Adam Saunders's Notebook

Monitoring, tracking, and responding to what others are writing about your company online is a relatively inexpensive and very effective strategy for building your brand's online reputation. It is an excellent way to learn about your customers, respond to issues before they get out of control, and generate customer loyalty that translates into increased sales.

The following free tools will help you stay on top of the conversation surrounding your business.

Google.com/alerts - Simply enter a search term, choose a "comprehensive" alert, choose how often you'd like it delivered, then enter your email address. You will receive updates every time any content with your keywords enters the GoogleSphere. This service will be even more useful when Google adds alert delivery via RSS.

Technorati.com - Technorati is the largest blog search engine. Add your RSS enabled website to Technorati and it will track other sites that link to you yours and add your blog to the Technorati network.

Backtype.com - This service does a scarily good job of tracking comments across the blogosphere. Type your name in to see all those pithy remarks you've made over the years. Type in your company's name to find out what people really think of your products and services.

Boardtracker.com - Indexes and tracks discussion board postings. Discussion boards were the original social media sites long before Facebook or MySpace existed. They often have a large, focused, and passionate user bases. If you want to have conversations with potential customers that care about what you do, then find and join the top discussion boards for your industry or area of interest.

Search.twitter.com - Twitter is of course the incredibly wonderful/annoying service that lets you update the world about every little thing that you do. While you may not use Twitter extensively, you will want to know if someone is twittering about your company, so try a search to see what comes up.

Yahoo Pipes - Yahoo Pipes allows users to get/pipe information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be filtered. Try searching for pipes that other users have built like the Social Media Firehose. You can modify existing pipes or create your own unique pipe to get your data just the way you want it.

Over the past few years marketers have focused on content creation as the primary means of "participation" in online communities. We've all been busy writing blogs, sending emails, building online communities, twittering, etc.. However, we would do well to take the time to seriously listen to our customers. Hopefully, these tools help.

Nicholas Negroponte of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Paul Lavole of TAXI talked at Advertising Week about the progress of the project and TAXI’s upcoming advertising campaign to support the November 17th, 2008 launch of the "Give a Laptop. Get a Laptop" store at Amazon.com.

The XO Laptop is great little machine that has won numerous design awards and tugs at heart strings like few other computers can. However, questions remain about its ultimate success and ability gain traction in world markets. Currently, a search for "xo laptop" on Amazon returns a list of low cost laptops like the Asus eee that compete with the XO for market share.

The advertising campaign aims to significantly improve the marketshare and mindshare of the XO laptop over the upcoming Christmas shopping season and generate widespread interest in One Laptop per Child project. The look and feel of the campaign seems very Appleish. The campaign concepts shown in the presentation consist of cute pictures of the XO on a white background with messages below like “Give a laptop. Get a Laptop. Change the world” and "Let’s create generation XO."

The partnership with Amazon is similar to last year, "Give a Laptop. Get a Laptop" lets consumers purchase two XO laptops and keep one while giving the other to a needy child somewhere in the world. However, this year Amazon will handle the entire sales and fulfillment process. Hopefully, this will eliminate the bottlenecks that plagued last year's campaign.

Interestingly, the next generation of the XO is an e-reading device that would seem to compete with Amazon's Kindle. It remains to be seen how this will play out given the close relationship with Amazon.

I would like to know what the XO campaign is doing to target expatriates living abroad and people with an interest in helping specific countries. Naturally, people will be more willing to give if they know that the donation will be directed towards communities they are involved with. I would certainly love to post an ad on Tadias.com to support laptops for Ethiopia.

When starting your typical open-source project, there is little or no monetary incentive for individuals to participate in the project. Participation is largely dependent on the brilliance and usefulness of the idea, the leadership of the project’s originators, and the platform for collaboration that is implemented.

Ideally, the software itself serves as a platform for collaboration and is designed to encourage participation in the project. This is the case with many popular content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, etc.. These systems allow users to easily post content and create social networks that encourage a positive feedback loop of creativity and software development. Project participants end up creating a system, which allows them to work more effectively on the system they are creating.

Of all the content management systems I’ve worked with, Drupal does the best job of designing collaboration into the structure of the software itself. The design is simple, but fundamental to Drupal’s success. Drupal is a bare-bones framework that allows modules of code to be plugged into it. The modules provide nearly all functionality in the Drupal system. Each of these modules has its own maintainer who is often the module's creator.

This structure automatically creates a team environment, because each developer has her own piece of the pie so to speak and is committed to managing the development of her module. Further, there is a strong incentive to contribute modules to the project, since contributing a module gives the programmer credibility within the Drupal community, as well as the opportunity to have the community improve the programmer’s code. This simple mutually beneficial system drives Drupal's development.

Drupal also excels at organizing programmers and users in real communities around the world. There is one site and one module that contribute the most to the massive worldwide organization of Drupal communities. The sub domain Groups.drupal.org (GDO) runs off of the Organic Groups module, which allows for the creation of an infinite number of topic and location specific sites. In this case, the subject is Drupal, but the same network of groups could be created around anything. GDO allows users and programmers to organize on a massive scale and drives widespread community involvement in the Drupal project.

The basic principles of Drupal’s success can be applied with technical and non-technical teams in for profit or non-profit organizations. Create a positive feedback loop that automatically rewards individuals for contributing to the project. Break the project into modular components that are owned by an individual or team. Create a platform for collaboration amongst team members.

Drupal is an impressive tool for marketers and community organizers looking to take advantage of the best social media tools. Consider using it on your next project and feel free to contact me with questions about building online communities and collaborative teams.

It's not often that one gets to found a new academic discipline. However, this is exactly what IBM is trying to do with a push to create a unified curriculum and degree program for Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) at major universities around the world.

There is a lot of academic verbiage surrounding the discipline. However, service science essentially brings together the traditional business department and computer department to study how people and technologies interact in large organizations to deliver value.

Service science is interesting to me on a number of levels.

First of all, I'm someone who has always walked the line between business manager and computer geek. When you inhabit both these worlds it is rather obvious that business people and computer people tend not to understand each other. This is something that has to change if any business is going to thrive on a global scale in the modern marketplace.

Second, service science captures the paradigm shift that is happening in the tech sector from a product based business model to a service based model. The huge success of open-source software and fiercely competitive new hardware manufacturers emerging across Asia continue to chip away at the profitability of the standard make it, pack it, and ship it approach.

Companies that focus on providing consulting services, software, and hardware as an integrated solution will be able to turn existing threats into opportunities for collaboration and growth. Delivering exceptional integrated information technology services on a global scale is clearly what will differentiate the leading tech companies of the future.

Third, this is the first time I’ve run across a well-conceived academic discipline that is essentially owned by a particular company. IBM is the top result when I google “service science” and most of the other results are from organizations somehow affiliated with IBM. Indeed, the current third result is a Wikipedia entry, which credits IBM with inventing the term Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME). IBM quite literally owns service science at the moment.

As a marketing professional, I am quite impressed with the type of big picture thinking that IBM is displaying here. They didn’t just create a website, buy some advertising, send out a press release, and contact "thought leaders" in business and computing. No, they put in the work to carve out a whole new academic discipline, at least that’s the impression one gets. Nice work IBM.

I'm currently looking at MBA programs with a strong focus on technology and international business. I'll be exploring service science further in the coming months.

I've been playing with Sony BMG's Musicbox for a few month's now. I was immediately impressed with the potential of the site from the first time I saw it. Musicbox is a seemingly endless interactive catalog of music, videos, pictures, and anything else you could think of relating to artists in the giant Sony BMG catalog. The only problem was that the site tended to be really slow, so it wasn't as much fun to use. However, when I logged in yesterday, the site loaded quickly. I clicked on the first thing I saw, the latest Britney video, and it loaded in a snap. When the "Piece Of Me" video ended I was immediately transitioned into another Britney video. Just like TV, it never stops so you get sucked in.

On Musicbox, to the right of the playing video, is a fairly extensive list of other featured videos that you can choose from. If you want to see the entire catalog you just need to click on the "play all" button at the bottom of this list. After watching a short commercial you get access to what seems to be the entire catalog of the artist's videos. Just like before, the player continuously loops songs one after another. However, between each video is a short 15 second commercial. The functionality of the more complete catalog gives an indication of what Musicbox is going for in the long run, continuously playing music videos with short advertisements between every couple video. This will probably be a very lucrative business model and could easily become the MTV for the web generation.

Surprisingly, Musicbox doesn't seem to have all that many advertisers at the moment. Most of the ads are either Google ads or ads for Sony products. I'm guessing that Sony BMG has been slow to seekout advertisers, because they are making easy money on Google advertisements, which direct users back to resellers of Sony BMG cds and other products. That's a sweet deal! A one-two profit punch that makes up for the rather pathetic revenue that Google ads generally generate. In addition to fast loading videos and a huge music catalog, the key to the immersive Musicbox experience is the fact that the advertising doesn't get in the way of enjoying the site. I didn't find the 15 second ads in between videos anywhere near as annoying as the 30-60 second ads that I run into on most sites. I will leave you with a Bootsy Collins video from Musicbox. The video currently only has 3 views, so Market Anomaly readers are some of the first to see this gem.

I recently launched a news style website for Tadias Magazine. The site is my first stab at deconstructing the WordPress content management system and the idea that personal publishing should always adhere to the rather boring blog format.

At root WordPress is a fully functional open source CMS that is quite easy to play with and modify. Many media companies use their own customized versions of WordPress to power large complex sites, so it shouldn't be that difficult to give the average user this power in the form of feature rich easily customizeable templates.

I started playing Second Life (SL) this weekend. For the uninitiated, Second Life is a virtual world where users can do pretty much anything you do in the normal world. Users (residents) can buy property, build houses, start businesses, buy services, host events, chat with others, modify their appearance, etc.. Generally the laws of physics and societal norms that govern SL mirror the real world, however there are some important exceptions. Residents can fly and teleport, and I don't believe residents ever get hungry, thirsty, tired, injured, or dead.

One of the interesting aspects of SL, especially for the non-gamer, is that residents can buy Second Life currency, Linden dollars (L$), with real world currency on the LindeX currency exchange. Linden dollars can then be used to purchase goods and services in the SL world. Even more interesting is the fact that people actually spend real currency to purchase Linden Dollars. The LindeX data shows that the current exchange rate hovers around L$270 / US$1.00.

As in the real world it is difficult to make the cold hard cash (Liden Dollars) in SL. It seems that the most lucrative profession is as a Second Life marketer in the real world. Residents get L$2000 for every member referral who becomes a premium subscriber. Designing items for the virtual world can also be quite lucrative, and the world's oldest profession seems to flourish as well. However, there is also a bit of a welfare system in SL and users receive a certain number of Linden Dollars per week just for logging in.

I'm still waiting for my check, but my stipend is supposed to be L$400 per week. This isn't to shabby considering that an entire virtual apartment building can be purchased for L$6000. Also, I'd actually make US $1.50 per week off the Linden dole, if I sold my Linden Dollars for U.S. dollars at the current exchange rate. With the injection of real cash, this virtual world becomes a lot less virtual, but until the exchange rate gets a little better, it's still a game to me.

Regardless of the financials and all the marketing hype, the looming question still remains, 'why would anyone want to spend significant amounts of their real and very short life in a virtual world?' Judging by the list of the most popular places in second life the draw is mainly sex followed by gambling. The Reuters, CNET, Wired spaces were totally dead when I stopped by.

I don't think I'm going to be spending much more of this life in Second Life. I judge all internet phenomena based on whether they make my life better, and I just don't see SL doing this. SL interests me mainly as a tool for facilitating discrete tasks like building a park, modeling human behavior, or holding a meeting (though video conferencing seems more practical). The media companies who are tripping over each other to setup shop in SL are over excited about the marketing potential of the platform, but who can blame them. Their job is to live in the moment and virtual worlds make for great headlines.

Eric Rice has a good post on all the real difficulties that SL is now facing including a customer rebellion over customer service and increased prices, as well as emerging competition in the metaverse marketplace. I'm not sure what companies like Crayon think they are going to do in Second Life that they can't do in the real world. No doubt, they got lots of links from their recent dual launch in both the real world and in SL. However, I think that after a couple months hanging out in SL, Crayon will soon realize that they could be doing more productive things in the real world and on the real internet.

Okay, it's back to reality for me folks.

There has been a bit of talk today about reputation. What makes it, changes it, defines it? Seth thinks about why Snakes On A Plane tanked at the box office despite buzz and press attention over the past few months. Robert wonders why Microsoft retains its bad rep despite recent efforts to open up and start having real conversations with customers.

I like Seth’s conclusion that SOAP basically failed because the product sucked. “I’m afraid we come back to something that marketers have been struggling with for a really long time–the best way to succeed is to have a really great product.” It’s a movie made by committee, so it was bound to suck. This reputation was cemented in my brain before the marketing even started. I was hoping that SOAP would fail, so that I would not be subjected to a storm of promotions for even worse copycats.

Robert’s point is a little different, but still gets back to the fact that it is the products that define a company. The problem for Microsoft is that reputations take a very very long time to build, and Microsoft has only recently started opening up and conversing with customers. The products resulting from those conversations are just beginning to come to market.

I switched to Mac when they went Linux, and since then I had never felt the desire to use a Microsoft product until I saw Live Writer. Live Writer is something different that leads the market by integrating word processing and web publishing in a simple user friendly fashion. If Microsoft puts out a few more products like this, their reputation will eventually change.

In the end, the quality of the products is the thing that defines a companies reputation. Conversations help make better products, they help market products, but conversations don’t make products. Conversations, are full of arm chair philosophers who love to pontificate, but making a great product requires a team of highly focused obsessive individuals, who sometimes listen to and sometimes ignore the general consensus.

I've been frustrated for a longtime by websites that continue to throw irrelevant ads at me in increasingly large quantities. It is well known that major media companies have been actively tracking and trying to make sense of user activity on their websites since the dawn of the Internet. So why am I rarely interested in the ads that I see? You'd think that all those PhDs in Silicon Valley would have figured me out by now, but as far as I'm concerned, they don't know me from Adam:) Yeah, I've heard that one too many times to count.

Last week I came up with what I think is a better way to deliver advertising, and for that matter content in general. I feel that it should be possible to select my areas of interest in a universal profile that I own and control, and have this little profile follow me around the Internet, so that websites can tailor their content and advertisements to me. That would make me really happy. I'd have a great browsing experience, advertisements would actually be informative, and I might even buy something based on those ads.

When I told my friend Eric about this concept last night he immediately gave it some more practical tech teeth by suggesting that I use microformats to create the universal profile. Then he introduced me to the Pinko Marketing discussion group and posted the idea there for discussion. I was surprised to see that 4 people already commented on Eric's post and gave him excellent suggestions and links. Thanks Pinkos! I've joined the fold, so you'll be hearing from me soon.

We're tentatively calling this microformat hInterest. There are a number of issues that need to be solved to make hInterest viable. Obviously, the biggest problem is getting the scale that will required to encourage large publishers and advertisers to adopt a standard format. At least one major player would have to adopt the format before it will be viable at all. With some work and industry backing, it should be possible to give users more relevant content, more control over their information, and a better online experience.

Jennifer Senior of NY Magazine wrote a great article on positive psychology and the study of happiness. My favorite part is the conclusion where Jennifer calls into question the goal of being happy, and gives strong support to the theory that depressives are the sane ones. After all, isn't the real goal to live a good life, not necessarily a happy one?

There is a well establish study showing that people who identify themselves as optimists tend to be mildly delusional:)

"One of the most interesting bits of American research to surface repeatedly in books about happiness is a study that shows depressives are far more likely to be realists, while happy people are more likely to walk around in a mild state of delusion. The study itself was fairly simple: A group of undergraduates was given varying degrees of control over turning on a green light. Some members of the group had perfect control; others had none the light went on and off of its own accord. The depressives accurately predicted, in each instance, whether they were in control of the situation or not. The nondepressives, on the other hand, thought they had control about 35 percent of the time over the situation in which they were, in fact, 100 percent helpless."

It's a fascinating finding with a hell of a lot of implications. New marketing campaigns for optimists, anyone? Check out the article for more details.

If you're a positive minded professional, who just wants the happiness action items, then read Happiness: A User's Manual.