Cook 'em Dan-O

Twitter Gets a Reason to Exist

I was hearing/reading about Iranians using Twitter to spread the word about protests they were organizing, in reaction to the recent election and allegations of vote-counting fraud.  Here's one example news story.  The Iranian government had had some success closing down sites such as Facebook, but the distributed nature of Twitter (lots of people posting "tweets") apparently made it much more difficult to control.

This reminded of me of the Tiananmen Square protests in China 20 years ago.  The government sought to control access to the media then (as it does today) in order to maintain control over information about the protest.  But apparently one of the technologies used to get information out of the country was something relatively new at the time--the fax machine.  People would fax updates to friends outside of China, who would spread the word among expatriate Chinese, and in some cases forward information back into the country.

It's great to see technology serve the interests of democracy movements!  Now if Twitter can just turn this into a plan for "monetizing its asset"...

Chickens Update

I posted a photo earlier showing our new chickens, Milk Chocolate and Dark Chocolate.  Actually, all our chickens pretty quickly get names like "Big Girl" or "New Girl" so don't expect the naming silliness to last much longer.

At any rate, they've grown by leaps and bounds and have now joined the aforementioned Girls.

The new Girls are on the left.  They're separated by a fence so that everyone can get used to one another before we try mixing them.  It took them the better part of a day to get up the courage to leave their cage and wander outside.  Of course, the free veggies helped!

Managing to a Successful Shot

I learned a while ago that knowing how to do something isn't the same as knowing how to teach someone to do that thing.  How many times have you seen an athlete struggle to explain a skill to someone else?  Shooting a basketball seems like a simple act until you try to explain it to someone.

I'm often reminded of this truth when I work with others to get things done.  Despite the fact that I'm working with talented people, it's not enough to say "do this" and expect to get the result I want.  I can say, "show me the value proposition for this product" and have a clear picture of what kind of information I should receive.  But the person receiving this request may not have such a clear picture, or perhaps has an equally clear--but distinctly different--picture.  So the "value proposition" comes back to me, and it's not what I had in mind.  Doh!

Here's one example from a recent sales training call.  I had asked one of my managers to pull together training materials for our sales team on a new product.  It needed to answer questions such as:

• what is it?
• what are the components that make up the product?
• how do the components fit together?
• how do I configure it?
• how do I order it?

I had pulled together  a presentation that attempted to show in simple pictures how the system came together, but the manager had other ideas, preferring to put together a Word document that described the system one part at a time.  As we were on the call the sales team started asking for a picture, saying they didn't have a good idea of how the whole system came together and where the decisions were needed that determined specific configurations of the product.  

Fortunately, this was just the first sales training call, so we were able to supply the presentation later and address the sales team's needs.  And the component-by-component view was still useful.  It was just easier to digest once people had a picture of how the entire product came together.

This situation reinforced the old saying, "you can't expect what you don't inspect".  If you're asking for a particular outcome, be sure the person understands what constitutes achievement of that outcome.  And use the opportunity to "inspect" the results to create a learning situation.  Had we reviewed the sales training materials before our call, the manager and I could have identified the need for a big-picture document to go with the detailed one and saved ourselves some extra work.

So anytime I get revved up and start tossing out directives for work to be done, I try to step back and remember that it took me a while to learn how to shoot a basketball.

Two Management Gems

These from Adriaan Theron, a fellow Product Management type who is now working as a recruiter.

• "Building a product is easy, building a company is hard".  I couldn't agree more.  As hard as it is to build a successful product (and it is hard), building a company means putting all that other stuff in place so that the product can be successful.  And it means creating the organization and culture that will allow future products to be built and launched.  Lots of companies are started in order to take someone's great idea and turn it into a winning product or service.  Some (perhaps most) of those companies fail to figure out how to turn that great product or service idea into something that everyone wants, is available everywhere, works first time every time, and so on.  Others succeed once, but then stumble.  There's a point where the company becomes more than Engineering and Marketing.  Successful companies build a foundation by bringing people in who have already solved problems the emerging company is only beginning to see.
• "There are four D's to every product:  Define, Design, Deliver, Deploy.  Most companies focus on Defining and Designing, and neglect Delivering and Deploying."   Anyone who has worked at a startup knows the craziness associated with getting the first product out the door; at times it feels like the clown act at the circus.  Successful companies realize that the methods used to ship the first product won't scale, and put an emphasis on creating methods for delivery and deployment that are both repeatable and scalable. If your methods are repeatable you can bring in new people and train them to do the job... which means you can grow.  If your methods are scalable, you can ship a hundred units with not much more work than it took to ship ten... which means you can be profitable.

  

Food for thought!

Seen in SF

Really? In the trees? I could buy in and around the trees. Or on the trees. But in?

Fences Make Good Neighbors

Our New Chickens

Here are the latest additions, Milk Chocolate and Dark Chocolate. Don't ask me which is which.

Cactus Anyone?

Got adventurous at Dos Amigos tacqueria and ordered the cactus and goat cheese burrito. Pretty tasty. Cactus is a bit like gelatinous bell pepper. No really you should try it.

Twitter Spam?

It's been interesting to see who elects to "follow" me on Twitter.  The oddest one so far:  a company called "bywave".  When I look at their "tweets" they basically are a sales pitch for some kind of software.

Will spam be the end of Twitter as we know it?  Stay tuned.

Screen Wars

You've no doubt heard about the term "market share"--what portion of the total market for something is controlled by one brand or one company.  And I recall that in the 90's one of the management fads was "customer share"--what share of the customer's IT budget your product accounted for.  And I'm sure there are a dozen more "___ share" terms floating about.

You've also heard about web ventures that want to "attract eyeballs" as a way of "monetizing their asset".  Which in English means, "we can get paid a small amount of money per person who views and/or clicks on an ad... and that's how we're going to get some revenue to offset all the costs in programmers and servers that we're racking up with our web 2.0 service".

Of course, the monetizing isn't that easy.  More on that later.  But now that I've been interacting with email, photo sharing, social networking, and other web-based services, I've come to see that the battle is all about "screen share"--whose screen you see when you go about your internet business.  In other words, whose application will you use, and therefore whose ads will you be exposed to.

Take the example of sharing a photo.  Thanks to advances in cell phone and digiital image technology, and the avaiability of reasonably cost-effective bandwidth, taking a photo on the spur of the moment and sharing it is quite simple.  Had Brian been willing to stand still long enough, I could have taken his picture at the top of the run at Heavenly Valley, with Lake Tahoe in the background, and posted it or emailed it before I got to the bottom of the mountain.  (Of course, with my skiing skills, Pony Express could deliver it before I got to the bottom of the mountain, but that's another story).

So consider my options for sharing that photo:

• I can send it as a "multimedia" message... basically a text message with a photo attached (except that I have an iPhone, which doesn't support this basic service)
  
• I can email it to my friends using a service like gmail or Yahoo mail
  
• I can post the photo to a photo sharing site like Kodak Gallery or Phanfare
  
• I can post it to my Facebook page
  
• I can post it in a "discussion" on my LinkedIn page
  
• I can send a "tweet" with a link to the picture 
• I can post it to my weblog
  

There are pro's and con's of each approach.  But what's interesting is that wherever I choose to post it will determine what ads you see when you view it.  Unless you view the photo on my weblog (which has turned out to be a not-for-profit venture), someone's going to be showing you ads.  They may be targeted ads, like something at the top of the gmail browser that says "ski vacations, click here".  They may be unrelated, like the "IQ" ads I keep seeing on Facebook.  Or they may be anywhere in between.

And the odds are that wherever you view that photo, you will likely respond using that same web site or application.  If I send a text message or email, you'll likely reply with a text message or email.  If I post it on Facebook, you're less likely to send me an email saying "cool picture, who's the stand-in for an actual skier?!", and more likely to comment via posting a comment on my "wall".  And if you write on my "wall", guess whose ads you'll see?? And when everyone else sees that you commented on my picture...

So it's clear that the first battle may have been about creating a fan base (and keeping it interested).  The next battle is about steering that fan base to your application for all their social networking needs.  And since social networks are non-exclusive clubs, and since we all have text messaging and email accounts, it's all about creating the most useful, easiest to use application.  After all, we're all lazy in a way, and will use your application to carry on our conversations if the application is reasonably easy to use, reasonably unintrusive, and so on.

So the battle is on, and corporate America is beginning to pay attention.  Hell, even Oprah and Shaq use Twitter.  Who will win? Whose cuisine will reign supreme? Oh, sorry, wrong show.  It will be interesting to watch...