Ecosystems: Riding on Them, and Creating Them

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Scott Gould

My friend Chris Brogan wrote a thinking peice last month on “Amazon and the Kindle Conspiracy” that many overlooked but I think warrants a deeper leadership discussion.

Chris discusses how Amazon went from book distributor to pretty much anything distributor, and how he suggests that the Kindle could do the same thing. He talks about how the Kindle also isn’t just a phyiscal device. You can have the Kindle on your iPhone, iPad, desktop, etc. It’s a distribution platform that lives on other platforms, something we talked about recently with Your Business, Ubiquitous.

That’s a big discussion there. Then Chris goes deeper into what is my favourite part of the post:

Don’t look at the device. Don’t fret about the device. Think of it as yet another way to gain ground in distribution. Keep your eyes on this, and also think about how this impacts your business. Think further on whether there are ways you could do distribution differently (better, partnered) and what that would give you.

This immediately makes me think of ecosystems. Consider Apple’s App Store and iTunes ecosystem. The devices that they can plug into this are potentially numerous, and as Chris suggests, it’s not really about the device – it’s the distribution of the ecosystem.

The way I see it, ecosystems are about flow of the river, the devices are the boat, and the person is the person. A good ecosystem means that a number of different boats can be on it in order to get people where they need to be. iTunes and the App Store is an ecosystem that allows many boats – the innovator boats, the late majority boats, the home boats, the work boats, etc.

I’m now seeing what were boats now become ecosystems in their own right. Consider Evernote, which is the handy note tool that remembers everything. Evernote created an API, and now with Evernote Trunk, serves as an ecosystem to boats that now ride upon it.

Facebook is an ecosystem, and so is Twitter. They are rivers that boats can flow on. Applications can be built for them. Communities live on them. You get the idea.

Riding on The Wave

The trick for startups and new things now is to use these ecosystems – to ride on their waves – in order to get our users to where they need to be. As Chris said in starting, the Kindle is about distribution. Why create a new ecosystem when a perfectly good ecosystem already exists that can distribute your boats where they need to be?

This is where socialising channels comes into play. Socialising our channels means getting your content to the places where people already are – the water coolers. If Facebook is where your people are, use that. If it’s Amazon, use that. If it’s the Kindle, use that. Ride the wave that gets your content distributed.

Creating Waves

The other option is to be the one building ecosystems – buliding the distribution channels that others can use. I’d be careful here. I’d only build an ecosystem where one doesn’t already exist.

That’s what we’re doing with Like Minds. I’ve noticed that the communities which are the most useful are the ones that become an ecosystem for others to sail on. The community and the events attached to it become enablers for the lives of others.

But the trick here is that we have to do it in a unique way – one of which being the Like Minds Club, something that I don’t know of any other event / community doing. The aim of the working club is to be an enabler for others to ride their boats along – whatever business, endeavour, need, etc, they might have.

I would say therefore, if was trying to define an ecosystem in a digital way, I’d say they are a platform that enable third parties and users to build and live from in a way that enhances their productivity through synergy with other users and shared benefits.

Your Leading Thoughts

As a leading and thinking person, your input here is valued and adds to the discussion and to this blog. Focus in on ecosystems right now, and use these points to help the discussion:

On a smaller scale, are blogs working as ecosystems?
What are the prerequisites for calling something an ecosystem?
What are the ecosystems that you are tied into?

Photo courtesy of Storm Crypt

Are You Afraid To Give It Away?

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Scott Gould

I don’t know who first said it, but the idea of an open platform and being an active authority is that by equipping people with the best resources that aren’t your own – by sending them away – you get them back.

This is the premise that most of the digitalls on Twitter follow. They share links all day long, because by being active in their area and telling you where to go, the idea is that you’ll look to them as the authority. Beyond that, there’s a bit play in open innovation with co-creation too.

An Open World

It does, however, go a lot deeper than this. The idea of open platforms is one of open source, of creative commons, of open innovation. This isn’t giving information away in such a context that people can directly see where the source was – like a ReTweet – it’s a place where you are giving people to take your work and use it, and there’s no guarantee people won’t use it for their own gain without attributing you as the source.

It’s one thing sharing someone else’s content and then getting a kick back if someone likes the link. It’s another sharing your own content for free and not knowing what’ll happen with it.

I can tell a story from both sides of this fence. Being honest with you, I’ve been the one who has ripped the work off of others (back in my HTML days), and I’ve also been the one who has been too afraid to share my creations for fear of it being ripped off.

Last Saturday, on our discussion of “Together“, a friend I made in Helsinki, Johanna Kotipelto, made an exceptional statement with regards to people being too afraid to collaborate together. Joanna said, in what I think is a highly quotable phrase, “Sharing is still a threat: it’s like taking a Mona Lisa to an exhibition – unsigned.”

Johanna wrote more about it in her post on Man 2.0 where she examines some of these themes more – it’s well worth a read.

The thing is – do I agree? Do I believe that sharing is a threat?

The Fear is Laziness and Ego

I think the ultimate display of this fear (in the blogging world at least) is when bloggers never link to other blogs but there own (or rarely do it), and keep writing about their experience, their ideas, and never our experience or our ideas.

I consider this fear to actually be laziness and ego. When I read a feed for a few weeks and find they never link out and talk about anyone but themselves, I think that they are too lazy and too self consumed to actually focus on others and curate conversation for others.

This same laziness and ego, in my opinion, is also what stops people from sharing – because you know what – if you talked about what you consider to be your intelectual property enough, you’d be generating so much discussion about it that people would know you’re the source. I’ve started to see, for example, a lot of the ideas that we’ve discussed here talked about on blogs I’ve never heard of and from people I don’t know – but they know where the source is, and the conversation keeps coming back here. (Also, we need to loosen up a little – we often think our ideas are better than they actually are!)

And I think the people on the other side of the fence – who take other people’s work and pawn it off as their own – it’s laziness and ego on their own side, but it says I’m too lazy and too good to work hard and get this myself.

Your Leading Thoughts

First of all – which side of the fence are you on? Where do you sit on this issue?
What is the FIRST example that you think of where ‘giving it away’ has caused a win? (Mine currently is Guardian’s Open Platform)

Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk

B2B & Social Media: Provide A Solution

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Scott Gould

You’ve probably heard at one point or another the question “does Social Media work for B2B?” Perhaps you’re even asking it yourself.

One of the main things that helped with me this is a post by Dan Blank called “Creating Interest vs Providing Solutions” from late last year. Dan says a number of pertinent things in this post, my favourite being:

If you can’t properly monetize 18 million unique visitors a month, how will another 5 million help clarify the way forward?

The point is that charging for interest is different to charging for a solution. Dan argues that many B2Bs, and publishers in particular, are thinking very narrowly about what their real asset is, and desperately trying to cling onto it, rather than actually start from the users point of view and explore what needs they really have around their interests:

Even in the cases where pay walls will work, it is not a complete solution, it is just one revenue stream. And in all likelihood, it is not one that will restore revenue and profits to the levels being lost by print.

Ads & Sponsorships are one model, but getting customers to pay you is another. If you rely solely on ads & sponsorships, how many page views is enough for your market? How many webinar sign-ups? How much growth can you garner year after year?

To differentiate your revenue streams, you may want to consider developing products that provide direct solutions. What service do you provide – could you provide- that people couldn’t live without?

Dan then linked to an exceptional presentation by David Cushman, called “a new era for specialist media.” Any regular here will find the ideas similar to our discussions on spreadability and people-to-people, but it is most certainly worth a look.

[slideshare id=2509580&doc=sipakeynotedc-091116051033-phpapp02]

All of this discussion makes me think again about the need for Social Media to be useful. And by useful I don’t mean useful for you, I mean useful for your users and/or community. We really need to understand them, with quantitive and qualitative research, and deliver what lifts restrictions for them – what enables them to do what they previously could not do.

For a really good case study on this, watch Yann Gourvennec’s Insight at Like Minds. His work as the Head of Digital and Internet at Orange Business Services is very, very inspiring.

Your Leading Thoughts

Are you a B2B player in Social Media? If so, are you providing a solution?
How do we begin to think ‘solution’, because I think at the moment we are very caught up with interest over solution.
How do you communicate solutions, without making everything a sales pitch?

The End Of The Age Of Content, Part 2

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Scott Gould

The last time we talked about the end of the age of content was in April this year, for me best summarised by one of my favourite quotes of the year from Jeff Jarvis:

The great stuff is already out there. Why remake it, except for ego?

Content is becoming has become a commodity. As I’ve been saying for over a year now, there’s too much of it. We’re over saturated. Trying to compete with content is a hard, hard game to win.

And the trouble about content is that all the digitalls have in front of their faces on Twitter all day. But for a second consider you are a digicool. How do you even find blogs like mine and yours? I would say relationship, or a very thin long tail.

Our Options

If it’s the end of age of content, then what is next, and what are our options?

1. Fight it. Keep saying that ‘Content Is King’ and tune up your personal brand and affiliate program, while you compete against the thousands upon thousands of others doing the same to promote your blog and product over theirs. If you’re trying to build a big blog or launch a community group, you also can’t start by fighting on this front, because others are doing it better than you already.

Ok, so perhaps that is a bit harsh – but my point is that you can’t fight on this level alone.

2. Relationally push. Every business starts out with friends as customers. If for the digicool it is through referral that blogs, etc, are discovered, then we lean on those relationships. The issue here through is that it doesn’t scale.

3. Go niche. Find focussed interest topics to specialise in. People are more prepared to go with specialist content as opposed to generalist. But writing about a niche subject doesn’t mean people will flock to you, nor trust you. Again, we are back to social authority.

Curation

Where we are going towards is curation. By having a good bit of fight, building relationship, finding niches, and then being a curator of the content and co-creation that is already happening, we find new meaning. The great stuff is already out there. Why remake it, except for ego?

Seth Godin posted an exceptional audio peice on “The New Dynamics Of Book Publishing” last month. I seriously recommend you listen to it.

From all the consulting that I have done with publishers of late, Seth’s insights are right on and encapsulate much of what I’ve been going through with these publishers.

If we take this into the Music Industry, for example, should’ve been curating experiences and communites rather than trying to create and sell music. The creation part is a comodity, the community curation part isn’t.

Your Leading Thoughts

Are you a curator? Where are you curating and how are you doing it?
Curation is a new buzz idea that’s going around at the moment – do you see it as the future?
Content creation has it’s own challenges. What are the challenges of content curation?

Photo courtesy of irisb447

Your Business, Ubiquitous

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Scott Gould

The idea of having your business everywhere might not be the ideal for everyone, but for businesses that are building communities, offering servies, or leading tribes, we have to discuss ubiquitous business.

With the virtual/physical, online/offline worlds becoming so merged together, not only through the mobile, but through other home media devices, advertising, in store displays, and so on, there are new opportunities for your business to be at the water cooler – to be where conversations are taking place, capture and showcase those conversations and make something out of them, and actually provide your services to your customers when they are using these devices and be ‘the elbow of the deal’.

Where are People?

To do this, we need to answer the question, where are people? Not just “which social networks are they on?”, but where are people online, offline? For example, football fans at a game. People on the bus. In fact, where are they offline, like on the underground, where they can take what was gotten online, offline with them?

Where is not just a spatial term, it is a time term, an emotional term, a participatory term. We need to deeply understand our customer to really know where they are.

Once you know where they are, how can you get there? How can you socialise the channels that you use in order to get your content and service there?

A fine example is Absolute Radio, who take their Baddiel and Skinner radio show and turn it into a podcast, live stream, iPhone app, Nokia app, Sony Ericson app, etc. It’s a great move by them, because when someone can’t be online, the content has been put offline on their mobile device, which they use to listen to the podcasts in all those empty spaces throughout the day.

I consider their app-driven approach all the more pertinent as apps will take over browser use on mobile devices. When you’re using the iPad, you’ll quickly note how much nicer it is to use an app in many cases, than using the browser version, even on a desktop. (Full review of this here.)

Another way to be where people are is by having a platform that is trans-platform, i.e., it cross all other platforms. Absolute Radio touch on this above by having their content on multiple channels, however those channels are fixed. I’m really talking about the concept of a hashtag as a platform.

I was quoted in AdWeek last week, in a peice called ‘Learning to Speak on the Social Web‘ (penned by my friend Neal Rodriguez), where I described that the hashtag is a trans-platform platform, that means the platform exists where ever it is used. Ubquity comes through this, because we can tag anything that we say or do with “#likeminds”, and it becomes part of the platform.

What About Location Gaming?

There’s a big discussion to be had here (my fiend Carl Haggerty most recently adding some interesting thoughts), and many of the points are obvious: “people can check into your locations”, “people can see you exist when visiting your town”, etc etc.

Let’s answer the where question on this instead. Where are people? They are on their phones, when they go into any area that warrants a check in.

Do these people use it to find new places? No. They only use it to check into places.

Your Leading Thoughts

Let’s begin by asking ourselves the question: where are you?
What kind of services to you want to be ubiquitous? Do you want services to be with you, where ever you go?

Photo courtesy of ViaMoi

I Don’t Talk Down To You

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Scott Gould

I was chatting to Julian Summerhayes yesterday and noting how many blog posts out there talk down to you. I don’t know if you agree, but let my quickly paint the picture I have of it:

They write as if they are teaching you, and you need them to say everything for you to understand, rather than appreciating the wisdom of their readers.
They write very much as if what they say is the authority, without drawing from the authority of their readers.
They tell you what to do, rather than ask what their readers think could be done.
They broadcast out ideas, rather socially discuss ideas.
They tag on the social cop out, “what do you think?“, rather than really drawing out from you, “what do you think?”

I used to write very much like this. In fact the peice on Innovation Over Tradition had the same prose feel that I think goes along with the above. Normally here, we’re talking things through.

The trick to much of this is what I learnt from Robin Dickinson – “under bake the issue.” In fact, we had a great discussion about this a while ago.

What I Don’t Know

The thing is, Monday’s post was an interesting read that got quite a few retweets (as I get so few), and certainly, there is a place for explaining things and being an active authority. But I think that can still be done without talking down to someone. I’m not sure.

Your Leading Thoughts

Do you notice different tones of blogging? Can we categorise them a bit?
Which writing do you respond to? Are there some blogs that you notice this “talking down to” in?
Are there, conversely, some bloggers who you can’t respect because they don’t speak with enough authority.

Innovation Over Tradition

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Scott Gould

Have you ever wondered how on earth moving your mouse makes a little pointer move across your screen? I actually don’t know, but I do know that the mouse, and the idea of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) were both controversial and criticised whilst they were being developed. Why? They changed the way things were in the name of moving towards something better, and both helped make computers accessible to the masses. In other words, they valued innovation over tradition.

Sometimes it’s easy for us to get lost in the hype of technology, especially in an age where talking about technology is made easier by the very technology we are talking about – it creates a perfect circular, the most pertinent example today being “I’m using social media to tell you how great social media is.” But as thinkers, we need to be able to step back from the buzz and think about the bigger picture – otherwise we run the risk of becoming clones and drones.

Clones and Drones

You know what I mean by clones and drones. The countless score of self-proclaimed ‘experts’ and ‘consultants’ out there, creating more noise than a batch of early 90′s servers. I’ll be honest with you – when I started out, I was one of these. I bought the myth of the digital personal brand and was trying to ‘create product’ to ‘ship’ to those who read my blog. I was using Twitter to ‘influence’ and ‘network’ in order to get exposure and sell my product, because someone else had done it successfully and now I was buying their 10 steps to do it myself.

This copycat behaviour has created a flocking effect that has widened the gap between those who are what I call ‘digitall’ and those I call ‘digicool’ – something some aliens once noted about us. The digitall are those who use tech for ‘all’ – their iPhones and iPads are filled with apps, their blogs overflowing with widgets (well, hey, they actually have blogs), they check Twitter infinitely more than they do Facebook, and they know what Augmented Reality is. The digicool, on the other hand, are those who use technology solely based on how ‘cool’ it is – like my wife who has an iPhone because it’s cool, is on Facebook because it’s cool, but doesn’t use Twitter because, unfortunately, it isn’t cool.

At the head of the digitall are the digeratti – the princely likes of Scoble, Rubel, Gray and the rest, who akin to the developers of the mouse, are challenging us to think in new and innovative ways. In actual fact, Scoble et al are just the ones telling us about the innovations – like the early days of Techcrunch where every Web 2.0 site was listed and reviewed. These technologies have changed the way the internet works – Wikipedia, Skype, Facebook, eBay, WordPress, Google – and in doing so, they have changed tradition.

The thing is, it isn’t the digitall that helped change tradition. It was the masses of digicools – the general population, if you will – that helped Facebook spread, realised the worth of Wikiepedia, and used Google because they couldn’t remember URLs (unlike the digitalls, who did). And here lies the decision for us all: are we going to talk about innovation and tradition, or be the ones who actually help put innovation over tradition?

The former only requires us to tweet, like, comment, retweet, blog. The second requires us to think. To think how we can take the wonderful innovations that are being used by a comparative handful of digitalls, and present them in an easy to understand way the digicools.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s the gap that needs filling, and the hands that fill it will not go unrecognised.

Your Leading Thoughts

First of all, confession time: which are you? Where are you? Are you talking, or innovating?
How, practically, can we fill this gap?

Case Study: Value-Based Blogging

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Scott Gould

Today I want to open up the guts of this blog and show you with stats, number and benchmarks the return of a value-based approach to blogging. My hope is that my transparency and openness will inspire you to go away and stop competing for retweets in the volume-based game and grasp what rich relationship and real return awaits you if you can get away from vanity and into community.

The image below is a screen shot of the last 7 posts on this blog in PostRank’s Analytics platform. We’ll discuss this tool a bit more in a moment, but the main features are that it tracks the number of engagements per post – most pertinently, the number of Tweets, Google Buzzes, Delicious Bookmarks and other social networks, in addition to unique visitors, reading time, etc.

Look and see how many comments this post gets, compared to how many tweets:

This isn’t just a trend over the last week. Almost every post I write has more comments than tweets. Also look at the reading times. I’ve highlighted the highest ones. This average time means people are reading the posts and reading the comments.

This means that my RSS subscribers are the real source of engagement for me. According to Feedburner, I have 148 people subscribed in Google Reader, and 48 who have subscribed to this blog in email.

So, time for some analysis:

Value Analysis 1: Keep Your Retweeets

A value based blog doesn’t need lots of retweets to get engagement. I want you and need you to understand right now that whilst more tweets about your posts will get it more coverage, lots of retweets are not necessary for and do not guarantee engagement.

If you were to ask me for my number one metric of success on my blog, I’d tell you instantly it’s comments. It’s the number of the them, and it’s the depth of them – because it means we actually have participation, not just blind retweeting.

Value Analysis 2: Backwards Engagement

According to PostRank, “80% of the conversations about your content happen off-site” (link.) Well, PostRank tels me that for my blog, 60% of the conversations about my content happen on-site. Value-based blogged is totally contradictory to standard volume-based blogging. The engagement is totally the other way around.

I don’t know of any top blog that gets more comments than retweets. In fact that only other blog that I can find that does is Robin Dickinson’s blog.

There are sometimes when admittedly, I wish I had more retweets. Sometimes it annoys me to see how many shallow blogs get so much coverage. But I will tell you this: no blog post that has received lots of retweets on my blog has ever had lots of comments.

80% engagement off your site is … well … worthless in my opinion.

Value Analysis 3: It Works

It’s one thing talking about a value-based blog if in actual fact it didn’t work. But it does. On an average of 10 tweets per post and 15 comments per post, this blog:

This is the 5th ranked blog on leadership on PostRank (last week I was #3)
This is the 2nd ranked blog on social business on PostRank and 9th ranked for social media marketing.
This is 185th ranked marketing blog on the AdAge Power150 (I would be higher if more people linked here. My InLink score is very low.)

For 10 tweets, this is very good. Most of the blogs on AdAge get a very high number of tweets per post. My AdAge rank is lower, as it takes PostRank (which focusses on engagement), and also considers other measurement platforms that track InLinks, volume of tweets, etc.

But more than these stats, the proof it works is that Like Minds works and engages hundreds of people because of the discussions we have here. It works because someone saw this blog and was so warmly invited when they commented that they saw a link to the Like Minds Club and bought membership right away. It’s also got me a lot of recognition and love.

It works because authors have found the ideas here (that we formed together through the comments), and put them in their books (they tell me so!) It works because the thing that we discuss have changed lives.

Your Leading Thoughts

I know I’ve kind of preached us full here – but there is room for a very important discussion here. Many of you guys are likely discouraged, distracted by wanting to get your content recognised with retweets and such. I’m keen to know

If you’ve been blogging for 6 months and over, what are your statistics on engagement?
Be honest – how much are tweets and ‘attention’ a motivator for you?
Where on the web do you enjoy engaging in value-based blogs?