Being Peter Kim

Now's the time, the time is now

Today is my last day at Forrester Research.

On Monday, I'll officially be joining Jeffrey Dachis to build a new company focused on enterprise social computing.  You may have heard about this venture a few months ago.

Why am I leaving?  Because I believe this new company offers both professional and personal growth opportunities.  I've learned a lot at Forrester over the past 2.5 years about effective writing and public speaking/presenting; along the way, I've won internal "Best Research" and "Top Keynote" awards.  And there are other skills I've acquired elsewhere that will now be put back into play, e.g. strategy formulation, project management, technology development, and budget/staff management.  Now I'll refine and develop new skills like business development and entrepreneurship.

Things are going pretty well for me at Forrester. George Colony is one of the smartest CEO's I've worked for.  At Forrester, an analyst can reinvent her/himself and stay refreshed, challenged, and engaged.  So now, sitting near the top of my 2nd career development S-curve at Forrester is a great time to contemplate both internal and external directions - from a position of strength, affording time for patience, introspection, and due diligence.

That contemplation has led me to my decision to ramble on.  My work experience includes a lot of companies you may recognize:  General Electric, Prudential Securities, Deloitte & Touche, Arthur Andersen, Coopers & Lybrand, Andersen Consulting, Fidelity Investments, Razorfish, PUMA AG, Stride Rite/Keds, and Forrester Research.  So why join a company that has yet to be named, without decades of brand history?

Because I believe the market opportunity is huge.  And we get to build this one exactly how we want.

At a macro-level, businesses must adapt to a new world of work.  As digital-born natives enter the workforce and all consumers assimilate new digital behaviors, organizations have no choice but to evolve from their legacy operational models, built on principles from the industrial revolution.  We are now in the social revolution - a Groundswell of change.  The idea of "command and control" has been turned upside down and the enterprise must avoid being crushed by the inverted pyramid.

Over the past two-and-a-half years I've been focusing on two major concepts:  social computing and customer centricity.  They fit very well together; becoming "socially successful" today requires that companies use process and technology to facilitate internal and external alignment.  Your market is calling for this in a voice that gets louder every day.  Unfortunately, many companies try to ignore what they're hearing - and I see an opportunity in helping enterprises listen, learn, and take action.

Our yet-to-be-named firm will help companies and their new leaders unlock value from social computing within the enterprise, driving customer-centricity and effective engagement.  The evidence of success will be found in culture and profit.

We will be hiring, partnering, building, and advising in the near future.  If you're interested in working with us to help change the world of work, contact Jeff at jdachis at austinventures dotcom.

Companies CAN'T "join the conversation"

My colleague Jeremiah recently posted about why some don't need to join the conversation.  He makes two key points:

1. Brands can and should use a combination of social computing tools can help brands engage individuals - e.g. voting, tagging, and sharing - which are not "conversational."
2. All people do not want to participate with you in the same way.

About a week ago, I blogged about how it's what's on the inside [of an organization] that counts.  That means people, i.e. individuals on your payroll must be ready to participate in social media.

Your brand can't blog.  Unless you're going for comedy, you shouldn't have a corporate mascot like Aunt Jemima, Jack In The Box, or the Brawny Man blogging.

If you or someone in your company is thinking of blog authorship behind the curtain of a corporate logo, stop and make sure that your organization is actually ready to get social with the outside world.  Because a company can't participate in a conversation, only individuals representing a company can.

This thinking comes naturally to individuals in firms who understand this internally.  Fortunately, it can be taught. (But some will never learn - all people do not want to participate in the same way.)

Should we talk about the weather?

I'll admit that I'm a big fan of the Weather Channel.  I've got two channels at home (regular and weatherscan), web bookmarks for frequent travel destinations, and two mobile bookmarks (regular and iPhone).  Earlier this week, the brand/channel agreed to an LBO of $3.2 billion, less than the original target of $5 billion, and will be managed by NBC Universal.

I'm not in the weather business (just a fan), but I think this deal makes sense beyond the eyeballs and ad revenue that media outlets seem to be reporting on.  See, earlier this month at one of my speaking gigs, I had lunch with someone from NBC, who gave me a different perspective on this [potential at that time] deal than what you may be reading about today.

Before we go there, let's take a step back.  The other buyers involved were Time Warner, CBS, and Comcast.  Two publishers and a MSO moving boldly into content.  So NBC seems to fit in the former category.  But that's only a slice of the picture.  From a media perspective, adding the Weather Channel makes sense, but their problem is that consumers don't spend a lot of time spent on site/channel. However, they get lots of eyeballs, meaning lots of ad impressions/revenue.  (An old/traditional model way of thinking.  In other words, doomed.)

Back to lunch.  So we're talking about weather and advertising and some of the possibilities when you combine the two.  Like an airline with banner ad inventory that could show skiing ads to someone who looks up a ski destination, or a Caribbean vacation ad to someone seeing snow in the forecast.  [yawn]

It would take a whole lot of uber buttons, 30" spots, and mobile text banners to make that $3.2 billion pay off.

Who's NBC's parent company?  Oh yeah, General Electric, the world's largest conglomerate.  So here's where things get interesting.  The potential value behind the Weather Channel lies within using its data to improve all of the other businesses within GE.  Sure, all of those advertising applications are interesting, but there's a lot of money in helping the transportation, energy, aviation, finance, etc. businesses more intelligent by better understanding the weather and how it impacts businesses on a current and forecast basis.  (Get the Corporate Audit Staff on this one right away, Jeff.)

At least that's the opportunity, "weather" or not its full potential is realized.  I wonder, is there any data that you have hiding in plain sight that could help dramatically improve your business?  It could come to you as simply as making small talk about the weather.

It's what's on the inside that counts

This isn't going to be a long post, although I've been thinking about the subject for a while.  I could probably spend the next few years on the topic, so instead I'll keep it brief for now.

The use of social computing has evolved over the past ten years (c. Cluetrain) and hockey-stuck over the last four.  Now blogs are the "new traditional" social media, morphing from their early ugly duckling status into slow-moving and elegant swans (overtaken by higher velocity, short-form channels).

But a small problem is starting to emerge along with the mainstreaming of social media.  Although there's a lot of talk about it - and more businesses feel the need to do something about it - most businesses are not internally prepared to make social media work.  I see this quite a bit when I'm working with clients, reflected in the questions I am asked:

• What happens if we accept customer suggestions but then don't make any changes?
• Why doesn't our blog have any comments?
• How am I supposed to formulate a strategy when our IT policy blocks access to social media sites?

Growing up, I must have heard the phrase "it's what's on the inside that counts" about a thousand times as I searched for an identity.  Today, brands are experiencing growing pains as well, figuring out how to create relationships with their customers.  And they're discovering that they need to understand how these things work before engaging successfully with the outside world.

We have hope, because individuals within firms have personal social media experience - and more enterprises are waking up to the fact that they need to put resources in place now, because just like e-commerce 15 years ago...social media isn't going away.  Instead, it's becoming the new way that things work.

Otherwise, brands co-opt social media and fill microblogs, RSS readers, and social networks with clutter, interruption, and irrelevance.  Same as advertising ever was.

I want to believe [that Twitter is useful]

  Why Twitter is Over Capacity 
  Originally uploaded by Jeremiah Owyang.

Twitter - do you love it or hate it?  I think your response to that question depends on why and how you use the application.  This drives the type of content you'll find valuable, the number of people you follow, and how you use text notifications and tracking.

Giving the continuing technical difficulties that Twitter has been facing - apparently birds moving whales can be quite difficult - I've been getting less value from my network.  I use Twitter as a heads up tool, to get advice, to connect with virtual communities, and to bridge communications from online to in-person (esp around events).  I was following almost 1,000 people - so getting information was either serendipitous when tuning in or via @/DM.

But I'm not getting text notifications like I used to.  So, inspired by some conversations and posts with/from Mitch Joel, Greg Verdino, and Mack Collier, I've decided to shift the way I'm using Twitter to make the conversation more manageable.  Similar to pruning my LinkedIn network, I unfollowed about 80% of my network, leaving only people whose names and/or pictures I recognized immediately, as well as people who I could remember having a helpful conversation with at some past point.

(remember is the key term here - my memory isn't fantastic and I'm bound to have offended some. My apologies, I will add you back.)

To me, Twitter content works best when personal.  Whether it's something you're doing or something you're thinking.  So I'm trying a new approach to Twitter, because I want to believe it's useful.  Maybe it's just microblogging that's useful and Twitter will ultimately pull a Friendster.

I think I'll go log into Pownce, haven't been there for a while...

links for 2008-06-24

• Investor's Business Daily: Firms A-Twitter Over Microblog Service
  Some Twitter stats: "more than a million users — 200,000 of those frequent users...[t]he service handles some 3 million messages a day."

  I've recently changed the way I use Twitter...more on this later.

  
  
  (tags: pressquote twitter)
  
  

Don't believe the hype (it's a sequel)

In the summer of 1999, I was subletting a place near Harvard Square while working at Fidelity Investments.  Near the end of the summer, my high school friend Dave moved to Cambridge to start his first year at HBS.  This was back when a book like Year One was invaluable, way before every student thought about bloging about the experience.  One of the things I found most interesting about the first years was that walking around the dorm, many had replaced the school-issued name on the door with business cards from their former employer - McKinsey, BCG, Goldman, etc.

I met up with Dave one day after work at an orientation happy hour at John Harvard's.  One of the people I met had previously been working in corporate finance for Paramount Pictures.  We discussed, among other things, the profitability of movie sequels.  Sequels are almost always profitable.  Why?  Among other things, they draft off the visibility of the lead, even if it tanks.  Assets can be reused and budgets more accurately scoped.  Distribution can bypass the expensive theater route and go straight to DVD or PPV.

So what does this have to do with marketing?  It has everything to do with branding and it's simple to make a connection with today's "viral" videos.  (I had a great conversation with Sam Ford from Peppercom/MIT last week about why the term viral is a misnomer - but that's a story for another post.)  Think Dove Evolution and Onslaught, for example.  At the time of writing this post, Evolution has 7.1 million views; Onslaught has 0.2 million.  So is Onslaught a failure?  No way - it's generated a ton of attention and surely Ogilvy didn't have to work nearly as hard to publicize #2 as #1.

Well, Kris Hoet from Microsoft Belgium emailed to let me know that a sequel to "The Break Up" has launched.  Even if you don't know the name, you've seen this video.  Now "Inspiration, Anyone?" is out - and has been since June 8th.

And I haven't heard anyone talking about it.

I don't know if it is just hasn't penetrated the echo chamber of marketing blogging or if most people have seen the sequel and thought "meh."  Or perhaps it hits too close to home for agencies - they can get very defensive, very quickly - e.g. check out this post.  Maybe it just needs time.  Some people have told me they think the first was successful because few people realized Microsoft was behind it.  But Dove was behind the Campaign For Real Beauty and that didn't seem to matter much.  Microsoft's making a point to sell more advertising services, Dove's making a point to sell more beauty products.  Maybe we can chalk it up to B2C vs. B2B.

If you haven't yet seen the sequel to The Break Up (it's 3:38 in length), I'd love to get your thoughts on why it does or doesn't work for you.

W I N G S

I have a poster of a young Michael Jordan hanging in the office.  The William Blake poem underneath the picture reads:

"No bird soars too high, If he soars with his own wings."

wagamama: positive eating + positive living - negative email

Have you ever eaten at wagamama?  They've expanded quite a bit since I first ate there in Leicester Square and have even expanded into the US, with two Boston locations.  I'm a fan of the restaurant/brand (yes, they have a Facebook group).  They may know how to run a good kitchen, but their email marketing needs some work.

You probably know that I don't research email for a living - I've only managed campaigns as a client-side marketer.  But I know enough to be dangerous, or at least to write a decent blog post about how to improve email marketing.

So here's the body of the message:

1. Pretty pictures, right?  Well first of all, this message displays terribly in text - it's just a bunch of hyperlinks.  Lesson:  deliverability matters.  How much attrition are you willing to suffer by relying on a link that says "can't see this email? click through to our website."
2. Look at the content.  How does this relate to a noodle house?  [answer: it doesn't]  Wagamama says it won't sell your information to 3rd parties, but this promo/promo/promo/promo is pretty much the same thing. Lesson:  make it relevant.  Why not a message like "Harvard Square now open" or "new summer menu"?
3. I haven't heard from wagamama via email for months.  Actually, I can't remember if they ever sent me an email prior to this one.  When a consumer opts-in, it's permission to build a relationship, not to ping them for money randomly like your alma mater.  Lesson: relationships matter and they need to be cultivated and maintained over time to thrive.

Forrester's analyst Julie Katz does this for a living and is worth contacting if you're responsible for this type of marketing.  As for me, I think I'll go unsubscribe from the list now.