crowdfunding: Sticknfind raises 1 million dollars via Indiegogo – #mwc13

This piece was originally written on behalf of the Orange Live Blog during a Press trip at Mobile World Congress 2013 last week

No, you aren’t dreaming! 1 million dollars were raised by Sticknfind by Jan 2013

No, you’re not deaming! The SticknFind startup raised closed to 1 million dollars on the Indiegogo crowdsourcing platform.

And The founders of SticknFind are no rookies either for they have been pioneers of Bluetooth products since 2003 and 2004 and they have been working for the automotive industry and have won many awards since then declared Jimmy Buchheim in his introduction yesterday. He and his teams have also developed the Blutracker project in the past can track various items within 2,500 ft range also funded through Indiegogo ($180,500 were raised for that project) as well as Meterplug, an intelligent plug which measures your real electricity consumption and displays the consumption in local currency (close to $128,000 on Indiegogo too). “This has been a very successful company” CEO and founder Jimmy Buchheim said. He started the new company in early December: “it wasn’t easy” he said, but he looked very pleased with the funding he got from the crowdfunding platform. Indeed, I know of few people who wouldn’t be happy with that!

Jimmy Buchheim, SticknFind CEO and founder shows the SticknFind tracker

why go through crowdfunding?

“The most obvious way, apparently, was to design our product, produce it and pitch it and then sell it to some industrialist, but this wasn’t easy for us to do. So we decided to go the crowdfunding way because the input from the users is sometimes more valuable than what you can get from a company” Buchheim said. He added “industrialists want to change the product to suit their needs and not that of their clients, and talking to VCs ends up with having too many cooks in the kitchen and this is how it starts to get bad!”

So, what is that innovation which users have found worth investing one million dollars into?

• First and foremost, it’s about an “amazing tracking feature” to put it in the words of Buchheim’s: “a lot of Intellectual Property went into the tracking mechanism” he said. What it means is that it gives users the ability to measure very precisely where an object is located : “the resolution is amazing, the system is able to measure very short distances”,
• Secondly, the find it feature which enables the sticker to send a notification if the paired object comes into range. Users get alerts on their phone if they leave the object behind them. You can place the sticker on a camera; on your car keys etc. and you can even measure the temperature of an object too (this would, for instance, tell you whether the object is outside or inside),
• Thirdly, the easy zooming capability enables one to find keys in a 150ft (45 metres) range but SticknFind was able to extend that reach to 300ft (90 metres). Based on feedback from users, they produced prototypes with 3 different manufacturers. “It took us a lot of tuning” Buchheim added, “they are made of very small parts and it required extensive work but we eventually identified the right kind of plastic so as to find the right mix [i.e. neither too rigid or too rubbery] in order to increase the reach”.

SticknFind will start shipping next week. The company started production last month, that is to say early compared to their initial promise (end of March), and the device will be available from retailers in April. This is the first generation of trackers, Buchheim said, “we are creating a new market and it will trigger huge applications. People and companies are losing a lot of money with stuff they lose” he said. What of generation 2 then? “It will be even smaller”, Jimmy Buchheim promised,h “you could even have it on your toothbrush!” in said in jest.

“This is the true Internet of things” Buchheim declared. The price for 2 stickers is $49 and $89 for 4 and there will be packs of 10 available. The app will be free and available on Google Play and IOS and it will be working on the Blackberry Z10 too (April release). And the battery lasts for two years so won’t even need to change it that often. A free SDK will be released to developers. The SDK will also be made available for Mac OSx (by March) and Windows 8 (from April onwards).

There are many applications for SticknFind, including industrial applications such as the keeping of inventory (100 and even 1000 items can be working at the same time the SticknFind CEO said).

The system, because it uses Bluetooth 4.0, only works with newer phones (Iphone 4S or newer or Samsung Galaxy SIII etc.) but no additional accessory is required to make it work. “The only way to make the battery work for 2 years was to use the new generation of Bluetooth, otherwise it wouldn’t have lasted more than a few days” Buchheim declared. As for security, pairing is limited to devices when they are 1 m apart and “you have to tap it to activate it so that it’s safer”.

This technology is really innovation at its best, it fill in a requirement, is available right now, and is both simple and ground-breaking; no wonder they raised so much money from Indiegogo.

QR codes are for everyone!

It is not just professionals who are using QR codes, even during the special week dedicated to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. On our way to the convention centre 2 days ago, I noticed A4 pages plastered on the walls on the side of the road with special QR codes advertising the Omnium.cat organisation. They had used the walls and these QR codes to voice the claim for an independent Catalan State; of course I am not taking sides or judging them in this article, but merely reporting on what I saw. If anything, for those who ever doubted it, mobile devices and QR codes are becoming tools for mass communications these days, and not just for professionals like us.

Catalan activists use QR codes to advertise cause

Barcelona, World’s mobile capital city for 4 days – #mwc13

This post was written as part of a blogger trip I organised for the Live Orange Blog. Connect to the blog for the latest on that event!

On February 24^th, 2013, we paid a visit to the Grand Fira which is the brand new venue for the MWC conference in Barcelona. Everything here is brand new and even though they built dummy columns at the entrance to remind visitors of the old place it is certainly lacking the lustre of the old romantic buildings at the end of the old Fira convention centre, situated in Plaza de Espanya.

[Polishing the signs while speakers are polishing their pitches]

Nonetheless, the new venue is – as the name goes – even bigger, and we can expect a lot to happen by way of innovation on the stands. The promise is that a new horizon for telecommunications is ahead of us. One, mostly, where NFC will be playing a role since the three letter acronym is absolutely ubiquitous. The press is even asked to check in through NFC gates exclusively and I was quite disappointed that I hadn’t taken the time to renew my phone and buy a brand new Galaxy SIII for instance.

[nothing is shown at MWC on the eve of the event. All is quiet… not for long!]

Talking about Samsung, we were greeted by a small stand of theirs at the exit of the Fira metro station. This is probably a sign that they are going to show big things this year. On the other hand, so far, we haven’t seen any signs of Android being at the forefront, but it’s not clear as the venue is always decorated at the last minute to avoid leaks. Last year was definitely an Android year. Does it mean that Google – I heard that rumoured yesterday – would toy with the idea of renaming its mobile OS by using its main brand (as they did with Google Play which replaced the former Android Market)? Or does it mean that new big guys, like the Mozilla foundation for instance, are sticking their guns this year. A new OS in the mobile environment is a possibility. Time will tell, I am all set for the press conference on new mobile Operating systems as well as the much expected Zte announcement. Stay tuned to the live Orange blog!

Synthesio report on Social Media Week 2013 puts me (and Nigeria) on the map #SMW13

It’s very flattering that my name appears on the list of “influencers” who took part in the social media week events of last week. Synthesio has put together this report which is very interesting and shows some of the countries and cities which are head and shoulders above the rest in terms of twittering and social media usage. Strangely enough though, Italy shows up on top of the list, above France and… even more surprisingly, England. Even more strange, we see Nigeria in the list of the most important countries of that social media week. I would have thought that people in Lagos had far too many fishes to fry at this very moment in order to become Twitteratis . Or is it that there is a glitch in the report? Identifying and measuring “influence” is definitely a very difficult and risky sport which contrasts with its apparent obviousness.

Social Media Week is a worldwide event connecting people and organizations globally, through collaboration, learning and sharing ideas. This week, 10 cities around the world celebrate the tremendous social, cultural and economic impact of social media.

Social Media Week has become an incredible platform and community that has grown to more than 100k members – this year, SMW celebrates its fifth birthday and marks this milestone with a unifying global theme that represents the connectedness and openness of the collaborative, digital world. This global theme is evident when examining overwhelming buzz around the event all across the map.

At Synthesio, we eagerly jump on the opportunity to track global conversations around an event of this magnitude with such a web frenzy surrounding it, so we decided to take a sip from our Twitter Firehose and track all Twitter conversations surrounding Social Media Week 2013, to provide you with engaging insights into the overall reach of the event, trending topics, and finally, our list of top influencers driving the conversations.

So, now it’s halftime for SMW13 and we invite you to stand up, stretch, grab a drink, and enjoy the Synthesio SMW Halftime Report. Congrats to the top influencers in the U.S., France, UK and Singapore, and don’t forget to check back for the full Post-Game Analysis!

via Social Media Week 2013 – Halftime Report – Synthesio #SMW13.

Powerpointis: a Marketing Disease (2)

My recent post on the true nature of infographics has prompted me to dish out this 10 year-old post by Giancarlo Livraghi which used to be available on my Visionarymarketing.com website. Even though some of its references are a bit outdated, nothing has changed since then, except that the means of propagating false and fabricated information have never been so powerful.

By Giancarlo Livraghi

Many of today’s diseases can be traced back to the origins of our species. It’s easy to imagine a prehistoric painter, who had found a quick and easy way of drawing a buffalo, covering cave walls with colourful celebrations of hunting success, regardless of his actual competence in bringing home food for his family or his tribe. The “PowerPoint syndrome” is a well known disease, clearly diagnosed not only by brilliant cartoonists such as Scott Adams, but also in a variety of analyses of corporate efficiency and communication. It’s called “disinfotainment”. It has been found that it can seriously disrupt corporate communications. Some companies, including Sun (now Oracle), have banned it from their organization.

In the September 2003 issue of Wired magazine there was an article Power Corrupts, PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely by Edward R. Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale. (His monograph, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, is available from Graphics Press.)

AP/Wide World Photos
Tufte satirizes the totalitarian impact of presentation slideware.

Here are a few quotations from his interesting comments

Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: it induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall. Yet slideware – computer programs for presentations – is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.
At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content.
The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: respect your audience.

Of course presentation tools existed long before electronics. There were blackboards, slides, etcetera. Some of the most beautiful paintings and sculptures of all times were used to present or support an idea, a way of thinking, an attitude, a project or an action plan. But most of today’s powerpoint presentations can’t be called a work of art – or even an example of effective presentation. Visual aids can be used effectively. To focus on key points, to emphasize relevant data, to make things clear. But it’s unfortunately easy to do the opposite – to muddle, to confuse or to deliberately warp facts, issues and concepts.

We know that data, balance sheets, statistics, trends, projections and forecasts can be manipulated in many ways. Fifty years ago this was explained very clearly in a wonderful little book by Darrell Huff: How to Lie with Statistics. It was published in 1954, it’s still being reprinted, and it’s as relevant today as it has ever been. Darrell Huff explained how data can be misused and misrepresented – by mistake or by deliberate manipulation. He also showed how they can be additionally warped in a visual presentation. For instance numbers can be shown using two-dimensional shapes instead of lines, columns or bars. The height of the picture indicates the actual quantity, but the perception of difference or change is twice as large.

By using pictures the effect can be even stronger. The perception is three-dimensional. If we use the picture of an animal to show the increase or decrease of a species, or a cow to represent milk production, we can make it appear doubled when it actually increased 30 percent. And further misperceptions can be added by using movement. Can that be done with money? Yes, of course. Instead of figures or bar charts one can use banknotes, coins or moneybags. It’s called “dramatizing”, but it’s cheating – as Darrell Huff explained fifty years ago, when there was no electronic slideware to make it easier.

Visual resources, as such, aren’t honest or misleading. They are tools – and the result depends on how they are used. A well planned presentation can be “truth well told”. But if it’s deliberately manipulated it can be a cheating device – or, if it isn’t carefully planned and tested, its effect can be quite different from what the presenter had in mind. Standardized tools and styles can make things even worse. Presentations follow a predefined pattern, bore the audience with repetitive mannerisms instead of catering for its interests and questions.

An effective presentation needs serious work, care, competence. It needs to be tried and tested, finding the most effective form for its specific content, with precise coherence of visual and textual devices to its intent and purpose. Even when technical resources were less easy and more expensive (costing time, care and commitment as well as money) there were mistakes and mishaps – as well as deliberate cheats. But it didn’t happen as often as it does now, because more effort and specific competence were needed for its preparation. Things are made worse by the powerpoint intoxication.

It seems so easy. An elaborate show can be put together in a few hours. The abundance of tricks and devices encourages exaggeration. The result is often depressing. The resources offered by standard slideware are always the same. As a result presentations often look the same, though they are dealing with totally different subjects. That is confusing and boring.

We often see a presenter, imprisoned in a predetermined format, unable to answer a simple question. Because he or she is trained to repeat, without any depth of understanding, a presentation put together by someone else. Even when people prepare their own presentations, they often get lost in the mechanics of form and format – and miss the point of what they were supposed to say.

Another ridiculous consequence is that, after a meeting or a convention, instead of a written document what is left behind is a copy of the slides. It’s obvious that slides prepared to support a presentation are not the appropriate format for reading – and lack depth of explanation and information. But haste, habit, and mindless subjugation to technology lead to the production of useless papers that confuse the issue (even when they are not deliberately deceiving).

There are also messy results of “personalization”. It’s easy, with word processing, to change a name. Too easy. A document (or presentation) that on page 1 shows the name of a person, or a company, in the publishing business reveals on page 12 that it was originally written for a car dealer. Things get worse in the case of online communication. It’s annoying enough to receive a three megabyte powerpoint attachment to tell us something that could have been said more effectively in six lines of plain text. But there are also websites that contain materials poorly adapted from something tat had been obviously prepared for another purpose. In addition to the well known and widespread disease of cosmetics prevailing on content.

After many years of serious discussion about usability and content management, the best website makers know that substance matters more than appearance. (See The architect and the gardener.)  But many site owners want things done poorly. Because they don’t understand that the internet isn’t television. Or because they are infected by the powerpoint bug. Or because they don’t want to commit manpower to produce meaningful content. So we are still plagued with a proliferation of empty boxes, shiny appearances with nothing inside.

The powerpoint syndrome isn’t just the misuse of specific technology. It’s a cultural disease. The abundance of resources for makeup and glitz leads to exaggeration and superficiality. Where appearance prevails on substance, scams and cheats are more easily disguised. We must learn to tame the wild proliferation of expressive tools to bring them to obedience, to the service of what we have to say. If and when there is something that is really worth saying.

The true colour of brands and true nature of infographics (1)

today’s selection is…

Thanks to my favourite stumble upon gimmick for finding new content and subjects, I discovered this very interesting piece of infographics about the true nature of brands according to their colour. I do not know what these graphics, beautifully crafted by the way, “[tell] about your business” as the headline says, but I certainly know what it means about the way that we read, understand and are influenced by pictures. A long time ago (2003), I published a piece on my  visionarymarketing.com website by Giancarlo Livraghi, an Italian publicist and the author of a book in Italian entitled “the cultivation of the Internet“. Giancarlo, in that piece, was describing what he called PowerPointis, a concept he had come across while seeing Colin Powell use pictures to convince the UN that the war on Iraq was justified. His point was that most of Powel’s pictures were fabricated but weren’t questioned because it’s hard not to believe pictures. This theory was accredited later in a Hollywood film based on a true story (Green Zone - 2010). I will re-publish this very important piece in a forthcoming post.

Imago ergo sum …

Infographics, mostly those like this one which are beautiful and laid out with excellent taste, go straight to the point and are easy to grasp. They are emotional and aesthetic. They appeal to our feelings. Besides because they are so simple and didactic, they are taken at face value, so much so that no one dares point out that they could be wrong. All you need is a click of the mouse and hey presto! The picture is multiplied and shared throughout the world. It is no longer cogito but imago ergo sum (see this piece in French).

Yet, infographics are also simplistic and exaggerated. They save time but at the same time, pictures tend to deprive readers from their critical eye. Most of the time they are non representative and show surprising results. They often refer to “a study the world’s top 100…” (Brands in this particular case) but who selected the sample? What are those brands? Who commissioned the study? Where are the results to be found? What methodology?… Such questions are and will remain, most probably, unanswered.

ING Orange account doomed to failure? not so not so…

A close look at the details underneath is even more enlightening. I just focused on the orange colour for a reason (disclosure: I work for Orange). As this colour is used by the company I work for, I’m very happy to realise that it is popular for high-tech according to this infographics and that the colour code is consistent with the brand values which we all like. I also read that this colour is said to be unpopular for banking whereas ING has been using this colour-code very successfully not only in the Netherlands but throughout the world and especially in the US where it is well known and associated with this colour.

I do not need to go any further. Looking at a nice picture like this makes me think of looking at a horoscope: it’s fun, entertaining, slightly puzzling, but this is not knowledge. Knowledge requires sources. Knowledge, requires contradiction. Knowledge can use pictures; but it certainly can do away with infographics.

The magic left the building with Jobs

Reblogged from Mario Sundar:

• 

I remember the moment Steve Jobs scrolled through his music and uttered those magical words - "scrolls like butter" - while illustrating the beauty of the original iPhone.

It's moments like this that you lived for, as a technology obsessed professional in Silicon Valley. And with Jobs we got to watch the Michael Jordan of technology, courtside, at his best.

Read more… 712 more words

This Is Not What Social Media Was Meant To Be today's selection is ... LinkedIn's Mario Sundar's piece is, despite its title, not just about Steve Jobs, it's about the way that PR is done, and the fact that Social Media wasn't meant to become what it is now. He describes a PR exercise by Zuckerberg and Facebook officials which lacks both the lustre and pizazz of Apple's classic keynotes. I am not an Apple admirer I must admit, even though I own Apple products and acknowledge that they are beautiful products, but I'm not in synch with the philosophy behind Apple. Yet, Jobs's keynotes were undoubtedly personal and performed with style. What is most annoying is indeed, as Sundar remarks, all those who try to mimic Jobs's methods... not always with great success. As pointed out by Herman Mellville: "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

LinkedIn Reaches 200 Million Member Limit

By Yann Gourvennec

As an early adopter (beginning of 2004) adopter and future “ambassador” of LinkedIn, I am very pleased to be able to reblog Deep Nishar’s post about the professional social network reaching the 200 million user bar today. A great achievement for what I consider one of Social Media’s best tools in the market. For memory, as of Dec 2011, LinkedIn only had 136 million users. The growth has been staggering, as stated in this earlier blog piece.

200 Million Members!

We recently crossed an important and exciting milestone for the company. LinkedIn now counts over 200 million members as part of our network, with representation in more than 200 countries and territories. We serve our members in 19 languages around the world.

I’d like to thank each of you for helping build the LinkedIn network into what it is today. It’s been amazing to see how our members have been able to transform their professional lives through LinkedIn. You truly grasp the power of LinkedIn when you start to focus on these individual success stories.

Take for example, Akshay Chaturvedi from New Delhi, India who was able to use LinkedIn as a launch pad for his career. Not only was he able to lead an international project at AIESEC for a project on AIDS right out of university, with the help of LinkedIn, he was recruited by KPMG and continues to receive career guidance from his LinkedIn network. Then there’s Robyn Shulman who stepped out of her comfort zone from teacher to now a published writer and leader of a ESL Bilingual Educators group on LinkedIn. She has rediscovered former talents and changed her life through LinkedIn. One of my favorite stories comes from Leonardo Brant from Brazil who founded Cemec, an organization to help Brazilian professionals and entrepreneurs think creatively about their business challenges. Today they use LinkedIn as their digital classroom to exchange information and foster a meaningful community to share relevant knowledge. Everyday we hear stories like these from our members and we look forward to hearing many more.

So, who are LinkedIn’s 200 million members? This infographic captures the diversity and magic of your professional peers.

via 200 Million Members! | Official LinkedIn Blog.

New Innovation Blog Launched

A few years ago, I used to be a regular contributor to bnet in the UK but the site pulled out of the European market in 2010. Fortunately, a new project has just been launched and I’m very happy to embark on it. It is named innovation generation and it is sponsored by our peers from Alcatel.You can find my first piece on that blog under the following title: Governments Ease Into Cyberspace. Below is the announcement for the new website; stay tuned for more info …

We are living in a truly connected world. That’s something most people might take for granted when they make a phone call or watch TV, but when you consider how a wireless network brings books to your e-reader, an Ethernet network keeps your savings account secure, and a cloud holds most of your online identity, it becomes a pretty powerful proposition.

It is the services that run on these networks that are the lifeblood of society, and the potential for innovation here is limited only by our own creativity.

Enter Innovation Generation. It’s a generation that’s not confined to baby boomers, Gen Xers, or smartphone-toting Millennials, but rather encompasses everyone living in today’s globally connected society. Our goal here is to explore the potential for personalized, interesting, and, of course, innovative new services that can increase the quality of life and work for end users while also increasing the value of the service provider in the process.

How are service providers delivering these new services to businesses and consumers? How can they get more from their infrastructures than they already do? What are the opportunities for business model innovation? How can service providers improve the customer experience?

These are just a few of the questions we’ll strive to answer on Innovation Generation. If you’re a global communications service provider or enterprise IT leader, Innovation Generation is your guide to navigating the challenges and opportunities in creating innovative business opportunities for your company and your customers. Here, we explore innovation at all levels of today’s connected businesses, from software to services to groundbreaking business models – with an eye on what’s practical, what’s clouded by hype, and what’s going to help the bottom line.

These are services that are transforming industries like utilities, transportation, the public sector, healthcare, oil and gas, manufacturing, defense, railways, and even the government. And service providers are at the heart of it.

via Innovation Generation – Named Documents – About Us

social media API war goes on unabated (reblogged from Gigaom)

Here is an illustration for today’s talk at the French Association of Marketing on the future of social media and a sequel to our discussions with Dalton Caldwell in San Francisco last September.

What the Instagram fight says about Twitter as a media platform — Tech News and Analysis

Instagram says it is removing the ability for Twitter to embed photos because it wants users to go to its own website instead of Twitter’s to see that content. Other media companies should probably also be asking themselves similar questions about their relationship with Twitter.

Remember when Twitter was just a free and open conduit for whatever content its users wanted to distribute? Those days are long gone now, replaced by Twitter’s desire to control and monetize as much of its platform as possible, and as much of the content that flows through it. The latest skirmish in this ongoing battle came on Wednesday, when Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom confirmed that the service has removed support for Twitter’s “expanded tweets” feature, and therefore photos won’t be showing up in Twitter any more. While Instagram’s relationship with Twitter is complicated, its reasons for doing this should make other media companies stop and think about how they use (or are being used by) Twitter as well.

As noted by Nick Bilton in a New York Times piece and by my colleague Erica Ogg — and confirmed by a post at the official Twitter blog — what Instagram has done is to remove support for the expanded view of tweets that shows up on the Twitter website and in its official apps. These tweets have a special pane that displays excerpts from blog posts and news stories published by certain partners, or photos and videos from certain external services. Twitter originally launched this as something called “expanded tweets” but it has since become a much more ambitious platform called “Twitter Cards.”

via What the Instagram fight says about Twitter as a media platform — Tech News and Analysis.

Yossi Vardi’s top tips for start-up owners – #leweb

Israeli entrepreneur and business leader Yossi Vardi came on stage at Le Web 12 in Paris today to deliver some of his tips. Unfortunately he was a bit rushed out and didn’t have time to finish his presentation. Here are the tips I was to able to pick up as I was listening to him.

[this piece written during a blogging stint for Live.Orange.com]

Yossi Vardi What should start-ups do to succeed?

1- What it takes to succeed?

The most important factor for success is luck. People who are hard-working though are often in the best position for being able to reap the harvest of serendipity. Trying and reaching out to people increases your ability to be lucky, Vardi said.

2 – raising too much money can be toxic

Start-ups which raise too much money want to show their investors that they are using the money and they are often led to burn too much money too early and fail to make a profit

3- right size for team?

Vardi suggests that the optimal size for initiating a start-up is 3. Having only 1 is too hard and above 3 it’s too difficult to get oneself organised.

4 – a mentor is needed

A mentor is needed to help support the team and help them meet the right people Vardi went on.

5 – pivoting

Start-ups have to pivot, i.e. be able to modify the concept so that it adapts to the Market. Pivoting is important but it can also prove that the founders can’t learn from experience if they are pivoting too often. This is a double-edged sword.

6- attracting investors’ attention

Finding an introduction to the right investors is important, this is why networking is key. The is also confirming what we had witnessed in  Silicon Valley last September.

7- exits

There is a debate – in Israel and elsewhere – between experts about whether it’s better to do an early or late exit. When doing exits, one has to remember that one is not selling one’s company to another one, one is selling to an individual Vardi said.

As mentioned above, Yossi Vardi’s presentation was unfortunately interrupted. There a many other recommendations Vardi can deliver to entrepreneurs, we’ll probably have to wait until the 2013 edition of Le Web for us to hear the rest of the presentation and Vardi’s advice.

Brogan Declares Social Media Not Dead But Boring

Today’s selection is…

Chris Brogan’s latest piece which shows that those who were in first, had to go out first too. I remember Chris from his presentation at Like Minds 2010 in Exeter where I keynoted too: he was passionate, energetic… and warning the world that something big was happening.

with Chris Brogan after Like Minds 2010

All that is gone now! three gazillion repetitive blog pieces later, you now know everything about how to optimise your corporate Twitter account and/or how to trick (or survive) Facebook’s ever-changing edge rank algorithm. Or rather, you don’t! because possessing focus focusing on tools is useless! Take a bit of hindsight with this piece and find out why…

by Chris Brogan

Isn’t it time we started telling bigger stories than this?

When Julien Smith and I wrote The Impact Equation, we had a very specific goal in mind: help people get attention, understanding, and eventually a relationship of value. We built the book around the premise that well-defined goals were needed to craft ready-to-understand ideas, and that people could build a platform to spread those ideas to a network of people who cared enough to share those ideas with others. That’s the simplest possible summary of the book.

What people maybe thought they were getting was a book about social media and social networks, about marketing and campaigns. Some people believe that’s what Julien and I do. Social media are a set of tools. They’re not all that interesting to talk about in and of themselves. The “gee whiz” has left the station. We want to talk about action– or if you’ll pardon the self-reference, impact.

via Social Media Isn’t Dead: It’s Boring.

Social Media in business today : SMI conference – Marrakech

I will take part in the forthcoming Social Media Impact conference due to take place in Marrakech, Morocco on October 11-12. Here is an interview I delivered a few weeks ago in order to introduce my pitch over there. I have included a video recording of the interview as well as an embed of my presentation.

What is social media’s place in the professional world today?

It’s actually quite different from what it used to be. We’re about eight years after the introduction of social media in the enterprise so my perspective in this SMI presentation in Marrakech will be that of somebody that manages social media in the enterprise and that has been doing so for the last five years. So obviously the kind of place we are in at the moment is that of the structuring of the initiative. We shall see three major phases in the project surrounding the presentation in social media within the enterprise:

• the triggering of the project: proving the concept and that it is really worth doing.
• the development phase: how one ramps up and scales.
• the structuring phase: that’s where we’re at. The structuring of the organization, the processes and everything else.

With the constant growth and reach of these social networks, can a company survive without them today?

Obviously, certain companies can survive without social media, it depends what you do. If you deal in plastic for instance, there are very few chances that you’re going to be a major player in the collaborative web. Now, if you’re in a market like the telecoms, as we are, or in any CPG market, you’ll have to be where your customers are, and customers are there, online. Northern Africa has been absolutely booming in terms of social media usage and so yes, brands have to be where customers are, to initiate or engage in the conversation.

As a company, how do you know which social media fits best to the message you wish to pass along?

There are a number of things I will dwell on in this presentation. To start, I will change that notion of message, because this is not how social media is working. We’re not working with messages but with conversations which we may not have initiated, or at least not in a traditional way. I will also go through a number of business cases taken from Orange from all over the world (Spain, France, England, Romania), and I will go through all these examples and show some of these cases and their return on investments.

What are the major threats posed by the use of social media in a company?

Well, if you don’t handle social media very well then you could face a number of threats. I think threat number one is just not being there, thinking that the conversation doesn’t happen simply because you’re not listening to it. Threat number two is, once you’re actually there and have engaged in social media, letting things get out of hand. So you have to be there nurturing, every day, and be sure to respond to, if not everything, as much as you can. So there are loads of processes and organization: it’s probably easy to do social media for yourselves, but if you’re a large organization then it is very different.

How do you see the future of social media in the corporate world in the near future?

I think the landscape is going to change dramatically in the next few months and years. We’re going to see a lot more governance thrown in to social media and the way it is organized, or rather disorganized right now. There is going to be massive endeavours in terms of how we train people and get them up to speed with regards to social media, and not just the ‘experts’, or the ones in charge, but the entirety of the enterprise.

Video Interview: interview : SMI conference

Gamification at Vlab: buzzword or real business driver? – #blogbus

The MIT Stanford lab was founded 22 years ago. Orange is a sponsor of VLAB and we attended a meeting on Sept 19 on the Stanford campus on the subject of gamification. Vlab had gathered a unique bunch of top international experts from Silicon Valley in order to debate this concept. Despite the fact that many think badly of Gamification, our users have explained that gamification isn’t about games but bringing gaming mechanism in business activities and this was all about rewarding and creating a great experience.

[this post was originally written on behalf of the live.orange.com blog]

1. Margaret Wallace(below)introduced the session. Margaret is the CEO and founder of Playmatics. She began her pitch by saying that games have been around for thousands of years. Her definition of gamification is “the application of games mechanisms in non gaming situations, it’s not about angry birds and such like” she said. Why bother gamification? there are a lot of detractors of gamification Margaret said; the Gartner hype cycle is placing gamification at the very top of the Gartner hype cycle “so you are here at the right moment” she added. There are many ways that games can be inserted in business, such as Nike running, Ford’s mobile app, energy orb (an orb which changes colour according to the status of the electricity grid) … even political groups are using gamification to recruit people Wallace said; Pdt Obama has a Foursquare account for instance. From then on she handed the floor to the other panellists.

Margaret Wallace (above)

2. Courtney Guertin (above), Co-founder of Kiip was next on the stage and he presented the concept that he and his partner have designed. The idea was to reward users, through mobile apps and disrupt the mobile app space. In July 2010 they built a demo and started sharing this idea around them. They ended up raising $ 300 k. But “raising money is the easy part he said; the difficult thing is building the business”. They then built the platform for rewards (thanks & acknowledgements). They also wanted to avoid building something “intrusive or annoying”. The business model is simple. They charge brands and users are rewarded for their engagement. Among his advice were to understand that the team is everything, and to be prepared for difficult days too. He added that brands, at the outset, didn’t realise that people of all ages were playing games. Not just kids but middle aged mothers and even people above 50 he said. Brands are now, after a few years, very knowledgeable about that and this is why gamification has got a bad name. What you really need to do is how you can create a great experience like this company that decided to change an escalator which no-one wanted to use, by turning it into a living piano; instantly people started to use this escalator for the sake of the experience that it was providing.

3. Andrew Trader (above), venture partner at Maveron was next. He has been part of the gamification world on both side: as part of the family team at Zynga and from the investment side too.  The value of gamification in his mind starts with the value of relationship capital. This is what – in his mind – makes farmville so relevant. One has to try and incentivise users to engage more deeply; gamification mechanisms are similar in games like Farmville and business gamification he said.

4. Joshua Williams  (above) from Microsoft jumped in the conversation at that time. The idea of gamification according to Joshua is “how we can get a task done in a more engaging and fun way, and less painful. To him there are a lot of challenges with gamification which are overlooked. It’s a double-edged sword but he think that it’s worth looking into.

5. Amy Jo Kim (above), founder and CEO of Shufflebrain said that a lot of her practice recently has been to tune reputation systems to make them more engaging. “We could call that gamification” she said. Her perspective, is that what makes games compelling is in the design; people are getting smarter faster she said. You have to design systems which have the dynamics of games she said. You have to look at the “large word of zero sum gaming” she said. She predicted we would see a lot of innovation in that space in the future.

3. Rajat Pahsaria (above) was last. Rajat is the founder and chief officer of Bunchball. Beyond the buzzword he said there are values to gamification such as rewarding users, enhancing the experience etc. “We have a wealth of big data which is telling us what our users are doing” he said. And this is what gamification does” he said, using these techniques which have been going for years, i.e. rewarding users.

real influencers in social media may not be those who you think! – #blogbus

On day 3 of the blogger bus tour we had the opportunity to meet face to face with two young start-up managers from San Francisco based Social Chorus an “influence marketing” company named Social Chorus. We were able to spend a whole hour with them and discuss influence, influencers, people-powered marketing and … “the power of the middle”, a concept which I have found particularly appealing.

Nicole Alvino (above) is SVP and co-founder of Social Chorus, she was “employee number two” in the company. Bobby Isaacson (below), senior Manager, implementation has been as Social Chorus for about three years now (he admitted “feeling like a dinosaur” which sounds strange for such a young man) and does business development that is to say that he sets up partnerships with other companies, in order to be part of their ecosystem.

Social Chorus (the company was in fact renamed in February 2012 and is the result of the merger of youcast  and the halogen media group) is a social marketing/influencer platform. The main problem the company is solving is that it is virtually impossible for customers to figure out whether influencers are really influential.  This is in essence, what Social Chorus is about: it provides both a tool and service for finding influencers (they might not just be bloggers, but also power twitter users  for instance. There are two offices, one in New York City and one in San Francisco.

NYC and SF: a world of difference…

To European eyes, those two cities might appear very similar but in fact, according to Bobby and Nicole, they are very different. New York is more about media and advertising and agencies, whereas Silicon Valley and San Francisco have always been, at least since the seventies onwards, more about high tech. But this is not all. Mentalities are also very different. Bonding is more difficult in NYC, a very large metropolis where, according to our discussion, people and companies tend to keep things for themselves, rather than share and get together in Californian fashion. And this is what makes all the difference. As I described in my post about Rocketplace, a lot of what happens in Silicon Valley is down to the ecosystem. San Francisco has a leg up in that game. Only Boulder, Colorado and Austin, Texas are adopting the West Coast spirit our hosts both declared.

social media at the forefront of investment

Start-up investment has changed too according to Nicole. “2 years ago, investment was more into media and advertising, now it’s a lot more about social media” she said. This is changing the ball game, Nicole said, “now that agencies are becoming more social they are tending to move over to SF”.

topical and brand influencers … not who you think

Social Choris is aiming at “brands wanting to become more human and having relationships with influencers” Bobby added. But how do you identify them and how can you tell they are really influential? “it’s a combination of art and science” Bobby went on. “There are topical and brand influencers” he said. Social Chorus will traditionally tap into its 1.5 million influencers database but they might also use Kred and Klout. Sometimes the best influencers are niche bloggers through .

social media influence: the pyramid metaphor

“Imagine a pyramid” Bobby went on: “PR handles the celebs, super fans and topical bloggers are in the middle and at the bottom, you have the vast majority of fans and readers who click and comment”. They might not be bloggers, they could just be twitteres for instance. Social Chorus’s focus of the solution is measuring the impact of a conversation with influencers. Manage the relationship over time.

the “power of the middle”

As soon as I can, I will also post a video interview of Nicole in which she explains that most brands are wrong to focus on just the top celebrities. “This can become pretty expensive soon” she said. I would also add that celebrities are often too self-centred in order to be generous. All middle tier influencers on the contrary are more open and more prone to become brand advocates because they will want to develop a relationship in the long term with the brand.

only 10-20% of agencies are ready to do that for themselves

Social Chorus is working with agencies like Edelman, Ketchum and others. It’s mostly agencies who are delivering this service to clients, but there are a few clients like Gatorade for instance who do this for themselves. “What we find is that the interest in that space exceeds the knowledge of how it works” Bobby declared. As a result, only 10-20% of the brand on average are willing to do this by themselves.

One of Social Chorus’s biggest challenges though is to hire developers; there is a lot of competition for developers. A very skilled developer in the valley can be paid $100 k and even up to $ 200 k if he has very special skills it’s commonly said here. As a matter of fact, as an entrepreneur told me at an after work party last night: “the developer in question might even be paid more than the project manager he reports to!”.

Social Chorus can operate over 3 different countries: UK, US and Germany. They will soon launch a new version in 2013, which will extend the service to other countries.

today’s presentation at the Sugar CRM “acceleration” conference in Paris

These are today’s slides for my presentation at the Sugar CRM “acceleration” conference in Paris. I will also comment on my views with regard to “Social” CRM and the integration of barely repeatable processes within CRM processes. Check my other pieces in which I mention Sugar CRM for more details on that company and its products/services.

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (5/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 5 of 5

Name a few examples as to how social media management has helped Orange get more brand awareness?

In most markets in which it operates in the consumer space, Orange has a very good brand awareness not to say the best. So social media isn’t really used for this at Orange. We tend to use it more for image, co-creation (like with the http://sosh.fr entry level offer in France), brand and user experience (see http://pinterest.com/liveorange or http://pinterest.com/orangefrance to name but a few recent examples), charity (check the French Orange foundation blog http://www.blogfondation.orange.com), user relationship (like Orange helpers in the UK: http://oran.ge/KqyW3r) and brand nurturing (like Facebook Romania https://www.facebook.com/orangeromania for instance). These are only a few examples from different countries but there are many more than this.

The only counterexample I can think of is the one I’ve been involved in for 3 years between 2008 and 2011, and it is related to the b2b arm of Orange, that is to say Orange Business Services (http://orange-business.com) . It is understandable that being in 220 different countries and territories as Orange Business Services is, means that there are vastly different levels of brand awareness in each of those geographies. Social media can come be useful in the areas in which we are not operating in the consumer space in order to boost the knowledge of Orange Business as well as our skills. It has proven very successful in many instances, we have even been able to use the blogs to initiate sales at a later stage (this is ‘pre-commerce’ again).

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[1] Check my personal blog for this topic at http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/category/b2b-marketing/

[2] http://bitdefender.com

[3] http://ronewmedia.ro

[4] Small Office, Home Office, i.e. very small or independent companies

[5] Media Aces is the French association of enterprises involved in social media, of which I am the President. My work on the four different types of brand in social media is available at: http://bit.ly/4brandtypessm

[6] Oscar Wilde quotes at: http://oran.ge/owildetalk

[7] Check the ‘worldwide’ tab on the http://facebook.com/Orange page

[8] http://timeline.orange.com

[9] Re. Andy Sernocitz ‘Word of Mouth Marketing’ check http://oran.ge/asbooks on Amazon

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (4/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 4 of 5

What do you think the ratio for the implementation of social media campaign should be in the entire media budget of the company? How was this situation at Orange?

To begin with, I do not like the term “campaign” which I find too military and aggressive. Eventually, social media marketing is a new form of marketing, more respectful, more centred on our customer’s interests and requirements, based on the principles of crowd sourcing and customer centricity. So I ban this kind of language as well as other terms like “targets” which are often times the staples of traditional marketing but are outdated and not applicable to social media marketing. Despite what most people think, social media marketing has to be thought of in the long-term, not in the short term.

using military analogies for communications? not a good idea … From bastille day

My second recommendation would be to build engagement and then spend money, not the other way round. First, I always start building the network using content. This is what takes the greatest part of our work and energy. Each time I am in charge of a new digital department, I start working on my content strategy and building the content, both externally and internally, which will fuel my digital strategy. Once I have done that, I can start crystallise communities around the content which we have created, as well as adapt the content to the liking of our audiences. The second step is to grow the network so that it reaches a critical mass. The third stage is to create synergies between the pages and the different platforms that we use: the Facebook hub on all Orange pages[7] is a good example of that, or Orange timeline[8] which groups or Twitter accounts around Orange. But it is also a matter of linking platforms and blogs to one another, both at Orange, and with Orange partners outside of the company.

Once I have sorted out all my budgets, and made considerable savings, then and only then can I invest my money, with great care, on advertising to promote this content and bring back traffic to my main platforms. This is a slightly more lengthy approach, but it pays in the long-term and is incredibly strong in terms of resilience.

My last recommendation would be to say to companies that they shouldn’t spend millions on word-of-mouth because word-of-mouth is supposed to be cost-effective; otherwise this is just advertising and advertising works best in traditional media[9].

My main frustration with regard to social advertising is to see that mainstream social media platforms have done very little to reinvent advertising so far. Innovation in that space is not on par with what we are supposed to expect. But this will probably change in the medium-term, hopefully.

As to Orange Group, this is how we work. I still haven’t spent a dime to grow the http://facebook.com/Orange page and yet we grew it from 40,000 people in May 2011 to over 215,000 a year later! Similarly, our Group Twitter account (http://twitter.com/orange) was brought from nothing to close to 9,500 followers in just a year, through sheer organic growth and content sharing.

Now that we have grown a critical mass, we might consider advertising to speed things up or bring them to the next level, but I do not expect those spends to grow out of proportion and much in excess of 10% of my overall budget, in the very long run.

 

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[7] Check the ‘worldwide’ tab on the http://facebook.com/Orange page

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (3/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 3 of 5

Can you give us 5 tips as to how company can manage a crisis through social media?

In fact, despite what most people think, and despite the usual romantic stories told about Internet crises and rumours, managing crises is a long-term rather than short-term exercise. Crises in social media in fact, reflect what is bad with your company, not what is wrong with your community management or the way you handle it. Here are my 5 tips about managing crises:

picture cc 2012 Yann Gourvennec (abstract album)

1. fix internal problems first: things that you do in your day-to-day business may be kept hidden, but not in social media. Eventually, social media tells more about the way that you are organised internally than about anything else,
2. work on the process: if you are making things up as you go along when a crisis arises, and then build the process as it happens, it means that you have done something wrong. You should work on that process from day one, before a crisis takes place,
3. make your PR go social: don’t put all your eggs in the same basket; your PR and social media departments should work hand-in-hand. There is nothing that the community management team should do without referring to PR when a crisis arises, and vice versa, there is nothing that PR is aware of that should not be communicated to the community management team, inclusive of the stances which have to be taken and displayed. Don’t take the Lone Ranger approach by letting community managers express themselves in the name of the company even though they haven’t received clearance for it. This applies to large companies and mostly listed companies, for which external communications are extremely critical, and may not be applicable to smaller enterprises,
4. prepare for the worst to happen outside normal working hours: my experience of crises online has shown that the worst problem often occur on a Friday night from 8 pm onwards or during the weekend, or at night. Work with vendors in order to set up round-the-clock moderation when necessary, in multiple languages when you are a worldwide company namely,
5. set up your alerting system: not to generate alerts in real time all the time, but mostly when something bad happens so that you know in real time when you have to do something when it is really necessary.

All these are applicable to companies with a strong brand awareness only. Listed companies rank high on the agenda with regard to crisis management issues and the need to industrialise the process around them. On the other side of the coin, other companies with weak brand awareness would gain from a negative crisis rather than lose. If your brand is entirely “under the radar”, and no one is talking about you at all, then having a crisis means that at least people will talk about you; even though the experience may be unpleasant. As Oscar Wilde once put it: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about[6].”

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[6] Oscar Wilde quotes at: http://oran.ge/owildetalk

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (2/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 2 of 6

Give us 5 tips for a Romanian company (a corporation, and medium-size company) to build brand awareness with social media

At first sight, one may think that social media marketing is only devoted to large corporations which can afford to hire big enough teams to manage such new activities.

But I think it’s just the other way round.

One of the biggest beauties of social media is that it makes word-of-mouth marketing accessible even to those who have very little means. Hence, unless you are a small and medium-size enterprise with difficulties to cope with your own business and not enough time on your hands to visit your customers and do your everyday work, I would suggest on the contrary that you use social media to gain brand awareness and do business.

small is beautiful

In fact, with social media you don’t actually do business directly. You do what Bob Pearson would call “pre-commerce” (Jossey Bass, 2011), i.e. you create the conditions for people to buy your products or recommend them to one another.

As a rule, large corporations have already built brand awareness (this is why they are large, in essence); what such companies might seek in social media marketing may differ significantly from what small and medium-sized companies may be looking for.

SMEs and Soho[4] businesses are by definition lesser-known and  have to build their brand awareness in the first place.

Having said that, I can deliver 5 general tips for enterprises which are ready to jump on the bandwagon of social media marketing:

1. first and foremost, know thyself and use social networks consistently with regard to your image, and your overall marketing strategy (for different types of brands and strategies, check the work the non-profit Media Aces[5] did with brand monitoring company Synthesio,
2. don’t shift your focus from business to social media: obviously, social media should support your business by enhancing your brand experience, awareness and/or visibility. If it distracts you from doing business, then don’t do it,
3. focus on content: if you are in b2b, it will have to be very professional (in-depth articles about your visions and technical prowess for instance); if you are in b2c, your content has to be essentially entertaining, mostly on Facebook, on which users rarely want to be bothered with serious stuff but are more interested in games, polls and interaction,
4. be yourself: there is nothing worse than bombastic boasts (such as “we are the leaders!” mostly when it’s not true and that you are only a leader of a niche therefore not a leader) or salespeople trying to sell their wares on social media. Think of keeping your readers/users and customers happy first, and then think of yourself. Be simple and natural, and when you produce content make it interesting for them, and not for you!
5. “socialise” your website: not by multiplying Facebook buttons, but by making your (interesting) content easier to share.

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[4] Small Office, Home Office, i.e. very small or independent companies

[5] Media Aces is the French association of enterprises involved in social media, of which I am the President. My work on the four different types of brand in social media is available at: http://bit.ly/4brandtypessm