weconverse

[WARNING UPDATE 2008-04-25 14:50 GMT+1: The kind of application described in this post requires the installation of software provided by other parties, in this case from woopra.com. A couple of hours ago I experienced some strange behavior on the weconverse.com site. The effects (file date modifications, som extra files added to the server, etc) reminds of a known spam attack, which I thought applied to other versions of Wordpress. Even though I have no reason to believe that woopra is the causee, I have temporarily removed it from my server because the strange things happened after I installed woopra.]

We are who we are and who we are need explanations  (guess where I got that from :-).

Last night I digged into my  dile (digital pile) of podcasts, blogs, news sources, and more. In episode 40 of the WordPress podcast I heard about Woopra, which looks like an extremely interesting service. The people behind Woopra (Elie Khoury, Jad Younan, John Pozadzides and the team of iFusion Labs) says that Woopra is:

the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. And it’s free!

My impression so far is that Woopra is like Google Analytics (and similar services), but offers a number of additional features. In particular: real time (data analysis, live tracking and web stats), more comprehensive (richer UI, site type focus), and most of all - built in capabilities for conversations between managers and visitors of the site (Click-to-Chat). Woopra is managed through an application installed on the site owners personal computer (Windows, MacOS, Linux). For example, I can tag some visitors to weconverse.com and whenever they return to the site my desktop application will notify me.

Woopra seems to be geared more towards personal/SME’s than corporate web sites. It was Launched April 9 and is still in beta. Up until today the services was by invitation only. I have signed up, installed the tools, but still wait for an approval to go ahead with weconverse.com.

Meanwhile, you can take a look at some reviews. The 10 minute video below from Johny.org is unfortunately without narration, but gives a pretty good idea of what we can expect.

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Last week, when I was in New York with a group of customers on a learning trip, the Thursday FiR 337 discussed the greenwashing issue. That is, misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices. A practice that perhaps will become impossible thanks to social media. Compare the Wal-Mart kerfuffle two years ago, when the retailer’s blogger outreach  "Working families" was revealed as a fake created by Wal-Mart and their PR agency.

Interestingly enough, last Monday our learning group made a visit to Saatchi and Saatchi X (shopper marketing) at their Manhattan offices. A nice surprice for us was the (too) brief session with Kate Cook from Saatchi S - S as in Sustainability. Kate told us about Birth of BLUE, and the Wal-Mart Personal Sustainability Practice case created by Act Now Productions. She provided it as a backgrounder to Saatchi and Saatchis January acquisition of Act Now, which was renamed into Saatchi S.

When I heard about that, my initial reaction was that it might very well be a greenwashing case. Saatchi just wants to appear "green", and the same goes for Wal-Mart. So, as a way to clear my mind I decided to to some further research. And now it seems to me that Saatchi S rather wants to create BLUE. When green is about enviromentalism, BLUE is about putting people at the center. More specifically, people as consumers. Most likely social media will be an important factor in this process, albeit not  as a core strategy (yet :-).

A key person in the story is Adam Werbach. In 1996 he became the youngest national (US) president of the Sierra Club. In 1998 he started Act Now Productions, and in 2006 he accepted a request from senior leaders at Wal-Mart to help them with their sustainability efforts. The same year Adam was also elected as a member of the international board of Greenpeace. Of course his decision to work for Wal-Mart was heavily criticized. As he examplifies in his speech to the Commonwealth club earlier this month (pdf, audio):

A widely circulated piece critiquing my decision to work with Wal-Mart was entitled “The Death of Integrity.” Another one, published just this week, has a more visceral title: “Adam Werbach makes me puke.” A blogger named Cliff Schector wrote a piece called, “Adam Werbach: Wal-Mart’s New Fraud Salesman.” “What Werbach needs to realize is that Wal-Mart is beyond improvement and yes, beyond redemption. Those who really are forward-thinking need to stop working with this man, certainly stop paying him and I would daresay, if you really believe in what you say you do, stop returning his phone calls. He has chosen to sell out. It doesn’t mean we all have to join him in Wonderland."

Tonight I invite you to join me in Wonderland.

In short, Adam’s creative idea was to motivate every Wal-Mart associate (1.3M in the US, almost 2M world wide) into a Personal Sustainability Practice (PSP). Thus allowing individuals to decide what sustainability means and what she or he could do about it. I suggest that you (pro)consume Adam’s Commonwealth speech (pdf, audio), because it explains in great details the situation, thoughts, lessons, surprises, and effects. Some of the results, regarding the Wal-Mart associates, include that they:

• lost more than 60 tons of weight;
• walked/biked/swam more than 380,000 miles
• created over 16,000 “Idea Groups” to support one another around Personal Sustainability; and
• quit or reduced smoking, with more than 10,000 Associates to date making a healthier change!   
• recycled more than 5 million pounds of aluminum, plastic, and paper

Kate also added a note about one of the interesting side effects. One associate suggested that the lamps in the stores’ Coke vending machines should be switched off at nights. I do not remember how much energy that saved, but it was a huge number.

Another important aspect here is the "consumer approach", where of course Saatchi & Saatchi comes in handy. Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, said in their news release:

Social change is part of Saatchi & Saatchi’s DNA. We are committed to world-changing ideas, to creating Lovemarks, to understanding the shopper, and to helping build a sustainable future across all dimensions: economic, environmental, social and cultural.

One might look at that as greenwashing. But personally I have for a long time argued that marketers, here an agency with expertise in (post) modern consumer behavior, understand people better than most  legislators, educators, environmentalists, etc. Furthermore, it is my impression that it is exactly that kind of expertice Adam Warbach wants to exploit for sustainability purposes. Sam Walton (founder of Wal-Mart) have said "The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want". My intepretation is that Adam’s approach is to make consumers really want sustainability. This could perhaps be compared with the different strategy (I believe) taken by The Natural Step, who employ organizational and educational approaches.

Future will tell, and I truly hope we are right. Still, I am not totally convinced. I could not find a word about sustainability in the "help/about section" of the Wal-Mart web site, but a search for "sustainability" linked to Wal-Mart Save Money, Live Better.

In any case, it sounds great to be BLUE. And I bet, given the marketing machines involved here, that we will see a lot of BLUE videos, plug-ins, widgets, gadgets, apps, and more. Or, are they already out there?

(by the way BLUE and PSP are not very smart brand names from a Internet search perspective, and I personally do not like commercial appropriation of core words in our languages, i.e, the name of a color or a digit).

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The following week I am visiting New York together with a group of bank leaders/managers from Swedbank and the Swedish Savings banks. I have adviced them on the content of this Learning trip and accompany the group as a way to share our learning further. We all look forward to a week full of interesting meetings, visits, and expereinces. Depending on what my customer, our hosts, and I think is OK to share openly, I will publish as much insights as I can here in weconverse.

The focus for our trip is The New Global World, The New Internet, and The Novel Experiences. Anything you want to know/share about that?

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SATU ry is the Association of Independent Producers in Findland. They are currently mapping out the schedule for the number one annual media event in Finland. That is, the Media & Message 2008. The event will take place on August 6-7, 2008, in the town of Naantali, close to Turkku. I have been asked to during 45-60 minutes present some thoughts and suggest:

Re:think media for our future

Today we are barely recognizing that social media most likely will transform mankind even more than the printing technology, books, and television did. Are we prepared? What is really going on? What do you want to do with it?

Media is commonly interpreted as a way to convey information between two or more parties. This includes the more narrow idea of mass media. That is, media that sends one message to many recipients. What we see right now, for example through the "social media" lens, is dramatic changes where individuals explodingly converse with other individuals. Hence we turn to new models, theories, and tools to use "social media" effectively and efficiently. But other phenomena such as recommendation systems, mash-ups, cloud computers, the semantic web, and sentiment analysis are typically overlooked. Richard have those in mind and will share his ideas around Social media in 2015.

What do you think? Does it sound interesting, too academic or just incomprehensible?

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For several weeks I have had the intention to publish a post about my experiences with mobile Internet (will come soon :-). In addition I wanted to contribute with some reflections on the issue as a comment to For Immediate Release (FiR). Even more so after Neville Hobson, who together with Shel Holz produce FiR, this Tuesday blogged  Experiencing 3 mobile broadband. I planned to record my comment on Wednesday evening so it could make it into Thursdays episode. But I did not find the time.

Yesterday (Thursday) I spent together with a group of bank managers (Swedbank and independent savings banks, Sparbanker). During the morning we had a wonderful session with the fascinating speaker/consultant Fredrik Härén. When Fredrik entered the stage I used my Nokia N95 8Gb to produce a short livestream video clip (in Swedish) via bambuser. Bumbuser is a Swedish startup, similar to Qik, but with a different approach when it comes to the streaming technology.

One of Fredrik’s topics is creativiy, perhaps that gave me The Idea. I thought…what if I would record my FiR comment as a part of the afternoon session with the bankers. Thought and done, I immediately used my HTC Touch Cruise to the send the following tweet to Neville (jangles at Twitter, note time stamps are BST, i.e. GMT+1, relative to when I copied the messages):

@jangles I plan to do a live (with audience) FiR audio comment about mobile broadband in about 5h 08:51 AM April 10, 2008

Remember, I did all this (livestreaming, twittering, and more) while listening to Fredrik’s presentation and his interactions with us in Swedbank’s meeting room downtown Stockholm. One (1) minute later, presumably still at home in Wokington, Neville replied:

@weconverse that’s great, Richard. Look forward to hearing your recording! 08:52 AM April 10, 2008 from twhirl in reply to weconverse

Around five hours later I arrived at the point in my own presentation where we took a look at podcasting. I demonstrated the FiR website and played a short clip with listener comments from Monday’s episode. Unfortunately I had left my Edirol R09 mp3-recorder at home. But besides accepting text comments and e-mail with mp3 file attachements, FiR also uses Mobatalk (pka MyChingo). The Mobatalk service appears as a widget on any web site that allows visitors to make live recordings through their web browser. In front of the group I hit the "Record" button and started to talk, keeping an eye on the level meter. Maybe three minutes later the folks in the room pointed out that the recorder had stopped. We all realized that Mobatalk had a two minute limit.

OK, I like to do experiments and test the limits of my (and the audiences’ :-) capacity. But this was kind of too much. Besides doing it all live, time pressed, speaking English, and a very sketchy outline of what my comment should include, the darn widget stopped me. While thinking "poor Neville who has to edit togheter two comments", "how much of what I said was recorded", and "what is most important to say during two minutes", I hit record again. When done I clicked "stop", "send message", and told the group that perhaps it would be part of the next episode. Then we continued our meeting, which included great thoughts and cases from Anders Lundkvist (Springtime) and Henrik Torstensson (Stardoll).

Those of you that have worked as consultants for banks know that it sometimes is impossible to be connected to the Internet from inside their offices. In this case I had a WiFi connection for my laptop, but no mobile coverage. Therefore it took some time before I read Nevilles:

@weconverse got your 2 Mobatalk recordings, Richard, thanks. Will be in today’s FIR. Recording later today. about 20 hours ago

Eager to see how things unfolded, I kept an eye on the streams through my twitter account the same evening. Here are the FiR production related tweets from Neville (he made many more):

About to record FIR 335. Boy, will this be late today. about 16 hours ago

Phew. Just finished recording FIR 335. Need another r&c now. about 15 hours ago 

Well into audio editing FIR 335. Break now for bite, back in 45 or so. about 14 hours ago

Some of the editing is a bit dodgy, I reckon, but FIR 335 is almost there. Final mix including a pretty cool podsafe music track. about 12 hours ago

RSS subscribers - FIR 335 coming your way via RSS feed. Show notes and direct d/l links soon. Plus one FIR Cut. about 11 hours ago

FIR 335 posted. http://tinyurl.com/5vvx5o about 10 hours ago

I went to bed before Neville published the result, he is amazing (and overslept this morning :-). In any case, you can enjoy the result in FiR 335. My comment appears 35m20s into the episode. But listen to the whole thing - it is as always packed with valuable stuff.

Thank you Neville!!!

[Update 2008-04-12] Check who spotted the above out:

Mobasoft @weconverse Just read your blog post. I’m glad that MyChingo (aka Mobatalk) was able to help you. Paid members get 30 minutes, not 2 ;-) 04:06 PM April 11, 2008 from web

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[Update 2008-04-07] I just got the message that SEB has changed their plans and “cancelled” the event.

SEB are developing their organisation for market- and information management as well as their corporate brand. Now it is (the first) time for the managers working within those areas in the Nordic countries as well as Europe to meet. In that context I am fortunate enough to provide some inspiration and questionmarks.

[side note, over the years I have provided at least four gigs, and advice in other contexts, for SEB as well as Swedbank. Interestingly enough I am not a customer of those banks. Skandiabanken, where I have my private fortune (well...), have neither responded to my constructive criticism, nor approached me with any kind of interest...]

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The what is there, why it is important follows here. When we say xxxx, what do we mean?  Consider the sentence:

Regarding the Swedish discussions about Public Service, not a single one of the ideas suggested by Richard Gatarski sucks.

My point here is not the content of the sentence, but its sentiment. That is, "the attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling". I hope that you find my attitude towards my own ideas are pretty positive. In other words - I do not suck.

In a comment to my previous post Adam Nussdorfer suggests that I should do a Google Suck Index (GSI) with "Gatarski sucks". Of course I did, and currently the result is zero hits. The same goes for the Swedish translation "Gatarski suger". Good enough, eh? The only problem is that soon there will be at least one hit (this post). And if one of you blogs about this post and include "Gatarski sucks", Google will have two hits. Long-tailing around for some time and the GSI for my name would at first sight look terrible. So, I need to rewire your brain behind the current blink at GSI.

In a post in his company’s blog Adam refers to the Business Week article Love the customers who hate you. There Jeff Jarvis, famous not only for his Dell Hell experiences, tells the readers to check their GSI. Read the article, because Jarvis’ advice on what to do with angry customers are insightful and valuable. The same goes for the lead story Consumer vigilantes and the podcast episode behind it.

But Google finds words, not sentiment. Hence you must think beyound hit counts - that is the important lesson here. Regarding my little person it does not matter much, because you (if you are human) can easily scan the few hits to grasp the sentiment(s).

Let us take a more complex, yet illustrative, example. A Google search for (without quotation marks): cheap monday are not comfortable, gives me 2.580.000 hits, and cheap monday are comfortable gives 1.660.000 hits.  Do not assume that means that the majority of the Web stuff about cheap monday’s jeans is about how unconfy they are. Actually, the first 10 hits on the "not" search goes to retailers and fashion promoters. Clearly, we (humans) can not analyze the dominating attitude(s) here by looking at hit counts. We need help.

Machines capable of interpreting feelings and meanings have become more important than they were when I defended my dissertation Artificial Market Actors in 2001. The issue of meanings was not in my focus, although I sort of grasped the importance. In other words I am not the expert here, others are (let us know :-).

As I noted a few posts ago (in Swedish), what most likely will come in handy is "Sentiment analysis". According to (the current) Wikipedia definition it is an:

"area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgement or evaluation (see appraisal theory), their affectual state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader)."

For sure not a new field, but something I believe anyone interested in market conversations must learn about and contribute to. Note, this goes far beyond Google and similar search engines. Sentiment analysis, and related fields, are useful for intelligence in all kinds of social and other media.

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The other day I was doing some ego surfing or as I prefer to call it, market intelligence. To my surprise, at the top of the Google results list for "Richard Gatarski", I found a sponsored link. Apparently one of my customers bought an adword bundle that includes my name (gig next week at The Conference). That triggered some moments of reflection. Can’t say I am terribly concerned. Rather more thinking about if that (unclear)  is something I could capitalize upon. If nothing else, the other guys at my office envy me. Their names did not reveal any (namenapped) sponsorships. Does your?

Now to the even cooler thing. A Google search for "Wednesday Relations",  the name of the company who organizes The Conference, rank the weconverse blog gig entry as number five, and second if one excludes sites owned by Wednesday Relations.

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Today I learned through futurambs really interesting post Volvo IT blocks sites mentioning "social software", The reason, as echoed by futuramb is:

[weconverse and other sites] is categorised as Social Networking and Personal Sites. Volvo Group provides access to a subset of web sites through its Internet services. Other web site categories are blocked.

So cool, I feel both socially discriminated, and sorry for the folks at Volvo, compare my earlier thoughts on the issue. Perhaps they can find comfort by chewing Ahlgrens candy cars temporarily shaped as Volvo cars (co-branded marketing campaign, most discussed topic right now at the Swedish Bloggportalen).

On a side note, I am currently discussing with a client about a learning project concerning social media for a group of selected managers. We cannot use Facebook, because their enterprise has blocked the access to it. Easy thing to choose another social network - but not for adding value to the project. Rather, the result might be the other way around.

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At this very moment (if we are following the schedule) I am presenting a few glimpes from a fresh survey regarding web trends in Sweden. Earlier this month Web Service Award (WSA) surveyed randomly selected customers with the purpose of assessing how managers responsible for web sites consider the site’s service quality from the visitors perspective. Of the 929 managers who received the web based questionaire 424 responded (45%). The web sites in question are for public use and published by (non-)government organisations as well as commercial enterprises, including e-businesses.

Part of the survey, which also was conducted in 2005 and 2006, concerns web technology trends. For around 10 named, but not described, technologies (e.g. blogging) the managers were asked to indicate their knowledge (none to very well). Those who had at least some knowledge about a particular technology were also asked how their organisations considers it (not interesting to implemented and evaluated). The questions concerns use of the tools at the respondents web site, not the managers personal use.

Here is a brief summary from my personal analysis of the data and later tonight I will publish my slides from the gig. Please note, it is a quick-and-dirty analysis with possible errors. The full report, which also compares the managers responses on service quality with those from actual web visitors, will soon be available upon request from WSA (in Swedish I guess). Disclaimer: I have adviced WSA on what they should survey about, I am in the WSA jury, and I moderate their awards event.

Communities is not so very popular. Unfortunately the question about knowledge of communities as a web technology disappeared this year. But 344 respondents answered on how they considered the use of communitites. 17% said not interesting, 42% relatively low priority, 23% are closely monitoring the development, 11% have actual plans to implement, 3% have implemented but not evaluated, and 4% have implemented and evaluated communitites.

Blogging is well known, but not popular to use. 93% had at least some knowledge. The trend from 2005 is strong knowledge improvement, but still less than 50% answers “know very well”. The organisations seems to give blogging some priority and the trend is increased implementation, even though more than 50% of those who know about blogging overlooks blogging, i.e. answers not interesting or give it relative low priority.

RSS is well known, fairly prioritized and undergo implementation. 81% had at least some knowledge, hence the awareness is good and have been increasing since 2005 when 50% knew nothing about it. RSS seems to be more popular to use than blogging and over 40% of those who know about RSS have implemented it. Less than 10% find it not interesting.

Wiki is known, but relatively ignored. 70% had at least some knowlededge, up from less than 30% two years ago. Still virtually none of the organisations had implemented wikis and close to 67% found it not interesting or gave it low priority. Since 2005 the interest to closely monitor the development (27%) has more than doubled (from 12%).

Tagging is known, but gets low priority from but a few. 69% had at least some knowledge and the trend is increased understanding from 2005. Still almost 48% of those who know about tagging more or less overlooks it and around 20% will, or have, implemented it.

Web 2.0 is known and monitored, yet not very implemented. 67% had at least some knowledge, up strong from 30% in 2005. Interestingly enough 56% responded that they knew about Web 2.0 fairly or very well. After all, it is controversial and vague concept. Nevertheless of those who know about Web 2.0  few (5%) had implemented it, but 25% had actual plans for implementation.

VOIP is still not more than known. 67% had at least some knowledge. The trend from 2005 is deeper knowledge rather than more wide spread, as fairly to very well has risen from 25% to 43%. Still virtually no one who knows about VOIP have implemented it. And VOIP is more or less overlooked with the exception of the 15% who closely monitors the development.

Podcasting is becoming more known, but ignored. 67% had at least some knowledge, slightly up from 50% in 2005. Still the majority (72%) of those who knows about podcasting finds it uninteresing or gives it low priority.  Around 10% plan to, or have, implemented podcasts.

Widgets/gadgets is barely known and ignored. 52% had at least some knowledge, and this question was new with the 2007 survey. Close to 60% of those who know about widgets/gadgets overlooks them, no one has evaluated it and less than 14% plans to, or have, implmented widgets.

Affiliation program is not so known and not so interesting. 37% had at least some knowledge, slightly up from 28% in 2005. Of those who know about affiliation programs 67% overlooks it and 10% have implemented it. Note, only 35% of the surveyed web sites have marketing or e-business purposes.

Mashups mostly unknown, gets low priority or is monitored. Only 32% had at least some knowledge and this question was new in the 2007 survey. Of those 7% hade very good knowledge and 13% fairly good. 5% of those who knows about mashups have actually implemented it, and close to 50% more or less overlooks mashups. Still, around 40% are closely following the mashup development.

Of course all the above would be interesting to discuss further. I squeezed writing this entry into my schedule with no time for reflections. But after its publication we can all converse about reasons and meanings…do you want to?

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