social media

  • October 10, 2013
  • Don’t look now but I think someone just invented the computerized watch.  I know there have been attempts, most recently by Samsung but the critics have been a bit harsh as in this review from the New York Times.  Also, Apple has been scooping up rights to iWatch but so far no product has emerged.

    One of the tough parts of inventing a category like this — even for the inventor — is trying to figure out what goes into the product.  If it’s a slavish imitation of what’s already in market as an analog product, why would you buy it?  If you envision something more functional, then what are the functions?  What makes it unique and not simply a miniaturized version of, say, a smartphone?

    The first computer watches all seem to suffer from smartphone-itis, the need to reproduce every function of the small screen on the teeny-tiny screen.  Seriously?  Yup, you know they’re out there.  But the path to the new, new thing is through a small identity crisis that asks what’s unique about me?

    Well, as it turns out in pure Cartesian logic, I am what’s unique about me.  I think, therefore I am has morphed into I respire therefore I am.  That sort of reduces humanity to the simple ability to fog a mirror but there’s more to it than that.

    Fitbit, if you don’t know, is a little device that straps onto your wrist and records the activities that are unique to your day.  Based on a few parameters you input at Fitbit.com, the system tracks the steps you take (and other activities) and figures out how many calories you’ve burned and how many you are (gasp!) entitled to if you expect to fit into that holiday outfit.  Even your blood pressure and glucose reading can be entered so that you have an up to the moment digest of the many important health parameters that are unique to you.

    So it had to happen at some point.  The sleek wristband that formerly simply lit up to tell you about some goal reached has morphed into a watch with a digital readout where the blinking lights used to be.  Now Fitbit is a data collector and a watch that synchs with your iOS and Android devices and can feed any apps in those ecosystems with your unique data for further processing.  Think about that.

    Watches that enable two way communication or social media hookups or listening to songs or that let you watch the World Series on your wrist have missed the point.  A compass?  Spare me.  All those functions have homes on the device and they are not needed on the wrist. They might run on the wrist the same way that spreadsheets also ran on the laptop but it took the graphics packages and slide show software to make the laptop an indispensible part of business life.

    And so it is with the computing watch.  Sure it tells time and so does your handheld or a Timex but just as the handheld became the social location (close to us but still somewhat apart) the wrist has now been claimed as true personal computing space.  The watch sleeps with us, showers with us; it is designed to not come off except for charging about once a week.  The Watch is part of us yet at the same time it incorporates our other devices and computers through ecosystem apps — a good balance that’s low on redundancy and high on added utility.  Most importantly, it captures some of our most intimate data helping us manage our bodies.

    That’s it.  Future generations of watches might incorporate more personal functionality (blood chemistry through sweat analysis, perhaps?) but they won’t bother with email or they’ll end up looking like over engineered Swiss army knives.  That knife has a lot of useful stuff, many even have a knife and fork but did you ever try to cut a steak with one?

    Published: 10 years ago


    It’s (mostly) Rock ‘n’ Roll

    Then there is this from Weekly Standard writer Matt Labash who writes a long rant on Twitter and why it is eating our brains.  Didn’t they say things like that about Rock ‘n’ Roll?  Obviously, they were right.  Matt seems like a man off his meds but like many such savants he can make some interesting points sometimes.

    Labash’s target is Twitter, and he points out, “Even after seven years of nonstop media hype, only 16 percent of Internet users tweet, the same as the percentage of 14-49-year-olds who have genital herpes. The difference being that the latter are not proud of their affliction, while the former never shut up about theirs.”

    I suspect the herpes numbers are kept down by increased condom use, but what about Twitter?

    Ok, seriously, I get it.  Twitter. One hundred forty chars. Bad.

    Maybe I don’t though.

    You may have noticed that about the only things I Tweet are blogs like this or pieces from the New York Times.  I don’t read my tweets unless they are delivered by email and I hardly follow anyone.  When I go to shows they supply me and my buds with tables, WiFi and power in the hopes that we’ll live tweet the event.  I write articles and check email.  Ever read the tweet stream from a show when the twits reach critical mass?

    “Look at Marc’s sox!”

    “Stripes gonna be big!”

    “Talkin’ ‘bout Marketing Cloud”

    “Marketing next big idea”

    “You going to the dinner?”

    Yadda.

    It’s not for any political reasons that I am Twitter agnostic, I am just an introvert.  I can go for days hardly interacting with humanity, truth be told.  My wife hates it but I think it’s normal and no, I am not shy.  When I have something to say, I… you know…say it.  There’s a lot happening in my head and I don’t usually have time to check out just to check in.  It’s more interesting in there.  I suspect most writers are like that, which might explain Labash’s incredulity about Twitter.

    But introverts make up only about 25 percent of the population according to Susan Cain, author of “Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”.  Perhaps the paperback might modify the title to include those who can’t stop Tweeting.

    Regardless of my habits, I think I get Twitter.  It’s a communication mode that unfortunately enables people with a need to know, to inquire as often as they like from the whole world about their status in it.  Twitter and some other social media have vast power to amplify our thoughts as well as our insecurities.  But look, only 16 percent, according to Labash, are that insecure.  And if insecurity is a form of neurosis then we haven’t made much progress since Freud and Jung but neither have we backtracked a lot.

    Published: 11 years ago


    Have you seen this?  I’ve noticed lately that Twitter is suggesting I follow people who I thought I had been following for years.  Seems the links break but why?  It also seems like the incidence of broken links is rising.  Something like this makes it difficult to treat social media, especially Twitter, like the industrial strength product it wants to be.

    Published: 11 years ago


    I flew home from Microsoft Convergence in New Orleans arriving back in Boston around 9:00 PM last Thursday.  I was tired from capturing a week’s worth of information from the Microsoft fire hose for the previous four days.  But on Friday a Tsunami named Salesforce.com blew into town to inaugurate a world tour trumpeting the company’s new messaging centered on enabling enterprises to become “customer companies”.

    The tour and the messaging was field tested in New York last month and refined over the past few weeks to produce the Boston show and if Salesforce and its CEO Marc Benioff run true to form, the message will continue being refined throughout the spring and summer and delivered in final form at Dreamforce to be held this year in December in Salesforce’s home town of San Francisco.

    The big news coming out of Boston, if I understand it right, is that Chatter will become Salesforce’s primary interface.  Prognosticators peeling that onion got immediately weepy eyed citing the risks involved.  Surely, the logic went, when you change sales people’s UI you are asking for trouble.  These people are not happy change agents after all — look what happened when SFA came onto the scene, they opined, look how poor adoption was and how passively aggressively sales people didn’t adopt.

    Yadda, yadda.  Have they forgotten that early SFA sucked?  But look how they took to Salesforce like ducks in your swimming pool.

    That was then and then was different or as Mark Twain liked to say history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.  So what’s the rhyme?  Actually, it comes from two sources as I see it.

    First, we need to Segway to Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research at Salesforce, and this is not a non sequitur; it has a purpose, I promise.  If you’ve been to a Salesforce event in the last five years or so you know that Coffee does a pre-show to warm up the audience.  Coffee is not an entertainer happy to give away prizes or perform skits the way others do at conferences.  Coffee’s orientation is news.  It’s focused on the matter at hand so that his effort bridges nicely into Benioff’s main event.

    So, one of Coffee’s interview guests last Friday was MIT professor, Andrew McAfee who, along with fellow prof, Erik Brynjolfsson just published Race Against the Machine a short book about the ways we will work in the future.  The subtitle provides the Cliff’s Notes: “How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy”.  Got it?  No?  I will post a review of this fine work (which I am not sure I agree with in all its particulars) soon.  My point here, and I guess it was Coffee’s point too, is that technology is racing ahead and changing how we work and that people who don’t adapt and adopt will be left in the dust.  That’s point one.

    Point two is the long evolution of CRM, SFA and mobility.  For many years we have been touting mobile SFA applications as tools that sales representatives can use to report to their bosses upon leaving the big sales call.  But now imagine if during the sales call, the rep had the ability to reach out through the mobile umbilicus to get help on any subject.

    Sure, the mobile phone has always been available to do the same but few of us took advantage of it because its use was so disruptive in a meeting setting.  But a collaboration feed is more discrete so that not only could a rep report back after the meeting but he or she can now reach out through a collaboration product like Chatter rather than saying those dreadful words, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

    Put the two ideas together and making Chatter the primary interface for CRM or SFA makes all the sense in the world.  Also, you need to consider that just as we can dream up a realistic use case for selling, the same is true for service and support or even marketing.  Quick aside, CMO, Kendall Collins, who was also at the event told me, “There’s only one sin we won’t forgive inside Salesforce and that’s losing alone.  If you’re going to lose, lose with all the support you need.”  In other words go down swinging and in other, other words, business is now, more than ever, a team sport.

    So I am more sanguine about the move to make Chatter the primary interface for Salesforce.  It’s a natural evolution, something whose time has come.  Cue the music.

    I am also skeptical that the big news coming out of Boston was this Chatter tidbit.  The discussion involved people from not only MIT but Harvard Business School and Yale as well as representatives from the private sector like the electronics giant Phillips and Stratus the fault tolerant computing company and they are all and already moving the collaboration needle.

    Salesforce, as usual, is on to something.  The messaging about becoming a customer company is almost right and will improve over time.  And if Coffee’s intuition about having Andrew McAfee in the pre-show is right (and I think it is) then in a couple of years we’ll see other vendors ponying up with their own similar messaging just as sure as today they are (finally) “all in”, as someone once said, about the cloud.

     

    Published: 11 years ago


    The president should have his own blog.  Maybe he’d only post once per week but it would be an incredibly effective way to reach young voters.  My idea comes in through the back door.  The weekly presidential radio address goes out on Saturdays and I have to say that while some news outlets quote it in passing, it doesn’t seem to garner the attention it should.

    Ronald Regan instituted the weekly radio address and it fit his style and unique characteristics.  He was a trained actor able to deliver a message and to be convincing not necessarily with the substance of his words but with the tone and style.  All presidents since have taken up the torch and delivered a Saturday speech that I would say most of us have ignored.

    So what’s better about blogging?

    Well, it’s social for starters.  A blog can collect likes, raw audience numbers and tweets and re-tweets.  All of these things generate numbers that can be tracked to gauge audience receptivity.  That’s a pretty good start.  A blog might be more easily quoted by the op-ed pages of Sunday papers too.

    A blog lives on too, which means that if an interested citizen or reporter wanted to research something related to the blog or that point in time, the option would be open.  I wouldn’t know where to get the presidential Saturday address from four months ago, would you?

    But there’s also the difference between the spoken word and the written word.  For a person like the current president who is an introvert and very logical, a written post is an opportunity to lay out a chain of logic that might be more convincing than a tale or a metaphor committed to radio and less likely to be mischaracterized or misquoted.

    When you get down to it, the difference between a blog and a weekly address are small considering the effort expended.  But the audience reach and the viral capability seem to me to favor blogging.  No doubt someone will point out that the radio address goes out to a population that may not have or use computers.  To that I say, keep talking.  Just remember to publish the speech to your blog when you are done so that the digital natives have it too.

    Published: 11 years ago