Size Matters - When Small is Big

March 31, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Artisanal Economy, Brian Hurlburt, Business Model, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Interview, Long Tail, Marketing, MicroBrand, Personal Branding, Social Media, Social Networking, Trusted Space, WalMart, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, Wikinomics, barriers, metadata

Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted - he wanted to be a retailer - but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!

My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields - not the least in Social Media - tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there - how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!

My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of - who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.

My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.

Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site - it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.

Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care - Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out.  So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.

So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web - he has experienced himself.

Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is - an open and vulnerable man - is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.

He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.

Is this not the Craigslist model?

What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.

The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.

In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.

This is more than Google Local or Craigslist - this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.

A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.

Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision - the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.

This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.

For me the lessons that  I have gained from looking at Brian are these:

• Niche is where the energy is - the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
• Aggregation around niche is where the value is - the more personal the better
• Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
• Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated

I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”

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An adjacency of opposites

March 21, 2008 at 10:41 pm · Filed under Community, Control, David Weinberger, FASTforward08, Messy World, User Revolution, advanced search, clare hart, enterprise software, metadata

A particular juxtaposition struck me on the middle day of FASTforward08 – I wonder if anyone else found it worth pondering as well. On Tuesday we had the fine keynote by Clare Hart of Dow Jones, who focused on the increasingly contextualized modes in which business information, news, and other commodified data will be gathered into “dashboards” that anticipate the specific needs of professional end users.

Immediately following Hart, David Weinberger gave us his vision of where the chaotic, miscellaneous, Web in all its ganglionic glory appears to be tending. Weinberger offered a radical recasting of the now hallowed nostrum, “Information wants to be free.” It’s quite otherwise — if I may paraphrase his thought: It’s we who are trying to be free from information.

Hart and Weinberger were coming to the crux of FASTforward08 from seemingly antipodal perspectives, and it’s to the conference creators’ credit that it stretched its community of discourse to include both:

In this corner, Hart, the corporate maven, looking at advanced search and context as a new platform for news and data providers like Dow Jones to actualize in ways that add tremendous and new kinds of informational value to large numbers of end users – so much so that they’ll happily pay ample subscriber fees for the privilege.

In that corner, Weinberger, looking at the “here comes everybody” energy, complexity, and messiness of the web as it is today, with its social spontaneity, its twittering micro-nets, its folksonomies that defy rational taxonomies because they’re spun from the arbitrariness of all those other minds. Each of whose lives, passions, traumas and idiosyncrasies is planting its own imprint on what matters to them. The result: a burgeoning infinity of highly idiosyncratic tags, links and ephemera, each of which makes sense within the universe of one that constitutes any single end user, but which present varying degrees of opacity to any data-mining operative whose success depends upon predicting how various sets of users organize their most vitally important data.

The differences between Hart and Weinberger come through in the differences between Hart’s dashboard and Weinberger’s “new front page.” For Hart, the idea is to know what the user needs and wants, and to build a unique set of data that changes with the contextual moment. Her example of the finance worker whose top news stories and analyses will be shaped by his or her clients’ portfolios made perfect sense, because the professional setting from day to day offers a predicable set of tasks, hotspots, and priorities.

Weinberger’s “front page,” on the other hand, is described as a rich and amorphous mess of referrals, nets, connections, keyed to the individual but marshaled by no one, controlled by no one. No two front pages of this kind will ever be alike, raising serious questions about to what extent there could ever be some commodification sufficiently compelling as to command a subscription fee.

Of course a key difference is that Hart’s dashboard is driven by professionally identified objectives and informational needs, where Weinberger’s “new front page” has as many shapes as it has users. Where Hart begins with the assumption that much of what her user needs and wants can be intuited and provided, Weinberger’s user is pretty much the vortex of a dynamic series of singularities – indeed, his user’s “front page” is more like the sign of what is unknowable until it exists, and mutates as soon as it is known. Never the same, as once was said of a river.

In a way, isn’t this one paradox at the heart of FASTforward08? Its ambitious spectrum brought the promise and excitement of advanced search techniques that will surely provide large new affordances within the Enterprise and new opportunities for monetization in the space between the Enterprise and its end users. At the same time, it touched on some thorny questions arising from the fact that human beings are usually not transparent, often do not understand themselves, and resist efforts by others to horn in where they themselves may fear to tread.

Which gives us reason to ponder one of the many suggestive things FAST ceo John Markus Lervik had to say in his opening address:

Today’s online environment is shaped by the person in it.

If true – and there’s reason to think it is becoming more true each day – then the professional knowledge worker is about to enter an environment steeped in a precocious awareness of her needs and wishes.

But those who, like irritants in oysters, generate something in the web that goes deeper than the consumption of information, could be less than delighted when approached by someone offering to do it all for them.

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Better Shift: The Attraction Economy

February 25, 2008 at 1:28 am · Filed under 3.0, FASTForward '08, intent, interaction, metadata, semantic

Not to diminish my colleague Joe’s efforts to report on John Hagel’s comments, the true potential is not in the Attention Economy but in the Attraction Economy (not to be limited to emotional connection, see also video [7:21] — emotion is one dimension in a personal economic model of decisions, and is relevant but not a priority in enterprise interactions).

Attention is the goal; attraction is the most effective means to achieve the goal: moving from reactive to interactive. The new ROI is Return on Interaction.

Hagel misses the real potential when he recommends moving from “push” to “pull” to optimize resources. Basic laws of physics suggest that the level of energy (effort) expended is the same for either push or pull – there is no net gain. The only way to capitalize beyond push or pull models is to leverage existing energy (effort for free) – by tapping the ‘draw’, the natural forces of attraction between: the customer and the company, the employer and the company, any combination of resources seeking each other.

Several different speakers illustrated how this attraction can be facilitated: zero-term search, liberal use of personal metadata and related metadata to build inference.

Ok, so if we’re going to talk inference then we’re really pushing toward 3.0. But the true innovative stories were leaning in that direction.

Gerry Campbell of Reuters, spoke of the significance of context — the need to create an ecosystem (infrastructure) that provides capabilities beyond core business operations. To move themselves and their customers toward such a reality, Reuters purchased a technology upon which they built Calais to enrich content with semantic metadata. Over time, user-generated context also needs to be fed back into the system. Such efforts move toward a big “tent” revival, where Michael Cleary of Reuters suggests that con-tent is brought together seamlessly with in-tent.

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