Louise McGregor Book of the Month, Book Review

Social Media is Bullshit

Social Media is Bullshit

BJ Mendelson

It’s rare that I find myself challenged by a book, agreeing with much of what it says and laughing out loud on my morning commute; this is that book.

BJ Mendelson’s stated audience is entrepreneurs and leaders of small business. Those who he sees as being victim to a deceptive social media industry. He has no beef with using social media for personal entertainment – but he points to a growing hype that if believed could be destructive to a company’s balance sheet.

For example, for a while the Dell story of making money from a twitter account used to sell discount items made headlines. The  magic number quoted was 3 million USD in revenue. Sounds like a lot of money – certainly more than in my account. But compared to all of Dell’s revenue in 2009 it was tiny, how tiny? Here’s a graph showing the revenue from twitter vs all the other revenue for Dell.
It turns out that the revenue via twitter is utterly dwarfed by the revenue from all other sources (61 billion USD). It was less than half of one percent of their total revenue. But Dell is a business so what did they get out of the social media? Mendelson points to a PR value; more than 13 million entries in Google’s search. (Note; a search for “Dell Twitter” now scores over 400 million search results).

Of course a large company can afford to try something in social media, and Dell has the klout in the business world and the advertising budget to make a success of their attempts. Which is Mendelson’s point; a lot of social media success stories are supported by large advertising budgets and the support of known brands. For a new brand or a small company social media probably isn’t the easy solution to marketing.

Mendelson is also pretty harsh on Facebook, pointing to its cloning or acquisition of ideas and its political activism against privacy restrictions (the book was written prior to PRISM). He argues that it’s redundant to build a Facebook fan base, since these people will visit your website anyway. Better to build a website with good content rather than to hope they’ll see your post in the 30 minutes it’s available in their timeline. If it even appears in their timeline, posts apparently only reach 16% of your fans.

There are of course good uses for social media by companies, Twitter has become a customer service channel for many companies. And Facebook is being used as a web platform for a number of cafes here in Amsterdam reasonably well. They do run the risk that the platform could disappear in the future, but for now it’s a free tool, free hosting to get a simple web presence out there. But it’s certainly not the solution to all marketing problems that some sell it as.

So what would good marketing look like? Start by making a good product,  make your product easy to use, get people behind your product via traditional media, improve your product using customer feedback. Not rocket science really.

I have said for a long time that you should use social media to achieve a business goal, and measure that goal; not fans or likes. Which is why there isn’t a simple play book for using social media.

Mendelsons’ book stands out as a refreshing, somewhat cynical take on the social media industry.

Louise McGregor Innovation

Deep Branding – on a washing machine

When you use certain combinations of buttons on your washing machine it plays a song, at least if your machine is made by Fisher & Paykel it does.

Fisher & Paykel is a New Zealand company, and that’s the New Zealand national anthem playing. (You might get a better idea of the tune when Hayley Westenra sings it)

Other companies have included a tune when the machine’s cycle is done but this an example of the company going a step beyond the company’s brand and the product’s function.  I think of these ‘surprises’ companies deliver as deep branding. Fisher & Paykel are obviously proud to be Kiwi.

 

Louise McGregor Intranet

Intranet Investment

I was listening to the UX podcast on Intranatverk, a conference held in Gothenberg they made a comment that struck me;

Intranets are like the poor younger brother; they get the least resources, the least research the least of everything and end up being years behind everything else.

(It’s at about 9.35 timestamp of the podcast).

It’s true; investment in intranets has been low compared to external sites, which is low compared to e-commerce sites. It makes sense, those e-commerce sites make money, they’re your company’s online revenue. In our company they have more traffic than non-transaction sites, which in turn have more traffic than intranet sites. Some years ago we encountered an intranet site with an average of six visits a day, it belonged to a department of 20 people, but I digress.

On the surface spending less on a site based on traffic makes sense, but not all visitors are created equal. When we start changing a site we often create personas, these are rough character sketches of visitor types complete with their reason for visiting. It’s pretty easy to see that the value of someone who has come to a site with the express intention of buying has more value than a random person who visited via clicking on a link by mistake.

But it’s a little more complex than that; for our corporate site we consider analysts and journalists as an important audience, even though it’s a small group, because they have a multiplyer effect. What they write and say about the company has a bigger impact – possibly even a direct impact on share price – than say, a university student research a project.

So what about intranets?

Traditionally intranets have been about publishing information; typically work policies and company news. Services were added; employees could now book meeting rooms, authorise invoice payments and request annual leave. Working tools were added; the infamous team sites of sharepoint, and later more collaborative tools.

Slowing intranets have moved from “read” to ” do”, and we’re starting to talk about “digital workplace” to mean the collection of tools that an employee finds within their company to enable them to work. So as it develops into a work tool employees using it to serve customers the intranet starts to show that “multiplyer effect”. It becomes business critical – without it customers cannot be served.

In theory it should start attracting greater investment, I think we’re starting to see this shift with many companies putting serious money into making their digital workplace something their employees can really use.

Image:  Cash Munny / CC BY-SA 2.0

Louise McGregor Buzzword

Drinking the Kool-Aid

When I first heard this expression I had never drunk Kool-Aid, I didn’t even know what it was, and I would have spelt it Coolade,

Kool-Aid is drink… and a wool dye. It does seem worrying that something you’d drink can also dye wool, but onion skins, beetroot and tea are also effective as dyes.

From the context I understood the phrase to mean “you’ve been brainwashed by corporate-speak, you shouldn’t believe everything you hear”.

Which is roughly correct. The origins of the term are more disturbing. It goes back to events in 1978 at a community known as Jonestown in Guyana (named after the founder Jim Jones; when people start naming stuff after themselves it should be a warning). The community was initially founded on socialist lines in the 1950s and known as the People’s Temple, but by 1978 had relocated to Guyana. When a US senator visited on a fact-finding mission and learned that some members of the community were unhappy, and wanted to return to America he offered to help anyone who wanted to leave.

By this time Jim Jones’ health had deteriorated, and he was paranoid about enemies from outside and from within the community. His security men attempted to stop those leaving, killing several people, including the senator at the nearby airport as they attempted to leave. He then induced more than 900 people to drink a poison-laden mixture, reported as kool-aid. This had been planned beforehand and was known by the Temple members as “revolutionary suicide”, it is now known as the “Jonestown Massacre”, and until 9/11 it was the single largest loss of US civilian lives apart from natural disasters.

The survivors returned to the US, and tried to build new lives. Fox News reported on some of their stories at the 30 year anniversary. It’s a litany of sorrow and guilt.

Somehow I don’t think I’ll be using this term.

Image; Fizzy Drink via Pixabay

Louise McGregor Digital, Editorial

Through the Prism

The US government has being spying on our online activities. That comes as no surprise, we’ve all seen the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (FISA), but what is surprising is that it now appears some companies including Facebook and Google have been allowing the National Security Authority (NSA) of the US government direct access to their data via something called Prism.

Facebook, Google, and now Yahoo have issued public statements stating that they are not working with NSA, but complying with legal requests. In an Orwellian twist the FISA prevents any discussion of any requests made under the act, including whether such requests exist.

Facebook and Google both use the phrase “no direct access to our servers”, which is not the same as “NSA doesn’t get our data”, which they can’t say because (a) they can’t discuss anything around an FISA request and (b) they are obliged to pass on data within legal constraints.

The New York Times article talks about some of the technical changes that have been discussed;

one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said.

Which makes it sound like a technical solution developed to comply with a legal requirement, and certainly far less scary than the “direct access to servers” statement that raised concerns.

Mashable takes a similar view, calling Prism a “data integration API” which the NSA would need to analyse and use the data released. Mashable also suggests that the term “direct access” is used incorrectly in the original slide deck, for the simple reason that it’s difficult – which means expensive – to do.

In many articles these technical solutions, and the fact that the servers to host them belong to the companies are cited as evidence that the companies are somehow collaborating with the NSA making it easy for them to get the data. I suspect it’s the other way around; The companies are building these solutions to make it easy for themselves to comply with the law.

So possibly, probably Facebook et al have been acting legally; but perhaps that’s the scary part.

The underlying laws, the Patriot Act and the FISA, raised concerns when they were passed, with cities opting out of the Patriot act, but now that the connection, and the scale of data requested/shared the concern level has gone up a notch. With commentators raising real concerns about the collection, use and safeguarding of personal data in an increasingly monitored nation. As the Guardian revealed the source of the leaked information as Edward Snowdon yesterday they also published his motives; safeguarding internet freedom.

Cyber security is a real issue, and it needs addressing. The global nature of the internet, and the huge potential unleashed by analysis of big data, make the online world a source of genuine crime-stopping information. But the right to privacy is upheld in the laws and constitutions of many countries and it is being eroded.

It would be easy to dismiss that as an “American problem” but it specifically targets foreigners, and our own governments show worrying tendencies to trample over privacy rights online including the Dutch proposal to give police the right to hack as a cybercrime prevention measure. Despite playing up their “Digital Agenda” in recent months the EU has been strangely silent.

.
Image; spying

Louise McGregor Buzzword

Showrooming

This is a function of the rise of online shopping, and refers to people selecting an item to buy in a shop, but making the purchase later online.

It’s interesting that this pattern has evolved in the early days of online shopping there was a pattern in the other direction; to research a purchase online, but make the purchase in store. Perhaps as online stores have become more trusted and distribution has become more reliable customers have taken the opportunity to make price comparisons online.

I’m guilty of showrooming and I didn’t even know what it was.

HBR this week came up with four strategies to overcome showrooming, including offering in-store discounts or making sure your product mix includes items where in store purchase is intrinsically better – buying high-fashion clothes for example.

Alternatively provide a great in-store experience and a wow website and then worry less about where people buy – as long as it’s from you.

Image; showroom

Louise McGregor Lessons from Science

Lessons from Science – Metabolic Pathways

As part of a course on system management and process design we had to read the book “The Goal” by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt. I found it easy; not just because Goldratt does a terrific job of explaining the concepts, and not just because it’s presented as a novel.  The concepts are familiar, they map to similar concepts in metabolic pathways.

Metabolic pathways are a series of chemical reactions that occur within a cell, examples include photosynthesis, glycolysis (the breakdown of glucose to release energy) or the Citric Acid Cycle (the energy producing pathway used by all aerobic cells, shown above).

Essentially a set of processes in a certain order convert a set of chemicals or metabolites into something else, with either a release or absorbtion of energy. It’s a lot like a business or manufacturing process, except that it’s generally energy absorbed.

Bottle Necks

In talking about process design the concept of a bottle neck came up, this refers to any step in a process that takes a long time, and slows the whole overall process. If you’re looking at improving a process this is a good place to start. Sometimes adding more equipment or resources can remove the bottleneck, sometimes a better solution is to move the bottle neck in the process. Many years ago I was overseeing the assessing of residence applications and it turned out that doing the qualification checks first (the bottleneck) made the overall process faster since we could begin working on whichever case had cleared that step.

In biochemical terms this is usually called a “rate limiting step”, and exactly the same thing happens, the total time of the whole process is dictated by the rate limiting step. Adding more metabolites (resources) or increasing the concentration of the enzyme can increase the overall rate, but these are not easy steps for an organism to take.

Catalysts

The rate of chemical reactions can be altered by adding catalysts, or in biochemical reactions enzymes.

In project terms this could be the endorsement by upper management, which suddenly removes a number of obstacles and releases resources in support of the project.

I don’t want to stretch an analogy too far, but a concept developed to understand one area can easily be applied to another. It certainly made the process design concepts easier for me to learn – although I did get some flashbacks of memorising the complex pathways that keep organisms working. Far more complex than any business process I’ve encountered so far.

images; chemistry

Citric acid diagram found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Citric_acid_cycle_with_aconitate_2.svg / CC BY-SA 3.0