Perry

Hewitt

Blog

  • Tying transaction to check-in

    The friction inherent to the foursquare check-in becomes a harder sell in an attention economy full of competing distractions – the value had better be high. Today, foursquare announced a partnership with OpenTable. Marrying the “Explore” feature’s social reviews by friends with the transaction and history of OpenTable’s reservation system is a big win, especially for travelers. It’s desktop web for now, but here’s hoping the app version isn’t far behind.

  • edX is here

    edX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. edX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone. More.

  • Digital delivery: CMO innovation summit

    Thanks to Margaret Molloy for Eight Digital Imperatives for CMOs, a thoughtful distillation of a panel from the CMO innovation summit in NYC last week. I liked the panel’s focus on digital delivery – there are a lot of digital theorists and issue spotters in any large organization, but this panel focused on practical approaches for successful digital experience delivery.

    Agree with all eight imperatives, but would underscore the need for broader marketing teams to get fluent in digital, and stay agile with efforts. In large organizations it’s tempting to invest too heavily in an enterprise planning approach, only to be upended as disruptive consumer technologies rapidly change audience behavior (half of American adults are smartphone owners) as well as the in-house expectations of speed (great special report from The Economist).

  • On Stanford & Silicon Valley

    Interpreting the dynamic between Stanford and Silicon Valley, as broken down by Auletta’s article, is a bit like watching “Wall Street,” a movie that was meant as a polemic on what was wrong with finance but which inspired kids everywhere to become bankers.

    Sarah Lacy, Stanford, Silicon Valley, and John Hennessy’s Real Legacy

  • Find your mobile champion

    Google has released the Mobile Playbook, which as they point out renders beautifully on tablet devices (or on what the rest of the country calls “My iPad”).

    Not too much new news here, and unsurprising but important emphasis on the rise in mobile search (25% of all movie searches are on a mobile device, for example). Biggest need and shift identified is for appointing a mobile champion in the enterprise. We’re at the same race to the siloed bottom without an integrated strategy as we were when every product brand in the enterprise created a website back in 1995. But the stakes are higher — back in the day, the web was one among many strong brand touchpoints, where mobile in 2012 will be the leading touchpoint for many audiences.

  • Must read: The Flight from Conversation

    Most of all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.

    The Flight from Conversation, an essay by Sherry Turkle (and don’t miss the irate comment thread of readers dividing themselves into evangelists v. Luddites). The fallacy is that live conversation  and digital connections will always be mutually exclusive. Her points are well-taken and beautifully articulated, but we’re at one end of the pendulum swing as society adapts to the new technology.

  • Facebook, individuality & loneliness

    Just re-read this thoughtful Stephen Marche essay in The Atlantic Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? about social networking in the current American social context.

    • Facebook arrived at a time when Americans were more alone that ever before. The article points out that in 1950 fewer than 10% of U.S. households contained only one person, and that number had reached 27% by 2010. We’re a culture that extols the individual, something I am reminded of constantly when I compare my own family’s daily or vacation habits and choices with those of friends who immigrated to this country.
    • Our hyperconnectedness leads to myriad but shallow connections with others. In-person connections still matter, and having a number of people we consider confidants reduces loneliness — and that number is dropping.
    • There’s a troubling paradox of how many people we are connected with online and our increase in social isolation. The effects of the latter are tangible — more mental health workers from psychologists to life coaches, and more professional carers needed as we age and become ill.

    What about time spent on Facebook, in particular, drives the loneliness in a constantly connected world?  Social media mavens cite the importance of authenticity. “Don’t mimic, that other guy with all those followers,” they tell us, “but be yourself.” Generally sound advice, but what they forget to add is that most people online are highlighting their best and most interesting selves “Here I am in Paris!” “Here’s the kind of witty banter that typifies an evening with my family.” The toddler beams into the camera, but the explosive tantrums are rarely captured and shared. It’s both widespread FOMO — at any given moment, someone in your network is guaranteed to be doing something more fabulous than you — and an underlying fear that perhaps almost everyone’s true selves are more adventurous and clever than your own.

    Perhaps we’re all just using Facebook wrong. The author refers to the work of Moira Burke, HCI graduate student and soon-to-be Facebook employee, who points to the behaviors of broadcasting and passive consumption rather than engagement with friends as a cause of loneliness. To a degree, that makes sense: We’ve all had the cocktail party experience of the person who speaks in paragraphs, and with it the dullness and loneliness of listening to a monologue in a venue built for dialogue. True engagement, in Burke’s opinion, is enhanced by writing to friends rather than resorting the “lazy like,” and being motivated by others’ sociability to enhance one’s own.

    Last year a Pew Internet and American life report asked ~1,000 technology stakeholders and critics about the ways millennials will benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives. The opinions were diverse — even among a wide range of people who think a great deal about the effects of the internet, it’s hard to find consensus on how our brains, behaviors, and happiness will change as a result. U.S. internet users spend about eight hours a month on Facebook, so the degree to which hyperconnectedness to Facebook itself creates or abets loneliness remains an important and unresolved part of the discussion.

  • Inside the Silicon Valley Gender Gap

    The dominant [element] next to the piece of technology is some woman who’s scantily clad. It creates a hostile environment, and it also doesn’t reflect back onto the female audience that ‘You can be a founder’—but ‘You can be an object.’

    Leslie Bradshaw, JESS3 founder, quoted in Inside the Silicon Valley Gender Gap

  • 10 commandments for enterprise digital strategy

    Today’s This American Life led with a selection of Ten Commandments for unlikely and rather specific audiences. There were the Ten Commandments for Gold Miners (“thou shalt not pan out gold from another’s riffle box”), for umpires (unsurprisingly, “keep your eye on the ball”),  and Paris dining (“thou shalt not be too familiar with a waiter”). People often ask what a chief digital officer does, and my standard reply is that a CDO directs the digital strategy for communications and engagement with key audiences in ways unique to an increasingly digital social and mobile world — but consistent with the offline one. This segment made me think it was worth taking a swing at drafting ten commandments for enterprise digital strategy.

    1. Follow your users — rather than build it and hope they’ll come. Not a new idea, but a vital one relevant to emerging social platforms as well as old-school destination sites. Investing in a stable and updated web property is important — people expect to have their needs met clearly and efficiently  when they come to your site. But that’s table stakes, these days — information in context of your users’ online experiences is the real winning play. Your organization needs to provide engagement opportunities and serve content in context on the sites, within the networks and optimized for the devices of your target audiences.

    2. Strike a balance between control and influence. Today’s brand management is a far cry from the 80s when brands had a playbook that they could use to make and enforce the rules — today the brand should be guided by the institution, but is ultimately molded by your stakeholders. Understand where the brand has to sacrifice some control to understand, engage with, and influence wider audiences.

    3. Bias toward open. “Open” is both ill-defined and over-used as a concept, but remains useful proxy  for an approach to your digital efforts. Don’t focus solely on your own enterprise standards —  adopt open standards where possible. Look to build on open source platforms where you’ll have the power of a community behind you rather than a proprietary system where you’re beholden to an SDK. (Side note: watch for openwashing.) Similarly, think about which assets you have and consider how an open API for those assets might empower your community (see influence, above) to do more with them.

    4. Avoid “not invented here“ and embrace “proudly found elsewhere.” Enterprises inevitably fall victim to silos — and the fallacy that you and your team can come up with the best ideas is surprisingly common. Whether you surface those ideas by crowdsourcing, or by identifying smart people in your community who can inform your thinking, know that you’re stronger employing the network. And that there’s still an important layer of value creation inherent to bringing these ideas to production-quality and scale.

    5. Publish once, use everywhere you possibly can. Content strategy is a linchpin of any digital effort, and content marketing is an established part of digital engagement strategy. Find ways to invest in high-quality content, and make sure that content can be readily syndicated with the right metadata to fuel multiple publications. And that’s not only your own content — where possible, aggregate and syndicate assets found across the enterprise. This involves thinking about content as separate from its presentation — a core tenet of content management — in a way that’s often counterintuitive to the structure of large organizations.

    6. Adopt new technologies, but avoid enchantment with bright and shiny objects. The best thing about a digital-first communications approach is also the worst thing — it’s an atmosphere of constant change. This is challenging from a budgetary perspective (How many social channels can an organization support? How many devices can it invest in custom apps for?), but arguably an even greater drain on attention and energy. Create a set of operating principles specific to your business goals that govern your digital investments,  and use them to drive prioritization and decisionmaking. It’s dangerous (but surprisingly common) to have professional-grade FOMO drive strategy for platform adoption. Data — both third party trends and primary data specific to your users that relate back to business goals — are vital for crafting your approach here.

    7. Understand that mistakes will be made. And if you’re doing it right, you’ll be making a bunch of them. Enterprise environments are generally more forgiving of wait-and-see indecision than they are of failure — particularly when a mistake becomes public knowledge. Digital is such a fast-moving environment that it’s hard to advance without any initiatives failing. It’s important not to confuse this reality with acceptance of mediocrity and/or sloppiness, and to make sure every failure is a learning opportunity. An enterprise digital competency and change management go hand-in-hand, so find leaders and partners that share your bias, acknowledge the role of failure, and reward responsible risk-taking.

    8. Accept that the devil is in the (sometimes tedious) details. Everyone enjoys attending the design comps meeting, but one hell of a lot happens between layered photoshop files and delivering a compelling digital experience of your brand. The success of a digital initiative often depends on the smart people and agile, iterative processes focused on execution. Performance, measured in milliseconds, matters. The more you communicate internally about your performance metrics as much as your visual design, the more you’ll educate executives and peers about what drives and diminishes user adoption.

    9. But don’t underestimate the value of design. Position your digital products at the intersection of speed and beauty. The load and transaction times are key drivers of usage, but the design thinking behind to your products is critical. And the bar is high, especially in the growing mobile sphere, where design as well as functionality is a key part of the success of apps like Instagram.

    10. Measure, rinse, repeat. Understand the behaviors of the people using your products. Too much digital experience design is done in meeting rooms over PowerPoint, and too little by looking at analytics data or live testing in the field. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole of mindless reporting, but thoughtful analytics provide both illustrative insights and data for making your case for investment.

  • The mobile future’s already here …

    Cross-posted on the MITX blog

    One of my favorite quotes is from the science fiction writer William Gibson. He once said, “The future’s already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”  I first grandly predicted the Year Of Mobile in 2000. Now, finally, there’s enough of it here that I can claim to be right.

    What’s happening in mobile right now is exactly what happened during the stampede to the desktop web in 1995. Organizations are trying to force-fit existing content and transactions to meet the needs of a new use case. Unfortunately, in most instances, it’s not working. There are so many mobile–appropriate and even mobile-magical opportunities left on the table.

    Social is the accelerant that’s igniting the mobile platform. It took AOL 9 years to get to one million users; it took Facebook 9 months, and it took Draw Something only 9 days. (Source) Mobile apps spread socially – brands need to figure out how their mobile experiences fit into that ecosystem, and how learned mobile behaviors, from gestural inference to game mechanics, provide opportunities to surf the social wave.

    But on the technical front, figuring out what to do with mobile isn’t always easy. Developing for mobile elicits church and state decision points, like native app vs. mobile web. Both play an important role in the mobile ecosystem. However, the advent of HTML 5 is helping to address this. Better HTML support in native apps allows for faster/cheaper native app creation for both smartphones and tablets. The “hybrid” approach of injecting HTML5 code into native allows developers to do both effectively. And of course browser-based apps can be made more compelling. Check out Facebook at http://m.facebook.com/ on iPhone/iPad’s Safari web browser and compare it to Facebook iPhone app and iPad app experiences, for example.

    Another emerging religious issue is responsive design vs. RESS (responsive endpoint with server-side adaptation). Responsive design addresses a fundamental challenge that everyone’s facing today: how to serve the growing variety of physical form factors of end-user devices. Responsive design assumes that all users on all devices want the same content, just formatted differently. That’s not always true; if you’re walking down the street looking at an iPhone for a few seconds, do you really want to see everything served up to a user sitting in front of a large-screen desktop? In contrast, RESS does more of the work server-side, and offers customized (and reduced) content for different form factors.

    What’s next for mobile?

    First, analyst firms report that in just a few years the number of mobile devices will dwarf the number of personal computers. We see it anecdotally with the devices students bring to university each fall, and we see it as mobile-first behaviors are reflected in our site analytics and app download numbers. This will be a wake-up call for organizations used to thinking of mobile as discrete apps or afterthoughts.

    Second, the steep innovation and adoption trajectories mean that generations just a few years apart are having very different experiences with mobile. We’ve all seen the video of the baby trying to make the print magazine behave like the iPad – and who knows what her little brother will expect? So the rapidly growing and rapidly changing experience of mobile will be yet another way consumer behaviors drive seismic shifts in the enterprise. In the mobile near-future, we may see a more seamless interaction with things and people around us, compared with the relatively clunky and interruptive way we “check in” today. Tablets are already changing how people – especially senior ones — access and share information in business meetings, too.

    So, “mobile first and mobile everywhere” is where we’re headed. It took me a decade, but just like that stopped watch, the prediction was finally right.