Twitter and Facebook Visual Comparison

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Quick Thought on GDC San Francisco 2009

It was clear early on at the San Francisco Game Developer’s Conference that the vibe was a bit different than previous conferences. Some of the events feel a bit more personal, as travel budgets have been cut. Regardless one announcement drew a good amount of buzz: the launch of Onlive, a subscriptions revenue alternative to buying or renting video games.  Bigger picture here – what’s most interesting about the announcement is the gaming industry as a whole embracing an all-you-can-eat model for content, which the recording industry has long fought (to their deteriment, many would say).  The idea seems to be gaining traction to combat both piracy as well as the margin erosion of secondary market sales.

And a few (admittedly grainy) iphone photos of the conference while I’m at it. Enjoy:

How NOT to Use Microblogs

If you’re a microblogger (Twitter, Friendfeed, etc) trying your best to annoy your followers and drive many of them away, here’s some great suggestions for you. You’ll also enjoy the added benefit of drawing in spam types and clueless vendors who misuse microblogs as spam tools and PR release websites as you let go of valuable followers. Follow these three steps and in no time you’ll be the next big typhoid Mary of the social web world:

Step 1: Spam Your Followers to Death

Blogger Josh Chandler decided to share links upon links of coverage during a recent news event. The result was Josh getting spanked for this clusterf.. er, debacle:

in all fairness to Josh, he’s owned up to it. Bravo. But other egregious examples remain, like this little retweet maven posted up on Andrew Mager’s blog:

For those of you who are unfamiliar with re-tweets, they’re basically just a copy and reposting of what someone else has said. Mager’s convinced me to stop this practice, since watching this is about as painful as sitting in a 400 degree oven while simultaneously being present as the IRS audits your 2004 tax return.

Step 2: Be a Fake

Seth Godin, speaker and marketing book author has his own blog, and recently showed up on Twitter as well. Some followers became immediately suspicious when they noticed Seth wasn’t engaged in conversations and wasn’t following other (a big no-no on Twitter). It turns out “Seth” wasn’t the real deal, but rather an imposter who simply link posted from Seth’s blog.

Needless to say once “Seth” was exposed, he was dropped en masse. By the way, the lack of following and conversation us to our next point..

Step 3: Don’t Interact

Here’s a question for you: are you wondering if Washington is out of touch with citizens and voters? The following screenshot should eliminate any doubts about this politican:

Other candidates actually follow (even if in just a token way) and engage. The hilarious irony here is that the Hillary-in-drag on Twitter follows and converses with zero people, and yet somehow posts this:

“This has always been your campaign, and there’s no one I want to hear from more than you.”

Fail.

Here’s another example of how software as a service provider NetSuite engages its customers on Twitter:

The last post was 4 months ago? Now, I’m a big fan of NetSuite since I worked there for a number of years, but using Twitter as a link to your webpage is soooooo 1999 (link swapping was the hot ticket back then). Predictably, the NetSuite account attracts an industry groupie gangbang of resellers adding zero value to anyone looking to have a meaningful discussion of CRM and ERP adoption strategies:

My favorite is the utterly B.S. sounding “Value Chain Group”.

Compare this to how more innovative companies like Virgin America, Aria Systems (who I currently work for), JetBlue, and Comcast use Twitter to really get to know their customers, and you’ll see what I mean.

Twitterquake Heard ‘Round the World

My thoughts and prayers go out to people affected by the quake. There are over 9,000 dead reported in central China and tragically hundreds of school children under a collapsed schoolhouse. Please consider joining me in donating to the Red Cross relief efforts.

After making sure our friends and family are safe, I started to reflect a bit on the earthquake. It never ceases to amaze me how Twitterquaking has become the defacto emergency broadcast system of the web. If you’re new to the term, it simply refers to using Twitter during an earthquake (or any other emergency) and using it to move around information, and find out if friends and loved ones are well. Exhibit A is this morning’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Chengdu, in central China. Twitter is the sole reason I know about it this morning and not the evening’s news.

Logging on this morning, my Twhirl stream was buzzing with activity among the folks I follow living in China. Apparently It was kicked off with Frank Yu’s asking “Earthquake in Beijing?” followed by a momentary comedic interruption of the news with “i twittered as the building swayed…screw running out the door, MUST TWEET !” That’s dedication Frank – or perhaps addiction. According to Marc van der Chijs, “within a few minutes the Twitter community found at least 3 active Twitterers (http://twitter.com/inwalkedbud, http://twitter.com/lyrrael and http://twitter.com/casperodj) that were reporting live from Chengdu. Quite amazing to see how quickly news spreads on Twitter, because we already had all information before the mainstream media picked it up.”

Marc is absolutely right. In fact, the USGS picked up the quake about 5 minutes after the initial Twitter reports began. Many of us had a map of the quake region before the USGS could post one. Now it’s tempting to chide the experts for showing up late to the party, but frankly Twitter is an unfair advantage for the rest of us (side note: I hope folks at the USGS are following Twitter. They aren’t doing their jobs otherwise). It seems increasingly the web is pushing mainstream news services are in the business of confirmation and analysis rather than actual news dissemination. This missive from Robert Scoble pretty much sums up the role of the mainstream media in the minds of active Twitter users:

For more updates follow the stream of news updates from Twitter users here.

Update 1: From Shanghaiist, Pictures out of Wenchuan. This brings me to the verge of tears.

Update 2: Some folks in China place the toll at 11,922. The BBC’s coverage is here. My friends Jeremiah Owyang and Elliott Ng (CN Reviews) have also donated and stepped up calls for action. Bravo fellas. Elliott’s blog post has a great list of organizations which can use your help. Thank you for the comments and continued support.

Startup Camp Starts Up

It started as an idea blogged by two guys and turned into an awesome event at Palo Alto based Vysr, where nearly two dozen aspiring entrepreneurs showed up to share ideas, learn, and teach. Startup folks from as far as Australia unconferenced with bloggers, media folks, and angel investors and angel groups about a variety of topics, such as scaling on a dime, finding angel investors, and pitching a deal. We even had the pleasure of meeting a fifteen year old entrepreneur behind Teens in Tech. The most oft-recurring themes of course were bootstrapping (discussion lead by Mukund Mohan), and angel funding (discussion lead by MR Rangaswami of Sand Hill Partners, Guda of Vysr, and Mark Balabanian of Koders). Between participating in a few sessions, I managed to snap a few photos, which can be found here.

Since the majority of sessions and the preponderance of collective interest were focused around angel funding (post-seed), I put together a 14-point list of learnings for entrepreneurs looking to pitch angel investors:

1. Relationships are a discussion starter. Get to know people with personal relationships to angels, and approach angels through those people. M.R. notes he’s never funded anyone outside his network in 11 years of investing.

2. Mind the basics. M.R. and Mark look for a clear value proposition which stands out.

3. Lose the Hockey Stick. The market size looking big is unimportant, as everyone who pitches investors has a habit of putting up impressive looking “hockey stick” graphs of how the total market is set to explode. Everyone can project a big market – what those kinds of graphs do is make your audience cynical. Savvy pitchmeisters specifically talk about total addressable market rather than total market size, which is received as more realistic.

4. Parallelism. Make sure your personal resume supports what you’re looking to do – investors are investing more in people than in ideas, and they want to know you’re not new at what you want to do.

5. Chemistry. The personality and chemistry is important. An investor’s involvement doesn’t end at funding, and they will be looking for people they can comfortably work with over the next 3-4 years time. Investors will sometimes provide a helpful “kick in the rear” and are keen on people who respond positively and decisively to it.

6. Demonstrate incremental success. They will also look into whether the person makes his commitments over a 3-4 month cycle -about as long as it takes to fund a deal. Even a stray comment can be construed as a milestone. Many a pitch has been blown off by a ballyhooed “we’re about to close a deal with Facebook, etc” pitch which never came to pass. If you’re working on meeting a milestone, alert investors to it only after it’s a sure thing, which make it appear you’re executing effectively.

7. Develop your story slowly. This may sound inscrutable but MR and Mark advise sandbagging to some degree. Giddy entrepreneurs usually make the mistake of showing all their cards as quickly as possible. A more effective strategy is to develop the story during the close process to maintain investor interest in your idea. It’s also important to maintain consistency. If the investor feels like they are being pitched a plan to be followed with a backup plan, then they will get cold feet.

8. Quit your job. Investors will be skittish about funding a startup in which none of the founders are working it full time. Said differently, they are looking for entrepreneurs willing to dive into their ideas without reservations.

9. Teamwork beats heroes. All else being equal, a founding team with well segmented duties will be more attractive to a single founder. While single founders do get funded, an angel will likely inquire why an idea is likely to be fruitful if a founder can’t convince others to join him or her.

10. Keep it real. Investors wade through many pitches and will mentally discount hyperbole with nary a thought. Do not pitch divine inspiration or perfection -be open about weaknesses you’ve identified and have a plan to deal with them.

11. Align interest with involvement. Pitching an angel based solely on the numbers is hubris; there are simply too many unknowns. Make sure to pitch to investors who are interested in your market. For instance, if you’re starting up a social network for soccer fans, then find angels who are soccer fans.

12. Advisory boards. Advisory boards are effective leverage: you pay people in stock and benefit from influencers who will talk about your idea to everyone they know. Adding an adviser is also a great way to mitigate risk of disinterest – advisers who do not want to be involved are usually removed quietly, while board members can not be removed to easily. Mark specifically notes that an adviser who is proficient in marketing wizardry is particularly important, since founding teams are usually weak at promotional savvy.

13. You Have No Secrets. Every angel or VC talks to every single other angel and VC. There’s no secrecy here so you have to pitch the idea intelligently and make sure that you retain value.

14. Put Everything on Paper. Many an internal founder power struggle has doomed a startup to failure. Since clairvoyance isn ot part of the business plan, preparedness has to be. Investors will feel more comfortable with a founding team defining their core competencies and their ownership stakes on paper, along with vesting schedules to each founder providing incentives towards continuity. That last thing an investor wants to see if half the team bail with full vesting in hand shortly after funding.

Thanks again to everyone who came and made the event a success. I look forward to the next such event; we’re hoping to put another one together sometime after the summer. Please drop me a line or comment below if you’re game!

General and contact info on Startupcamp:

Wiki: http://barcamp.org/StartupLegalandFinanceBootcamp

Twitter stream: www.twitter.com/startupcamp

Email: startupcamppaloalto@gmail.com

Techset BBQ Weekend

Many of the weberatti converged on the Techset BBQ hosted by Brian Solis, co-author of Now is Gone and principal at Future Works. This was a bit of a SXSWi reboot, where the only agenda item was keeping up on friendships old and new, and getting another taste of Austin’s Salt Lick (which was a real treat for me, since I’m a Longhorn). Below are a few pics, more available here.

Brian and Wendy Solis:

My favorite picture of the whole day:

Lingling and I were able to meet lifehacker Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-hour Work Week

Cloud Statistics

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Mark Twain

I admit it – I’m a data junkie; and Tweetclouds is my new drug. It allows everyone to analyze Twitter accounts the way Sam Lawrence of Jive has number crunched to provide the frequency of words used on the blog of 10 bloggers he feels are thought leaders. Essentially the process boils down to creating a cartogram of words used and enlarges them based on frequency. The results are a unique window into the bloggers/tweeter’s mind.

There’s a number of social media metrics I’ve thought about, and I’ll probably blog about it later. I’m having too much fun with this new tool right now to do so. However, here’s two I ran and figured I’d share.

Am I different on Twitter vs. Blog?

My guess would have been yes, and the clouds below confirm my Twittergab is far more colloquial than my blog writing. My blog seems to be where I think and my Twitter account is where I network & socialize. Update: I’m not the only one fascinated with Tweetcloud it seems!

My Twittercloud

My Blogcloud

What’s (fill in a name) thinking?

I figured I’d try entering Lingling’s account into Tweetcloud and see what I come up with. The words that jump out are “Tiger” (her nickname for me), “good” and “happy”. So I guess she’s pretty happy, which makes me happy as well.

I’m going to post some more thought on this at a future point in time. For now, here are some thoughts I’ll tease you with – Will Twittercloud analysis become as common an HR proceedure as a background check for hiring? Will nerds like me run social media metrics prior to doing business with someone? Is this an effective (or ethical) way to get inside a prospect’s head for salespeople? What are the shortcomings and caveats here?

How would you use cloud statistics in business, or in your personal life?

The First Tweetup

Lucky for me the first Tweetup in the bay area happened to be a few blocks from our offices at Socialtext, so I picked up Ling ling and we headed on over to meet fellow tweeters. My thanks to Ryan and Jennifer for kicking it off. Here’s what it looked like after the drinking got started (click the pic to pull up more):

The Tweeters are, from left to right, Martin, Ling ling, Rachel Luxemburg, me, Ryan Kuder, Mukund Mohan, Jennifer Leggio, and Joel Postman. Chris Abad and Leora Zellman also came from a drink and a gab after the above pic was taken.

We mostly had a laugh about some of the recent Twitterdrama as well as how each of us came to get onto Twitter. There’s always a learning or two to take away – Here’s my three takeaways:

1. Twitter turns the acquaintance process on its head. Normally we meet people, exchange pleasantries and start to form relationships based on shared interested. With tweetups, you go in with predefined “tags” for many people you meet. I realize that sounds impersonal, but there is also the benefit of skipping the lowest common denominator conversations (just to be polite) and heading right for conversations both you and the other person find interesting. For life hacks types of people, this is awesome.

2. Tweetups fill the gaps. Like Mukund, I wondered why despite the efficiency of many to many scalable communication, we still meet in person. I think we are programmed to communicate as much via visual queues as we do with words (these are of course missing in Twitter). Hence face to face meetings “complete the picture”. There’s also the serendipity of meeting someone you likely wouldn’t have friended otherwise.

3. Open conversations inhibit more open conversations? Everyone there is well aware that tweets aren’t private, and thus felt free to throw around some good natured jabs at widely known bloggers and tweeters. In other words, they felt more free to share their opinions in a way they never would on Twitter.

Social Media Adoption – The BONG framework

A recruiter friend of mine getting into the social network and social media scene asked me what’s driving the uptake. There are a number of terrific blogs out there cheerleading the social media movement which have looked into this, and of note particularly is Marshall Kirkpatrick’s thoughtful post on common objections to social media adoption. Like Marshall, I’m not convinced persuading anyone to join the party is a fruitful exercise.

However, I do think watching out for conditions which may lead someone to adopt social media tools and spurring on adoption is helpful. I’m taking a queue here from Sun Tzu’s classic treatise – creating conditions for victory is imposible, but taking advantage of conditions for victory which present themselves leads to success. Watch out for these needs if you want an opportunity to introduce someone to social media tools, and carpe diem.

I’d argue people join social media to do one of four things:

Belong to a Group – Maybe your friends all joined myspace, so you did also. Maybe you joined Twitter to connect with people with the same interests, or perhaps because it gave you a direct line to speak asynchronously with people whose work you’ve come to value. Prime example: Facebook

Office chat/gossip participation – I’m talking about the watercooler chat effect taken online. We’re particularly primed for this kind of adoption considering all the M&A activity during the past few years, which creates coworking situations between distant geographic locations. Another driver is the rise of telecommuters. Prime example: Twitter.

Nature’s Call – This is my polite term for saying that a number of people sign on to social networks to find potential romantic parters. To put it more colloquially, people log on to get laid. It sounds funny, but I know at least two guys who signed on to Myspace and Facebook for that express reason. Prime example: Myspace.

Get a Job or Sale – Basically networking to advance one’s career objectives; to network with influencers to get hired, get a starup partner, or get a contract executed. Prime example: Linked in.

So there you have it.. the “Bong” framework. I can’t think of any drivers falling outside the four basic buckets outlined above. Can you?

The High Cost of Free Parking

If you’ve never passed by upstate New York, you should – it’s literally a living museum of late 19th century America. It’s a mix of old towns left for dead by career climbers fleeing to NYC or snowbirds moving to southeastern US suburbs who left behind beautiful architecture and dwindling small communities. Mayors of these old towns are trying to revive the small businesses in their city centers and need to build consumer traffic to do that. Free downtown parking is something most mayors don’t blink at – drive traffic without incurring any additional cost.

Enter the Tragedy of the Commons

Of course, there’s no such thing as free (even if you’re talking about GPL). As soon as they turned off the meters, the towns began to accumulate a collection of antique cars. Not the kind of cars you’d find at an antique show, but another kind of artifact altogether. Try visualizing streetfuls of “vintage” automobiles which look like this:

Eventually the city had to incur the cost of pulling these heaps off the road, which were making the city sidewalks unattractive to would be customers they tried to draw in. The additional tax revenues vaporized, leaving the city in the red on the whole move. It’s a typical tragedy of the commons story, but it doesn’t end there.

Opportunity (Cost) Knocks

To accommodate the sudden increase in demand for downtown parking, some cities predictably responded by opening up parking lots. Many of them displaced farmers markets from city owned lots to spaces further outside the city, dropping the return on investment of the land now used as car storage. The city could instead have leased that land to a local business, those revenues representing the opportunity cost of that land.

The High Cost of Free Parking

Most of us have learned about the tragedy of the commons, and anyone who’s done a stint of high school economics has heard of opportunity cost. The two come in tandem almost by definition, and I call the combined effect “the high cost of free parking”.

This phenomenon works the same with enterprise software. I’ve spoken to a number of I.T. shops who figure a low cost or “free” consumer wiki works just fine for their needs. In practice, CIOs I’ve spoken to who have sanctioned “free” or “low cost” wikis have found them multiplying like rabbits. Once that happens, I.T has three possible choices: support the morass of wikis, ignore user appeals for support, or convince them to standardize on something I.T. establishes. All three in some way combine the tragedy of the commons (the commons being I.T. time and resources) with opportunity cost (the amount of time spent on departmental tech projects instead of core competencies).

The end result is far from ideal, despite all of the resources spent. What’s strange is the very tools designed to foster collaboration become handcuffs when departments contain collaboration to their own departments. When there’s no strategic drive behind collaboration software, you end up with knowledge fiefdoms contained within departments, but which do not cross-pollinate. The cost of these knowledge fiefdoms of course is “free”, as in the high cost of parking.

How high is the cost of free parking in your organization?