Executive Director, Telstra Digital (www.telstra.com)
Founder of UBank (www.ubank.com.au)
With that, consumer expectations are rising, and corporate providers better get ready for a world of hyper-everything or stand to disappoint their customers.
Hyper-transparency
Content producers have learned early on in the journey of the web that whilst anonymity is possible, it vastly reduces credibility and thus visibility of one’s content. What good is posting anonymously if noone sees the post?
So the initial view that anonymity was a benefit of the net, has made room for the insight that transparency and attribution are powerful elements of quality control and accountability. Entire communities thrive on the notion of self-governance via attribution.
The same is true for corporations. The web is littered with examples of failed corporate digital efforts which were based on deception. Some nice examples of what impact this world of transparency can have are found here http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7913-14-epic-social-media-fails
Being hyper-transparent on the internet doesn’t come natural to corporations, however. Many traditional business models are based on clear segregation of information intended for publication (“a marketing brochure”, for instance) and information that is deemed “confidential”. This delineation is disappearing fast. A good example is the rapidly growing demand and ability to trace the origin of food products to their place of origin, in some cases to individual farms. (Have a look at www.scoringag.com for instance)
So corporations that rely on confidential information to generate profit are in trouble! Examples are hidden costs and under the table offers, both of which are quickly unmasked in online forums. Customers frequently reverse engineer a company’s business rules such as eligibility for discounts and publish them online. Who hasn’t seen a post recommending to call a provider, asking to cancel a product just to extract a discount? Someone built an online tool to browse discounts on Amazon, for example http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/cheap-amazon-loopholes
To prepare for this world of hyper transparency, corporates need to create a sustainable business model that has minimal reliance on “secret” information. What if a company’s intranet was published online? Shouldn’t make a difference.
Hyper-social
No longer do people accept a lonely experience browsing wares on flashy websites where the rules are set by Mega Corp. If a site doesn’t provide social integration, well, Facebook, Pinterest and Foursquare are only a click away – and so are your competitors’ ads and their cute little social posts luring customers elsewhere.
And the “sharing button” doesn’t cut it no more. Visitors expect user generated product reviews, access to other customers’ authentic experiences with your product and real-time access to support provided by other customers.
Needle.com provides a platform to “fansource” live chat support for products during the purchase products. Urbanoutfitters.com is one of their customers providing real time access to “fans”, not outsourced “customer service reps” reeling off a trained script.
Lithium.com operates a platform where customers help customers, and one of the users is telstra.com : crowdsupport.telstra.com.au/ (note: I work at Telstra and we use Lithium).
Hyper-mashup
The notion that “the web page will be dead” is almost commonplace in geek circles: static content creation and publishing will be a thing of the past. User generated content and social media platforms have demonstrated the demand for dynamic, real time and customized content. In fact, Facebook itself has transformed itself from a list of user generated status updates to a socially driven mashup of web content.
Interestingly, “search” is likely to make a real come back if developed in the right direction. On a recent trip to Google’s HQ at Mountain View we received some glimpses into the future direction of Google’s search. Whilst it is not being expressed like this by the company, my interpretation is that search results will be ever more real-time customized mashups, to a point where each search result will be a customized “web page” for a user’s specific demands at that time, at that location and on that device. Add the Google+ social layer to it, then a Google search result will also encompass social content as well as social endorsements for the construction of a results mashup. One view of the future of Google search is expressed in this post http://mashable.com/2012/02/13/google-knowledge-graph-change-search/
So, ultimately the Facebook timeline and Google search results will both become real time customized mashups competing for eye balls on the basis of relevance and performance.
For corporates, this means that being included in search results and on whatever the Facebook timeline will become will be ever more important. It also means that corporates will lose control of the context in which their content will be displayed. So, rather than optimizing page layouts and design, the quality of content will be critical.
And “mashup” doesn’t refer to web content alone. Rather, organisations are being mashed up themselves.
Firstly, old organisation structures where each department minds their own business are not supporting a digital sales and service model. To provide an effective live chat service, for example, customer service agents who traditionally sit in a call centre need to work closely with the internet team. And marketing teams who are used to working around agency briefs need to ensure their digital traffic goes somewhere worthwhile, and thus need to collaborate with digital channel teams to produce results.
Secondly, the boundary between “employee” and “customer” is falling – fast! Often times customers know more about your product than your employees. In the days of globoal product management, a super user of an iPhone in Poland may outperform your call centre easily. And with crowdsourced customer support, you probably find that call centre agents use those public platforms over internal “knowledge management” systems.
Have you seen evidence of Super Hyper Everything affecting your business?
Keep abreast with Super Hyper Everything by following http://paper.li/gerdschenkel/1334364096
As mass consumers adopt the internet for ever bigger portions of their lives and work and new technologies open up new possibilities, there are subtle, but important shifts in the use of the net.
We may just be in the middle of one of those shifts: the rise of the “curated” net.
Traditionally, we’ve distinguished “content consumers” and “content creators” (sort of). With the arrival of the social net, the number of content creators has increased dramatically, and mass consumers who initially used the net like a directory or a library suddenly became adept at sharing their own, original content. Smart phones played their role, of course putting the ability to instantly snap and share photos in everyone’s hands. (According to Sensis/ Telstra 46% of mobiles are now smartphones, rising fast.). The term User Generated Content (UGC) entered the geeks' vernacular.
But now that we have new content created at a rate much faster than even the totally of web users can hope to consume it, the issue becomes how we can pick out the tasty morsels in a sea of mediocrity or irrelevancy. Who has time to scan “timelines” top to bottom?
And search doesn’t do it anymore either. Goggle reluctantly (my own view) deciced to index Tweets. But new platforms arrive all the time, so if you want to venture into the more exciting corners of the web, Google doesnt always cut it.
The answer to this challenge may be the role of the “Curator”.
Again, digital life seems to follow the (formerly called) “real” life: curators have for centuries been making the task of selection easier. Art galleries, for instance scour the vast mass of art produced – like UGC, mostly not very good – and attempt to pick the promising pieces and exhibit them. In traditional media, the curator is the Editor who scans countless news reports and wires to pick out the items that may be of most interest to the mass consumer – and helps sell papers.
On the web, curation has been with us for some time, and as you’d imagine, it comes in different forms and shapes:
One form of curation are features of social platforms. The “Like” or “+1” buttons are good examples.
Another form, and a fast growing one, are dedicated curation platforms such as Stumbleupon, Pearltrees, Scoop.it or Pinterest. (And, there’s still the Web 0.0 Yahoo Directory). These offer a different way of using the net altogether. Rather than replacing passive TV channel surfing with “web social time” on Facebook, the experience on Stumbleupon or Pinterest is an entirely different one. It tends to be topic driven and feels like it happens on a different, more pre-selected level. Consequently, it requires a more active participation from the user, but also offers a better chance of the “wow” factor. The people one follows (the curators), are not the object of interest like on Facebook, they merely make the topic of interest more accessible and more rewarding.
Both forms of curation are based one one crucial factor: the selection of the curators and their abilities – or better: your affinity with the curators’ tastes and judgements.
Therefore, your Facebook “friends” or Twitter followers are unlikely to be exactly the same people you’d follow on Stumbleupon, but more likely a subset thereof. Quality is definitely more important than quantity on curation platforms.
Paper.li interestingly tries to automate the curation process. Given it bypasses the essential process of the curator, its results – whilst initially amusing – soon turn into an annoyance.
So where are we on the adoption curve with curation?
According to this Pinterest has between 2 and 4 million active monthly users. Stumbleupon claims 18 million members and 5 million active monthly user. One post claims that in July 2011, Stumbleupon has surpassed Facebook in “social media trafffic” volume in the US. And Pearltrees is said to have a paltry 200,000 users.
So, is the age of comparing pure follower counts over? Maybe! The age of the blind web search already is...
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Read more about the Curated Web:
http://ryanspoon.com/blog/tag/curation/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brittany-morin/the-curated-web_b_1096186.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curator
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/26880/
http://www.webdistortion.com/2011/03/10/content-curation-tools/
(Image borrowed from http://www.artcameroon.com/cameroon_art.php?painting=73)
Imagine a small group of villages in a forest somewhere.
At some stage the villagers discovered that clearing some of the forest and growing crops had significant benefits over hunting local animals and gathering berries and roots. The villagers could now broaden their diet and have more control over their time. They ended up thriving and spent much of their new spare time having fun and generating notable art such as music, dance and visual arts.
At a gathering, they noticed that one of the villages had become very good at growing a particular local vegetable, call it the bongo root. Naturally everyone wanted that village's bongo root over their own as it tasted much sweeter and was more nutricious. They also noted that another village had become very good at gathering local berries. Whilst most other villages spent much of their time on clearing forest and planting roots, this village was successful in finding the best spots in the forest to gather a special berry that could be made into a sweet slightly intoxicating juice, call it banga juice. Quite naturally, a regular central gathering (eventually to be called a "market") developed where the bongo village could exchange their bongo roots for other food items, such as banga berries, and vice versa.
But all was not well.
At yet Another gathering, the villagers discovered that they shared a plight: all the moving of goods to and from the weekly market was taking it's toll on their bodies. Their feet ached and their backs were painfully bent. The village elders agreed that a solution was required. They didn't want to give up their bongo roots and banga berries, so the solution had to be a better way of moving goods and people about. So they agreed to pool the smartest of their midst to come up with a plan.
After meditating in the mountains for a month, the chosen group revealed their solution to the villagers via their spokesperson: "Here is what we should do: we invent a range of new materials - call it "steel and plastic" - that requires us to dig up the ground and extract non renewable resources as well as the processing of those resources generating toxic byproducts that we'll dump into the local river (the illnesses and deaths from poisoning will be less than 5% of our village population, so is entirely acceptable). Then we use these new materials to build ginourmous machines - we called those a "car" - each weighing as much as 25 men with seats for four people and space for our goods at the back (but most times there'll be only one person in each of those machines because we expect that villagers will prefer to listen to their own music whist they "drive" around). These "driving machines" will be very fast (faster than any animal) but we'll let the villagers race them past each other in close proximity in opposite directions on a small strip of hardened earth (some of us call it "bitumen")."
"Of course there will be the occasional collision but we expect only a few thousand villagers to die each year. To avoid too many deaths, we recommend that villagers not steer one of those machines if they had more than four cups of banga juice as that tends to distort the vision. As this is not a small undertaking, we propose to separate about 20% of all villagers and ask them to specialize on digging out those non renewable resources, make the "cars" and provide associated services. The rest of us will have to feed them or they would die. So each family will have to spend about 20% of their food ("wealth") to have one of those machines available. We don't really need to force people to participate, as there will be enough of a natural incentive to participate in this "car industry": because these things drive very fast, the markets where we exchange our goods will be larger and larger and further and futher apart (one of us called this "globalization" but we didn't reach consensus on that). So if a family doesn't provide 20% of it's food they will not have access to a "car" and therefore no access to markets, so they will die. There will be the odd proposal of sharing of transport machines ("public transport") but we are certain that listening to their own music while "driving" is more important to villagers than limiting their dependency on this scheme."
There was widespread applause and cheering in response to this important announcement and the villagers went home that night satisfied that their future was assured.
Yes, security is one of the biggest reasons for some not to adopt the web in their daily lives - at least in financial services.
But we have gone too far!
When we have to log in with a password that is "at least 8 characters long, has at least one upper and one lower case character, hast at least one number and one special character" to access a free subscription to an online newsletter, something is wrong
(Here's a fun post on the topic http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/92q3/selpass.html)
Same with logins to grocery sites. Who is paranoid enough upon leaving Coles in the "real" world to cover their purchase under a big tarp to keep it secret that they've gone for the cucumbers today? (Interestingly, people seem perfectly happy with the fact that the grocery providers keep a record of everything that we scan and then use and on-sell that data to others).
In the same vain: why do customers have to "register" and then "login" to pay their bill at their utilities? Yes, it helps with user tracking and cross-selling, but hey, customers are meant to come first, right?
What we lack is a healthy balance of risk vs rewards in user password policies. This should be well grounded in relevant examples. For instance, if a person carries a wallet, they take some risk of theft or loss. The amount of cash and the personal data carried in the wallet reflect the risk profile of that person. Most people carry wallets. So presumably most people would be comfortable to lose say $50 and expose their name, DOB and address if an online account were lost or stolen.
I say, get rid of the "zero loss" objective in online security for most consumer applications!
The second crazy effect of this online paranoia are captcha's gone crazy!
Yes, their aim is legit, but come on... we're not all bionics.
(Don't know whether these are all real examples, but they're fun http://www.random-good-stuff.com/2008/03/11/crazy-and-funny-captchas/)
I'm wondering whether the providers using excessive password rules and captchas actually count the impact of the resulting loss of business. A huge one is the effort and cost required to deal with all those password reset requests (reportedly up to 30% in some call centres!).
Now, what's the solution? I can think of four:
1. Use the same password for everything. A bad idea. Just one loss would expose your really important stuff, like, ah, your bank account. Unfortunately, this appears to be the most common consumer response.
2. Browser or desktop based password aggregators. Soothes the pain, but seems like fixing a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place.
3. A mandatory, government issued master login that can be used by any web provider. Hmmm, this wouldn't fly in a developed democracy with a healthy suspicion of government power.
4. Broad adoption of open ID models. Of the ones mantioned, this seems like the best option to me (althoug I'd be careful with Facebook's version of it). It retains all control with the user, but provides a convenient option of at least some password aggregation. For example, all the "low risk" logins could be replaced with just one login, eg Google's, but the "high risk" logins could remain specific, eg your banking.
Your thoughts?
Isn't this a great time: we are 24/7 connected to each other, to the people and brands we love and don't miss a beat
Or is it?
Remember the times when we still had time to reflect- to reflect on our lives, on work or relationships? This used to be the time we made big decisions. These days, we call this time "junk time" and fill it with lots of tasks, tweets and posts.
Whilst this is great because we seem to "get more done", I am a firm believer that it comes at some cost: the loss of reflective time.
But do not fear: there is an easy fix. All we have to do is expose ourselves actively to the opportunity to do nothing. Make it an event in itself. Embrace it. Yes, even schedule it!
Many folks have written about this topic before:
Adiz says "doing nothing forces you, sometimes painfully, to face yourself and your concerns." http://www.adizes.com/blog/?p=50
Carl reminds us of the health benefits "Before antibiotics became the favoured prescription of GPs, the most common thing one would hear from a doctor was the need to get plenty of rest." http://www.suite101.com/content/health-benefits-of-rest-a51767
And Steve reminds us that "The World can get along just fine without you" http://www.examiner.com/leadership-in-national/the-benefits-of-doing-nothing
So, consider it!
If you have trouble getting started, try http://www.wikihow.com/Do-Nothing
In stark contrast to the Dalai Lama's Rules of Life (http://newobservations.posterous.com/dalai-lamas-18-rules) are the following 11 rules of life attributed to Bill Gates (not confirmed though).
You chose which set of rules to apply to your life:)
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Rule 1: Life is not fair -- get used to it!
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping -- they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
The Dalai Lama's 18 rules for living
I love these because they are designed to help YOU in YOUR life. They are not rules that restrict your life to honor a deity. Whilst some other "commandments" were also designed with real every day value in mind, they have in some cases lost relevance in today's world, and have been so much interpreted over the centuries that the original purpose can be somewhat lost.
My personal favorites are number 5 and 18.
Enjoy!
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1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs:
1. Respect for self
2. Respect for others
3. Responsibility for all your actions
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
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PS - just for fun, you may want to also read "Bills Gates' " 11 Rules of Life (http://newobservations.posterous.com/bill-gates-rules-of-life)
If you'd like to keep up to date with the "Facebook Valuation" topic, you can do so here: http://paper.li/gerdschenkel/1296254033
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There's been much hype around the Facebook "valuation", stimulated by the recent Goldman Sachs fund raising at a valuation of $50b.
As usual, there is kudos in being a heretic and call "the bubble", and there's no shortage of mainstream journalists, stock analysts, sages and oracles taking this role.
But there's also a - seemingly smaller - group of people that are supporting the "hype". I am one of them.
Following a recent trip to San Francisco that included meetings with many of the "internet greats", I have come to the conclusion that Facebook has all chances to create what AOL aimed at but failed - yes, the "walled garden" is back!
Walls that create rules in the anarchy of the net, but also create sources of profit for the wall keeper.
Facebook has proven very adept in making the right decisions to keep the walls just high enough, to keep the rules just tight enough, and to preserve privacy just enough to become the world's premier, mainstream internet framework.
Not only does this concern Google hugely (rightfully so), it also opens up the doors for a very profitable stream of transaction revenue.
Facebook Credits is only one of them. The gross marging on Facebook Credits is a whopping 30%! Banks can only dream of such a margin which is more akin to the tax rate of a country. In fact, Facebook is more like a country, and at 600m regular users it would be the world's third largest.
Now, is $50b a "fair" valuation for the world's largest country? Warning: rhetorical question :)
In addition to this argument, there are several more pedestrian valuation methods that can be employed. There are many other people that can do this in more detail (because they do it for a living), but just to kick off the debate, consider this:
The Commonwealth Bank's Retail bank is valued at about $2,842 per customer (subject to some assumptions and the recent public data of course). At $50b and 600m regular users, Facebook is valued at only (!) $83 per regular user. I encourage you to make up your own mind...
PS: here's a nice example of applying a similar logic (better done...) to the valuation of Xero http://gregnz.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/xero-valuation-part-1/
Now that I've had some time to digest the Vietnam experience (see previous posts), I'm trying to identify my next project for Save the Children.
One of the topics we discussed on the trip is the fundraising mix of STC vs. other INGOs.
World Vision and Plan are known for their child sponsorships. This model gives them a nice reliable fundraising basis. But not everyone is a fan. I won't repeat these criticisms here, but there's an extensive summary here: http://danny.oz.au/politics/poverty/child-sponsorship.html
Being a firm believer of the power of networks and technology, I quickly started investigating leaders in "peer to peer giving".
Two sites have emerged:
(Of course) Kiva, the online microfinance site (www.kiva.org, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva_(organization)); and also Global Giving (www.globalgiving.org, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Giving), an online site to give donations to grass roots projects. Both are registered not for profits, but loans under Kiva are not tax deductible. And donations to either are not necessarily tax deductible everywhere outside the USA.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of Kiva. They have grown quickly via the use of "field partners", which in some cases sound more like "local loan sharks". I say this because of the high interest rates they seem to charge at least in some cases to the borrowers
(ie "the poor people"). So, consumers lend their money interest free to the field partner, and the field partner then receives interest income. This means that the consumer has no real idea of whether their interest free loan really provides a much better alternative to the recipient than other local alternatives. In extreme cases, this may mean that the local "loan shark" has access to free capital to fund his (I'm assuming they're men :) ) loan shark business. I'm sure there's lots of worthwihle activity under Kiva, but the lack of control from the lenders' point of view does bother me.
Furthermore, there seem to be situations where loans - even interest free - are a better tool to create positive impact on the ground, and then there are some situations where a grant (or donation) is a better tool. Just building on the things I observed in Vietnam, I reckon grants are better where a recipient is in need of rebuilding their livelihood after a catastrophe (such as the people in Huc Nghi http://newobservations.posterous.com/huc-nghi-village-vietnam). Whilst a microloan seems to be more appropriate for situations where a recipient (or borrower) is trying to move beyond a subsistence existence to build capital.
So, wouldn't it be nice if one site could cover both, microfinance as well as "micro grants"?
Kiva only does loans, Global Giving only does donations.
So, I'm currently exploring a new site that uses Save the Children's global field office network to identify worthy projects, and provides no-interest microloans (no interest means no loan sharking...) and microgrants to needy recipients.
In addition, I'm considering to set this up as a social venture. In my opinion this means that the prime purpose of the venture is to maximise the amount of donations in a self sustaining business model, and the secondary objective is to produce a return for the investors.
I'd love
to hear your thoughts about this, either as a comment below or directly to my email gerdschenkel@hotmail.com
Another village we visited was Ba Long (http://www.geographic.org/geographic_names/name.php?uni=-4923550&fid=6659&c=vietnam).
Also affected by typhoon Ketsana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Ketsana), Ba Long was completely covered by floods. Villagers showed us the floodline which was at the top of a high one story building.
For the subsistence residents this meant the complete loss of livelihood (crops, stock, possessions).
Save the Children helped by providing residents with new livestock, crops seedlings and other support.
In a meeting, some of the people there said that they knew they were poor and that they were embarrassed to receive the help. This was at the same time sad and also eye opening.
We also visited a school. Thanks to the Vietnamese government's focus on education, there are several school building around. However, they seem to often lack on materials, such as books.
Save the Children helped the local schools by setting up a child friendly library, a scheme that includes books but also a child friendly play area.
Executive Director, Telstra Digital (www.telstra.com)
Founder of UBank (www.ubank.com.au)
Executive Director, Telstra Digital (www.telstra.com)
Founder of UBank (www.ubank.com.au)
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