Just saw my first “social search” result from Google.   Wow, pretty cool.

Very nicely done.  When I click on my social circle it gives me a nice transparent look at exactly what is going on here

Since I don’t really use google chat and have never consciously curated my chat list, it is mainly just a list of people who are also gmail users with whom I have exchanged email from my gmail account.  I think I disabled my Google Buzz profile a few months back (ie my twitter account is not tied in because I opted out) or else I would have a lot more connections.  Mark Suster maybe this sort of answers your question about Google Buzz??

There is a lot more information available to me about my social circle, including all of the source data that Google is indexing for me broken down by contact.

I was a guest speaker last week at Andres Terech’s two MBA-level Marketing Strategy classes at UCLA Anderson GSM.  The main subject of the discussion was internet privacy as it relates to marketing strategy.  I left both classes with the advice to strongly consider starting a personal blog and make sure they maintain an up-to-date LinkedIn profile, mainly as a way to curate the information that is associated with you on the internet.  The idea is that when you are going on a job interview or even to a business meeting, its likely that the people you are meeting will do a Google search on you, and you want to be controlling what is on the first page.  This advice is even more important in light of this feature….

Posted: June 4th, 2010 under social networking.
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This is my last week at Flux/MTVN. I have mixed emotions about leaving. When I left Yahoo! in July 2007 it was for a lot of reasons, but primarily I wanted to find a role that was closer to product and strategy side of the organization – the running of a business. Joining Flux gave me the opportunity to get back to what I love best and work on marketing, product, organizational leadership, and of course doing deals and managing a business development team. It was a wild ride, we cranked out a lot of groundbreaking products and worked with a ton of great partners. The acquisition of Flux by MTVN was a great outcome for our investors and for our employees, and it gave me the opportunity to help lead a team through the often difficult process of integrating with a large media organization. But its become apparent over the last few months that my career path will take me in another direction and that now is the time to go. Good luck and a big thank you to everyone at Flux and MTVN, keep making it happen.

When I was looking through my desk drawer a few weeks ago I noticed that the cowbell that we rang (loudly) when we closed a new partnership and got a new site live was tucked away there, and hadn’t been rung in a long while.  Somwhere between being a scrappy fast moving startup and becoming a division of a major media company you stop doing things like ringing cheap cowbells when you get up on the scoreboard.  I’m not sure whose bell it was originally, and I hope they don’t mind that I’m taking it with me to my next gig.

Posted: March 25th, 2009 under digital entertainment, flux, social networking, work.
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My friend from high school and fellow CA transplant Mike Byrne tagged me on Facebook with one of the viral notes that has been going around, and this one inspired me to post.  There was no way I could limit it to just 10 albums.  Enjoy!

1. KISS – Destroyer:  3rd grade in 1977, the first real rock and roll I got into

Detroit Rock City

2. The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band:  LOVED The Beatles in grade school

With a Little Help From My Friends

3. Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy:  Hearing The Ocean for the first time blew my mind

The Ocean

4. The Grateful Dead – Cornell ‘77:  Its not an album, but it sure is awesome.

New Minglewood Blues

5. Bob Marley & The Wailers – Rastaman Vibration:  My Dad somehow owned this great record – I’ll never forget being curious and digging it out in 5^th grade, dropping the needle and hearing the dub groove for the first time.

Positive Vibration

6. Dire Straits – Alchemy:  Straits!!Strictly speaking this video isn’t from Alchemy, but Knopfler played the same notes every night so it might as well have been.  Knopfler melts Clapton’s face for a few minutes starting at 4:30 and then at 8:00.

7. Pearl Jam – Yield: One of only 4 or 5 cassettes I had when I drove around Europe and Turkey for 3 months in ‘98, their most underrated album and still my favorite.

No Way

8. Thelonious Monk – Monk’s Music:  One perfect melody after another with Hawkins, Monk and ‘Trane trading jams. Purchased in Providence in a bargain bin, played 1000 times.

Epistrophy

9. Joni Mitchell – Blue: well, you know

California

10. Drive-By Truckers – Southern Rock Opera:  My favorite rock band reaching and making anthems work – a masterpiece

Ronnie and Neil

11. The Stooges – Fun House:  Missed this one growing up in the Aerosmith, J Geils, Boston dominated Northeast in the late 70s, discovered it later, now a lot of other things make sense

T.V. Eye

12. Ryan Adams and the Cardinals – Cold Roses:  No artist gets more airtime on my stereo the last few years – this is the record that drew me in.

Easy Plateau

13. Howlin’ Wolf – London Sessions:  Introduced me to the Blues when I found it at age 14 – without that where would I be?

Built For Comfort

14. The Allman Brothers Band – Live at the Fillmore: (hon. mention Derrick and the Dominoes at the Filmore, Band of Gypsies at the Filmore, Santana at the Filmore, and Bill Graham)

In Memory of Elizabeth Reed

15. Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks: My favorite album by my favorite artist

You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

16. Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band – The Mountain: The greatest bluegrass album ever recorded, and nobody knows it.  The mandolin intro on The Graveyard Shift is precision awesome.

Harlan Man

17. Neil Young with Crazy Horse – Everybody Knows This is Nowhere:  Still thrills me to cue this one up, the soundtrack to a lot of wild times in high school on the tape deck of my ‘78 Pontiac Catalina.

Cowgirl in the Sand

17. Bruce Springsteen – Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.:  A lot of Springsteen albums could be on this list, but this one stands the test of time – the Boss was my guy in the musical wasteland of the early 80s.

Spirit in the Night

18. Miles Davis – Filles de Kilimanjaro: We all wish we were cool, I wish I was Miles.

Frelon Brun (Brown Hornet)

19. Kimmie Rhodes – Love Me Like a Song:  I heard Love and Happiness on public radio late at night in my car, searched out the album, then searched out Kimmie in Austin and became friends. Alec and JJs favorite lullaby, and for that I’ll always be greatful.

Love and Happiness For You

20. Tom Waits – The Heart of Saturday Night:  “Love needs a transfusion, let’s shoot it full of wine – fishin’ for a good time starts with throwin’ in your line.”

New Coat of Paint

21. Tom Petty – Damn the Torpedoes:  A nearly perfect rock and roll record that I never tire of listening to.

Even the Losers

22. Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble – Soul to Soul:  I saw SRV 6 times in concert before he died during my junior year in college.  I had tickets to his final show but I passed on the 3 hour drive from South Bend to Wisconsin because I had just seen him the month before.  The first time I saw him was at a Jazz festival in Massachusetts touring for this album the day I got my driver’s license.

Ain’t Gone ‘N’ Give Up On Love

23. Brian Eno – Music For Airports:  An original Sam-leg (burn by my brother-in-law Sam), this album and red wine has gotten me through that last hour of the JFK-SFO, ATX-SAN, SEA-LAX more times than I care to count.

2/1

Posted: February 24th, 2009 under mp3blog, social networking.
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Hulu’s content partners are have asked Hulu to ask Boxee to remove Hulu from it’s product.  This makes no sense.

If you haven’t used Boxee, its an interface for media based on the XBox Media Center (XBMC) platform.  You can install it on your Mac and it’ll scan all your media folders and give you a browsable interface thats compatible with the little white Apple remote.  It also does a good job with streaming content sources (like Hulu, Comedy Centtral, etc) and it is social (you can make friends and see what they are watching, etc.)

But what really had people excited was that you could install Boxee on AppleTV and access all the same functionality on your living room on your sweet HDTV with your home stereo etc.  I’ve been following this space for a long time and it seemed like just maybe someone had finally cracked the living room media center code, which has seen hundreds of millions of dollars in flame outs.  Why?  An open architecture that would work on any living room based linux box with a good mix of streaming vs. owned media and a nice UI and some lite social networking.  No DRM, no prepackaged content deals with a locked partner set.  And a small company with a moderate burn rate that didn’t need to become a behemoth to be successful and provide a good return to its investors.  Success would mean that the streaming/caching models that are developing on the internet would work on your best media-watching screen.

And Boxee has been going about their business the right way.  They preserve the Hulu interface, preserve its commercials, don’t allow stream ripping, etc.  Its basically the same experience you can have right now on your PC.  Any Macgiver with some duct tape and some patch cables can already put Hulu on their TV.  Boxee just made it easier.

I don’t actually use Boxee a ton, but it’s great for what it is.  I NEVER watch live TV, I always time shift so I never watch commercials in my living room.  The only exception being on Hulu on Boxee on Apple TV.

So if you are a media company and you’ve already come to terms with putting your content on Hulu, why on earth would you not want entrepreneurs to figure out ways to get that content on more screens?  Of course this means that existing models and franchises (like Sat TV and cable TV esp.) are threatened, but that was the case before Boxee.  And as Mark Cuban has so elequently (and correctly) argued the internet is a long way from being able to replace satellite and cable for breadth of on demand HD content in the living room at a mass market level.  Companies like Boxee are exactly the kind of companies you want innovating for you, because if the innovation doesn’t happen there its all hacks and hackers and torrents.  Plus if they start picking up steam you can buy them and have them help you evolve and live to fight on.  Its like our experience with the music industry all over again.

The living room TV is a screen, just like my phone and my computer screen.  Captive media audiences are a thing of the last century, you can’t lock down the content and you can’t completely control distribution.   If you can’t figure out a way to create loyal followers with great user experiences, your content is useless.  Pissing off early adopters is a horrible way to go about evolving your business.

UPDATE:  check out Jonathan Strauss’s Boxee logo with a black eye.

Posted: February 18th, 2009 under digital entertainment, portable devices, social networking.
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MTV just launched a cool site that has legal embeds for their entire music video catalog.  Its also integrated with Flux, which is excellent. Here is a Wilco vid grabbed at random. As of now there doesn’t appear to be any advertising, although I’m betting that will change.

Posted: October 27th, 2008 under digital entertainment, digital music, flux, mp3blog, social networking, work.
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I installed the new Disqus Wordpress plugin this week.  I had held off before because it didn’t support trackbacks but the new features made it seem worth a try.  I was really impressed because it did NOT go smoothly.

The process is: 1) Install and activatate the plugin. 2) Tell Discus to import your existing comments from the Wordpress database.  I can tell you from experience that #2  doesn’t scale well.  Database import/expoorts, no matter how simple, basically need to be overseen by a human because some percentage of the time the import/export is going to be misaligned.  Whomever the product people are at Discus had 2 options – they could make ME the lowly blogger manage and debug the process or they could have someone there do it.  Making me do it scales better (in theory they need fewer employees per new user).  It also guarantees that some of their customers are going to have bad user experiences.

Per my post on the new brand math, it’s crucial in the Internet age that you manage every single customer interaction.  Asking users to debug database import/exports would be a big mistake.

So there WAS a problem with my import/export.  I found out because AndrewB at Disqus sent me an email.  I emailed him back telling him I was pulling the plugin down, and to let me know when I should try it again.  He emailed me back this morning and told me “We fixed the glitch”.  I turned Discus back on, and found all my comments imported successfully.

If Disqus had relied on me to debug the import/export, I likely would have pulled the product down and grumbled a little.  Instead, they managed the interaction and got a customer and a glowing blog post.  That is how you scale a business.

Posted: August 14th, 2008 under social networking, work.
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or “How to Throw Away Billions in Brand Equity Away Picking Up Pennies” *

Something has changed. Or maybe it has changed back. The customer is king.  Super brands are developing in markets big and small – brands with fanatical followings, unheard of loyalty, dedicated employees.  And brands that were only a few years ago considered “great” have the lost a great part of their luster.  Customers are becoming so much better informed about their options, and know how to reward companies that treat them right, and punish those that screw them over (see note about Netflix below).

There are objective measurements that try to assign value to brands by comparing the market valuation that a company should have based on the free cash flow it is generating (and other valuation models like P/E etc.) to the market capitalization it actually has.  The difference in the two values are attributed to the value of the pure brand.  There are other survey-based qualitative methods.  And hybrids of the two.

It’s not important to  bother with trying to actually quantify a brand value in dollars and cents unless you are working on an M&A transaction (or trying to sell marketing consulting contracts!).  What’s more important as an executive or manager is to understand the velocity of your brand’s value.  Are your current business practices creating or destroying brand value?

What not to do – Dell Inc.

While surfing the internet recently I found this article from ‘04 in which Dell is actually cited as an example of a world-class brand.  Certainly from ‘95 through ‘02 Dell was a juggernaut from a brand perspective, consistently ranking at the top of quantitative and qualitative brand value surveys.  By 2004 though, the Dell brand velocity was clearly negative.  They abandoned any brand levers except low price, which cut into margins and forced their hand in operations.  They moved to outsource their customer support to India, which was a disaster.  They started relying on making money with gimmicky financing packages.  They didn’t respond when the competition began redefining the form factor.  For the 2 years their competition has been personifying them as oafish buffoons all over the place, and they haven’t been able to respond.  This year the NY State attorney general got a judge to say this about them.

“Dell has engaged in repeated misleading, deceptive and unlawful business conduct, including false and deceptive advertising of financing promotions and the terms of warranties, fraudulent, misleading and deceptive practices in credit financing and failure to provide warranty service and rebates.” OUCH.

Simply put, if you are earning margins by tricking your customers, you are destroying your brand value.  Misrepresenting your level of customer service and whacking people with unseen service and financing charges have been OK in the past, but it won’t work anymore.  Your customers are way too well informed, and they have means of retribution for a bad customer experience that didn’t exist 10 years ago.

Building a brand right – Zappos

By any rational evaluation, building a company selling shoes (they also sell clothing any other accessories) online should be impossible.  Amazon sells shoes.  Shoes have to be tried on, you’ll get killed on the return rates.  There are a million other reasons why selling shoes online is a terrible business.  Zappos is making it happen by being slavishly devoted to building their brand by closely managing every aspect of customer interaction, which is really, really hard.  Do yourself a favor and buy your next pair of shoes from Zappos, and take note of the experience at every touch point.  Its amazing.

The only way to pull it off is to develop an entire corporate culture devoted to improving your consumer facing brand.  State your core values and let them inform everything you do as a company.  Offer trainees a bonus to quit.  Zappos are so confident in their employees they even encourage them to tweet, and aggregate their employees posts. (I follow their CEO and am finding out that they are featured on Nightline tonight).

The good news for my dear readers is that so many companies have negative brand velocity, and even the best brands are miles away from being able to capitalize on the latest technologies to constantly test and improve their brands.  Get out there and help them turn it around!

Brand Death Watch (companies with valuable brands that routinely screw their customers and provide shoddy customer service)

• DirecTV and cable TV companies (can’t wait to cancel my subscription forever)
• Wal*Mart (just say no to cheap crap)
• Starbucks (at least they know it)
• Netflix (mainly because they are killing multiple user queues per account Update:  Todd informs me that Netflix listened to their customers and reversed this decision.  Strong! This is why you leave comments turned on for your corporate blog.  I’m leaving them on the list because of their reliance on pop-unders for customer acquisition.  Everyone knows they are effective, but we stopped using them cause they are so damn annoying.  This is a bigger problem for Huffington Post and Boston Globe who are monetizing with pop-unders via Specific Media.)

Brands making it happen

• Apple (taking brick-and-mortar retail high-end for everyone)
• Amazon (I buy everything here, except shoes)
• Netflix (they do some things right see above)

Who am I missing?

Posted: July 7th, 2008 under social networking, work.
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My twitter circle is having a little tiff about suitability of twitter posts. Specifically, @emayoh has been bombarding everyone with Hype Machine updates for the last few weeks. So about every 2 or 3 hours during the day everyone who subscribes to him sees a text message on their phone saying

emayoh just loved Peter Presta – Set Sail (Scuola Furano Remix) http://hypem.com/track/469035

And some people who follow emayoh are starting to twitter back asking him to tone it down. Which of course is often the worst part about spam – all the stop spamming spam.

This reminds me of the spam wars I had to endure during the first few weeks at B-school. Every student in the school was on a list-serv from which they couldn’t unsubscribe and to which any other student could post. With over 600 full-time students on the list obviously a strict etiquette was required. The funny part was how fierce the (admittedly 99% type-A) student body was in mocking and calling out the poor souls who complained about prices at the coffee shop or otherwised spammed the high volume list. People got seriously called out, and once it almost came to blows. The community quickly figured it out, and the rudimentary social networking tool worked fairly well for the 2 years I was there.

Twitter is way more advanced, and the policing and self correcting that needs to take place on the network is orders of magnitude easier and all in your control.

1. Don’t have all the updates go to your phone (you can turn device notifications off on a user by user basis). Use Twhirl or Twitterific etc. to follow people who update too frequently or who’s twitter updates aren’t valuable to you on your phone. I do this for @nprpolitics and @techcrunch among others.
2. If #1 doesn’t work for you, stop following the person who is twittering too much for you.

Asking someone to twitter less so you can follow them is, by the mores of social networking, rude. Its like asking an author to write less or a photographer to take fewer photos. Twittering is self expression and works (like all social networks) because its opt-in. If a twitter user is interested in having a lot of people follow them, he/she will self moderate.

So @emayoh: Heart all you want on Hype Machine. I turned off device updates for you a few weeks ago. But every so often I check out your pick via a quick click on Twhirl.

PS: The group of people whom you follow (and who follow you) on Twitter need a name. Like a pride of lions or a covey of quail. What should it be called? I sort of like “my twique”, or “my tweeps”. But then again, those are really terrible names.

Posted: May 21st, 2008 under portable devices, social networking.
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SxSW ‘07, which is when Twitter became a thing by my reckoning, was a year ago next month. Why does Twitter still suck? From a technology standpoint, correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t “do” much except route small packets of info around the internet. Not like they need to buy gazillions of servers to keep up with demand etc. The technology is a lot simpler than even the eNow/Relegence technology we developed back in ‘99/’00. Why do a noticeable portion of my twitters not make it to the few places I want them to go? Why is the twitter.com down (seemingly) all the time? The Twitter blog is complaining about abuse, but come on we all deal with it.  I have definitely noticed that the number of people following my feed isnt growing anywhere near as fast as my Facebook network.

I’m definitely a fan of the concept and hope they figure out a way to improve, not getting bought too early etc.

Posted: February 13th, 2008 under social networking.
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I blogged about the Facebook ads targeting the Yahoo employee network a few months back. It turns out that the VC behind the ads has put up round two to see if the continued uncertainty at Yahoo is helping his CTR. It is. He’s also targeting MSFT employees.

Yahoo’s employee base has a higher number of entrepreneurial types I’d guess, since a larger percentage of the employees came aboard via acquisition.

My own unscientific research gleaned from talking to my friends at Yahoo! – the ads were definitely noticed.

 

I always said during my tenure at Yahoo! that is MSFT did finally acquire them, during the resulting bureaucratic confusion I would simply stop coming to work and see how long I could keep getting a paycheck a la Office Space. My over/under would be 12 months.

Posted: February 8th, 2008 under social networking, work.
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