Riding the Google Wave

Another guest post here, this time from Tractionista Carly Schwartz — @carlicita to the twitterati. Carly got her hands on a prized Google Wave invite (eat your heart out Willie Wonka — golden tickets got nothing on these). Her thoughts are below. And a few of mine are below that.



Carly says...


When I first heard about Google Wave, a pair of Australian developers’ take on the next generation of online conversation, I was skeptical. A longtime Gmail loyalist, I couldn’t understand what, exactly, needed fixing. Then the Mountain View megacompany released its demo to a limited, invite-only audience, and the blogosphere exploded.

After reading 140-character testimonials about the supposedly revolutionary—and highly exclusive—communication platform, I started to feel left out. When access trickled to a handful of my friends, I watched as they, too, tweeted their success stories.

Resolving to become a part of their inner circle, I submitted countless requests, even penning a Limerick (“There once was a girl named Carly, who thought Google Wave was quite gnarly…”). Luckily I managed to convince my roommate, a Google product manager, to trade me his last invite for a bottle of cheap champagne. Voila! Instant access to the Internet elite.

Google Wave is, in essence, email to the umpteenth power. It combines rich media like photos, videos, maps, and application plug-ins into a hosted conversation that can be edited in real-time by multiple end-users who share access. As edits are designed to flow seamlessly, such documents are called “waves.” Anyone added to a wave can invite anyone else they choose, thus eliminating the need for CCing and pesky 37-person e-mail chains.

Google captures a version of the wave as each new edit is made, allowing users to go back and view the document at every stage of the creation process using a simple “playback” button. Once the program is universally released, developers will have a field day creating extensions from Twitter plug-ins to Scrabble games using the wave’s easily accessible API.



Pretty nifty, no? In theory, Google Wave is the answer to collaboration and conversation in the twenty-first century. Gone are the days of clogged inboxes and larger-than-life attachments. Instead, the wave provides users with a full aggregation of all their media, the richest of rich communication tools.

Perhaps I wanted to throw a party for my friend’s twenty-fifth birthday. Using Google Wave as my primary means of communication would allow guests to divvy up responsibilities, determine a date and time that works best, map the location, tally up the invitees, and even share incriminating photos the morning after—all in a single shared document.

Or say Traction needed to conduct an internal brainstorm before a major client meeting. If said discussion took place via Wave, we could edit one another’s work, embed media to support our talking points, and finish with a clean final product.

But in its beta phase, developers still have more than a few bugs to zap. And even if every kink were ironed out perfectly before the program’s universal launch, Google Wave would still have its fair share of issues.

For one, a clunky interface prohibits users from accessing more than one wave at a time, making multiple conversations at once nearly impossible. Moreover, the ability to add anyone to a wave at any time takes the intimacy and confidentiality out of one-on-one communication.

Real-time editing, as cool as it is to watch, seems to me like a recipe for digital disagreements if certain wave users don’t like the changes others make. And a slew of awkward features, from the confusingly small scrollbars to the inability to actually delete waves (Google calls it “muting” instead), may deter otherwise early adopters.

After a week of playing in the waves, I’m equal parts impressed and ambivalent. The ability to communicate using a smorgasbord of media in one place is fascinating, but I can’t shake the notion that those Aussie developers tried to find a solution to a problem that never existed. I give it at least five years before the wave becomes, er, a tsunami. Until then, TwitMyFaceTubeGmailpedia will have to suffice.

And I say...


What's on the mind of many marketers (or at least the hipster digital ones) is what will Google Wave mean to the future of marketing? Will it change everything? Will they have to figure out how to do their jobs all over once again?

The good news: not so much.

Don't get me wrong. It's a cool tool. It's got great potential for creating brand narratives that engage and involve consumers. We'll see lots of forward-thinking brands using it in innovative new ways. It is a very real tactic that will make it into the social media marketing strategies of 2011.

But a tactic is not a revolution. Neither is the Wave.

Zappos Presentation from the Inc. 500 | 5000

This is Tony Hsieh's presentation from the Inc. 500 | 5000 Conference I mentioned in my last post. Great advice on how to build a brand from the inside out.

Zappos - Inc 500 - 9-24-09

View more presentations from zappos.

2 things I learned at the Inc. 5000 Conference

I’m leaving the Inc. 500 | 5000 Conference in Washington D.C. feeling inspired. The Inc. 5000 is their list of the fastest growing companies in the United States over the past 4 years. This year, Traction was ranked #1399.



I go to a lot of industry events for advertising and digital media, so it was a refreshingly optimistic opportunity to be in the presence of an “industry” of entrepreneurs. To be honest, before I went, I wasn’t too enthused. But I left feeling really humbled to be among this proud group of people who are making the American Dream happen for themselves every day.

Sound sappy? Maybe, but it’s how I feel this morning.

Last night, they gave the Entrepreneur of the Year award to a woman who, despite being severely handicapped in a car accident when she was 23 years old, invented an “invisible bib” for people in wheelchairs to protect their clothes—and turned her idea into one of the 5000 fastest growing companies in America. I’ve never felt so genuinely humble.

The conference brought in one of the best list of speakers I’ve ever seen. Jim Collins, who wrote Good to Great, tore the house down. Tony Hsieh from Zappos spoke. Randall Graham from (Traction’s former client) Bonny Doon Vineyards. David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue. Eric Ryan from Method Products. BET founder, Robert Johnson. ZipCar CEO, Scott Griffith. And so on.

I even got to have a one-on-one conversation with Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke (see video below). I’m hoping he’ll consider me to be part of the advisory council to the new Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. We talked about Twitter and how Traction’s healthcare premiums (they went up 40% between 2007-2008).



So, what did I learn?

Two things:
• Truly great brands don’t define themselves by their products, but by the experiences they provide to their customers
• What you do on the inside is as important as what you portray outside in creating a real brand

Just two weeks ago, I was in Hangzhou, China as a guest of my client, Alibaba.com to attend their 10th anniversary celebration and the APEC SME (Small Medium Enterprise) Summit. Great speakers there too, including Bill Clinton and Nobel prize winner Mohammed Yunnis.

Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, also gave a great speech at APEC.

And, here’s something telling: The advice he gave was almost a carbon copy of the advice I heard over and over again at Inc. 5000.

• Zappos does not define itself as a great online shoe store. It’s their goal to provide the greatest customer service in the world.

• JetBlue does not define itself as the great airline. It’s their goal to provide the greatest customer service in the world.

• Starbucks does not define itself as a coffee company. It’s their goal to provide the greatest customer experience in the world.

And all of these leaders had the same thing to say about how to get there. Exceeding customer expectations was not the most important thing in the world for their companies. What was?

Exceeding employee expectations.

It all starts with providing the greatest employee experience in the world. It was striking that again and again, the thing that made all of these companies so great was their people and their people were great because they loved their jobs, understood the vision of the company and their role in it.

Zappos employees are offered $2,000 to quit anytime during their training period to weed out anyone who doesn’t truly believe in the vision. One JetBlue employee told David that she was famous because she worked there—people would call out to her in church and at the supermarket. Woo hoo, JetBlue. Stuff like that.

As a branding professional, these are two insights that are critical to understand. The world's greatest companies don't position themselves around product attributes or holes in the competitive landscape. They define themselves by the experience they deliver.

That experience is not window dressing. It starts at those companies' very core—their people.

Traction has defined our mission as being a respected creative agency where the experience getting there is as great as the work itself. Since, we started our company in 2001, we've had three people quit ever.

The Inc 5000 made me feel like we're on the right track.

MC Hammer on Social Media Strategies

This post was written by guest blogger, Jim Reed

During Adweek's Social Media Strategies conference this week, keynote speaker MC Hammer told a childhood story about how he would walk to the Oakland Coliseum on game days from his Oakland neighborhood and watch 50,000+ people stream into the stadium. It didn't take long for him to realize that the likelihood of someone buying something from him was pretty good. He wound up selling popcorn, peanuts, soda, etc. but Hammer makes this analogy to a group of social media marketers because the odds are in the numbers. Facebook now has more than 300 million active users, so in the long run marketers are bound to sell something.



Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are the latest toys for marketers to ponder, but the results are still to be determined. Conference panelists and speakers agreed that brands need to be on these platforms now because it takes time to gather a following, to get a stride, to see what works, and most importantly to provide a channel for your customers to reach out to you and hear from you. There was a lot of discussion about putting an actual human behind the tweets and status updates. Rather than a stiff corporate logo with carefully crafted copy for each tweet, consumers will identify more with a real person who can type with wit in real time. Dunkin Donuts has Dunkin Dave. Comcast, who has a notorious reputation for bad customer service, now has a guy name Frank answering customer complaints via Twitter. We at Traction have several humans chiming in (Adam, Theo, Renee, Kellie, Jim) – the point is to maintain a personal voice.

But what about Facebook? The big takeaway from Facebook is to remember that microsites are islands in the Internet – no one will visit your pretty microsite unless you spend great effort and great cost driving traffic to the site. So don't make a microsite experience on Facebook. Leverage the features inherent to social media by encouraging users to express themselves and share with their friends. At Traction we incorporate these strategies for our client, Adobe. On Facebook we encourage users to upload their own creative work, to participate in discussions, enter sweepstakes, and of course share content such as tutorials and interactive games.

Small is beautiful

I'm in Hongzhou, China at the APEC SME Summit. "Small is beautiful" is the theme of the day. This event coincides with the 10th birthday celebration of our client Alibaba.com. Kobe Bryant is speaking today and Bill Clinton will be speaking to this crowd via closed-circuit video.

So, it's a big deal.

It's been an amazing weekend so far. One that I'll not forget anytime soon. Last night, AliFest, was a bizarre and magnificent celebration of Alibaba's success over the past decade providing a platform for SMEs (small and midsize businesses) around the world to survive and grow.

More to come...



-- Posted from my iPhone

Interview with Pandora founder Tim Westergren

This week I had the honor of being the first-ever guest host on Susan Bratton's DishyMix podcast! My guest was Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora. If you don't know Pandora, it's a genius service—are recommendation engine that creates radio stations customized to your personal tastes in music. Have trouble finding the music you love? With Pandora, it finds you.

How? You'll have to listen to the interview. Good stuff.

Download it on iTunes here. I'll update this with a link to Susan's blog when she gets back from Burning Man and posts a transcript.

SXSW Panel Picker - Please Vote!

I've been nominated to be on two panels at SXSW and need your votes so I can go party in Austin. Voting ends Friday, September 4 so please vote before then. Just click on the links below to vote for each of the other panel topics! (you'll need to quickly register to submit your vote)

Traditional’s Dead--But is Digital Driving the Hearse?

Dinosaur RFPs: Should They Be Extinct?

Thanks!

Getting Dishy

If you're reading this blog, you're probably interested in marketing, advertising and technology. If that's the case, you might want to consider putting Susan Bratton's DishyMix podcast on your iPhone. It's a great little program where she interviews some amazingly smart and relevant people. Past guests have included Steve Wozniak, Alex Bogusky, Nolan Bushnell (inventor of Atari), Gina Bianchini (CEO of Ning), Seth Godin, John Battelle (Federated Media) and dozens of other really smart and knowledgeable people in the industry.

I listen to it all the time, so I was really pleased when Susan asked me to be on it a few months ago. Even more so when she invited me to guest host the show. I interviewed Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora.com and I'll publish a link when that episode goes live. It was really fun and Tim's an amazing guy and Pandora is revolutionizing how we discover and listen to music. Can't wait to share that.

A transcript of my interview and the actual podcast are available on the DishyMix blog. Here's an excerpt from the transcript that I liked (I took the liberty of editing out the "ums" and you knows"):

Adam Kleinberg: ... the vision that we have—that I found from our first website on the Way Back Machine—is still true to everything we say and believe today despite all of the web design agency, advertising agency, confusion along the way. There’s a vision that we’ve been true to all along…

Susan Bratton: What is it?

Adam Kleinberg: The vision is that everything is interactive. It’s all about the experience. What we have here that’s different from other agencies is that we have both a very established practice of human centered design, user experience design, and we also have a really great background in branding, advertising and design. We try to bring those two together into an approach that we call brand experience design. You ask us what we are? We try to avoid it ‘cause it sounds kind of buzz wordy—but we're brand experience designers. That’s really what we’re designing. Every point of contact between a brand and a consumer… I’m not saying we do everything. We don’t do PR. We do what we’re good at and we outsource the rest for sure. But, we’re taking a really holistic approach. We’ve even come up with an approach to communications design, communications planning, that we’re calling engineered marketing.

You know, the funnel doesn’t exist anymore, right? The marketing funnel is now…

Susan Bratton: No, the funnel is now shot full of holes, right?

Adam Kleinberg: Yeah, it’s a maze, right…

Susan Bratton: Or a siv.

Adam Kleinberg: So what do you do with that? There wass an e-marketer study last year that said 60 percent of consumers now rely on word of mouth for how they make purchase decisions. That’s up quite drastically from a few years before. I don’t want to throw out a statistic because I don’t have it specifically, but I believe it was in the range of 30 percent a few years earlier…

Susan Bratton: So twice as much.

Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Adam Kleinberg: That means you’re in a world where contributors to your brand's story are as important as purchasers because purchasers are relying on contributors when they’re making purchase decisions. So you have to really think through all of these things. You know, one of the things—when we were frustrated about the lack of integration we were seeing—was: here’s a print ad, use the same photo in the banner ad. That’s not integration. Integration is thinking like where are people going to go, what are the opportunities, what are the possibilities, how are they linked together, what are the metrics that you’re assigning to track and optimize all of these things and how is everything working together, because every time a customer comes into contact with your brand it’s part of an overall brand experience.

Susan Bratton: So it’s planning, but it’s planning in the web world where so much of that contact is either IRL – In Real Life – or something that’s a touch point on the web that is something that a classy corporation is just getting their hands on, that change, right?

Adam Kleinberg: So we’re doing print, we’re doing TV downstairs, we’re even doing packaging, but we see them all as part of a brand interaction. We’ll think about where that print is driving someone online… We’re just doing wire frames that extend beyond the page out into the ether.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Adam Kleinberg: You know, interactive goes beyond digital. I think everything is interactive.

What we do at Traction

Depending whom you ask, Traction is seen as a creative agency, an interactive agency, an ad agency, a design agency, a social media agency or some combination of the above. The common thread is that we design brand experiences across channels of communication. We believe everything is interactive.

In pitches, we illustrate that the marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, intent, action) no longer exists in a connected world. What’s more, consumers are now empowered to consume media on their own terms—meaning brands must provide relevance and value more than ever before. We have a flexible process framework for developing communications in this environment.

Every assignment has five phases: Learn, Plan, Concept, Build & Evolve. The three areas we generally apply our process are User Experience Design (web sites, apps, mobile, anything with an interface), Social Marketing programs and Integrated Branding & Advertising campaigns.

Strategy happens in the Learn, Plan and Concept phases. First we learn—we gather inputs from internal (client) sources, on the target audience and on the marketplace. Then we plan a strategy that aligns to our brand and digital philosophies.

We believe that in the mind of a consumer, a brand can be one thing. That one thing is not a box. It is a prism through which a brand can be expressed. The artifact that we use to express how we got to that one thing is called the Brand Strategy. This is one of two key deliverables of the Plan phase for our end-to-end brand process.

The second deliverable of the Plan phase is called the Interactive Strategy. We are an interactive agency, but we don’t limit that to digital. The artifact we produce here defines target media consumption and shows how we will move audiences from awareness through conversion (and conversation). We’ve been calling our approach to designing integrated communications plans “Engineered Marketing.”

First, we redefine the purchase continuum for a scenario. Then we develop a big creative idea. Next, we “engineer” a tactical multi-channel contact strategy that takes into account how people actually engage with a brand today. Finally we produce a narrative across tactics to drive measureable results. We define how we will measure success from the outset and provide a transparent view into program performance along the way.

Observing human behavior to design solutions that meet human needs has become a hallmark of the worlds’ leading product design companies. But, no one has applied design thinking to communications planning—until now.

At Traction, we create a brand narrative that aligns business objectives with human behavior.

How to have happy accidents

No, this is not a blog post about potty training (although that is a subject I know intimately).

Last night I had nothing to say, so I tweeted: "What should I write a blog post about?"

@Ray_anne responded:

@adamkleinberg write about accidents in life that turn out to be blessings...

So accidentally, here I am writing this post. A blessing? Maybe, maybe not. But I do believe that not only can accidents turn out to be blessings, there's a lot you can do to make sure that comes true.

My background in the ad agency business is on the creative side. As a designer, I've always seen my job as sculpting little accidents into solutions to creative challenges. To me, this is what the creative process is all about. Tiny experiments based on a framework of intuition, experience and common sense.

It's this framework that is the key.

When the economy collapsed and Theo and I got laid off from Tribal DDB in 2001—one year after being recruited to start their San Francisco office—that was an accident.

We thought we could create something better, so we started Traction. Now, BtoB Mag says we're the #1 interactive agency in the country. I feel confident saying that accident turned out to be a blessing.

Sure. Talent, hard work and luck all played a role. But I truly believe that it was having a consistent framework that has—and will—evolve us into a great company.

I recently peeked at the Wayback Machine to see Traction's original website. What struck me was that all the stuff we said when there were four of us working out of the spare bedroom of my apartment is still the stuff we're saying today. Things like:

"Messaging must be concise, relevant and compelling. The user experience rises to the forefront of consequence. A clearly defined benefit is imperative - a catchy tagline or jingle will not suffice. Simply put, a unique human insight must be presented to the consumer at all points of contact."

But, our goal is not just to produce great advertising, It is to produce a great company where the experience getting there is as great as the final work itself.

Life is the stuff that happens while you're making plans, after all.

To achieve our goal, we need accidents to become blessings all the time. We need a framework.

How do you define a framework? Well, what do you value?

At Traction, we've very clearly defined what we value: Candor, Communication, Great Work, Empathy and Integrity

This means that everyone in my organization can intuit the correct answer to a "what should I do?" question by looking at this framework.

Watch.

Q. "Should I tell the client now that their expectations are unreasonable?"

A. (Hmm. Candor!) "Yes, I should."

Q. "Should I spend an extra hour on this ____ until I nail it?"

A. (Let's see. Great work!) "Yes, I should."

And so on.

By defining what it is YOU value and understanding how values contribute to your goal, you can give yourself the framework you need to fall uphill.

There will always be setbacks and challenges you can't control. Eventual outcomes, however, you have the power to guide. Having a framework, a mission and value system—call it what you will—sets you on a course.

Follow it.