New York Times has an article about my neighborhood. Many of my favorite hangouts are listed, just in time for tourist season. A rare article about Boston with no mention of Duck Tours.
Silicon Beat talks about the perceived similarities between the GoingOn network and PeopleAggregator. There are lots of similar projects in the pipeline, including the new Red Hat initiative and of course the new AOL service, AIM Pages.
A month or so ago I talked to Fred Stutzman at ClaimID to get a better idea about what his new project was all about. The next day, Aldo was over doing a podcast here about identity. The week after that, Aldo interviewed Fred. Last week I met Fred in Person at the Identity Mashup. Today, I installed MicroID plugin for WordPress and added ClaimID to my sidebar. I use a somewhat-hacked theme for the blog which doesn’t support sidebar widgets and I haven’t taken the time to figure out what edits need to be made. Needless to say, some progress is being made at Theprogressbar.
NY Times has an article about people in Tokyo using cell phones as guides. Point your phone at a building, and the phone retrieves information about it from the net and displays it. Geovector, a US company, is working on the location-based technology to bridge the link between cyberspace and meatspace.
Marc Rotenber, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center says:
“It’s like getting junk faxes; nobody wants that. To the degree you are proactive, the more information that is available to you, the more satisfied you are likely to be.”
I met Marc last week at Identity Mashup at Harvard. I mentioned a business idea to him and he 1/2 jokingly said he would have consider filing a legal brief on it. You know you’re on to something interesting when the policy watchdogs get excited.
The Times story is a great intro into the coming age of geo-location services. I can’t wait for this stuff to come here, I’m tired of carriers trying to wow us in the US with 2 year old technology.
Mack Collier at Marketing Profs says he agrees with some of my comments on the Pinko Marketing Manifesto, and disagrees as well.
I am posting this because I think we may be creating a war that isn’t there, or at least it shouldn’t be. This isn’t a war with the ‘consumers’ over who has control of the marketing message. Neither party has total control. Marketers have control over the marketing message that they send to their communities, and the communities have control over how they relate that message to others. If at all. And they can send a marketing message (feedback) back to the marketers.
I took the time to write out my thoughts on each of the manifesto points because thats often how I dive into new concepts. Obviously I think PM is important, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the time to respond. Mack is right on when he says “Communities need marketers just as much as marketers need communities. The role of marketers isn’t to cede control to our communties, and get out of their way, our job is to JOIN our community, and clear a path for them to help them reach their destination as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
Right on, the discussion is really about Prepositional Marketing.
I wanted to respond to Tara Hunt’s Pinko Marketing manifesto as a way to further understand and address my perspective towards it’s tenants. Wiki or not, I didn’t want to edit over what’s up there at the moment.
1. Pinko Marketing is about the end of the Marketing Manager, Director and anyone else who thinks they have control over the message, market or ‘brand’
This is total nonsense. This is part of the problem of the mindset of the 500 or so people that generally push the internet along. Consumers branding a product is an interesting concept but this doesn’t come from anyone who has spent time talking or working with global brand managers.
How about “Empowering consumers to build meaningful relationships with companies and brands.”
2. The commons…the producers…will decide what makes it ‘to market’, what flourishes, what dies, what is ignored, what is celebrated…whatever.
Consumers already do this. Revise to reflect the new power balance between consumers and companies.
3. No marketing budget, big or small, will change your advantage in this new world.
I could not disagree more with this statement. Was this written by someone who has actually had a budget larger than a typical cash-strapped startup?
What are they trying to say here? Guerilla, viral marketing is more effective than a bigger marketing budget?
4. Amateurism means passion, curiosity, intrigue and growth. What the hell is a professional? You get paid for doing what I’m doing right now? Cool. How do I get that gig?
Merge with something about the marketing power of consumer-created content.
5. The ‘masses’ will decide what is ‘mass’ and what is not…whatever the hell ‘mass’ means…wait a minute? We aren’t being stuffed into a overarching classification? So, we can divorce ourselves from any notion that we are some monolithic mass of consuming beings? Cool.
Remove, repeat of 2. We are a monolithic mass made up of millions of niches.
6. Ask your shareholders, Board of Directors and investors to kindly sit down and relax. If they’ve invested in a dog, they’ll know soon enough.
Huh?
7. Monetize this.
How will the benefits of this new marketing paradigm/relationship result in new companies and ecosystems that add value.
8. The ‘Elite’ and their ‘Wannabe’ hangers-on will also sit down and shutup. They may learn something very valuable in this next while.
Remove. Both sides will learn from each other. Some hubris, please.
9. Having a corporate blog does NOT mean that you get it. In fact, it mostly means that you don’t.
Huh? It sounds like there is some backlash against corporate marketers. Help them adapt to the new ways of doing things. Good for them to start a blog, now let’s embark on something truly innovative. Blogs aren’t quantitative, they are the new press release.
10. The voices of the community, your employees and your competitors are more valuable than anything you could ever say. Listen. No…really…listen.
I’ve spent years doing external business environment analysis as the basis for business strategery. How will pinko change this? Don’t come out of the gate with reactionary oversimplifications without providing at least a glimmer of how you plan on making improvements.
11. Small is the new big. I know it sounds cliche, but beyond lipservice, let’s embrace it.
Remove, this is the same as the anti-mass produced thing.
12. Shifting your attitude to Pinko Thinking today will not only put you ahead of the curve, it will mean your survival.
What is Pinko Thinking?
Survival is such a keynote phrase. Way too strong. I agree with the notion of benefiting from adhering to some pinko principals. If the principles are the manifesto, nobody is going to be able to follow it.
13. I’m not copyrighting this. It belongs to the commons. Please use it.
Where is the Creative Commons link?
14. Put down the marketing plan and walk away slowly. It’ll be alright. I know. You have a tough job ahead of you. It’s called killing your inner control freak. I have the same issue.
Refine marketing plan to reflect changes in the relationship between companies and consumers, consumers and brands. Marketing plan should fit on a single sheet of paper in the beginning.
15. Everyone is a marketer. They were right! All these years that I fought that and they were right! Everyone does it. I feel so much better…
Nonononooo. You mean everyone is a consumer. Some are more clued-in than others. There has to be a distinction that WOM != marketer.
16. K.I.S.S. – simplify
Remove. Goes without saying. Really.
17. D.R.Y.
What is this?
18. From this point forward consider any outgoing messages – as innocuous as they may seem – to be SPAM. Stop it.
How about “Be mindful/clueful about external messaging now that we have many new channels without norms and rules for marketers yet?”
19. Database marketing was when the marketers had the databases and the customers didn’t. Now the customers have caught up in the information technology race and they can link, subscribe, aggregate, recommend, block, and filter faster than marketers can track them.
Good start. Still doing database marketing, but it’s now data mining. How about providing the tools and education to consumers that they need to use these new technologies.
20. Karl Marx said “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Amateurs are gaining the same abilities as the professionals. They outnumber the professionals, so with the levelling of the playing field their voices will become the dominant ones. You’d better be nice to them. Rohan Jayasekera
Merge with #4.
21. Your customers are incredibly smart, and remarkably creative. They’ll create great content that will showcase your brand better than you ever could — if what you do is any good. – B.L. Ochman, What’s Next Blog
Some of them are, the rest are sheep. Find and groom the standouts and give them input, like Lego for example.
22. If people are saying bad things about your product or your company, listen up. It’s probably because there’s something you need to change. Thank them for pointing it out and then deliver more than they asked. – B.L. Ochman, What’s Next Blog
Move to #10.
23. Respect your community. You exist to serve them – listen, communicate and facilitate. Deborah Schultz
Move to #10.
24. The community is always right, because the community as a whole is much smarter than the customer.J. Botter
That is so not true and goes against the anti-mass production stuff earlier. Community is smarter than the company or the individual? Often times, what I want is what I want.
25. “Right,” like ying, cannot exist without “wrong.” As soon as we start talking about right and wrong we devolve into a power struggle. This isn’t about being right. It is about being involved. Marketers are guides. In the future effective marketers will be co-conspirators. Bob Robertson-Boyd
Nice quote. Same as pay attention to people, etc.
26. Content may be king, but community is the kingdom it serves.Mike Sansone
Great phrase but covered already. Also, many would argue that brand is often king over content.
27. Forget kings! The audience is the content. Bob Robertson-Boyd
This is a repeat. Audience is content? Explain.
28. We don’t need to be convinced of a product’s worth – it should be self-evident. M.P.B.
Many times it never is self-evident. Quite the arguable point. Self-evident how?
29. Refuse to report: reporting on your Pinko Marketing wastes time describing a situation that has already changed; worse, it allows the team to delegate their responsibility to engage with customers. If the team wants a record of events, tell them to hire a documentary-maker. OK, maybe I just hate writing reports… alan jones
Huh?
30. Help them find a documentary-maker, they wouldn’t know where to begin looking. alan jones
Huh?
31. Everyone becomes a creator — designers, developers, writers, musicians, etc. — and the marketing happens all by itself. sean coon
Repeat. Merge with earlier.
32. Time is the most valuable currency. Spend it, not money, on your community -
Cole Whitelaw
Bump up near top. Resource, not currency. If resource, people are the most valuable.
33. Stop thinking in military analogies. No more campaigns. No more market penetration. If you’re thinking of it as a war, you’ve lost already. -
Oh, but it is a war once you have competition. Suggestions for new analogies? How about reframing in terms of prepositional marketing (with instead of at or to), conversations, attention/intention marketing?
That’s it for now, I’ll be keeping track the the manifesto over time to see how it matures.
Yahoo, for one, although after spending time with Fred at ClaimID last week, I’m pretty confident that Micro/ClaimID will drive microformat adoption for identity aggregators and job boards.
Nice writeup about the differences between Structured Blogging and microformats here.
It’s because the Structured Blogging plugins are a TOOL that makes it really easy to create the reviews. People aren’t using the tool because they want to publish structured data, even I don’t really use it for that reason, they use it because it makes writing reviews easier.
Are people writing a lot of structured reviews? I thought it was more for events.
How about a bidirectional FOAF editor while we’re at it?
Poor Pubsub, time to use Blogpulse or Technorati?
ClaimID is now officially Justouttabeta. Congrats to Fred and Terrell, who I got to meet at Identity Mashup last week.
It’s quite clear that microformats for claiming content are starting to come together, and ClaimID is smart to integrate with OpenID, MicroID and keeping an open mind towards working with other initiatives that strengthen and increase the value of microformat-based data aggregation.
ZoomInfo is a summarization search engine which approaches content aggregation with a crawl-based system. As I mentioned to Fred last week, ZoomInfo would be a great partner for ClaimID. I’ll even link to the Partner page to make it easier.
I’m curious about what people think about Technorati’s Microformats Search. Do you think it’s a good idea for Technorati to support ClaimID as well?