Andrew Lark

The Naked CEO

This great piece on the value of transparency and pretty much a must read for communicators. Clive's blog is worth a look as well.

As with most pieces on the rise of blogging and participatory media, Clive can't help but take a swing at PR folks and their craft. This marrs the story with causal assumptions. While I agree with the central tenet of the story - transparency is great and should be used to your advantage, the notion that you need to "fire your publicist" and "abandon the message" to be transparent is nonsense.

In fact, nothing in the story seems to support this or point to the fact that complete transparency is the luxury of the unlisted, closely-held start-up. Nearly every corporation other than RedFin cited in the story have an army of PR people encouraging and driving transparency. Not does it point to another real-estate brand - Zillow - that has achieved superior mindshare (albeit in a different segment of the real-state market) on the back of a great PR effort.

Now that's not to say I don't like Redfin. In fact, I love it. Redfin also has a PR rep and still seems to issue press releases... I wonder why...

Transparency and engagement are the hallmarks of all great communications - that doesn't mean they don't require publicists or messages.

I also find it hard to see Google as a "reputation management system". It does no managing. Customers, bloggers, pundits and the like all have a new found power to shape reputations. Google mirrors the popular vote, effective optimizer of search, and ranks sentiment that isn't necessarily a reflection of what your customers think but is a reflection of where the heard is running. Does that make it a "reputation management system" - I don't think so.

What I do agree with is that Secrecy is dead. And Google is a terrific truth machine. And that customers have become "working partners".

Thanks to Noel for the pointer... btw Noel, get a blog man!

Dialogue-Driven Communications

Great story in AdAge this morning on P&G moving to dialogue-driven communications. They get that it's no longer about "telling and selling".

Procter & Gamble's Jim Stengel described a major cultural shift that is turning the world's largest marketer into a starter of conversations and a solver of consumers' problems rather than a one-way communicator. "It's not about telling and selling," said the chief marketing officer of the company that once lived by that simple mantra. "It's about bringing a relationship mindset to everything we do."

Too often the focus is on a "digital or nothing" strategy - with an emphasis on moving into the interactive realms. Stengel is right that the imperative needs to be different: "the need for brands to be authentic, trustworthy and generous".

And I like this view: "Market share is trust materialized."

Ten Things To Track...

Seems that "ten things" is a sure way to attract eyeballs and this one is no exception. A terrific post on "Ten Things You Should Be Monitoring".

The Power Of Recommendation...

Sun CEO Schwartz points to a terrific move they are making:

"Which is why you'll see something very interesting next week start to appear on Sun's web pages and throughout our our on-line store. You'll start to see product reviews written by users. You'll see user defined ratings, right on our products. Just like book or product reviews as Amazon.com..."

They are starting with a few products and going from there. Brilliant!

This got me thinking about the need for a system for recommenders to be authenticated. Some kind of opt-in registry so those of us reading the reviews get even more transparency into who is recommending. As much as I would like it though, I'm not sure it is needed.

The very act of participating and the inherent transparency of the act turns blogs and the web into one big "transparency engine". Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant.

Technorati : PR, Sun

Blogs Give Employees An External Voice

And there is no better example than this:

People need to be fired and moved out of Microsoft today. Where's the freakin' accountability?

InformationWeek picks-up on the story and gives it some legs. 350+ comments later.

Aftermail

Aftermail - a really hot NZ software company was just acquired by Quest Software. Congrats to Rod & the team. You didn't just build a great product, you built a great company.

“With the support and brand strength of Quest, our leading-edge technology and our aligned visions, we see this acquisition as a way of accelerating our growth as a leader in the strategic e-mail archiving market segment,” said Rod Drury, chief executive officer of AfterMail. “This is an exciting investment in our team, and in New Zealand. As a part of Quest, we now have access to a rapidly expanding global market.”

This is also great news for software entrepreneurs in NZ.  It is clear proof of their ability to deliver worldclass innovations and businesses into the global market and should underscore the opportunities in NZ for investors and partners alike.

Time For NZ To Wake Up As Well...

BusinessWeek reports that Silicon Valley CEOs are issuing a wake-up call to America. The same call needs to be issued in NZ. One of the central gating factors is broadband - which is  a critical innovation enabler. It's just too expensive. It just takes too long to get installed. And once you've got it, punitive billing strategies limit use. It's not so great in the US either:

Jerry Yang, co-founder and chairman of Yahoo! (YHOO), pointed out that the U.S. remains far behind some Asian countries in broadband. Korea and Japan, for example, offer consumers far faster broadband connections than the standard in the U.S. 

 

That's a problem, said Reed Hastings, CEO of the DVD-rental service Netflix (NFLX). Hastings thinks the next phase of the Web won't arrive until people in the U.S. can get bandwidth of 10 megabits per second, or about 10 times the common rate here, at a comparable price. Only then, for instance, will people really be able to watch video online comfortably. But he says that's now three to six years off.

Just as these CEOs are doing, NZ needs to recognize that it isn't the threat isnt the US - it is Asia. Driving home, I can barely hold a mobile phone call in the Valley. During a week in China, I didn't drop a call. And my minutes cost me a fraction of what they did in NZ.

 

Dyson was the most direct:  "The country has grown lazy and complacent," she said. "We've created a country where we've outsourced the intellect to other countries." Instead of trying to figure out how to beat the Chinese, she said, we need to try to "beat ourselves and help the Chinese" succeed, so that the U.S. has that huge market to sell to, she said.

For Kiwis In the Bay Area...

Kia Ora! In a little over a month, Maori Art Meets America – here in San Francisco. Save these dates:

• August 4. Dawn: Ceremonial waka arrival into San Francisco harbor followed by a reception that evening at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
• August 5-14: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum ( 701 Mission Street @ 3rd in San Francisco) will host Toi Maori: Art from the Maori People of New Zealand –  a world class collection of fine Maori cloaks, enhanced with live weaving demonstrations and kete displays along with  photographic works plus live demonstrations of moko (Maori tattooing).  Both exhibitions will be supplemented by indigenous carving, jewelry and pottery. Quite simply, this display is “a must see.”  Toi Maori: Art from the Maori People of New Zealand  is the largest exhibition of contemporary Maori art from New Zealand in the USA in over two decades and seeks to demonstrate the spiritual significance of Maori art and culture.
• August 7, 2pm: Special FREE performance by “Kapa Haka” Maori dance group in Union Square as part of the “Jewels in the Square” series, sponsored by MJM Management Group and SF Parks Trust.

Ralph moves on

Not one for all you Americans but, Air NZ's chief exec is off to run Commonwealth Bank of Australia. What Welch is to the US, Norris is to NZ. He's a genius. Time to by shares in Commonwealth Bank... I suspect we will see him running a major American bank one day. What he did for ASB bank in NZ was remarkable.

Net-Enabled Bootstrapping

Ross has some terrific thoughts on "net-enabled bootstrapping".

I've been doing some of this myself lately and the economics are stunning. Here's how we're driving costs through the floor and virtualizing:

• Skype calls account for about 70% of all the calls I make 
• Basecamp for project management 
• SugarCRM On Demand for media and analyst database 
• Freeconference for meetings...
• Flashmeeting for more meetings... (really cool)
• Blogs - conversation engine
• FunctionFox - time tracking
• Quickbooks Online - accounting
• T-Mobile - WiFi
• SocialText - Wiki

So, think real-estate free entrepreneuring - no computing real-estate; everything virtualized and available to teams so no physical real-estate needed, work from anywhere (don't have to be close to my own server) so no ties to real-estate.

"Real Estate is the leading cause of death for start-ups." - Ross Mayfield

About the only service offering I've been disappointed with is Vonage. Lousy sound quality compared to Skype. Expensive compared to Skype. And they want even more money to make it work like Skype.

Ross is right on:

"I am convinced that being virtual is the best way to start a company.  The benefits go beyond cost (although the culture of frugality can go a very long way).  In our case, it improves the product.  But generally it is more productive.  When the bandwidth for collaboration is constrained at times, you gain a certain focus.  And with wiki, you develop a group memory to draw upon as you go forward."