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Filed under: communication, community | Tags: blaze, Cache Valley, cats, communication, communities, fire, Logan, Utah
While on my Thanksgiving holiday, I noticed the today the front page of the small town newspaper at my wife’s parents. Take a look:
It is heartening to realize that in many less well-known areas, the “simple life” is the norm. There is also a lesson here about understanding your audience. A large city editor sent to “save” this paper may demand a focus on more mandarin matters. In doing so, the editor ought to be most aware of how his community currently and wishes to communicates, rather than how the saving editor thinks they ought to converse.
I am not advocating always pandering to the lowest level your audience. I am simply stating, sometimes people care more about cats than wars—and if that is your target group, you should be well aware.
Filed under: communication, online media | Tags: blogging, communication, communities
Today we at Zions Direct, along with a few of our sister institutions, launched our “Think” blog.
Well, it actually begin a few days back with an inchoate posting by yours truly, but today—with more substantial commentary by those who have the expertise to offer it—we can safely say it is official.
I am quite happy with how this has worked out and have great hopes we be able to facilitate better conversations through this medium.
Disclosure:
You may see that I like Zions Direct Auctions. I also work in marketing on that product, which means I may be a bit biased (but it also means I do something that I believe in).
Filed under: community, innovation | Tags: beta culture, communities, early adopters, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Nicholas Carr, product cycle, Vista
Lifehacker quotes a Gizmodo rant against the “beta culture”:
We have surrendered in the name of progress and marketing and product cycles and consumerism. Maybe those are good reasons, I don’t know, but looking at the past, it feels like we are being conned. Deceived because the manufacturers of electronic products have taken our desire to progress faster and even embrace the web beta culture as an excuse to rush things to market, to blatantly admit bugs and the rushed features sets and sell the patches as upgrades.
Of course, comments centered around the notion that beta releases are usually free, but, as “tamoriel” points out, if companies are releasing beta quality as final—that is where the problem lies.
That last clarification is easy to agree with, but the earlier premise doesn’t seem accurate. Sure, there are some offerings where beta quality is treated as final (*cough Vista*), but typically, the beta culture is actually better for us than the alternative.
Early adopters have always had to face bugs, it is a part of being in that group. Things just don’t always break like they should in a test environment. But when an organization can embrace this stage, and, in so doing, they create a relationship with their top users in which the users can benefit (free service, having voice, etc) and reciprocally can help form the product or service into a better design, you have a true positive user-provider exchange. It just needs to be done well (see a 2006 “Beta Culture” piece by Nicholas Carr for a deeper look into this qualification).
Instead of hiding the offering until launch, and then give consumers a guesswork-led design, the secret is to get your end-users to truly design with you. That’s why the “beta culture” works.
Filed under: community, politics | Tags: BCS, blogging, communities, Dodge County, Dodge County Independent, editor, ESPN, Facebook, Flickr, Ivan Maisel, Kasson, MN, movements, MSNBC, obama, Randy Carlsen, small towns, Twitter, voting, Wired, youth, YouTube
Last night, I got really riled up for the first time this autumn. No, unfortunately, it wasn’t for anything political. Nor was it for the Cubs total collapse; that just made me sad. No, it was for Ivan Maisel’s ridiculous defense of the BCS. Yes, that shows my priorities. I almost added to the chorus of voices calling him clueless, but then I realized—that’s probably what he was looking for.
So I am instead going to focus on a story that wasn’t simply asking for as much attention. I find it interesting to scan the small town newspapers across the nation, likely because I grew up in a small town and I get a kick out of the activities, opinions, and culture that pervades that type of life.
In the Dodge County Independent (out of Kasson, MN), Randy Carlsen, editor of the Dodge County Independent wrote last month:
Presidential candidates are going after the young vote. They feel that youth will be the ticket to the White House. Try again!
If either of the presidential candidates had any sense at all they would be going after the senior citizen vote.
[...]
When I turned 18 in August of 1973 I was excited about going to the polls and voting in my first presidential election. I think today most young people are more excited about turning 21 so they can go into a bar.
Ouch. Of course, when we see the images of the campaigning and the prevalence of the youth vote in polling stations and political rallies, we may have reason to disagree. Well, it turns out, the candidates did have some sense. MSNBC reported:
Youth vote may have been key in Obama’s win
It is a bit disingenuous to say the youth of our nation are the lazy, unconnected ones. Instead of looking first to this commonly target demographic, consider the fact that after decades of civic isolationist creep, it is the youth that are using blogs (even if they are dead), YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera to not only connect, but to push ideals and create communities. We are creating movements. A force for advancement that we haven’t seen the likes of in this nation for decades.
That defines the youth of today. I guess there was something else that riled me up.
Filed under: community | Tags: CNN, communities, homes, Marilyn Mock, Samaritan, Tracy Orr
I talk a lot about communities here—just look at the category and tag clouds to your right. The reason that communities are so powerful—in movements, in marketing, and in simply living—is that it is important for us to be connected with others. We can feel that inner desire to reach out, to support.
The cool thing is, people are really on a whole pretty good. There is lots of negative news about rotten individuals, but then a story like this comes out.
“Are you here to buy a house?” Marilyn Mock said.
[Tracy] Orr couldn’t hold it in. The tears flowed. She pointed to the auction brochure at a home that didn’t have a picture. “That’s my house,” she said.
Within moments, the four-bedroom, two-bath home in Pottsboro, Texas, went up for sale. People up front began casting their bids. The home that Orr purchased in September 2004 was slipping away.
She stood and moved toward the crowd. Behind her, Mock got into the action [...] she bought the home [...] That’s when Mock did what most bidders at a foreclosure auction never do.
“She said, ‘I did this for you. I’m doing this for you,’ ” Orr says.
[...]
“All this happened within like 5 minutes. She never even asked me my name. She didn’t ask me my financial situation. She had no idea what [the house] looked like. She just did it out of the graciousness of her heart.”
Lest you think I am hiding something, Mock and Orr are going to work out a way for Orr to pay her back. Mock isn’t a rich “Good Samaritan” that goes around with money to burn. Things are tight for her too, but she was in a position to help. And that’s what Orr needed.
That’s why we have communities, that’s why we need to facilitate their creation. It’s so people can continue to have these types of experiences.
Filed under: community, innovation | Tags: 37signals, communities, Quiet Innovations, reciprocity, T-Shirts, Threadless
Since first featuring Threadless, as one of my “quiet innovators”, they seem to have been less “quiet.” This probably has much more to do with a cognitive bias on my part than anything else, but it is obvious that people love them. And for good reason. They are awesome.
The concept is simple:
*translation, you design it, the treadless community votes on it, and if your design is liked, you get paid.
Matt at 37signals writes about their “Community…no, really.”
A lot of sites pay lip service to the notion of building a community. Threadless actually does it. And it’s not just having a blog or a forum (though the site has those too). Check out the site’s navigation where “Shop” and “Participate” are given equal treatment
[...]
It’s no accident. Threadless isn’t just a place to buy stuff. It’s a place where people do stuff too.
And I love the comments to Matt’s post. They give us great insights in the pathway to Treadless’s success.
Threadless sends out the only newsletter that stops me in my tracks during work. While every other newsletter gets a ‘junk’ click, I can’t wait to see what is new from them.
Threadless personif[ies] everything that’s great about the web.
Threadless is an example of an actual real community online.
Their transfer of work to users is a brilliant strategy in not only sharing design cost, but also in creating and maintaining a community. There is a give and take factor that underpins the entire organization.
And so we come to reciprocity again. It is a key factor to community-building (if not the key). If you can figure out how to do that, you create one pretty strong and hard to assail position.
I am going to be purposely vague, the reasons being obvious. Over the last two weeks, a family member of a popular blogger went missing and was later found. Online posts, images, and messages proliferated when the word went out. But when the immediate crisis was over, there was a simple message:
Now that [removed] has been found [...] we are asking all that posted on Twitter, messageboards and their blogs to please delete the posts. We don’t want this following the family around for the rest of their lives and would appreciate your continuing support.
And now, if you go to those posts, you are likely to find “Error 404 – Not Found”, “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.”, “This photo is unavailable”, a blank page, or some other message.
Communities become communities when reciprocity occurs. And in this case, it did. The circumstance was unfortunate, but the response was beautiful. That community exists in the truest sense of community. This blogging group has figured it out.
You want to bet that this organization continues to be pretty successful?
Filed under: community, marketing | Tags: marketing, Seth Godin, communities, Chief Awesome Officer, Triiibes, tribes, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam
As you can see on the sidebar, I have been reading Seth Godin’s Tribes. I vacillate between promoting books like this—books that do a good job of inciting but are more shallow on hard data—and discouraging their propagation in light of more deeply founded arguments. This moving to action that like books offer is most helpful when trying to organize a group around a core idea. And when we compare Godin to Putnam (as in the Bowling Alone author), the former is going to do a much better job of furthering the ideas in the latter’s book.
That said, Putnam’s book gives a strong foundation for understanding the cultural forces in such phenomena as a tribe, thus giving the reader and insights into steps that move beyond what is discernible in the case studies and metaphors that Godin breaks out. Tribes is the spoon full of sugar, Bowling Alone is the necessary medicine that the true marketers, managers, and strategists ought to have their organizations swallow.
It is worth reading both, but you will have much more success in passing Godin’s book to others (as I have started to do—we’ll see what our CAO thinks about it).
With that, Godin has also produced (with Triiibes) a Tribes casebook in a free ebook format. Included in this book is a case study that I wrote and I have featured here already, so there is a bit of self-promotion with my referencing this publication. If you do download it, please read the very first case study. It is remarkable.
Filed under: innovation, online media | Tags: communities, innovation, power, service innovation
First of all, let me respond to questions about the previous posting. I am not a PC. That said, I’m not really a Mac either. This is not some condescending piece on how I am above being just some “label”—which I am not at all; I like to be defined by one or two words—rather, I am simply not a Mac or PC. As polemic as the world is, we need not be defined by just those measures being the either-or (as noted by my Linux-loving workspace neighbor Steven).
The posting was about the “I’m a PC” ads. That’s it.
As I have written before, there is a co-worker here that describes himself as our Chief Awesome Officer. I don’t necessarily think that it is because he is awesome (strictly speaking), but rather having a Chief Awesome Officer would be pretty neat, and being that he came up with the concept, he gets the name.
I, on the other hand, would like to go by Batman.
As our CAO was leaving today, he gave me some homework to do tonight. I am not usually inclined to listen to him too much as he is an older brother that has not managed to really keep his brothers under his thumb as he’d like, so he tries to pull in others as a sort of proxy. That said, this one intrigued me a little, so here I am fulfilling it.
It was a simple question to be answered: what makes us (Zions Direct—specifically the auctions) remarkable.
Remarkable is a very simple concept, it means that something is worth talking about (you are able to remark). That means two things:
- Something about the subject matter is uncommonly interesting—not necessarily ultra-rare or amazingly ingenious, but noteworthy enough that you wish to share it, rather than just note it.
- The subject matter is easy-to-share. For example, the fact that Stephen Hawking has bet against the discovery of the Higgs boson in the Large Hadron Collider is certainly newsworthy, but pretty hard to share.
Now, the purpose of this exercise is more than just academic. If I rode a horse through the nearby State Capitol, that would be remarkable: uncommon and interesting to some + easily shared. But that doesn’t do much for me besides getting some attention.
So with Zions Direct Auctions; the focus here is on what makes this approach remarkable in a way that benefits user and provider.
The fact that we use auctions is not necessarily interesting. It is a process for selling CDs and other securities. Not really something that most people are bursting to let out. If that was all we did, it would simply be an unusual way to deposit money.
Also, selling CDs and other securities isn’t too remarkable. It’s just what financial institutions do. It’s like a fast food restaurant advertising they offer fast food.
But something does make us different. It’s what excites me about the business. It’s what makes me spill out my visions of disruption and innovation. It’s what makes this the focus of the future, as long as we can make sure we ease the process of access.
It’s about democratization.
That’s it. Unlike other financial sites and organizations, consumers are given access and power in ways they have never before been able to experience. It starts with FDIC-insured certificates of deposit. This is the most vanilla of securities, but pretty simple to understand. Customers come in, they bid, and they win or they lose—that’s how auctions work—but it is their collective decision that sets the price; it’s not us.
It’s not so much the how (the auction), but the purpose behind it. Instead of “auctioning” off rates that banks determine you should get, we actually leave it open. You decide. You want a higher yield, bid it. If that’s where the price should go, then that’s where it should go.
And then there are Senior Notes and Preferred Stock that we been offering. These are direct-to-consumer offerings sold in such a way that every self-directed investor can come in to help set the price as they bid to win. And this is without brokerage fees or middlemen taking cuts.
For years, the real power in the financial community had been in the deals that powerful institutions could take and slowly filter down until it eventually reached the common man in manner diluted by the profits taken by the handling organizations.
We disrupt that—we give that power to the everyman.
Sure we offer securities—lot’s of people do that. But we have actually given ordinary people greater power to influence and access to choice than any have ever before. That’s worth talking about.
Disclosure:
You may see that I like Zions Direct Auctions. I also work in marketing on that product, which means I may be a bit biased (but it also means I do something that I believe in).
