’m personally tired of the whole contest thing. Too many big companies think it’s good idea to create some kind of cheesy campaign where, for example, they entice people to make their own commercials for you or slog through a ridiculous scavenger hunt for the chance at a big prize. This doesn’t count as a giveaway because contests like this demand payment (manual labor and/or creativity) in exchange for nothing but a chance at a reward.

Instead, what I’m talking about is not all that different from the old concept of a loss-leader. You take a loss on something that will attract people to you, and then you try to deepen the relationship with those people and persuade them to (or simply hope they will) buy more stuff. What if Microsoft simply gave away the Xbox for free, knowing that such a move would push their console market share way past the PlayStation? Could the resulting increase in game sales make up for the cost of such a move?

I’m sure Microsoft has already run the numbers on this, so I won’t fantasize about getting a free Xbox, but there are plenty of giveaway ideas that cost almost nothing.

A lot of companies have quite a bit of capital in the form of information. Become the expert. Make your company’s blog the go-to source. Tell secrets. Teach people something cool or valuable. Enable. Entertain.