Tag: strategy

  • Friday 5 — 7.24.2015

    Friday 5 — 7.24.2015

    nasa tweet earth 2

    1. Social media success is about much more than mastering the platforms and tools. Finding a voice that resonates, developing terrific content, and building an engaged community require a culture of experimentation and continuous learning. Quartz reports how NASA developed a smart social media strategy that fueled its global reach.
    2. Instagram has enabled desktop search for users, hashtags, and locations. It’s another sign that the social network is moving beyond its savvy, mobile-only origins. Its next phase of growth will require enabling consistent cross-platform experience, and driving web embeds of its wealth of user content.
    3. Strategy, not technology, drives business transformation, according to this recent report from MIT Sloan. The study also found that a company’s digital depth is a hiring and retention differentiator; the vast majority of respondents of all ages reported wanting to work for digitally enabled organizations.
    4. Is the web fundamentally about connecting knowledge, people, and cats; or fixing the world with software — or something else entirely? Read this presentation on the first 100 years of the web, which raises questions about the internet’s purpose and continued rate of change.
    5. Curious about content marketing? This article reveals results of an experiment conducted on the Hubspot marketing blog. The idea for the experiment started with a Twitter conversation, and resulted in months of testing post frequency and type (tactical, top of the funnel, promotional for gated content, etc.). Their findings conclude with a practical summary of ways to conduct a similar test, and how to think about altering your publishing approach.

    Weekend fun: If you typically wind down by reading in the evening, see Product Hunt’s new foray into books for suggestions that skew geeky. It’s way better than the social media scrolling alternative.

    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 — 5.1.2015

    Friday 5 — 5.1.2015

    Video Viewer Stats

    1. Facebook is up to 4 billion daily video viewers, and some think it may unseat YouTube as the go-to video destination. Not much of a present for YouTube’s 10th birthday.
    2. Instead of bucketing content referrals by each social network, BuzzFeed launched a new technology to track content shares across social networks. Dubbed Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion (POUND), the system offers a realistic, more nuanced view of how stories spread. Buzzfeed’s own post buried the lead — the data show that sponsored content is shared just like editorial content.
    3. Click wisely: Nearly 2% of Gmail messages are designed to trick users into giving up their passwords, and well-crafted phishing schemes are effective 45% of the time. Given those scary statistics, this week Google launched Password Alert to let you know when a password reset may be in order.
    4. Why is Snapchat getting into the news business? With hundreds of millions of users, a valuation of $15 billion, Snapchat is becoming one of the fastest-growing media platforms in the world. With a critical new editorial hire, a built-in audience, and the pipes laid, deciding what to flow through seems to be a natural next step. The question is whether the Discover tab can serve as its own destination, or will remain a time-waster between user-generated snaps.
    5. In my experience, there are few things more time-consuming or expensive than a free trial of new software. The Chief Marketing Technologist blog includes this advice among other useful suggestions in 8 useful tips for marketing tech companies on pitching CMOs.

    Weekend fun: So much for “Canada nice” — the poop emoji is a big hit in Canada. Here’s how emoji usage by country breaks down. A little gross, sure, but a lot less creepy than the selfie arm.

    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 — 4.24.2015

    Friday 5 — 4.24.2015

    the_atlantic_redesign

    1. If you are responsible for a high-volume brand homepage, be sure to read this Nieman Lab take on the Atlantic re-design. I particularly like this framing from Bob Cohn: “In an age of social traffic, a homepage is less about traffic triage — directing lots of direct visitors to the content of their choice — than about presenting an image of your brand.”
    2. Back when the “Mobile-friendly” text first appeared on Google search results on mobile browsers, many assumed this was a first step toward an algorithm change rewarding mobile-first design. Mobilegeddon is here without any apparent, major fallout to date, but Moz has listed some potential big losers.
    3. While Facebook continues to court news publishers, this week’s algorithm changes favor content created by family and friends in the news feed. Facebook has a delicate balancing act: the need to broadcast content for publishers who drive revenue, while remaining aligned with its mission to forge and reinforce social connection.
    4. Are you interested in the technical, moral, and legal issues surrounding the use of algorithms as they affect your daily life? The Berkman Center at Harvard has published a free case study [account required] for those seeking a deep dive into both practice and policy.
    5. User experience has come a long way as a discipline since 1999, the first year it appeared on my business card at Harcourt, Inc. Whether you’re a manager or in an individual contributor role, here are some useful tips for how to become a UX leader.

    Weekend fun: Are you a damsel in distress, an action girl, or a missing mom? Tropes are familiar conventions that a writer can rely on as present in the audience’s minds — explore their use in TV and movies  through Stereotropes, an interactive experiment created by technology firm Boucoup.

    stereotropes visualization

    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 — 4.17.2015

    Friday 5 — 4.17.2015

    digit

    1. Apps without an interface provide services to users through native mobile capabilities. For example, Magic lets you text a number to order whatever you like without hassle, while Digit monitors your bank account activity and automates your savings.
    2. Looking for all the narcissism potential of Facebook with the quick-hit guilty pleasure of Giphy? Try Kong, a social network consisting solely of animated GIF selfies. Bring your best ridiculous expressions.
    3. The Dao of Web Design captured tensions between print and web design, and presaged similar battles over control and process that have typified digital creation since. Web design leaders share their perspectives on the seminal essay 15 years later.
    4. Here’s a good collection and detailed explanation of hidden gems in Google Analytics. My favorites? A shortcut to let you save preferred views, and custom alerts you can set up to email or text you.
    5. 97% of us worry about how governments and corporations are using data about us as individuals and consumers. This article looks at three kinds of customer data: self-reported, data exhaust (browsing history, etc.), and profiling data created about us, and makes the case for developing enlightened data principles to build customer trust.

    Weekend fun: Attention Star Wars fans out there — once you are finished watching the trailer and reading this shot-by-shot reaction post, you can add Star Wars emojis to your tweets. I’m definitely finding a way to work Monday morning stormtroopers into the tweet rotation.

    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 — 4.10.2015

    Friday 5 — 4.10.2015

    Apple Watch

     

    1. The first round of many Apple Watch reviews are in — here’s my favorite one, although it’s derided capably here. Certainly no one is suggesting it’s a digital must-have, but most agree it packs a few canny features. (For the optimists: Pre-order here.)
    2. New Pew research covers teens’ 2015 use of social media and technology. A solid majority (73%) of U.S. teens now has a smartphone, with predictable increase and shifts in mobile-accelerated social networking. Unsurprisingly, teens are constantly connected (92% report daily, and 24% admit “almost constantly”). The survey also reveals income-correlated disparities in access to technology, and different habits by gender.
    3. How are messaging apps evolving as the smartphone becomes the new social platform? Mobile messaging apps are different tactics, from leveraging the phone’s native capabilities to integrating more closely with mobile web browsing interactions. And now a mobile-first Facebook app has migrated to the desktop.
    4. Although nearly 50% of emails are opened on a smartphone, many emails are not yet fully optimized for mobile. This article explains ways fluid layouts and a testing protocol on actual mobile devices can make a difference.
    5. A modern workforce requires frequent, new technology adoption. This article offers useful suggestions for getting skeptical employees on board, including articulating the “why” and getting influencers on board.

    Weekend fun: Email is just like driving a car — you’re convinced that you do a pretty good job at it, but everyone else is an moron. You might change your point of view when you watch these email offenses acted out.

    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 — 3.20.2015

    Friday 5 — 3.20.2015

    payments-in-messenger

    1. Facebook introduced new friend-to-friend payments on Facebook Messenger. Now friends can split a lunch check, or settle a wager right in a chat. And, for now, zero fees.
    2. Google Code shut down and moved nearly a thousand of its open source projects to GitHub. Here are a few important ways GitHub got it right where others failed.
    3. Should news media drop costly native apps in favor of mobile web? Monday Note makes the case that a mobile site, lightweight and focused on a small feature set, can satisfy most use cases.
    4. We’re generating an ever-larger stream of data, and that data is increasingly accessed by our connected devices to serve up relevant experiences. Many layers of data — identity, financial, etc. — combine to shape and enhance our daily activities in the Age of Context.
    5. Crowdfunding platforms provide an outsized opportunity for entrepreneurs and innovators. $529 million was pledged in 2014 on Kickstarter alone. Here are 9 tips for building a successful project on Kickstarter.


    Weekend fun:
    When you read this, I will be flying back after Harvard Men’s Basketball readily defeated UNC in the first round of March Madness. Unless, you know, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight is right. Sports not your thing? How about a Star Wars-themed drone instead?

    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 — 3.13.2015

    Friday 5 — 3.13.2015

    Google Maps: Empire State Building

    1. Google Maps is an app many use daily — after all, not everyone can live in a CityMapper zone — but have barely scratched the surface in terms of functionality. Here are some useful tips, including offline access and one-handed use.
    2. New digital projects often start with an existential crisis of organizational identity. Land the plane with some content strategy mad libs. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it — I found it a useful exercise to lead stakeholders away from high level mission statement debates toward concrete areas to hammer out agreement.
    3. When designing a mobile app, it’s tempting to start by turning a feature list into a series of pages or views. For better usability, shift your emphasis from function to focus on user flow mapping instead.
    4. Google is entering the wireless industry — and its entrance might change the fundamental business of the access market. Through analogy (“like Uber for wireless”), this piece explains why there is a huge opportunity in wireless — even if Google never owns the last mile of delivery.
    5. Is Buzzfeed is the most important news organization in the world? Here’s a compelling argument, pointing to Buzzfeed’s wholesale adoption of of internet assumptions of constant iteration and learning, and its corresponding robust business model.

    mobile hellWeekend fun: Enjoy this painfully accurate comic about mobile browsing in 2015. And in absurd but adorable news, SXSW this year will have dogs to bring you mobile device chargers. Try not to use that device like an idiot on social.

    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 — 3.6.2015

    Friday 5 — 3.6.2015

    Meerkat

    1. Meerkat is a new livestreaming video app that launched and skyrocketed this week. Tightly integrated with Twitter, the app allows you to livestream video direct to your Twitter feed. It’s ephemeral content — viewers cannot replay it, but creators can save the original video to their phones.
    2. Despite the mass adoption of Gmail, Google has never gotten contact management right. The user interface is confusing, duplicate records are hard to eliminate, and the termite guy you used once in 2005 seems to be suggested as often as your frequently-emailed sister. Here’s a preview of its much-needed overhaul.
    3. How was news represented in Wikipedia in 2014? This long read explores how news entries were produced and consumed, and identifies fascinating patterns. Fun finding: Wikipedia has a cohort of “ambulance chasers” that move between and edit many current events articles.
    4. Everything old on the internet is new again, and the animated GIF now appears everywhere from new media listicles to sober New York Times opinion pieces. It’s easy to create a bad GIF, but surprisingly hard to create a good one. Here are useful how-to tips for making great GIFs.
    5. If you used the internet last week,you can’t have avoided commentary on #TheDress. Maybe your boss wandered into your office and asked if you can get some of that viral content going. Enjoy this brilliant, albeit reluctant, thinkpiece on why this Buzzfeed achievement is not immediately replicable at your place of work.

    Weekend fun: Cultivated Wit hosted a Comedy Hack Day. An online marketplace for unearned privilege took the grand prize, with a runner up app that can silence your judgmental friends by altering low battery life in screenshots. Best accompanied by an a capella version of the PowerPuff Girls theme.

    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.