Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
No Leeway For Lacy?
It’s been written about (and Twittered, Meebo’d and whateverelsed about) ad nauseum, so it’s almost not worth discussing further, but there’s something kind of disturbing about the kerfuffle around Sarah Lacy’s keynote interview with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg at the SXSW Interactive conference.
By various accounts, Lacy was described as unprepared and uninteresting. By other accounts she was described as “flirty” and “fawning.” As we’ve all seen before, the boys’ club mentality of the tech blogosphere can spiral out of control – let’s hope that’s not why Sarah Lacy was getting skewered all last week by the technorazzi. Clearly Lacy has a conversational interviewing style that is a bit outside the norm, but obviously it’s served her well – she’s been a reporter at BusinessWeek since her early 20s and has signed a six-figure book deal. Also, let’s not forget that Zuckerberg is a notoriously tight-lipped interview and that counts for a lot.
Maybe Lacy did do a bad job – though it’s tough to see how a BusinessWeek reporter would be that unprepared for an interview with perhaps Silicon Valley’s most famous CEO – but it would still serve everyone’s best interest to keep gender and stereotyping out of the discussion.
LaunchSquad Interview: FreshBooks CEO/Co-Founder Mike McDerment
Freshbooks is one of the coolest things to come out of Toronto since Rush, and it probably helps a lot more people make money than Rush ever did. In this interview, Freshbooks’ CEO and co-founder Mike McDerment talks about how his company transformed small businesses in the last couple of years, and where the company’s going.
Democratizing Restaurant Reservations
It’s only got 12 seats at a bar and the chefs are also your waiters, but Momofuku Ko, a new restaurant that opened last week in New York, is THE hottest restaurant in town. So you would expect to see those few highly desired seats taken by the Olsen twins, Tom and Giselle, the Beckhams and probably a few hedge fund managers, but this restaurant has approached the sometimes shady process of reservations in an new way.
Owner David Chang has established an online-only reservation policy through his new reservation site that gives a hipster in Williamsburg the same chance of getting a couple of seats at the bar as Mayor Bloomberg. Chang has democratized how people get reservations. While most restaurants of this caliber have reservationists that hold the power to grant (or not grant) tables, Momofuku Ko has tapped the internet to level the playing field.
Even the editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine, Ruth Reichl, who raved about the divinity of the restaurant’s fare, was told by Chang at her meal at Momofuku Ko, “No phones, no favorites, no exceptions. Online only. I mean it.”
We often hear about how the web is democratizing so many traditionally undemocratic institutions such as software and education, and Momofuku Ko has added restaurant reservations to that list. The seats will fill, that’s not an issue, but how to fill those seats and who to fill them with is a big decision for any restaurant owner. David Chang has taken an innovative approach to the “how” question. As for “who?” He doesn’t know, and doesn’t seem to care, just be sure to be online at 10 a.m. sharp!
Lara From LaunchSquad On The Today Show This Morning
Some days, it seems that I can’t escape the clutches of the Wojcicki family. In 1993, Esther Wojcicki, better known as Woj to her students, became my high school journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School, permanently molding me as a writer. When I visited her a five years later, she informed me that two Stanford students had started a company, Google, in her daughter Susan’s Menlo Park, California garage. Five years later, I became Esther Wojcicki’s student-teacher, and she let me student-teach her journalism and English classes, which were my fondest memories of my years in public education.
Tomorrow, Anne Wojcicki’s company 23andme is being profiled on the Today Show, and our own Lara was interviewed for the segment. Two weeks ago, the Today show production crew came into LaunchSquad’s San Francisco office for a surprisingly easy interview.
“It was relaxing and professional; it was really not a ’showy’ type of situation. The producer came in with the camera-guy, and they were just regular people, and you could tell they were really professional by how easy it was,” Lara said. The Today Show spent two hours just filming Lara’s gene journal and another two hours interviewing her. That’s over three hours of shoot time, which will be edited down to a five minute segment. The producer told her that usually turn it around the next day.
The field producer, used to working with slightly nervous interview subjects, worked with Lara a bit to soften her up.
“He could tell I was a little nervous, so he was asking other questions that had nothing to do with the subject matter - ‘What do you do at LaunchSquad?’ - that kind of thing. After about ten minutes I forgot there was even a camera there.”
At first, Lara was a little nervous about sharing her experience; 23andme cautions clients not to share their results with anyone.
“I opened the [privacy] door by blogging about it,” she said. “But, it’s an emerging tech company, and we work with emerging tech companies.”
Some of the 23andme subjects were a little blasé about their experiences.
“Everyone he spoke to was unimpressed, saying things like ‘It was cool and fun, but I didn’t understand most of it anyway.’ The interesting thing about 23andme is that in 5 years they’re going to have a larger sample size of what they’ve genotyped, and as time goes on, the gene journal will be more meaningful because they have a larger sample size.”
23andme’s gene journal has increased from 16 to 50 types in the last two months alone.
“They’re obviously doing more research,” Lara said. “The most interesting thing is what’s going to happen in the future, in five or ten years.”
Score another one for Woj.
The episode airs at 7 a.m. on your local NBC affiliate.
Geni: Family Trees Made Fairly Easy
Normally I turn down invites from new social networks; Bebo? No thanks. LinkedIn? I’m starting to use it less and less. Bandmix? Man, if I could get my ten bucks back, I would. What a stinker that one was.
So, when my wife’s Uncle DeeDee created a profile for me on the genealogy website Geni, I was a little sketched out. Geni is a social network of sorts; it’s a place where families can go and make up their family trees. Since the family tree was already made up (and I was neatly placed in the middle of 463 members), I figured I should do my part and update it. I was really surprised at how simple it was - it took under 10 minutes to update it, and, I’ve got to say, it was a cinch. And it looks pretty good.
Yes, you read that right. It’s not all that tough. In fact, I think it’s the closest my fifty-something mom and fifty-something uncle have come to social networking. My mom has spent at least three or four hours on the site, making trees, updating profiles, and inviting relatives. I noticed that a great-uncle of mine was missing, so I added him to the tree in about 15 seconds.
That’s the thing with Geni:it all starts with one person. My uncle DeeDee invited my wife, who, in turn, invited my mom and I. Two months and 463 relatives later, and this is starting to look pretty cool, and pretty coherent.
My mom has always had a yen for genealogy - one of her cousins wrote a incredibly thorough book about 22 years ago tracing our ancestry back to a small Russian village in the 1880s. I think it’s pretty cool that this site gives her the ability to put it all in a coherent format (and one that’s easy to email or print out for non computer-savvy folks).
Cool features include the Family Birthdays feature (it sort of looks like the Facebook birthdays feature) and the privacy feature, which, in some senses, mimics the privacy settings of more sophisticated social networks, in that it allows “layers” of privacy. For example, you can make it so the public, searching the Geni site, can see your name and location, but not your photo. It even has a “hide age” feature.
The key (obvious) disadvantage of Geni is that the deceased cannot update their own profiles, and even though Geni seems to be based around the family tree, once you drill down, it all comes down to the profile. There’s also a slightly disconcerting feature that allows any family member to update any feature of the deceased’s profile (i.e. favorite food, quotes, etc.). While it may be plausible to update a deceased ancestor’s occupation or upload a photo, it seems a bit strange to me that you could, say, denote that your Uncle Schmuel’s favorite food was gribines.
The single biggest concern about Geni is the business model. Although over 10 million profiles exist on the site, the company is not earning revenue at present. About a year ago, they alluded to charging for a premium service. Whatever happens, I hope the data stays put, because my mom will be really ticked off if somebody futzes with her family tree.
If ‘08 Is The Year Of The Crowd, What Does That Mean For Marketing?
Some people are predicting that 2008 will be The Year of The Crowd. In a story last month, Karlene Lukowitz from MediaPost predicted that “Crowd” would be the word of the year. Lukowitz says, “Business people love buzzwords, and none will be buzzing more than terms paired with Crowd. She says “get ready for Crowdsourcing, Crowdstorming, Crowdbursting and who knows what else.”
The Year of The Crowd hails from the term Crowdsourcing. Jeff Howe first coined the term in a June 2006 Wired Magazine article.
Mountain Dew’s latest campaign is a great example of Crowdsourcing. In November of 2007, the interactive game Dewmocracy was launched, in which users vote to determine the can graphics, color and flavor of a new Mountain Dew product to launch in 2008.
Dewmocracy (officially written by PepsiCo as DEWmocracy) is a combination of the words Dew (a nickname for Mountain Dew) and democracy. It is an interactive game on its own domain that encourages users to vote for the next flavor of Mountain Dew that will make its debut on shelves in 2008. The game features a live-action short film and 3-dimensional characters. As the player goes through the game, users will help pick every feature of a new Mountain Dew, including can graphics, color, and flavor, from five choices for each aspect.
Mountain Dew and Pepsi aren’t only using this Crowdsourcing project to engage their loyal customers in designing their next product. They are also using this as an opportunity to market the new product between now and when it is released. They are betting on the fact that the consumers that come to Dewmocracy are loyal Mountain Dew customers, or brand evangelists. They are hoping ultimately that these brand evangelists will help spread the word about the new “Dew”. Word of Mouth Marketing has proven to be one of the most effective ways to market a new product, and to build buzz.
Paul Gillin, a social media consultant and author summed up brand evangelists best in a recent article in BtoB Magazine by saying,” Customers are a low-cost and high-powered extension of your marketing team. Their words carry more credibility than any ad or promotion you produce. Thanks to the new wave of online publishing tools, they have unprecedented potential to spread the word about your brand and seed the market with their spontaneous enthusiasm.”
But Mountain Dew isn’t the only company that is using the concept of the crowd for its marketing needs. Some large companies are using “Mob Wisdom”, or the “Wisdom of the Collective” to gain unique insights from customers.
Companies are realizing that if they could listen to all of the conversations customers were having around their products, their services, and their brand online, that they could then take that marketing insight and change their business for the better.
So, 2008 isn’t only the year of the crowd. It may also be the year of the online customer community. In its predictions for 2008, Forrester projects that at least one-quarter of Fortune 100 companies will launch online customer communities this year in order to create higher levels of engagement with their customers and prospects.
Companies are listening to customer conversations by tapping into the interactions between customers in online communities, and social networks. However some companies are only having basic customer communities built on their sites, or developing simple networks or groups for social networking sites. This creates added customer engagement between customers. But an online community on a company website can also be used to increase levels of engagement between customers and the company itself.
This happens by taking those online conversations, and using analytics to really see, monitor, and track what customers concerns, wants and needs are. Then, you are effectively using the crowd to help shape your company.
This type of Crowd Marketing has been described as many things so far. In a Chicago Tribune article from November entitled” You Talk, They hear on the Web,” Deborah Schultz called this emerging social practice Conversational Marketing.. Schultz consults on Social Media Strategies for Proctor & Gamble.
One of LaunchSquad’s clients is now using this Wisdom of the Collective to help provide companies with unique marketing information about their customers. Networked Insights allows companies to listen to conversations around a brand and tap into these interactions. This provides companies with actionable data they can then use strategically.
Networked Insights is currently working with The Guild and (The ArtfulHome.com), a marketplace for artists and collectors.
The Guild has been using Networked Insights for a little over three months and has completely shifted how they are strategizing in 2008 due to insights gained directly from their customers. The Guild realized that their customers were primarily buying products with interior design in mind. They were not aware of the scope and importance of interior design, and have now shifted their business priorities in the upcoming year.
Paul Gillin summed up this new type of marketing quite well by saying in a recent piece, “Your best product and marketing consultants may be out there right now, for free, waiting to help you. All you need to do is let them.”
Networked Insights and the Guild are a perfect example of this savvy interaction. What a way to start off the Year of the Crowd.
How to See Graffiti Art While you Type
As seriously as I now lust over landing a good story with a great writer, my younger incarnation hankered after rambunctious, spray-can toting skateboarders. Among them, street artists loomed large, becoming minor celebrities and giving all us all something exciting to look out for on our daily commutes through New York City.
While I was perusing the Wired blog this month, I came across The Decapitator, a street artist whose signature tag is removing heads from street signs and replacing them with boney, bloody stumps. If you haven’t seen these awesome images, you should definitely check them out.
The post got me researching graffiti artists last weekend and I found that there is an amazing selection of sites showcasing works from celebrity taggers like Neckface, as well as sites that highlight local heroes like the Ukranian Fat 315 crew.
While I do not advocate the destruction of public property, I do like how these online street art depositories connect a shared scene over international boundaries in real time — and I am intrigued how the sites have propelled those who were once seen as rambunctious skater kids into international icons. Perhaps the best example of this is the London street artist Banksy, who become an sensation when in February of last year took home £102,000 for a piece he sold at Sotheby’s.
Would I have any idea who the Fat 315 crew if it wasn’t for the web? The answer is no. But at Wooster Collective or Streetsy, I could sort by name and location. If you are interested, you can pull up a list of celebrity street artists on Wikipedia and start street art hunting online.
