Tag: culture

  • Friday 5 — 9.25.2015

    Friday 5 — 9.25.2015

    1. Facebook has already established itself as a formidable video-serving rival to YouTube. This week, with the help of its Oculus acquisition, Facebook launched 360 degree videos — click and drag the video above to see what is now possible. This interactivity is terrific for all kinds of immersive experiences from tours to product demos, as well as myriad off-label uses.
    2. Digital marketing, and then the rise of programmatic advertising, promised marketers a seeming nirvana: the ability to reach a unimaginably large volume of very specifically defined audiences. But reality is more complicated: here’s a great explanation of the murky world of bots, click fraud, and fake traffic.
    3. Starbucks is known for its forward-thinking digital approaches. Their latest mobile order and pay initiative (MOP?) is designed to defeat ‘line anxiety’, which is what you experience seeing 12 other caffeine addicts between you and your morning joe.
    4. Tracking how people get to your site is important — yet many organizations don’t have sophisticated analytics software in place. Buffer has released a basic guide to UTM codes to help you parse that traffic.
    5. As internet access rises, many marketing departments are migrating to web-only surveys. Pew analyzes the audience you miss with a survey reaching  89% rather than 100%.

    HUBweek hiatus: I’m taking a two-week break for HUBweek, which will have no shortage of amazing sessions on digital topics including the state of the podcast, ventures brewed in an Innovation Lab, and whether social media is ruining politics. Back Friday, October 16.

    Weekend fun: Curious how much longer you have before being shuffled off this mortal coil? This bouncy animation uses Social Security data to calculate the likelihood you will live to see next year. If that’s too grim, enjoy the internet’s best GIFs in a music video.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 9.11.2015

    Friday 5 — 9.11.2015

    mobile internet

    1. If you’re thinking about mobile as just another line item in your overall internet strategy, Benedict Evans will set you straight.
    2. Some company cultures are more conducive to digital transformation, while others hinder progress. This HBR post discusses the risks of excessive focus on technology, and the benefits of distributed decision-making.
    3. Your digital footprint — gleaned from likes and comments on social media — may reveal more about you than you think. Research confirms that computers analyzing data can discern a surprising amount of personal information from online interactions. Click wisely.
    4. Despite the apparent absence of groundbreaking news, the Apple announcements dominated the news cycle.  Stratechery weighs in on Apple’s approach to products and platforms, including the strength of the high margin iPhone and the weakness of the iPad developer ecosystem.
    5. Buzzsumo and Moz analyzed 1,000 pieces of content and drew some conclusions about shares and links [PDF]. Some were unsurprising — authoritative domains matter, shares are more personal than links — and others were encouraging, like the relatively strong performance of longform (>1,000 words) content.

    Weekend fun: Miss the Apple keynote? Catch up with some Apple pencil jokes, or see how this cartoonist foretold the future.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

     

  • Friday 5 — 8.28.2015

    Friday 5 — 8.28.2015

    emotional response to video chart

    1. Why do some videos go viral while others seemingly underperform? HBR looks at how psychological response and social motivation drive video sharing. Apparently it doesn’t hurt to reach the “supersharers,” who are responsible for 82.4% of total video shares.
    2. Slack’s integrations — from GitHub to Giphy — make the team collaboration app delightfully sticky. This week Slack announced a new feature providing apps with the native capability to “Add to Slack.” This feature debuts in 13 apps (including my daily favorite, Nuzzel) with more soon to follow.
    3. As voice communications continue to spiral — does anyone remember the concept of “rollover minutes”? listen to voicemail anymore? — messaging apps proliferate. However, there are regional differences in adoption. Quartz reviews why WhatsApp lagged in U.S. markets compared to Snapchat and Kik, and what these apps will need to do to fend off Facebook Messenger.
    4. The shooting of a news team in Virginia this week, and the rapid dissemination of footage online, led to some somber consideration of the implications of technology. These include the autoplay video behavior on Facebook and Twitter that can cause involuntary viewing, and the phenomenon of a senseless murder planned expressly with social media in mind.
    5. Good manners are about making other people feel comfortable, and what feels comfortable has a way of changing over time. Pew breaks down for us all what mobile phone etiquette looks like in 2015. Related (in case you missed it): an excellent primer on how to be polite.

    Weekend fun: Ever wanted to just pull up stakes and go? This clever art project has married census data to a “Why I am leaving X” letter format to make your parting thoughts painless. Or stay put; Harvard research says you can manage your stress by getting a dog.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

     

  • Friday 5 — 8.14.2015

    Friday 5 — 8.14.2015

    slack screen

    1. Are you getting started on Slack to increase your productivity, reduce your email, and fuel your dependence on animated GIFs? Here’s a helpful how-to explaining all the basics.
    2. Technology has consequences, positive and negative. This week a new refereed online publication forum, Technology Science, launched as a place to share timely academic papers exploring the benefits and adverse consequences of social, political, organizational, and personal aspects of technology. They’ve already hit the headlines with a piece on discovery of a Facebook Messenger privacy flaw and price discrimination for travel to the U.S.
    3. Nieman Lab’s Joseph Lichterman has a collection of articles on news alerts, those mobile notifications sent by major news organizations that let you know an earthquake has struck or that  Serena Williams has won again. Helpful for understanding the what when and how, but it can be surprising what rises to the level of an alert from the New York Times. What did I click or not click that has them notifying me when Sesame Street moves to HBO?
    4. Peter Shankman pulled together four tips for how to send an email so that it’s actually read. He includes my main pet peeves: lack of descriptive subject lines and inclusion of attachments.
    5. While everyone else is talking Snapchat, don’t lose sight of Vine which delivers an impressive 1.5 B video views (or “loops”) per day. Quartz explains why this mobile-friendly, snackable video service has taken hold.

    Weekend fun: Now shorts on the internet can get you a real live Hollywood movie deal. This six-minute, apocalyptic short is the latest example of Vimeo-to-studio. Dystopia not your thing? Then check out this oddly gratifying video of a an eagle talon-punching a drone out of the sky or just turn off the damn computer and play Guess Wu.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

     

  • Friday 5 — 6.26.2015

    Friday 5 — 6.26.2015

    atlas chart internet traffic

    1. News stories are often well told visually, particularly in an era where more data than ever is available. Business and tech news site Quartz launched Atlas, a slickly-designed command center for all its charts, where you can download, embed, or grab the data. And it’s an open source product, so you can create your own version.
    2. McKinsey looks at ways that large organizations are raising their digital quotient: strategy, scale, culture, and talent. Their connectivity point focuses on brands and their customers, but these behaviors will also have a large impact on operations within the enterprise.
    3. Does your organization have a reverse-mentorship program around digital? Millennials are helping older professionals with tech in the workplace.
    4. LinkedIn has over 360M members worldwide, and is making some savvy changes to continue that growth. Recent shifts include moving toward a ‘follow’ rather than a reciprocal ‘friending’ model, and becoming a viral platform for content publishing.
    5. In the last 90 days on U.S. government websites, mobile and tablet account for about 32% of traffic. Learn more about user behavior and popular content on government websites at the new analytics portal, analytics.usa.gov.

    Weekend fun: Who among us has not sent an email we regret? Gmail undo to the rescue. But when that inappropriate pixel-blurt comes out as a sexist tweet, you may find yourself at the mercy of Amy Poehler.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

     

  • Friday 5 — 5.29.2015

    Friday 5 — 5.29.2015

    new business communications

    1. It’s worth reading every one of Mary Meeker’s internet trends slides. I’m struck by the relative rapidity and impact of the trends in the American work environment, including what motivates the millennial workforce (hint: not money), the ways connectivity has changed the nature of work, and the rise of online platforms, marketplaces and their impact. The slide above continues her observations on reimagining business communications — with Slack as a well chosen example of a transformative technology.
    2. The new Netflix redesign is visually pleasing, but more importantly, it’s based on a rigorous, data-driven approach. With more unbundled competition for video viewing, it makes sense for Netflix to invest heavily in gathering and driving decisions from their user data.
    3. Journalist/social media editor Sarah Marshall compiled a list of 19 useful tips and tools for social sharing and searching, I particularly liked her ideas for attribution and correction, and a few new tools to check out.
    4. For marketing analytics geeks, check out these 5 deadly myths, debunked. Some fall into the category of taking meaningful data and analytic advances to an illogical extreme, but many will ring familiar with those working at the intersection of marketing and tech in the enterprise.
    5. Expect to see more about virtual reality implementation as competition increases and technology goes mainstream. This week, Oculus announced that a VR-ready PC and headset should run you about $1,500 when it launches in 2016. Based on the wide adoption of GoPro plus drone videos (fun Harvard example), GoPro announced it was working on a VR camera + quadcopter drone combination to launch later next year.

    Weekend fun:  Ever since I read the reviews for the Bic pen for women, I’ve wanted to find the female version of everyday products. Thank goodness for feminizeit! In other news, you can gauge how strong your 404 game is, or improve your web viewing with a Chrome extension that transforms references to millennials into “snake people“.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 5.22.2015

    Friday 5 — 5.22.2015


    google maps view

    1. For those of you already planning your Memorial Day driving routes, Google Maps has released useful, new features alerting users to delays and detours as you enter your destination. Beyond the time estimate, new cards provide additional context about potential delays. Related trivia: Google Maps also released the top destinations from Memorial Day 2014.
    2. new twitter searchGoogle is once again showing tweets in search results, starting with mobile. Now you can search for topics and hashtags directly within Google. At the same time, Twitter is rolling out its own more robust search, with new features for logged-out users. My guess is that Twitter native search will cater more to live Twitter consumption of breaking news or events.
    3. More than just music — everyone’s favorite social playlist subscription service Spotify is diversifying into podcasts and programming.
    4. Today’s workforce spans multiple generations, new economy and old economy roles, and various degrees of digital capability. Here’s why the expertise gap matters, and why the first step is acknowledging the problem.
    5. The MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) hype cycle peaked in 2012, but educators are still trying to crack the right formula for effective, online learning. Read this explanation of why primacy of location and cost still matters to motivate learners in a world outside the autodidacts of Silicon Valley.

    Weekend fun:  It’s the long weekend — why not let loose with some street dancing to beatboxers. Bad weather where you are? Then pore through these examples of faux code in TV and movies.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • The institutional odyssey

    The institutional odyssey

    Exploring best practices — and unanswered questions — as we navigate social conversation in today’s digital organization

    social chatter

    Back in the mid-90s, establishing an institutional web presence began with writing a million dollar check to Oracle. As a next step, you hired a fleet of technical employees, one of whom was called a “Webmaster”—schooled in the dark arts of web servers, ftp, and HTML—and may well have been your first employee to wear a T-shirt to work. A couple of decades, a cloud computing revolution, and an explosion of content publishing software options later, establishing an institutional web presence is less onerous but no less complicated.

    Today, an institution is expected to create and nurture presences on major, relevant social media channels, which raise a new question: What are the expectations for an institutional social media presence, and how can these presences understand and interact with the individual social media users within and beyond them?

    In order to answer that question, an organization establishing a social presence must first consider a few of the decision points:

    • What are our goals, and how will we measure them?
    • Which networks does it make sense participate in? Where is our audience?
    • How much will each account listen, publish, and interact with audiences? How does this integrate with customer support?
    • What’s the associated staffing model and workflow?
    • What does governance look like, in terms of people, policy, process and practice? How much control versus how much free-form proliferation of accounts?
    • How will the different institutional accounts interrelate, for example between central corporate and business unit, or between business unit and HR? How human or hard-coded are these connections?

    Beyond these institutional presence questions, many institutions now have the bulk of their employee base online, which leads to what might be the most difficult question: As social moves beyond the marketing suite, how will the institution interact with the individuals that comprise it—at both the leadership and the staff levels?

    For all institutions, the relationship between the institutional and the individual accounts is still forming. Even among co-workers, the rules are still being written. I caution employees that social media is a bell that can’t be unrung—if my Facebook feed shows me an Instagram photo of you out at a party at 3am, it’s difficult to be sympathetic about that report that wasn’t in by noon.

    Beyond deadlines, more complex HR questions loom. In addition to spelling errors and beer pong photos, a manager and coworkers may now have knowledge of an employee’s out-of-work conduct, sexual orientation, and political leanings. As what was previously unknown becomes knowable, organizations are rapidly enacting policies to evolve with these challenges.

    However, this as much an opportunity as it is a challenge. Recent research shows that employees have on average 10x more social connections than an institution does and content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by institutional channels. Employees are clearly an asset, and can act as effective advocates on the institution’s behalf, yet the appropriate balance and process remain uncertain.

    We deal with this same question in higher education—but it comes with a twist. The faculty and the students, who provide the research, teaching, and learning that fuel the institution, are not traditional employees. They’re contributing and sharing content related to their diverse disciplines and experience—along with all the other news items, casual observations, and sporadic conversations people share on social media. The sum of the parts, in higher education, is what makes for a successful whole. Most universities see bringing faculty online as consistent with knowledge-sharing part of their charge of the creation, dissemination of knowledge. Younger faculty, particularly in sciences, are sharing more research and inviting more collaboration via social media.

    So, what’s an institution to do? First of all, be cognizant of the delicate balance and role that institutions must play in a social setting; no one wants to be interrupted, especially by a brand trying to force its way on stage. The institution can focus on and reflect overarching, shared priorities, and perform an aggregating and amplifying role that highlights local achievements and campaigns. But institutions must also be wary of new privacy and cultural norms emerging with social content. A person authoring a tweet or Instagram post may know, intellectually, that this is a public act. But having an institutional account amplify that message to millions of followers may reveal that there was, after all, an expectation of privacy in networked publics. Institutions must consider the impact of sharing public content intended for a small audience with the broader world.

    The one thing that is clear is that institutions cannot ignore this change. Instead, you can take concrete steps to:

    • Discover the individuals within your organization who are highly engaged on social. Many social publishing platforms provide tools that enable you to tag individual accounts with relevant attributes. Use these to understand individuals who may be your thought leaders or champions in different disciplines.
    • Convene groups of relevant individual users around themes and ideas. If your software company has people already engaged in conversations about cloud computing, how might they be invited to participate/lead the online conversation in your next conference?
    • Awaken your marketing and HR departments to the “show, don’t tell” possibilities. If you have engaged employees with active social accounts, think how they fit into current digital campaign and conversation planning.
    • Develop norms about what’s a fair ask. We recently saw hundreds of employees from a services firm dutifully post their CEO’s appearance on a television talk show to social channels. This was clearly a broad mandate that yielded a painful, work-to-rule like result. Just as you wouldn’t expect your employees to recite your mission statement at a cocktail party, don’t expect to script their social channels.
    • Create a strategy for your “influencer” users who thrive on the social graph—regardless of org chart. Have a new product you are eager to get to market? Consider adding these individuals to an early beta release to get their feedback and support.

    Social strategy is nearly a decade old, but it is changing just as quickly as the rest of the business landscape today, and there are still large, blank areas on the ever-changing map. As organizations themselves change, and as the boundaries between organization and public blur, the institutional odyssey will only become more complex—and more exciting.

    Originally published to Medium on behalf of the Digital Initiative at Harvard Business School, studying & shaping the digital transformation of the economy.

  • Friday 5 — 5.15.2015

    Friday 5 — 5.15.2015

    facebook instant

    1. The big news for publishers this week was Facebook Instant Articles. The New York Times and Buzzfeed were among the first publishers on board, reaping the benefits of reach, fast-loading articles, revenue sharing, and data access. While some fear it’s a deal with the devil, Poynter is more measured in its assessment.
    2. What do Facebook Instant Articles and the $4.4B Verizon-AOL deal have in common? This Stratechery post draws the thread of the important shift in digital advertising that underlies each development.
    3. Launched in 2012, Quartz is a business site that’s reshaping digital news — and along the way has prompted its competition to raise its game in data visualization. 10 million monthly readers and a daily email with a 42% open rate are data points in a successful overall strategy described as “Quartz can go anywhere our readers are, in whatever form is appropriate.”
    4. Many of us are obsessed with workplace productivity hacks and smart filtering as our days are besieged by internet distraction. Here’s an alternative take: embrace your digital overload.
    5. I bought the Apple Watch early for fun, and have been pleasantly surprised by its workstream utility. Text messages and Slack notifications pop in usefully and unobtrusively, and can quickly be dismissed. Walt Mossberg offers his cautiously optimistic take on “a fledgling product whose optimal utility lies mostly ahead of it.”


    Weekend fun:
     Self-congratulatory splash pages with tedious descriptions of user benefit are the calling card of website redesigns like this or this. Thankfully, The Onion used its redesign to mock all other redesigns and their self-congratulatory explainers.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 5.8.2015

    Friday 5 — 5.8.2015

    photo cloud

    1. No matter how much time I spend trying to do a respectable job managing my digital assets, I take a look at the state of my photos online and despair. If you feel the same way, these photo management tips are for you.
    2. The Instagram engineering blog performed a fascinating machine-learning analysis of the rise of a new language: emoji. Fun fact: a mere 38% of posts in the United States contain emoji, while the Finns top out at 60%.
    3. Advertisers believe that teens are abandoning social, and data shows that networks like Facebook are hard hit. But are teens just redefining what social means?
    4. If your colleagues are anything like mine, they’ve been obsessively uploading and comparing disastrous “How old do I look?” shots. Fun aside, this viral tool is a data miner’s dream for Microsoft.
    5. GPS location data has gone far beyond driving directions as the primary use case. Exploring new places and frequenting local haunts are made better by restaurant suggestions, coupons, and weather alerts. But as we trade location data for convenience, it’s worth remembering who’s watching.

    plateWeekend fun:  Smartphone food photographers rejoice: a new line of Instagram-friendly dinnerware is designed for you to take the perfect shot. Watch this completely un-ironic video to see “the Limbo” or “the 360” in all their glory. 

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.