Fun With PR - The Facebook Drama

One of the big stories in the world of marketing this past week was the news that Facebook secretly hired the PR firm Burson-Marsteller to promote negative stories about Google in the media. Not only was this good for at least four posts on Techcrunch, it was also an amusing conversation topic for friends and colleagues.

In some ways, it's rather surprising that it became such a big story. For many people I spoke with, the headline could easily be rewritten as, "Used Car Salesman Employs Questionable Techniques to Sell Crappy Old Car to Naive Customer." This isn't a Man Bites Dog story -- or rather, the PR aspect of the story isn't. For most of us, the amusing aspect of the whole thing is more of the meta-story around the story.

1. Why would Facebook's team decide to pursue this type of PR strategy?
2. What did they hope to accomplish?
3. Why would Burson-Marsteller sign on for this gig?
4. Where there the checks and balances that prevented this type of tactic from being employed?

As I don't work for any of the parties involved nor do I have direct contact with them, my guesses are all pure speculation. Here's what I think?

1. I suspect that this program is a product of younger, inexperienced staff. If you're thinking of your competitors as Yet Another Social Group in College, that might lead you to believe that seeding bad media coverage about that competitor may benefit your organization -- it's true for politics and it's potentially true for some percentage of social network users.

2. That's a good question and probably the fundamental one -- was this program and it's strategy well thought out? Perhaps this program was driven by someone more gifted at tactics and execution than strategy. Or, not knowing the internal politics, perhaps it was simply a petty, mandated swat driven by immature management element with the org.

3. Since they aren't Facebook's primary PR agency, I suspect that the team at Burson-Marsteller looked at this as a great foot-in-the-door opportunity for a lucrative, premier account.

4. This is sort of the surprising aspect -- that with all of the recent investment and the huge spotlight that Facebook has under, where were the checks and balances on this type of blunder? This wasn't simply a 'loose lips' slip of the tongue, this was a program that required budget and approval. Where was the oversight? If you think about it from an internal execution standpoint, it really makes you wonder not only how this type of program was justified and approved, but what that says about their internal operations practices.

Clearly, there's probably an interesting story behind the story, but it's one that you and I probably won't hear. Instead, it'll probably just be another one of those 'Can You Believe' stories by former insiders told over drinks in a post 'our time there' grumble session. Another day in Silicon Valley.

How Amazon Controls E-Commerce

There's a nice piece over on Techcrunch -- with slides on Slideshare -- about Amazon.com and how they dominate e-commerce. Take the time and go through the presentation -- you'll probably find several tidbits of information that surprise you, impress you or otherwise inspire you.

How Amazon Controls E-Commerce

The Problem With Fundamentalism

G O D I S N O W H E R E
Back in college, I had a philosophy teacher that opened a class by writing this on the board. The theme of that class session was that, depending upon your perception, you could see and interpret this in several ways. Some might see "god is nowhere" while others might see "god is now here". This perceptual shift and the recognition of multiple ways of seeing the same thing and adding an interpretive layer is key to flexible thinking and analysis. We spent a lot of time in that philosophy class exploring ideas of 'how do you know' and building frameworks of thought around those ideas.

Fundamentalism and the Problem of 'The One Interpretation'
At the heart of religious fundamentalism is the idea that this one document -- possibly even one specific version of the document -- is the foundational truth and an axiomatic platform to build all knowledge upon. Upon this base is an ideological framework that says, if this is true, then this must be true. Often, this house of cards knowledge construct is actually framed by 'authoritative' voices that provide shaped corollaries - 'since it says this, it also means this.' This process transforms framework into something like, "since it says God Is Now Here, anyone failing to see that is doomed and should be ostracized because God did speak to them." In that way, this extended element becomes dogma, perhaps being further extended to address the moment when people perceive the message, the fate of non-perceivers, and so on.

The problem is that, as dogma, these conceptual constructs carry the same ideological weight as the core -- they are equivalent truths. As a result, anything that questions an interpretation is also an assault on the original principle. In practical terms, people who approach problems with this type of thinking become very defensive about their belief framework even when a concept is distant from the core. Finding a flaw in thinking can potentially result in the catastrophic failure of much larger conceptual framework elements.

This is also why this type of thinking often struggles with tangible conflicting information. For example, when some fundamentalists add up all of the years mentioned in the Bible and define a specific number of years for the span of history, dinosaur bones date to before that time. And there's not really any mention of dinosaurs in the Bible, but there are very real bones. Rather than accept the idea that the dinosaurs existed before the scope of human history, some fundamentalists go through ideological acrobatics to incorporate dinosaur bones into their conceptual framework a la the creationist museum.

Fundamentalism is Business, Marketing and Creativity
While we're all familiar with fundamentalism in religious beliefs, we're not always quite so aware of how this same type of thinking affects us in business. And yet, if you reflect on your ongoing business experiences, you'll probably find examples and issues that were created or defined by this type of thinking.

• Brand behavior
• Product feature and roadmap definition 
• Creativity and idea brainstorming

With brand behavior, it's easy to think of examples of how some of the same types of behavior that you see with fundamentalists carry over to brand identity. But one element that can be easily overlooked is how committed brand loyalists are once that framework has been established. Even when presented with a factual framework that might point to a brand change, brand loyalists may probably fight and die for their brands. Consider this as it relates to enterprise software, on-premise versus SaaS, or even very technical brand decisions that take place inside the data center.

With product features, it's not uncommon for people to lock in on specific features as "fundamental" elements of product definition, even when the relationship between the feature, the functionality, and the product are actually dynamic. Recently, you see this a lot with touch screen versus keyboard and mouse functionality. And it's carried over into defining the next generation versions of iOS and Mac OS X, Windows and Microsoft's mobile OS, and the very essence of what drives phones, tablets, notebooks, desktops and servers.

With creativity and brainstorming, it's natural for people to see complete conceptual frameworks form out of a simple idea. Since the idea generator is also the original interpreter, they often have even more invested in their conceptual framework than someone who has developed the extended conceptual elements through authoritative dictate. This is the same bug that bites you when you write a sentence that can be interpreted two ways, but you can only see a single interpretation of the text. In these instances, it can be very difficult for an editor to convince you of an alternate interpretation and a corresponding edit.

Adapting to Fundamentalist Thinking in the Workplace
Ultimately, it's important to recognize this pattern of cognitive behavior and how it comes into play in building conceptual frameworks. While it may not be possible to completely escape this type of thinking, flexible thinking is an essential skill needed to function and thrive in an environment where new ideas are the currency. If you can only see GODISNOWHERE as one of two possiblities, then you have already bound yourself to a framework that rules out any other options -- God!sN0Where might simply be a variation on a strong password. It's amazing how metaphysical one can become about a simple stream of characters.

How Many Emails Does It Take To Make You Call It Spam?

So I was looking at my email inbox the other day when something struck me -- on any given day, I get two to four emails from wine vendors. That's not a total count, that's a per-vendor count. Each wine vendor I've given my email address to likes to celebrate our relationship by sending me multiple offers each day.

And yet for the most part, I don't block these emails. I don't grumble in the same disgusted tone that I use for bulk emails from Consumer Reports or other companies that drip market to me on a weekly or monthly basis.

So my question to you is simply this -- are there vendors or markets that you participate in where you get more than one email a day from the vendor? Are they things that you have signed up for? Have you blocked any of them?

Why Are People Shocked About Flip?

Earlier this week, Cisco announced a restructuring that basically eliminated the Flip camera group, a company that they bought for $590 million a few years ago. Following that announcement, I've seen a number of posts that reflect a sense of shock surrounding the death of the product. Me, I'm more surprised that people seem surprised.

When the iPhone 3GS was launched and included video capabilities, there were numerous articles and posts about how iPhone video would be the death of the Flip. Since that time, there's been a lot of innovation in mobile video on the smartphone platform -- Apple even added iMovie and basic video editing to the platform with the iPhone 4. Meanwhile, the Flip platform hasn't evolved. This leads to several questions:

• Was the acquisition simply a strategic blunder on Cisco's part?
• Was this a technology or other resource acquisition?
• Was this the result of a large organization being unable to provide the fertile environment needed by a start-up to prosper?
• Would a start-up version of Flip been able to innovate enough to remain competitive?

In the end though, this shift in the market has been going on for two years. I'm not really sure how that constitutes a surprise.

Reflections on Freakanomics Radio Podcasts

Recently, I've been listening my way through the series of podcasts from the Freakanomics Radio team. If you aren't familiar with them, this is from the same guys that wrote Freakanomics and Superfreakanomics. The catchphrase that they use a lot is "exploring the hidden side of everything."

One of the themes that runs through most of the things that they explore is that, often, when we think about incentives that drive behavior, we underestimate some hidden incentives that actually have a powerful effect on behavior.

One example of this is highlighted in their episode on World Cup soccer. As part of their exploration of soccer, they talk about penalty shots and how the results correlate closely to game theory. At the same time, they point out that, statistically, penalty kicking players under-utilize a kick to the center that should result in more goals if they kicked the ball there. However, players are driven by the hidden incentive of not looking like an idiot if they kick the ball straight and the goalie just stands there and catches it.

What struck me with this is, in our daily lives, how often we are affected by people who are driven by the hidden incentive of not looking like an idiot. This incentive is drilled into us as we grow up. It's something that we learn when we answer questions in front of our class. It's something we are reminded of when we speak in meetings. It's something we participate in when we hide behind consensus.

Creativity, on the other hand, often flies in the face of the not looking like an idiot incentive. It's exploring an under-utilized, under-exploited path. Creativity is a high-wire act where a successful effort results in a goal but everything else falls short.

So the question you might ask yourself is, how many of your successes came as a result of ignoring the incentive of not looking like an idiot? How would you measure those accomplishments in the overall scope of your history? Is there a theme there?

Design: The Essential Element

Often when people think about "design", they narrowly focus on external visual aspects of an object, like looking at the exterior of a car. To these people, design is this practice of taking a functional object with a set of features, then wrapping an elegant wrapper around the object. In that way, the functionality lives in one dimension, and the design, the artistically styled wrapper, exists in another. Offering one in pink, for the ladies, is what constitutes design for people with this mindset.

Design as an add-on is one reason why so many products suck. Design as an add-on means that you don't have an understanding of what and why. It means that users will have to penetrate a layer of wrapper to access the functionality that they need. But it's worse than gift wrap, because the lack of design means that what's inside the wrapper is a mismatched collection of cool stuff and useless garbage, neatly bundled in a colorful garbage bag.

Colorful garbage bags are often spawned in an environment where the push to do something leads any planning or vision. While one group might look at the popularity of the iPhone or the iPad and say "let's add a touch interface to our Windows platform," design weighs the functionality and utility against the cool factor. Design asks, "how does this help" and "does it make it easier".

Design is an editorial process. It's honing and focusing the what and how into it's most simple, straightforward essence. Design is about analyzing the why it is and it's interrelationship to the what. Design isn't just art, design is process -- one that we all follow with various levels of self-awareness.

Design is how we organize our closets or our kitchens. It's how we organize the remote controls for our television and our entertainment center. Imagine all of the places you could designate as 'the place you put the remote control when you watch TV'. Besides the obvious ones like next to you or in front of you, think about reasons you might use to justify some of the really stupid ones.

Too often though, people don't solve problems as designers. Instead of asking, "why do I have to get up and walk over to the remote control storage next to the TV in order to get the remote and change the channel," they ask, "why do I need to change the channel." Few people would consider the remote location as a design problem. And yet, as designers, sometimes our biggest challenge is to overcome people's undying commitment to arbitrary ways of structuring the problem like, "Dad could never find the remote control. He always put it by the television, so I put it there because I can always find it." Design deconstructs and rebuilds in order to explore how the idea is engineered and constructed.

Ultimately, design requires analytical thinking skills. Often, when people 'grow up' in environments where they simply follow processes and mindlessly repeat instruction sets, they don't practice critical analysis nor explore alternate conceptual frameworks. These kinds of environments, be they social, political, educational or workplace, maintain barriers and disincentives to original, analytical thinking.

In the end, the analytical thinking used in design may make you a hero, but it may make you the goat. It may make you an obstacle in the path of someone who doesn't think or understand -- someone who just wants to 'get it done.' There may be no glory in your approach, but trust your instincts -- you'll be glad you did.