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You Make Big Happen.

    Archive for April, 2008

    Since the last customer highlight was so popular and since Nike’s newest online community went live yesterday, I thought I’d share some of the kick-butt things that they’re doing. They are an unbelievably creative company that spends a huge amount of time engaging with their customers. Loic had already interviewed Michael Tchao (first video). I got a chance to do the same with Roberto Tagliabue (who also provided videos about how Nike puts on events for their community’s “super users” as well as a commercial they made highlighting their top community member).

    You guys sell apparel, what does an online community have to do with that?

    For Nike, you are no longer just buying a sneaker. You are joining the largest global running club. We offer you shoes and apparel that helps you run longer and faster. This is our “hardware.” We now offer you cool “software”: ways to track your progress, tools to find people to challenge. We want to keep you active and motivated.

    You started this road by focusing on one product–Nike+ Running. Why that product and what have you learned so far?

    We noticed that something interesting was happening in the world of running: more and more people were running with music and a good majority were running with an iPod. We thought that we could add a little extra that could enrich the experience of running. So we made a sensor that tucks into the shoe. We worked with Apple to have the sensor talk to your iPod and reveal your running data while you are listening to music. The big learning? Enrich an existing behavior and make it simpler: press a button and start running. We will do the rest. Do not disrupt something very basic and liberating like going for a run with tons of complex features.

    Video: Nike’s event with their online community “super users”

    But lots of folks wonder what the tangible business value is, what’s Nike’s experience so far?

    As of February, 2008, Nike+ members have run over 50,000,000 miles, logged over 14,000,000 runs and issued over 450,000 challenges. We created the world’s largest running club at nikeplus.com. 40% of community members who didn’t own Nike+ ended up buying. That is pretty tangible.

    What happened that you didn’t expect?

    The desire of runners to find other runners happened very fast and was unexpected. Since day one, runners were using ‘creatively’ different functionalities of the site to accomplish this. Like the Mapit application. It allows you to trace your runs and to visualize your progress. A lot of runners took it in a different way. They were looking at public runs posted in their neighborhood in order to meet other runners and run together. Same happened online. It was meant to be a place for people to talk and to help each other solve technical problems with their nikeplus products or with their iPods. We found that the most active section was and still is the one about organizing runs and challenges: Men vs Women, College X vs College Y, etc.

    Commercial featuring Nike’s top community member

    What have you learned about your customers you didn’t know before?

    We are there listening continuously to our users and keeping the “party” alive. As in real life people tend to aggregate where there is a fun party going on with a lot of people and energy. NikePlus is a fun party with tons of people, but there is more. Now the users can ask to have more or change things when they are bored and we (Nike) can answer right away. It is an everyday learning when you have a product/service that allows you to communicate in both directions.

    Where does Nike want to learn next?

    We just launched a cool new product for all the people that don’t like or don’t want to run with music: Nike+ SportBand. It tracks your distance, calories burned and other performance information and it is your key to access the NikePlus application and community. It is an even simpler concept… Just run. We do all the rest like calculating your distance, calories and time.

    How has this changed your conversations internally at Nike?

    NikePlus made us learn a lot and change a lot. The overall direction in digital shifted. It is less about Nike and more about you, the athlete. Now the user is at the center and Nike is there to serve experiences to better them. We simply enabled what was not possible or very difficult before. Now you have the tools to challenge a friend and to see who is really the fastest. Now you can connect with other runners like you and see how they run, how long and how fast.

    How might you imagine influencing internal collaboration now that you’ve created powerful external communities?

    We are using a similar tool to enable our digital producer around the world to publish, comment and share content faster before they go live.

    The big IT vendors aren’t taking social software seriously. They can’t. Not even if they wanted to. They’re wedded to a massive install base and business model based on extremely profitable file-based applications. There’s no easy way out. This very thing happened ten years ago to the photography market. That’s why the ten-year stock prices below could very well be a glimpse into their future. Sounds extreme but I imagine the same was true in the late 90s when folks said that digital photography could upturn everything.

    Once upon a film

    Kodak had a monopoly on the film business for decades. But at the end of the 1990s, consumers finally got the chance to use something they loved: Pain-free (digital) photography. It made photography accessible, fun, and immediate. No more trips to the store for film. No more waiting to see if you got the shot. No more expensive processing and film. This huge demand made it’s way into commercial business as well. Sound familiar?

    No longer relevant

    Kodak dominated the imaging market for decades but their entire DNA was about film. I happen to know first hand that the company didn’t take digital seriously for a long, long time. In 2003, I had meetings with film and digital people. All of us would be in the same room and the digital people were always shoo-ed like buzzing flies. That’s even after their CEO had vowed they’d become a leader in the digital space (late in the game). I’ll spare you the details of those meetings but suffice it to say, back then it was obvious they didn’t have the people or culture to stop the digital strangling.

    Radical change needed

    I’m not trying to say Microsoft will go the way of Kodak (or even Polaroid). I mean, IBM is still around and they used to rule the PC roost. Transformations happen. Apple did it. Dell’s trying to. But typically this sort of transformation is rare, expensive and born from innovation. Not something Redmond is known for. Making fundamental change requires companies to overhaul everything they do–from planning to manufacturing to marketing. It’s something Microsoft will have to do to enter into the consumer advertising market, let alone deal with their massive document dumps vs the people-centric social software movement.

    The next enterprise software leaders

    Canon used to be fax machines, printers and copiers. They were able to reinvent and capitalize on the digital imaging market and flip flop leadership with Kodak. Kodak is still a player but now there’s a wholly new set of competitors. The same thing will happen for enterprise software. Sure Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle will be around but there will be room, for the first time in decades, for new players to capitalize on the massive demand and emerge as leaders in a wholly shifted playing field.

    For those not in the Twitter stream, a week ago I broke my foot in three places. Last weekend, I Twittered about it and joked about getting my wheelchair sponsored for Web 2.0 Expo, which started today. Within seconds, Zivity raised their hand, which shocked me. Potentially too racy for a Jive sponsorship, they were immediately followed by the kind folks at Capgemini and FG Squared, who told me they’d happily do it. I mocked a goofy picture up and showed them what it would look like. I wanted to bring the Enterprise Octopus to life and hand out stickers of her (it’s a she). Both companies were really supportive of this wacky idea, and low-and-behold one week before the conference, I’m a rolling booth for “people-focused” work.

    Unpacking the Octopus

    Assembly…and more tomorrow

    So tomorrow we’ll assemble this sucker and cruise to Moscone. I have some super kick-butt Enterprise Octopus stickers. Want one? You’ll need to say “hi.” I’ll also have a video camera so I can interview those who aren’t shy. I’d love any pics that people take of this nutty thing so I can post a follow up blog post on it. So please send any you care to share.

    Or heck, even Twitter for that matter? In the meantime, a little cottage industry of Twitter-focused services has sprung up. Noticeably absent is Google. I can’t tell if that’s some sort of Jaiku-in-the-waiting move, or no move at all. Perhaps they’re waiting for someone else to get it right so they can buy them. No doubt, getting Twitter search right is probably harder than it seems. Most of the sites I’ve found are pretty sloppy.

    Frankly, I don’t use many of these since all these Twitter pieces are too fragmented and formative for me to remember to bother.

    Still, here’s a quick review of the stuff I’ve tried lately:

    Summize

    By far my favorite search, Summize replaced the now-defunct Terraminds as my #1 Twitter searching buddy.

    All my RSS Twitter searches are driven from Summize. It’s even got some other nifty features like showing threaded conversations, trending topics (memes), “nifty queries,” multilingual support, and an easy way to tweet your search results. I also love that Summize doesn’t use the word “Tweet” in it’s product name. It’s why I can’t remember most of these, they sounds exactly the same.

    Outside of my iPhone client, Summize is by far the best Twitter search/stats app on the market.

    Tweetscan

    I do give serious credit to my old Twitter search engine, Tweetscan, for flaunting their eco-friendly toilet advertisement on their homepage but other than that, they lost me.

    The site needs some UI love. The colors remind me of the 1990s Mint and Teal craze, which makes me want to shower. Upon closer look they display popular searches and upon looking again, I found the toilet even nicer than the first time I saw it. I mean, it’s pink and ecofriendly.

    That’s one kick ass toilet. I might return now that I found that.

    Quotably

    I had high hopes for Quotably. It’s supposed to help you follow Twitter conversations but I find that it doesn’t work any more practically than Twhirl, which I use for my desktop client. There’s no doubt that following conversations on Twitter can be very hard but the results in Quotably are mostly inaccurate and don’t lend themselves to being any more practical than searching for your replies and using your memory.

    I guess if you have no memory, Quotably could be ok for you. I’ve typed, “where are my keys” a few times in it’s search box but it didn’t help me remember where I put them. And there’s still no way for me to put an RSS feed on my keys as much as my wife would like to engineer one.

    Tweetstats

    I wish I had a need to use Tweetstats site more. It sure is purty. Friendly, too. And it makes some interesting graphs. How can you not like a site that says, “There be faeries” while you’re waiting for the results? And I believe that it’s powered by creatures, so don’t tell me it’s a lie.

    Most of the graphs I find novel more than useful. Who cares which hours I’m most active? What am I supposed to do with that, amp up my activity between 4am-6am? I do like the graph that shows who I talk to the most. It’s the only one I find interesting.

    I recently discovered that there’s a “tweetclouds” button at the top which shows you a not-as-pretty but still interesting rendering of your activity.

    Tweetclouds

    Anyone who reads this blog knows I’d like the Tweetclouds service. I was cut and pasting to create clouds before this thing came along.

    I’ve noticed that they’ve fixed a lot of their instability problems (no one could get on the site for a white) and that they’ve added some of the Many Eyes features like two-word clouds as well as nifty things like “@” suppression.

    I’m not sure why no one is yet doing trend-clouds. I want to see a living cloud over time. Imagine time lapse clouds which show if one word is growing or shrinking. I want to see the patterns. And I want to be able to have it as a living thing on my blog.

    iTweet

    While I’m naming off Twitter services, I might as well include a phone client. I’ve played a heck of a lot of iPhone clients and iTweet is my current favorite (with Hahlo a close second).

    All that said, I still hate tweeting on my iPhone. The EDGE network is slow and typing is a pain. And all the Twitter clients on the iPhone fail to be able to page ahead on your timeline (supposedly that’s a Twitter API problem and not a phone problem).

    I like iTweet’s way oversized buttons and easy menus. I have massive paws so having big targets makes me a happy boy.

    As an aside, I recently learned from Shel Israel that he and I have both nearly totaled our cars while tweet-n-driving.

    Update

    Ironically, this article about Google working on social search hit Techmeme today.

    It still bewilders me that Ad Agencies and PR Agencies remain separate, broken entities. If markets are conversations then why do communications organizations continue to avoid them? It starts with the Agency’s clients who don’t demand this singularity of their agencies. Marketing execs go shopping for the pieces. They look for a PR agency or an Ad Agency. Budgets are allocated based on this separation. Companies staff their teams with PR people and Marcom people. And Agencies match this staffing with specialists to match that demand. This cycle perpetuates; rinse and repeat.

    Fragmented, complex, and blind

    As an exteme example, I used to run the global Microsoft Office business at an Ad Agency and no one (on either side) was more guilty than we were. Our assignment was to convince the market through brute force that their version of Office wasn’t good enough. It took us 18 months to create a single (horrible) ad campaign. We’d talk to their PR agency maybe twice a year. We had no idea what they were doing and they really didn’t care what we did either. Our joint meetings were focused on making sure we didn’t step on each other’s feet so we could continue to do what we wanted. Even within my Agency, the media, creative, production, direct marketing and “interactive” people were completely isolated and distinct. As long as everything looked the same and was blasted to the street at the right time, we were fine.

    Marketing disciplines are out of date

    Go click through some agency’s websites. They’re still siloed into various mass-media disciplines and I can tell you after having sat though hundreds of pitches and working with over 20 agencies that they’re all still filled with prima donna specialists who think the best ideas come from them. Integration means checking the various boxes and repurposing the same idea across channels.

    Time for a media cage match

    In 1993, the UFC brought together fighters across all disciplines and pit them against each other in an attempt to determine which system would be more effective in a real, unregulated, combat situation. Since then, it’s become the most rapid growing sport in history and created a whole new, singular discipline called “mixed martial arts.” That’s exactly what needs to happen across Advertising and PR Agencies.

    Mixed Martial Media will kick ass

    The new communication companies will nuke all that specialization and reorganize. Here’s what they need to do:

    • Enable, facilitate and participate in communities. Stop pretending and really learn about consumers.
    • Focus on quality content instead of ads. Repeat: Stop making ads.
    • Share creative talent with the community. You don’t own the ideas.
    • Blow up the funnel and concentrate on unique steps that graduate along the way.
    • Participate, be open and visible.
    • Concentrate on the connected. Change your metrics to reflect it.
    • Results will occur daily or you’re not doing it right