c.Figallo

Archive for March, 2009

I consider both Eric and Tim to be among the premier teachers in the effective application of social technologies to real world uses. Lately, recognizing the dire straits we’re in on so many levels, Tim has been espousing the idea of that we “work on stuff that matters.” Meanwhile, Eric has continued sharing his valuable lessons learned as a serial entrepreneur in the digital space. One of his key teaching topics – and one that I’m finding very useful these days – is the lean startup. Last week, Eric was a guest blogger on O’Reilly Radar, where he mashed up his lean startup lessons with the stuff that matters meme. The result is well worth reading as a whole, and included some exquisite passages:

The Lean Startup is a disciplined approach to building companies that matter. It’s designed to dramatically reduce the risk associated with bringing a new product to market by building the company from the ground up for rapid iteration and learning. It requires dramatically less capital than older models, and can find profitability sooner. Most importantly, it breaks down the artificial dichotomy between pursuing the company’s vision and creating profitable value. Instead, it harnesses the power of the market in support of the company’s long-term mission.

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And here’s where working on something that matters to you more than money is critical. When you’re committed to something larger than yourself, every minute counts. Hype and transient success won’t keep you going. But the simple process of finding out whether or not your vision is right will. Because people who are dedicated to the truth are more likely to fail fast, learn, and try again.

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And here’s where working on something that matters to you more than money is critical. When you’re committed to something larger than yourself, every minute counts. Hype and transient success won’t keep you going. But the simple process of finding out whether or not your vision is right will. Because people who are dedicated to the truth are more likely to fail fast, learn, and try again.

Griff Wigley has been in the online social biz for a long time. I first met him on the WELL around 1990, and then in person when he was in town for one of the WELL’s infamous parties. That man can dance! Since then, he’s been the project manager for Utne Reader magazine’s online Cafe Utne community and a role model for implementing online social solutions for local communities. In Northfield, Minnesota, where Griff lives, he’s founded Northfield.org – the local community portal, and since 2005 he’s been a co-host of Locally Grown, a civic-issues podcast and weblog.

Griff invented his own practices of blogging for leadership , beginning with local organizations and small businesses and expanding to the virtual weblog coaching realm with clients all in the US and overseas. Griff’s blog at Wigley & Associates carries lots of useful information about practical uses of the weblog and Twitter platforms as demonstrated by a wide range of people, from hospital administrators to educators to civic leaders. You can see how he’s been busy revamping some of his local small business blogs. He demonstrates how you can become a true craftsperson using social media.

Here are some topics from a page of Griff’s online guide to effective blogging:

Once you understand why blogging can be an important leadership tool, you’ll increasingly have more than enough ideas on what you can blog about. But there’s a bit of craft involved in knowing how to blog effectively. In this section, we explain the how.

• Tell stories
• Link, link, link
• Insert photos
• Insert relevant images
• Post short and frequent vs. long and infrequent
• Answer email with a blog
• Promote discussion via a blog
• Give notice if you stop blogging

Anyone paying attention knows that the Dutch, as a people, are way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of reducing their carbon footprint while simultaneously planning to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Being a coastal nation with much of your land below sea level will do that to a culture. They seem to have developed some very collaborative attitudes and habits over the centuries since they inhabited the lowlands along the North Sea.

This Business Week article describes some of the initiatives under way in Amsterdam, with partnership from some of the big companies in tech and banking helping to push things along.

The projects, all getting under way over the next few months, represent Amsterdam’s initial steps toward making its infrastructure more eco-friendly. The move comes as governments worldwide set aside billions of dollars to create so-called “smart cities,” or towns that mix renewable projects, next-generation energy efficiency, and government support to cut overall carbon dioxide footprints. Yet, unlike cities that could take decades to upgrade their infrastructure, Amsterdam aims to complete its first-round investments by 2012. That makes it one of the first and most ambitious adopters of the smart city concept, attracting attention from policymakers worldwide hoping to glean lessons from the green experiment.

Here’s the beginning of a shared toolset that is on the right path, I think. DIYcity invites people to join from wherever they live, and develop Web-based tools and widgets that can be shared to help people in each place take care of business at their locally-connected-grassroots level.

DIYcity is a site where people from all over the world think about, talk about, and ultimately build tools for making their cities work better with web technologies.

The idea is to improve city living, so it’s not (yet) all about sustainability or adaptation. But the distributed, networked structure is similar to my original thinking about AdaptLocal. The site is only 5 months old and it’s still pretty thin on content, but there are about 400 members representing about 40 group locations. Their Project Pool at this time containg:

• Cooperative Bike Share
• Distributed Smart Phone Bus Tracker
• Bar Code Bus Tracker
• Taxi Share
• Open Source Post Office
• Open Source Ridesharing App
• Zoning Application

On the WordChanging blog I ran across some good ideas developed in the most drought-and-wildfire-impacted region of southern Australia.

Andrew Outhwaite was traveling the area as a member of the Hållbarhet2009 Learning Journey and Conference, witnessing the damage done by the Big Dry – the years-long extreme drought that has transformed huge tracts of land – and the devastating fires that consumed much of the remaining vegetation. In the group’s interaction with local groups of residents, Andrew identified some barriers to community impact in adapting to the new climate, and then thought through some ways in which technology could help leap those barriers. Here are  a couple examples:

Barrier: The desire to ‘get more done urgently, now’ rather than taking the time to really connect, listen and build the trust that underlies collaboration.

Community-Enabling Technology: Reestablishing rituals. For example, Aboriginal people inviting visitors to their traditional lands to participate in welcoming ceremonies, a kind of spiritual technology: circling a sacred fire and breathing in the smoke generates a visceral sense of respect and connection with each other, other species and creation.

Barrier: Being too identified with your own profession/network/clique, and its language, symbols, models, paradigms and habits can seriously inhibit inter-network collaboration, even within the sustainability movement.

Community-Enabling Technology: Encouraging information Cross-Pollination. Universities (e.g. BTH, UTS and RMIT) are encouraging transdisciplinary research to enable innovation across departmental, sectoral and epistemological boundaries.

In the populous countries of the developing world, people have been flocking from rural areas to cities for decades, and the pace continues to quicken as drought, conflict and economic collapse make living in the country less supportable.

Most poor families move into cities or on their outskirts because such locations offer more possibilities for income where wealth is being created and resources are being used, provided and discarded. Slums surround most cities in the southern hemisphere today and, though it would be wrong to claim that slum living is a good end for anyone’s life, some studies are finding threads of a silver lining in the innovative ways that people adapt to their self-made communities.

Stewart Brand has, for years, reminded us of this “major demographic event” as what he calls “squatter cities” formed as villages of the world empty out. Here’s his typically pithy TED conference presentation on the subject. In an essay written for the Long Now Foundation, which he founded, Stewart wrote:

Speed of urban development is not necessarily bad. Many people deplored the huge Levittown tracts when they were created in the ’40s and ’50s, but they turned out to be tremendously adaptive and quickly adopted a local identity, with every house becoming different. The form of housing that resists local identity is gated communities, with their fierce regulations prohibiting anything interesting being done by home owners that might affect real estate value for the neighbors (no laundry drying outside!). If you want a new community to express local life and have deep adaptivity, emphasize the houses becoming homes rather than speculative real estate.

Squatters – largely because they have no choice – have much to teach us about adaptive community. Though we probably won’t find ourselves desperately constructing settlements out of the discarded junk of affluence, we may very well be innovating new ways of collaboration and building to fit our changing circumstances.

Some quotes from an article in the Boston Globe, titled Learning from Slums:

Some frustrating parts of slum life – the close quarters and the need to cooperate with neighbors in endeavors like obtaining services – have an upside: they can contribute to a strong sense of community.

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There is an ethos of self-reliance in communities independently built and continually rebuilt by their residents.

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Meanwhile, some observers in the developed world have been asking, what if the laudable aspects of these informal communities could be disentangled from the unfortunate parts? To build housing for low-income people, [architect and professor at UC San Diego, Teddy] Cruz has drawn inspiration from Tijuana shantytowns for developments in Southern California, and is currently working on the one in Hudson. It will include communal porches and terraces, and spaces meant to encourage small start-up businesses – for example, providing room to store sewing machines. The intention is to integrate a poorer immigrant population into the area by creating openings for a community to evolve. He calls his vision “club sandwich urbanism – layering. It occurs through time. Our planning institutions never think about time.”

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Cruz and [author of "Shadow Cities: a Billion Squatters, a New Urban World," Robert] Neuwirth say we can also learn from the spirit of collaboration in informal settlements, and their ingenuity in the use of space. Their richness suggests to some that the dominant American mode of living, for all its suburban comforts, has come at a price. Municipalities might want to reconsider zoning laws to allow residences to double as businesses, says Cruz: he imagines small enterprises being run out of garages. In Werthmann’s view, we might also emulate the low-rise, high-density model, which is conducive to neighborliness and requires no elevators.

The work that’s been gaining traction since Obama came into office – aimed at opening government up to more civic understanding, collaboration and involvement – is crucial as we try to dig out from so many years of government abuse. Led by organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, these efforts follow on Obama’s issuing a memo on Transparency and Open Government.

Hundreds of grassroots technologists, techno-activists and government employees gathered in Washington D.C. two weeks ago for Transparency Camp 09, exploring the social and technological interfaces for the new openness. The spirit is contagious, as you can now Google “governmental transparency” and find activity at the state levels as well as federal.

For a while now – driven mostly by my concern that climate change adaptation needs to be addressed at the local level – I’ve been wondering how local governments and citizens could use technology to collaborate more closely than they do. What – for example – would be the feasibility of building a platform that would serve both local transparency and coordination around adaptive action?

A few associates and I are exploring this idea under the name RealGov.

This report from the Pew Internet and the American Life Project (PIALP?) is dated February 12, 2009 and is based on data gathered at the end of 2008. Why do I get the feeling that it’s already going stale? In any case, it’s about as current as we’ll find. It’s titled Twitter and status updating and you can download the whole enchilada as a pdf.

As I use Twitter (and Facebook, too, for that matter) it’s less for updating people on my status (who could possibly care to hear about that all day?) than to pass along interesting stuff that comes up in our work and scanning of sources for knowledge, best practices, fresh ideas and news. Status-schmatus.

Excerpts from the overview:

As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others.

Twitter and similar services have been most avidly embraced by young adults. Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter. The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.

Social media strategies – worth pursuing for what you want to achieve? How do you know you’re on the right track? This is and always has been the big question where something tangible like revenue is not at the core of your plan. And even in consumer-driven environments, investment in social support and connectivity has become a major piece of customer support, marketing and loyalty strategies. How much is it worth to you and how do you know if you’re doing it effectively?

Amber Naslund at Altitude Branding blogged about metrics and gathered most of the usual suspects for consideration (see below), adding some wise caveats such as this one: “Start with your objective in mind, and from there, work back toward the measures and metrics most likely to drive toward that goal and support the intelligence you hope to gather.” And this one: “For all the metrics you track, you have to realize that the path from initial contact to desired result is a winding one when it comes to marketing.”

What You Might Measure

Revenue and Business Development: (benchmark before and after SM initiatives begin)

• Speed/length of sales cycle
• Number or % of Repeat customers
• % of Customer Retention
• Number of customer referrals (new business), net number of new leads
• Transaction value per customer
• Customer lifetime value
• Conversions from blog/email subs to leads or customers
• Website conversions for leads or sales
• Organic search rankings > converted leads
• % of Converted leads from online vs. offline sources

Potential Cost Savings:

• Shorter customer service/issue resolution time
• % of issues resolved via offline vs. online channels
• Number of support calls before/after outreach effort
• Recruiting costs through online presence (vs. recruiters)
• Training costs
• % of quarterly or annual customer/account turnover
• Overhead costs for communication (measure costs of online outreach vs. analog as compared to resolution ratios)
• Number/ ratio of viable community-driven product ideas
• Length of concept-to-development cycle (use of online community as testing/focus/idea development)

Value, Awareness, Influence

• Brand Loyalty
• Sentiment of posts online – advocates, detractors
• Share of conversation/voice
• Number and frequency of mentions in media (online or print)
• Net Promoter Score (likelihood of recommendation)
• Subscribers to blog/email/newsletter
• Comments/engagement on posted material, downloads of ebooks, etc. (interaction with content)
• Inbound links to site/blog (total as well as on-topic/relevant)
• Number of Tags, votes, social bookmarks
• Fans/followers/group members for social profiles (implication of a brand following)

Working with multiple clients and holding meetings face-to-face or on conference calls, I often find myself feeling that I’m not getting what I came to the meeting for. Hmmm…weren’t we supposed to resolve this bottleneck? Didn’t we, instead, end up spending most of the meeting hearing Bruce talk about his grand new vision?

Seth Godin must have just had another of those kinds of experiences, because this description in his blog matches my feelings pretty closely. And let me just add my own suggestion: make an agenda, make sure everyone understands it, clarify it at the beginning and make sure you reach closure before you adjourn.

As Seth puts it:

There are only three kinds of classic meetings:

1. Information. This is a meeting where attendees are informed about what is happening (with or without their blessing). While there may be a facade of conversation, it’s primarily designed to inform.
2. Discussion. This is a meeting where the leader actually wants feedback or direction or connections. You can use this meeting to come up with an action plan, or develop a new idea, for example.
3. Permission. This is a meeting where the other side is supposed to say yes but has the power to say no.

PLEASE don’t confuse them. Confused meeting types are the number one source of meeting ennui. One source of confusion is that a meeting starts as one sort of meeting and then magically morphs into another kind. The reason this is frightening is that one side or the other might not realize that’s actually occurring. If it does, stop and say, “Thanks for the discussion. Let me state what we’ve just agreed on and then we can go ahead and approve it, okay?”