Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The Economist: Among the Audience (redux)

Cluetrain co-author David Weinberger says he thinks of ‘user-generated content’ as ’us-generated content‘. I like.

David also links to the Economist article, Among the audience, which Tomi mentions below. Great quotation re Barry Diller:

"What an ignoramus!” says Jerry Michalski, with some exasperation. He advises companies on the uses of new media tools. “Look around and there’s tons of great stuff from rank amateurs,” he says. “Diller is assuming that there’s a finite amount of talent and that he can corner it. He’s completely wrong.” Not everything in the “blogosphere” is poetry, not every audio “podcast” is a symphony, not every video “vlog” would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia, the free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers, radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The Economist: Among the Audience

This week’s Economist (April 22, 2006 issue date) has an excellent 16 page special report on new media, called Among the Audience. It covers much similar ground as we did in our book, Communities Dominate Brands, such as having two pages on blogging (we did a chapter) or including the Ohmy News case like we did as a case study, etc.

The story is a particularly good read for anyone involved in the “content side” of old media. It helps explain the roles of blogging, wikis, and user-generated content. I think for covering new media, it does leave the real innovations - user sharing, engagement, and the role of advertising/marketing in that space - at too little coverage, but it perhaps was not the purpose. Certainly the Economist article is well researched and covers many of the new media phenomena such as pointing out that podcasting is not quite the same to radio, as blogging is to print media; for one thing podcasts cannot be delivered in real time (you cannot cover breaking stories efficiently with podcasts) - so podcasts are more time-shifting media; and unlike blogs, you can’t link from one podcast to another.

For anyone who reads our blog, I urge buying this week’s Economist and reading that special report. It is definitely worth reading!

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Wikis at work

David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, offers this remark about how we may be learning from Wikipedia:

What are our students learning from the success of Wikipedia? We hope they’re learning that they can’t be passive recipients of knowledge. But they’re also learning that authority doesn’t come only through chains of credentials; that we can get on the same page about what we know; that knowing involves be willing to back away from your beliefs at times; that knowledge is a social product, or at least heavily socially contextualized; that the willingness to admit fallibility is a greater indicator of truth than speaking in a confident tone of voice; that knowledge lives in conversation, not in the heads of experts; that certain people who do not need to be named are just impossible.

Yes, David’s comment was directly aimed at students, but anyone who has even the most minimal experience using Wikipedia can probably relate to some of the sentiments he relates. Now ask yourself: Could I, or anyone in my company, or my customers, benefit from moving that experience from the personal to the business realm?

You may not think so, but even the most basic office functions could benefit from wikis. Too much dynamic content is locked up in static formats. Even if you only grow by a few heads a year, how much sense does it make to keep a staff phone list in an Excel spreadsheet? And I bet there’s a lot of information floating around your company, and that everyone has some of it, but no one has access to all of it.

Are you using wikis at work? If so, how? The applications are endless, but I’m interested to hear how you may be using them.

The "fuzzy front end" of innovation?

Neil McIntosh, the innovation guy (or one of a few, from what I can see) at the Guardian and all around good egg, writes about the concept of the “fuzzy front end” of innovation and product development, which he’s encountered during the tail end stages of his MBA.

Put simply, it’s the theory that, during development of a new product, the time to rush is not at the end (during “crunch mode") but right at the start. Yep - the time to really put the foot down, the time when hurrying up is going to have maximum impact and save the most money, is right at the point you’re sucking on your pipe, metaphorical or otherwise, and saying: “maybe we should do.... this”.

Smith and Reinersten, the two guys who came up with the theory, have this to say:

“In fact, the true cost of this phase is usually many times higher than managers suspect. In this phase the most important influence on cost is the cost of delay, not of the manpower assigned to the project. The calculated cost is often 500 to 5000 times higher than the visible costs of the assigned personnel. Managers unaware of these costs will tend to ignore the ‘fuzzy front end’. Those who understand these costs will instead focus a great deal of attention on this phase.

[...]

The front end offers some of the cheapest opportunities to cut development time that are to be found anywhere in the cycle."

And now, as I am with anyone who says they’ve got the metrics all figured out, I am desperate to see how Smith and Reinersten calculated this. 

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Relating to the public - what a novel concept!

But what happens if big company brands realize that they no longer need a media middleman to connect with consumers?

So asks Scott Karp, only three+ years or so after Adriana Cronin-Lukas actively started taking that question direct to the big brands. Of course it’s a matter of when, not if.

Link via Dave Winer, who has his own reaction.