Robert Paterson's Weblog

Boingo -How to make it safe corporately to use Social Media well

Perhaps the most powerful barrier for large organizations using social media well is the fear that if they give up control something bad will happen – someone will say or do something that brings discredit to the brand. Yesterday I commented on Kotex who have transcended this fear. Kotex did this because they could see that changing the conversation about a taboo subject was actually the liberating POV. But most organizations don’t have a secret taboo at their heart. So how can they:

• Be personal
• Be immediate
• Be edgy
• Be effective

How can they solve the paradox of the core issue of the Cluetrain Manifesto and offer a personal and human conversation – “These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.”

I called up Baochi Nguyen, who manages the Social Media Program at Boingo, to find out. I called her because as a user of Boingo, I had been so impressed by how human and personal Boingo was on Twitter. I had had a couple of issues that were picked up in minutes and I found myself talking to a real person with a name who fixed my minor problems in minutes and who as a result now gives me confidence as I travel that I have a companion that is by my side ready to help. Boingo and Baochi seemed to have found the way and I wanted to find out – first hand – what that way was.

At Boingo, Social Media is not some add on, but is core to the philosophy. Customer Care is the core idea for as in any service, if there is a problem, how and how fast you fix it is actually the deal. For travellers, access to WiFi that is up and easy to get is now a critical service. After all, I am an addict, aren’t you and isn’t Wifi becoming as important as your IP?

Most of the service issues are handled on the phone, but Boingo’s public face and voice is Twitter and Facebook. Baochi is located right next to the service folks – steps away. Here a monthly Buzz Report is  read by the senior team and the CEO and Baochi collaborate several times a week on hot topics coming out of the social media channels. This is no afterthought.

Boingo’s SM effort is not a sales and marketing effort. Nor is there an ROI demanded for the SM work – this is not a sales channel. It is where Boingo LISTENs to what is going on. “It is an invaluable channel for feedback where we are part of the conversation about us.” I asked Baochi how they staffed the role. She told me that because SM is 1) Part of the corporate goal of offering world class customer care and 2) Is a critical conduit for customer feedback and suggestions on Boingo’s service and software , the position demands, not an entry level of new person but someone intimately familiar with the technical world of the service and also was fully conversant with the strategy. The role is like being a navigator on a ship.

The position is one of high trust based on experience and interaction. So here we see the core of the solution to the Cluetrain paradox. Trust. Central is to place the work in the strategic role of “navigation”. Second as with all “navigators”  Trust has to be found in the person that you select to do this work. The person has to interact as a matter of course with the key parts of the organization – for her information and her channels are the optimal way to see through the noise and chaos of the modern market. Thirdly it is best to have a “Framework” for where she interacts with the public.

Baochi and a cross functional team that included senior management spent a great deal of time in developing the framework in which Baochi would have freedom to operate. This is not a set of guide rules abut what she says but a place in which she has room. The Boingo Framework includes:

• Talking about Boingo
• WiFi
• Technology
• Travel
• The Community
• The environment

These areas were chosen with care to match up the known interests of the Boingo users who tend to be travellers and tech enthuisiasts.

Boingo does not speak about anything outside this framework. They also set categories for these elements for weight. So 25% is about Boingo 25% for tech and so on.

Baochi sees her role also as providing a “Companion” for those on the road. It’s ironic because that is exactly how I felt as a customer – that I was not alone.

A key element of this feeling is that Baochi has “Super Fans”,  a group of customers who have formed a real relationship with her and Boingo. These Super Fans are the group who so enjoy their Boingo experience that they regularly evangelize Boingo’s services – without any prompting from Boingo. Baochi spends the first part of her day catching up with the fans and so deepening the friendship. I think that this is a very important insight. It is the secret to Laura Conaway’s success at Bryant Park, Planet Money and now Rachel Maddow. This inner core of relationships builds further trust and offers the enterprise an unparalleled access to deeper insight and support and to more connection.

Here is how the science works for this idea. What really matters is not the total number of “fans” you have but that you have a core of no more than 150 who really care. This is the leverage and Baochi and Boingo has intuitively played this card.

So in summary what are the lessons for you:

• SM offers the best navigation for a turbulent world – so it is not an after thought buried in the marketing department but an adjunct of the office of the CEO
• Trust is the key – the person who has the role has to be known to the senior team as a colleague and be given a framework where she has freedom
• The job is Listening and interacting
• Best helped by developing a small core of less than 150 people who are your social guides

You can do this can’t you?

Disclaimer – I have no connection to Boingo other than being a customer.

via fastforwardblog.com

Posted via email from Rob's posterous

Obesity Linked to Poor School Performance

But what relation obesity and diabetes have to the mental functioning of the developing brains of children and adolescents has been uncharted territory -- exactly where a scientist like Dr. Convit and his research team would want to go.

They began their work studying obese adolescents with type 2 diabetes. They wondered if serious weight gain and diabetes reduced intellectual performance in youth. To answer this critical question, they would test the brain's functioning by measuring intelligence, reading, spelling, vocabulary, reasoning, memory, attention, concentration and mental efficiency. They would also do imaging of the brain by MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a scanning technique where the brain can be safely studied) to see if there were reductions in its size or capacity to function, of course factoring in age, that might be related to lower levels of mental performance.

Their results show that the adolescents with type 2 diabetes did more poorly across the board on mental performance tests. In addition, these same youth showed smaller brain volume for the entire brain and the frontal lobes, where much of our reasoning occurs. The frontal lobes are the last part of the brain to mature, making it is highly sensitive to change during adolescence. The abnormal findings Dr. Convit found occur more in obese diabetic youth than in (matched) youth who also were obese but did not have diabetes (or pre-diabetes -- in which the body has developed insulin resistance).

Obesity in youth has tripled in the past 30 years, with one in three three high school students now overweight or obese in the United States. Minority groups show even more disturbing trends with one in two Hispanic and four in 10 black youths affected. Obesity is the road to insulin resistance and diabetes, with their well known adverse effects on blood vessels and the heart -- which shorten life and erode its quality along the way. What is new, however, is that obese, diabetic youth also have their brains impacted and appear to have difficulty learning and succeeding in school.

via huffingtonpost.com

Education is not only about school. Health is not only about medicine. Our minds our bodies and our perspectives are all set by the experiences that we have when we are young.

It makes perfect sense to me to make healthy eating part of school. This is not juts a pipe dream. My daughter works for a very successful organization called Real Food for Real Kids in Toronto that does just that. It offers real food to kids in Daycare and Kindergarten.

In so doing it creates new habits for the kids and for their families. In so doing it is becoming a critically important driver for a new better local food system in Toronto.

There is no better investment in our future than in making the link between local food and schools.

This goes beyond providing better food and stimulating local food production. Giving kids the chance to grow food themselves is part of this. Re-introducing them to the reality and the miracle of food.

Even this has a model - the Edible School Yard.

What could be better?

Posted via email from Rob's posterous

Household Net Worth – Back to the Old Normal | Credit Writedowns

There is a new graph on the internet that will be seen and discussed at length in the coming days and weeks.  It shows how household net worth has changed over the past 59 years.

The graph below, originally from Macro and Other Market Musings, has been annotated by Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture.

What is evident in this graph is another appearance of the effects of the two historic bubbles of the past half century. That the household net worth experienced bubbles is evident by another annotation of the graph that I have performed, below:

via creditwritedowns.com

Credit Writedowns is another go to site for me - always thoughtful and outside of the box

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U by Kotex* - Reality Check

U by Kotex* - Reality Check.

 See how Kotex have sent themselves up here - no going back to Twirling

The market IS a Conversation - How Kotex is winning where Old Spice is not

Who has not seen an Old Spice ad recently? The campaign has been a huge viral success. But while it has put the brand name to the front and got everyone talking about this being the new model, has the campaign done what it was meant to? has it increased sales and market share? The short answer is that it appears that it has not. (Bnet)

Procter & Gamble (PG) faces an unpleasant dilemma on its Old Spicebrand: Its campaign — featuring an impossibly handsome man in a towel who tells women, “So ladies, should your man smell like an Old Spice man? You tell me” — is hugely popular but sales of the product are going down. The campaign reached a climax this week as the Old Spice Guy filmed more than 200 improvised videos replying to questions and requests from Twitter users. Alyssa Milano, Rose McGowan, the Ellen Show and Perez Hilton were among those who got YouTube-ed replies.

But the shower-fresh brand has a dirty secret, as Brandweek notes:

For instance, it was none other than P&G that picked up the Film Grand Prix this year for Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” TV spot from Wieden + Kennedy. There is little doubt about the viral hit’s popularity. Launched in February, the official version has racked up nearly 12.2 million YouTube views.

But sales of the featured product—Red Zone After Hours Body Wash—aren’t necessarily tracking with that consumer appeal: In the 52 weeks ended June 13, sales of the brand have dropped 7 percent according to SymphonyIRI. (That amount excludes those rung up at Walmart.) P&G execs were not available to comment.

* Please note that later today 2 commenters have told me that the results from IRIare premature and do not apply to the period of the campaign - please have a look at the notes at the end of this post

On the other hand, how much do you know about the Kotex campaign for U BY Kotex? Maybe you have not – you have missed some fun there too. But what they have done has worked. This is a new product and in less than 6 months it has reached an 8.3% market share in a mature market and it has not cannibalized the older Kotex brand. So what is the difference. Both had used very funny viral videos. What is the secret? I called on Jordan Miller who is the point person on the campaign and asked her this question.

At the heart of the Kotex Campaign is “Listening” and real conversation. The big idea was to take a taboo subject – periods – and offer up the support and the safe place where women and girls could help each other with advice and support. The funny videos were ‘Ice Breakers” and not an end in themselves. Their point was to make it easier to talk about a topic that even in our progressive time was off limits. The early videos also pointed fun at the old Kotex ads that had girls twirling in white swimsuits and where pads always had a blue liquid. If I have intrigued you go to this link to see some videos – the ones that Kotex made and now also the ones that the public have made.

This Facebook snip says a lot. We see the taboo aspect of the topic and the fear. We can see that Kotex have made it safe to ask questions. We can see that Jordan Miller is personally on top of the site – she never seems to sleep! Many questions are answered personally.

On the main site there is a panel of Experts, Mums and Peers that answer more generic questions.

So what has happened? What has made this work?

Simply, Kotex (Kimberly Clark) have seen through the viral fun aspect of social media – though they have pulled this aspect off very well – and got to the core. They have set up a space where it is safe to have a conversation on a topic where the silence has been deafening.  They have levelled the power by telling the truth about even themselves and laughed at how they used to talk about the issue and the product. All the video that they mock was their own old ads.

Central is no pounding message about the product! But a focus on the people who have concerns about their periods. The Old Spice ad is really about Old Spice. The U By Kotex campaign is about you and people like you who share a common problem.

I asked Jordan what she thought was the secret and her answer was that the senior folks really believed that this was the way to go – “They are the best Client I have ever worked for”. It’s ironic that top level support is still pivotal now when the culture  is so opposed to letting go power.

And power has been let go. All organizations who go down this road are scared that someone will say the wrong thing. All sorts of safe guards are set up that risk reintroducing the corporate voice and slowing the pace down.

Senior leaders gave up this control to their point person – Jordan. Who has been allowed to be very edgy on an edgy topic. The campaign is not run on a day by day basis by a committee but by one person who has a real voice and a rweal personality who is well known to all who participate.

For we know that we can’t have conversations with institutions but only with people. In my opinion this is the most important aspect of the entire campaign – the trust that Kotex put in a single person who has to participate in real time 24/7. There is no time to oversee and still be human. So the choice of who you pick is critical. The give up of power is critical. Not many organizations can make  this move but it is I think the key.

So what next? Kimberly Clark have to go forward. Not only has the campaign been a technical success in that it has moved product – but more important they are now connected to a community of 1.4 million women who have found something important to them in the conversation. What a place to find yourselves in as an organization! No more twirling!

So the “conversation” that we all need to have is not about your product or your service per se – but it is about your customers. What do they need to talk about? It’s not just about a funny viral video and being talked about. It is about having conversations about matters that are important to people.

The “conversation” has to be hosted not by an impersonal institution but by a person who in turn has to be trusted not to let the organization down.

“These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.” (Cluetrain)

This is not easy – everything we have learned to-date makes any of this hard.

Later this week a story about Boingo – who have found some ways about how to make this easier to start.

via fastforwardblog.com

Posted via email from Rob's posterous

PS Ciaran McCabe contacted me to tell me that the Bnet news of falling sales for Old Spice is being challenged 

According to PR Week sales of the product increased over 100% last month. A piece in Forbes.com uses the same SymphonyIRI study to show that sales were up 7.9% from the previous year. At this time, there is no way to know which numbers are real and which are not. However, the -7% number still sounds fishy to me." Source:  The Ad Contrarian (Bob Hoffman, owner of SF ad agency Hoffman/Lewis) 

PPS from Commentatin: Rob, love both of these campaigns and agree that the Kotex campaign should get way more credit and press, but people have got to STOP citing these SymphonyIRI numbers in reference to the Old Spice campaign. They measure the year ending June 13th, 2010, a full month BEFORE the viral/social aspect of the Old Spice campaign even started. Not only that, they include 7 full months of sales data BEFORE the tv even ran. I recognize you’re just quoting from other reporting, but you ought to stop and consider whether you should perpetuate the incorrect conclusion that a campaign isn’t working by including PRE-CAMPAIGN sales data as your evidence. And guess what else? According to sales data released by Nielsen in the last few days, the body wash sales are actually up 52% over 3 months and 107% over the last month. Let’s all wait and see data from AFTER the campaign ran before we start drawing conclusions. Seems to be that would be fair.

UK Government make their move to start to use Facebook in a big way - Travel

On July 9, the PM announced on a video with Mark Zuckerberg that the UK government will use social media to get connected to the British people. Well it has started with an ideal sector – travel!

Here the Foreign Office and the citizen connect and in time will create I think an unbeatable site where all you need to know can be found out – and where when bad things happen immediate action can be taken.

I think that we are seeing a new future for governments. Until now government sites had been slow, hard to use and dull. Until now governments had often banned the use of social media inside. But this model offers governments of all types the ability to  be fast – easy to use and effective. Also to be very cost effective!

The barrier of course is culture. But with HM Gov in the lead it will be hard to say that “we can’t do this”.

What area would you like to see where government uses social media like this?

via fastforwardblog.com

Posted via email from Rob's posterous

Urban Farming - A Future for All? Detroit picks up steam as it were

Across Detroit, land is being turned over to agriculture. Furrows are being tilled, soil fertilised and crops planted and harvested. Like in no other city in the world, urban farming has taken root in Detroit, not just as a hobby or a sideline but as part of a model for a wholesale revitalisation of a major city. Some farms are the product of hardy individualists or non-profit community groups. Others, like Hantz Farms, are backed by millions of dollars and aim to build the world's biggest urban farm right in the middle of the city.

Mark Covington, 38, is one of those 21st-century pioneers, though he stumbled on his role almost by accident. Finding himself unemployed after losing his job as an environmental engineer and living back with his mother two years ago, he started tidying up an empty lot near his Georgia Street home, planting vegetables and allowing local people to harvest them for free. An orchard of fruit trees followed, as did a community centre – made by converting a pair of empty buildings – which keeps local youths off the streets. The result is a transformation of the area around his childhood home. Local kids come to movie nights held amid the crops. Residents love the free, fresh food in an area where no major supermarkets exist. The Georgia Street Community Garden is never vandalised.

Standing next to a freshly planted bed of onions, potatoes, garlic and collard greens, Covington is a genial soul with gentleness built into a giant physical frame that could play American football. As he walks his neighbourhood, it seems everyone knows his name and calls out hello. He seems unsure of whether or not he is at the forefront of a social revolution, but he does know that he has made a big difference to a part of the city where real improvements have been in short supply. "I just did what seemed like needed to be done," he shrugs.

A familiar refrain from many of the thousands of people involved in urban farming in Detroit is that they are returning the city to its pre-industrial roots. Back in the late 18th century, Detroit was a small trading post surrounded by fields and farms. "You know, this area began as farmland and we are just going back to that," says Rich Wieske, who runs more than 60 beehives in inner-city Detroit and sells the resulting honey commercially. The middle-aged Wieske sports a white beard and a passion for his bees. What began as a hobby to provide honey for making mead has now turned into a profession.

As he tends five of his hives, situated on a plot of land that used to house a grand brick mansion, but is now a pleasant patch of woodland, Wieske marvels at how suitable the environment of the inner city is for his tiny charges. Each year Wieske's apiary, Green Toe Gardens, produces about 3,000lb of honey and sells it in local Detroit markets. "Our harvests are as high as anywhere else in the US. There is so much forage, so much land for the bees," he says.

Yet the fact remains that for the past 100 years Detroit was all about industry. It was where Henry Ford invented the production line, giving birth to the car industry. Detroit became the archetypal American 20th- century metropolis on the back of hundreds of huge factories, surrounded by solid middle-class houses and a thriving downtown filled with skyscrapers. It was a magnet for immigrant workers and produced vast industrial fortunes for grand American families, becoming a centre of culture and manufacturing where politicians could dream of one day rivalling New York.

No more. The car industry faded, taking jobs with it. "White flight" saw neighbourhoods decay as the middle classes departed, ruining any chance of raising enough taxes for the city's upkeep. A once-wealthy, ethnically mixed city is now more than 80% black, with an unemployment rate believed to be as high as 50%. Since the 1970s there have been numerous efforts to stem the decline, either by trying to stop the car factories from leaving or by bringing in new industries, such as the massive casinos that have sprung up downtown.

All have failed. Detroit is not being transformed by some massive top-down initiative, but by projects like the urban farm that has emerged on Linwood Street. It's a typical Detroit scene, with burnt-out shops, empty lots and houses, plus a few other buildings where residents are barely clinging on. It is busy with the roar of traffic, as well as the sound of a small John Deere tractor which is mowing the grass around a large plot of bare earth that has been prepared for planting. There are more bare fields on nearby lots. The smell of damp earth and fertiliser mingles with exhaust fumes. The Linwood Street urban farm is now in its fourth planting season, producing a bounty of corn, squash and potatoes for local residents to harvest, again for free. Developed by Urban Farming, which was founded by Detroit singer and former Prince protégé Taja Sevelle, the movement is dedicated to turning vacant land over to food production, providing a healthier diet to city people who either go hungry or have poor nutrition.

Some of Urban Farming's projects, such as Linwood, are huge, spanning several city blocks and generating substantial amounts of food. Others, like planting single gardens on rooftops or creating "living walls", are small. Last year alone the group oversaw the creation of 900 food gardens in Detroit. Some were in people's gardens, others on land donated to charities by local people or bought from the city.

Sevelle sees what is happening as a harbinger of urban development for the western world's declining inner cities, with Detroit at the cutting edge of the phenomenon. "I see the entire world looking different. Detroit will be number one in showing people how to pull a city out of a situation like this," she says.

via guardian.co.uk

If there is no more manufacturing with $70 an hour wages - if the jobs have gone to Asia - then "There are no more jobs!"

At rock bottom, Detroit is I think showing us part of the future. A new local, local owned, small scale, highly networked, high out put, high employment food system.

Posted via email from Rob's posterous

They asked Jobs to wear a suit? « A Man With A Ph.D.

Fascinating piece by Fred Vogelstein for Wired magazine on the Apple-AT&T relationship:

In a bid to avert the looming problem, a team headed by senior vice president Kris Rinne met with Apple to ask for help. Of course AT&T was planning to upgrade its network to handle the increased demand, Rinne’s team told Apple executives, but that was going to take years. In the meantime, would Apple take measures to help throttle back the traffic? Perhaps Apple could restrict its YouTube app to run only over Wi-Fi. Maybe the iPhone could feature a smaller, lower-resolution videostream or cut off YouTube videos after one minute. Rinne, who had already met with Apple’s iPhone team at least half a dozen times, fully expected the company to play along. After all, manufacturers agreed to such restrictions all the time. It didn’t make sense to build phones and offer features that carriers couldn’t support.

But in meetings with Apple engineers and marketers over the subsequent year, Rinne and other AT&T executives discovered that Apple wasn’t playing by traditional wireless rules. It wasn’t interested in cooperating, especially if it meant hobbling what had quickly become its marquee product. For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck. “They tried to have that conversation with us a number of times,” says someone from Apple who was in the meetings. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”

And:

They have even fought about wardrobe: When an AT&T representative suggested to one of Jobs’ deputies that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, he was told, “We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.”

[More]

How out of touch can you be to suggest Jobs change out of his trademark turtleneck and jeans? This whole story demonstrates the total difference in world views between American telcos and Apple.

I would imagine that Verizon would be having similar problems. The telcos have always gotten their way as they hobble wireless in America, compared to many other countries.

via amanwithaphd.wordpress.com

I have been reading Richard 's blog for many years - he is a gold mine

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Seth Indicts the Education System as a Scam

What is our system designed to do? Turn out obedient factory workers.

What do we need now? People who can think originally and do new things.

The proper response to Bin Laden - We made a mountain out of a molehill

Meanwhile, liberal Robert Dreyfuss notes in The Nation: "The core problem... is that Al Qaeda and its affiliates, its sympathizers, and even self-starting terrorist actors who aren't part of Al Qaeda itself, are a tiny and manageable problem. Yet the apparatus that has been created is designed to meet nothing less than an existential threat. Even at the height of the Cold War ... there was nothing like the post-9/11 behemoth in existence. A thousand smart intelligence analysts, a thousand smart FBI and law enforcement officers, and a few hundred Special Operations military folk are all that's needed to deal with the terrorism threat."

via voices.washingtonpost.com

We have made a molehill into a mountain.  

Instead of a few thousand smart people we have 2 wars - one endless - and nearly 1 million bureaucrats - and we wonder why we are short of money?

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