Ooops - you might wonder how this headline goes together with our very own services for social communities? In fact it goes very well, as the point I want to make here more or less concurs with this article in Business Week back in May 2009. Gene Marks, who is a bestselling author for small business topics, makes this point there:

We’ve been misled as to the benefits of social networking sites. Many of us are finding that these tools do not live up to the hype, especially for small business. Once we start digging deeper, we’re finding a lot of challenges. Are you thinking of using Facebook, Twitter, or the like in your business? Before you go any further, consider the following myths:…

Most of the marketing departments who start using social media marketing think that they need to get onto Facebook and Twitter first. Actually, there is a much better way, which also makes use of the social community advantages for your market ecosystem: private social communities. Of course many might also mistake social media marketing with Facebook, StudiVZ or Twitter only and see - rightly - no point for their target audiences engaging. Marks also makes this point here (which I also agree with except that I don’t like the examples he has chosen):

Where, then, should a small business owner go online? Often the best social networking sites are specific to business owners. For example, Intuit’s (INTU) social media people are on their own small business community. Another good one is Bank of America’s (BAC) small business community.

The reason I think these are not such good examples is that they start out with the idea to create “small business communities” when in fact there is no such thing as people looking for small business advice but they are looking for accounting, investment, IT, etc. advice. Both do that in effect, of course, but should change their headings I think.

To make the same point less controversial sounding he could have asked “when to use public social media services and when to build your own?”.

This week we have seen two major announcements that are clearly relevant for social media communications: first Microsoft said they would integrate both Facebook and Twitter into Bing and then Google announced an integration into search with Twitter and others. “Financial terms” were exchanged between Google and Twitter is what Marissa Mayer disclosed at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco so it is at least clear that there are business interests behind it.

I think this will be the start of much more social media relevance and for sure also the use of private social communities (disclosure note: that we also offer as a service to deploy and manage) where companies built their own communities that are relevant to them and the stakeholders that they see as relevant.

At the same event Web 2.0, the most commented on presentation was btw exactly about this topic where Sean Parker, an entrepreneur who was founding President of Facebook and founder of infamous Napster and others and at the age of 27 was already a VC at Founders Fund, talks about a paradigm shift away from information services towards network services: “Why companies like Twitter, Facebook, Ebay and Apple (but not Google) will determine the future of the Internet” or “Collecting data is less valuable than connecting people”. His slides can be seen here.

Today I attended for the first time the Swiss Comdays 2009. This event is organized by the Swiss telecom industry regulator BAKOM and brings together the Swiss telecom management to listen to 30min presentations on telecom topics the first day and the second day the talks are about the media industry.

In general I don’t like such talking events as they are a platform for great speakers and not surprisingly are ideal for politicians to show off. Now these Comdays were no difference, with one exception:

A group of utility companies presented in a side room of the event (all supported by the BAKOM) how they plan to roll out FTTx.
I found these talks much more interesting and informative and thought that they should better run such events at these Comdays where they pick one topic and have key stakeholders give presentations.
Now as it turns out Switzerland seems to become one of the first countries in Europe - after Sweden and Asian countries - where utilities will invest into FTTx network infrastructure and then open the network to service providers who offer then Internet, voice, TV or any other telecom/datacom service (Open access model). Of course this has not been an overnight decision but took as in the case of the Zurich EWZ utility nearly 3 years of discussions and at the end a “Volksentscheid” (people’s vote) meaning that they will now be investing 200 million CHF into a fiber network over the next few years. Also other utilities such as in Basel, Genf, St. Gallen and Bern have decided to do the same and formed a cooperation between each other where they will use/apply what the EWZ with its “Zürinet” learned and uses. Also they decided just last Friday to establish some common service rules which will allow them to share technical standards and possibly even OSS solutions reducing the overall planning/rollout/operations costs.
The local incumbent Swisscom acknowledges this development but of course does not really like it.
This investment is a good start for Switzerland to become one of the leading countries in the deployment of high speed broadband access via fiber networks all the way to the  homes, companies and organizations.
The work for all these utilities and many others who will now follow has just started, though, and there is lots of work ahead still. One of the things ahead will be e.g. to explain to the end users what high speed data actually means for them and why this will be needed. Not an easy task for this industry, which is more used to talking ICT lingo between experts rather than using easy-to-understand analogies. Maybe an online community site is needed to do just that and also bring the key stakeholders (utilities, telcos, service providers, system vendors, system integrators, regulator, politicians, end users) together on a discussion forum where they also find excellent information on this topic.

To give you my opinion right away: I can’t imagine that Motorola and Verizon will by addressing some of the possible shortcomings of the iPhone ecosystem make their own Droid launch a success. Product management is more complicated than looking at  the market leader, writing down all its product specs and then simply bringing out a product that shows better features. This strategy succeeds only in a commodity market. But Apple and the iPhone, app store, iTunes ecosystem is NOT a simple product only but a thought-through end-to-end user experience product & service offering. The Motorola and Verizon folks have obviously still not understood this otherwise they would not have launched such a desperate campaign merely addressing - mostly - features. The strongest point was the openness of Google’s Android platform but also here they did a quick-and-dirty job. Not surprising knowing how desperate Motorola is these days to finally get back on track with a successful mobile phone after its long-time-ago success of the Razr.

But if you want to tackle Apple then you must take them on in a completely different way. And I think they are vulnerable because any company who is arrogant will miss opportunities or simply not do the best job possible. History has shown that over and over again. Unfortunately the Indian or Chinese style of product management, comparing spec sheet features one by one is not enough to make an impact. This has to be done differently…

Ever so often I take out some older DVDs to watch them. Last night I picked one of my favorites, Out of Africa (from 1985, 7 oscars), with Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer. I asked myself then why is this such a great movie. Obviously great actors and one of my favorite actresses: Meryl Streep,  who plays a baroness from the “small country next to Germany”, Denmark. Bored, feeling trapped in a men-ruled world, she decides - strangely - to break out of it all by marrying “her lover’s brother” and following him to Kenya where the British were operating a colony at the time.

Here a list of what I think makes this a great movie and what you can learn from it if you are in product marketing and also trying to run a campaign that gets attention, makes a difference and will be remembered:

• Something unknown: Africa and what to expect there are as interesting for the audience as for Karen Blixen
• Story: clearly a great story is told in this movie, and in addition Karen Blixen is a great story teller
• Adventure: going to Kenya at the time was clearly a big adventure and I suppose one of the main reasons, next to the bad weather in England, why they went there
• Love: great love story, no great movie without that
• Freedom: flying above the endless colorful African grasslands and mountains must be a fantastic experience; I always enjoyed flying across the flat land expanding from the Silicon Valley to the Sierra Nevada in a small plane, but to do this in Africa must be even more stunnin
• Beauty: beautiful actors and landscape as mentioned
• Drama: love alone won’t be enough, only the opposite makes it like a real life story
• Women in work life: clearly Karen Blixen is in her time what many working women are in business life today: independence-seeking, competent, hard working, fact-oriented, apolitical, detail-observing, listening, good communicators, tough but fair…, an interesting subject for many, not only women

Enjoy the weekend.

Kenya picture, courtesy of Ben Heine.

LinkedIn, the professional contact social network, is somewhat in the shadow of its much more visible rivals Facebook, Myspace or - recently - Twitter. For business users LinkedIn is in my opinion the strongest public social network tool I can think of. I also tried out XING, its German rival, but dropped it after finding little other than job seekers in it. LinkedIn on the other hand becomes a very very strong tool once you have 100+ or so contacts as you can then get in contact via InMail with many people that you might want to do business with. And with every new contact you sign on the network grows exponentially. What most people don’t know is that LinkedIn was started also by a German: Konstantin Guericke. Recently LinkedIn has been trying to also include more social communication features such as e.g. a status line on what you are working on.

I think they could easily also include more of what Facebook and Twitter have to offer and with that get the network growing some more. One key difference is that LinkedIn are far less willing to share their API with developers; this may be a benefit in some ways but it does limit the ways that LinkedIn can be tied into the user’s life. Another way they might expand is that they could start a LinkedIn Junior or something like that to attract younger folks as well. But whichever way you look at it, LinkedIn is a big success story and all the folks who have been involved deserve a lot of respect.

Recently I have been hearing in various places that print news were recovering, triggering comments of relief (from the newspapers) that predictions that everything was heading online were obviously not correct. I had a smile on my face when I read that, and it reminded me of a short-term assignment I had more than ten years ago with Bertelsmannn BMG in Hong Kong, where I had to plan for a data center for their AsiaPac countries. BMG was already thinking then about distributing music over the Internet and for that purpose went into the Internet access business. They formed a joint venture with - at that time market leader - AOL and even built their own country-wide access networks in Germany, as well as buying providers in other countries. Of course they did not realize that the Internet is a shared medium and it therefore did not make too much sense to buy it like a print or CD manufacturing plant.  Back to Hong Kong: as the data center did not seem to make economic sense at the time I suggested to them that I help with setting up an online music sales operation testing the waters in the AsiaPac region first (at that time dial-up was still to be found everywhere). Despite their investment into the AOL joint venture and into whole country IP networks (in Hong Kong we had the option to buy Hong Kong SuperNet, the city’s first and largest ISP) they looked quite puzzled about my offering and had one question only: how do we protect ourselves from illegal pirate downloads and distributions? My response was that there are technical methods even if not all can be protected, but most importantly we cannot sit and wait until it happens anyway. So still they turned the idea down and I moved on as well…

By now we all know what happened: a fruit company from Cupertino sells more than 50% of all music online and is taking the profits. Not only Bertelsmann BMG but all the other music labels lost the race to a company that had no idea about the music label business and its distribution at all.

So while the music industry shift online is done and one company dominates it, I am convinced we will see the same in the print media. And it looks like it might be the same fruit company eying for it. Read I. Cringley’s latest article on this, providing more background info. Interesting to read that he had the exact same experience in the print publication industry (in 1994 already) that I had in the music industry. History repeats itself, it seems, telling us that if you wait too long someone else will come and take that opportunity.

On my way back from a business trip I read a good article in the Economist, “Some companies are finding opportunities in the recession”. They mention four types of ways how companies take advantage of the current downturn to come out even stronger afterwards:

• take advantage of bargain-basement prices to make acquisitions (PepsiCo bought two of their biggest bottling companies, paying $6 billion)
• invest heavily into innovation (Intel’s Craig Barrett “you can’t save your way out of a recession; you have to invest your way out”; P&G is doing its biggest expansion in the company history opening 19 new factories around the world and IBM is holding a series of “innovation jams” to find new innovation ideas)
• companies reposition themselves (Cisco is buying startups, moving into services and expanding its business portfolio away from a pure network hardware provider)
• and last, but not least, entire new companies are being formed, following in the footsteps of others that were also started during recessions, such as FedEx, CNN and Microsoft

Update: nice slide from Phil Kotler on this subject.

While there are some signs of recovery, it seems a slow moving process and many companies are still having a hard time planning their budgets for longer than just a few months ahead. Also the question comes up what to do in marketing. Will people even be open to what you do? Or should you save that money entirely?

Tools that I feel will still work are:

• video casts of products, your company; insightful interviews of your customers (needs someone doing the interviews who understands your business otherwise will be worthless small talk or high-level surface scratching); and something that you can try out as well are animated presentations with spoken text. This is easier to do as you don’t need video interview skills.
• virtual events: as VMWare and others have shown, you can increase the audience by 3-5x with a virtual event site that gives every participating company their own space. When travel costs are being cut, that seems the way to still have people engaged even if they might not physically attend the event
• interactive sites, if you are able to hook your target group with interesting discussions on hot subjects in your product market this should draw attention; and if you manage to get many to even leave comments, you have achieved the best one can expect from a product marketing tool. These social community sites require very careful and skilled planning, though. Also cultural aspects inside and outside your company need to be taken into account. You cannot just buy a community software tool and set it all up in a week. While technically possible, it will definitely not fly. Still, many software vendors try to make you believe a community is just another simple collaboration tool like chatting or project collaboration. But it is simply not so!
• fun sells: it requires a bit of courage to use fun elements such as cartoons but, if you do, it will draw attention. It’s important that the fun is linked with what you do and not simply a general cartoon or joke
• webinars save people the time and expense of attending a seminar but, as with e-newsletters, I feel though there are many webinars offered, maybe too many? The beauty is nevertheless that you need only one participant and it is still worth doing as also on your side the cost is minimal. So I would try them still. Maybe you get some initial prospects. Be aware though that you need to do a personal invitation as well, which means more than sending out a general e-mail to your e-mail list!
• banner ads: if you want to make them effective then you need to spend a good amount of money making them very big and displaying them on highly trafficked sites where you expect your target group to go. A small banner ad next to half a dozen others will not be worth the money you have spent.

Tools that seem to have lost its magic:

• e-newsletters, I get much less than a few years ago when everyone sent out a newsletter and really expected that people would read them. I think they don’t unless you have something super interesting to say. Also if you do it it needs to be done very well incl. the design. The standard e-newsletters are not good enough. There are better ways now too such as RSS or community sites to do the same or even better.
• e-mailings, I think with RSS e-mailing campaigns have lost their raison d’aitre. Still there are many out who still spam the inboxes of their target groups. More annoying than effective I would think unless, again, it is a personal email but that is hard to do.

Update: and a more generic slide on Marketing 3.0 from Phil Kotler.

I have been using Evernote now for quite a while, primarily to organize the weekly and daily tasks. Also whenever I have a new idea I write it down as a note and sync it when there is WLAN access available, like at my home or in the office. Evernote has evolved form a simple note taking tool to an archiving system and how this looks has been described by Guy Kawasaki at length. I don’t think I will use all of these things but perhaps you will find some of them useful? Forwarding e-mails to my Evernote e-mail address and with that archiving them is something I have decided to do now.  Here’s a summary of all the things you can do:

• Forward email to your unique Evernote email address.
• Upload text, photo, or voice recordings via an iPhone, Palm Pre, or Windows Mobile phone.
• Drag-and-drop audio, images, PDFs, and files into Evernote on the desktop.
• Attach Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF documents to an email and send them to your Evernote email address.
• “Save PDF to Evernote” from the printing dialog box.
• Clip websites and blogs.
• Send documents directly from a scanner.
• Tweet text with the string “@myEN”.
• Upload from cameras directly to Evernote using the wireless EyeFi card.