Soccer 2.0: Germany vs.Greece as seen by Monty Python!

A very clever video from Monty Python on Soccer philosophy... There are many more like this on Gary Ireland's vlog listed on the right hand side.

Where in the World are Laure Manaudou and Hope Solo?

Laure Manaudou is a French Olympic, European and world champion swimmer. Hope Solo is a goal keeper for the US Women’s National Soccer team. Both are very successful athletes whose notoriety has reached far beyond their respective sports. Laure Manaudou‘s new found fame was generated by a humoristic piece entitled “Laure Manaudou Sex Video” on YouTube that drew more than 1M viewers. The joke is that the video was about monkeys and fortunately not about Laure Manaudou. Because of all the attention it garnered, Laure Manaudou was also in the top 5 searches on Technorati for quite some time…

As for Hope Solo, she gained tremendous publicity through her temporary exile from the U.S. Women’s National Team. Indeed, her exile became the dominant story line at the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Unbeaten Hope Solo was benched by the coach in favor of veteran goalkeeper Briana Scurry just before a crucial semifinal game against Brazil that the US ended up loosing. USA today reported that this incident drove up ESPN’s ratings and filled blogs and comment pages with a passion not seen since the big USA win at the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup and Brandi Chastain’s jersey toss. In addition, there was a back-story to this incident recounting Hope Solo’s relationship to her father and his tragic passing a few months before the World Cup.

I’m relating these two “soap” stories to illustrate how public attention – though ever so short term- is driven by what I’d call the phenomenon of “Tribal Voyeurism”. I believe that it is critically important for B2B marketers to research and understand the mechanics of “Tribal Voyeurism”. Indeed, the glaciers between the B2C and B2B worlds, if they ever existed, are definitely melting! They’re melting not because of global warming but because, as noted before, of the ever increasing use of social media tools in the enterprise. Moreover, the hyper-mediatized “prosumer” has been completely saturated and become indifferent to the un-imaginative, un-inspired gobbledygook prose dished out by the vast majority of B2B marketers, and is hungering for a more genuine and entertaining style of communication!

I’m by no means suggesting that B2B marketers should become unsavory, voyeuristic, and soapy, but rather that they need to learn to appreciate and accept how professionals access and evaluate information. There are many successful companies that have succeeded in attracting and keeping the public interest either through style, meaning or both. This includes the likes of Apple, Salesforce.com, Facebook, PG&E (yes, the utility company), Interface and many others. So, break the mold. Create. Imagine. And have some fun!

Even the Moon Cried

“Come along now, we mustn’t be late,” my mother insisted as she tugged me forward by my hand. I quickened my pace; I did not want to upset her tonight. It was April 14, 1865, the night that Abraham Lincoln was to attend the show Our American Cousin, and the last person I wanted seeing my mother scold me was my own president. I caught up to her and began looking around. I saw so many people talking, mingling around, not too many children though, yet an adult accompanied every child I saw. I kept close to my mother: not wanting to get lost in all the chaos. I breathed in the chilled, night air and gazed up at the stars. They shone brightly in the dark night sky. The full moon hung, stranded apart from the stars. As I looked at it, my eyes lead me to believe a large smile crossed it’s round face. I smiled back at it.

“Jane, what on earth are you up to?” my mother asked, “would you rather watch the still stars than the performance?”
“No Mother,” I answered in a shameful, low voice. I forced my gaze down to my polished black shoes as they clattered along the stones on the ground.
“Then hurry up darling,” my mother instructed. I did as I was told.

We found our seats after much trouble, and happily sat down. I flipped through the pages of my program. The number of actors and actresses overwhelmed me. I read through the brief preview of the performance, and when I was through sat quietly in my seat. I was confronted with so much time and so little things to do. My fingertips traced the fancy letters on the cover of the program that read: Our American Cousin.

“Jane darling, look up there,” my mother said softly, nudging my arm and gesturing toward the boxes in the back, specifically toward box seven’s balcony. There, I saw no one other than Abraham Lincoln.

“Goodness gracious,” I said under my breath. I had never imagined myself so close to such an important man. I looked again at my mother; she smiled and widened her eyes at my thrilled face. I giggled slightly, and sat back in my seat. Every moment I wanted to look back, but I knew quite well staring was impolite. Finally the show started, and I did my best to keep my curious eyes on the stage.

The actors and actresses were doing a magnificent job in the performance, and I was thoroughly enjoying myself. Then one of the performers said something so humorous everyone broke out in laughter. In the midst of all jolly voices, an unmistakable sound shook through Ford’s theatre. It was the sound of a single gun shoot. It did not come from the stage, that I was certain. I swirled around in my seat in desperation, and saw my most dreaded thought in my mind.

The president’s head hung low, and he slouched in the seat in which he sat. A man stood behind him with a gun visible in his hand. Everyone had seen it. Suddenly a military major who I guessed to be Major Henry Rathbone, leaped onto the man with the gun. But the man with the gun got away after quite a wrestle, and leaped from the balcony. It all happened so fast my eyes could hardly follow. Screams rang through the audience, and what I thought to be chaos outside earlier, did not resemble this by any means.

People ran and yelled, they cried and held each other, some going absolutely crazy. I felt a comfortingly firm hold on my shoulder from my mother. Remembering her presence, I turned and flung my arms around her in complete fright. It was then I saw the man with the gun. He leaped onto the stage and began to spew off words in a language I could not for the life of me understand. Then he ran again and out of the theatre.

It took much time to settle everyone down, and rightfully so. After all, it was our president who had just been murdered, and not to mention practically in front of our very own eyes! Though after all were quiet, a man entered form the back of the room and began to make his way down the aisle. He walked with pace and purpose, and although I do believe he was fully aware that every eye in the room was on him and intended to stay that way, he took absolutely no notice what so ever. My ears would not hear the words that came from his mouth when he reached the front of the room and began to speek, but to the forceful blow of the gunshot I had heard so clearly about an hour before. As I realized he was leading everyone out in an orderly fashion, I obediently followed every step my mother took. I held her hand far more tightly than I ever had. When we finally reached the door, I stepped out in relief. I was alive and unharmed. But my president on the other hand, was certainly not.

Everyone around me wept, even my own mother. I felt tears trickle down my cheeks. I gulped in the crisp, late night air, and desperately looked up at the sky as if expecting a miracle. Of course, it didn’t come. I looked all around for the moon, and finally found it. I wanted to see it’s smile, thinking perhaps, just perhaps, it would comfort me. Though to my dismay, what I found across the moon’s bright face was not a warm smile, but many, many cold tears.

Zoe Pacalin #22

Ultimate Networks

For some odd reason (Facebook anyone?), I celebrated New Year’s Eve embroiled in a heated conversation debating the merits (or lack thereof) of on-line social networks. One side of the argument was defended by very accomplished academics and the other by very successful and pragmatic business folks.

I don’t intend to recant all the details of this rather entertaining argument, but instead I’ll attempt to net-it-out while sharing with you my vision of how to make good use of these networks in a - social media- marketing context.

Of course, this enlightened crowd was well aware of the fact that new media can generate a non-local community and that this phenomenon isn’t new at all! In fact, if Wikipedia has it right, scholars associated with the Royal Society of London had already formed a community through the exchange of letters in the 17th century.

My objective, in the conversation, was to move past the theory of social networks and explore the use of today’s electronic social networks as tools for business. I don’t know about you, but I have neither the interest, nor the time to write notes on Facebook’s walls or share my daily activities on Twitter. There is way too much clutter and noise as it is!

My interest in professional social networks was first triggered some time ago when I was deeply involved in designing customer satisfaction and customer reference programs at Oracle and Siebel Systems. Invariably, the results, of these then state-of-the-art programs were very structured, contrived and certainly not real-time… Yes, they made great slides and gave an impression of control, however, the fact is that such programs are expensive, infrequently conducted, do not always distinguish between buyers, users or other influencers, are of very limited use for timely fixes of problems or for product development, and most certainly are a huge pain to customers.

My vision is to replace these static, non-interactive, memory-less programs by leveraging modern social network platforms. [I’m using platform in the sense of open APIs that run in the environment created by the social network (Facebook, Linkedin)]. As we develop these newly conceived programs across multiple social networks we should be able to identify lurkers, novices, regulars or other change agents and leaders, as well as, implicit or explicit unmet customer needs. Imagine: No need to get IT involved, no extra budget, self declared participation, and always-on interaction with your customers, very cool indeed!

I got the feeling that several in the conversation thought that some of these needs were already being addressed via the traditional technical on-line support groups, as well as, by public forums like Dell’s “Idea Storm” (www.ideastorm.com) and Salesforce’s “Success Force” (success.salesforce.com). Some also felt that the presently available tools like dynamic network analysis (DNA) and multi-agent systems (MAS) are only suited for very large networks. Perhaps my friends are correct and the currently available statistical tools do not lend themselves well to the analysis of smaller social networks. And certainly, “Idea Storm” and “Success Force” are steps in the right direction.

However, I’m still convinced that once social network portability takes hold we will be able to develop and use a suite of analytical applications that will help us better understand the quality and intensity of the relationships between network participants, as well as, brand sentiment and the role of influencers in shaping opinions. More important however, is that the potential benefit to business of such digital interaction optimization applications is huge! So, rather than waiting for Facebook, Linkedin and others to agree on a “Social Network Interop Protocol”and extend their applications, let’s use current web2.0 tools like Ning, Scout Labs, Umbria, Omniture, Google Analytics and other widgets to deploy the new CRM and create competitive advantage!

Soccer Rocker Poem

Hi! I'm Zoe and I love to play Soccer. I play half-back for a great club (UFC) in Palo Alto and love to watch games. Leave a comment to let me know if you like my poem!

YouTube and Viewer Responsiveness Index

Today, it was too cold for me to go on a bike ride... Instead, I played sleuth and joined the digital natives on YouTube! I explored the correlation between “brand” and the number of video viewers for a selected set of companies. The results were quite surprising! The companies I selected are enterprise apps companies Oracle and SAP, Internet juggernauts Yahoo and Google, Salesforce.com as the enterprise 2.0 proxy, FaceBook as the Social Network / Internet platform, and Microsoft as Microsoft.

In an effort to remain objective, I chose to be very quantitative. I added up the number of viewers for the first five videos for each company, sorted by “relevance” and “all time”, as well as the number of comments and ratings. I then created a ratio that I call the “Viewer Responsiveness Index” – VR Index – to characterize the engagement of the viewer vis-à-vis the video.

Et voila, the winner on total views is FaceBook with more viewers than Google and Microsoft combined! And, first place for the VR Index goes to Microsoft with a score of 3.80, but keep on reading as the numbers themselves aren’t the whole story.

Indeed, quantitative analysis is great but it can only take you so far. So let’s enter a more subjective and qualitative world.

Oracle and SAP have the worst VR Index which may be explained by the fact that their videos are geared at techies and that watching a video about SAP NetWeaver or Oracle Fusion doesn’t necessarily generate a lot of excitement. By contrast, Salesforce.com videos are packed with humor and more fun to watch. So, while total viewership is the lowest of the companies surveyed, Salesforce generates a VR Index of 3.41 with mostly positive comments!

So by now you must be thinking: How is it possible for Microsoft to obtain such a high VR Index? Well, if you work in Marketing at Microsoft, don’t get too smug… The most watched video for Microsoft is Microsoft Surface Parody with 1,550,904 viewers. And, Punish Your Microsoft Developer garners 214,280 viewers alone… I guess people like to make fun of the Redmond Empire.

Google’s technical videos got a little bit more traction than Oracle’s or SAP’s, but what really boosts Google’s numbers are the Google Earth videos that all told reach nearly 2,000,000 viewers. As for Yahoo, the number of total viewers would have fallen below 80,000 if it weren’t for a Japanese video called Hard Gay Japan with 203,392 viewers.

So, where am I going with all of this? One thing is for sure, as the video-web becomes more important than the text-web, companies will need to keep an eye or two on what’s happening on YouTube. And while one could argue that comparing Oracle to Google in the context of YouTube is not meaningful, I hope that everybody will agree that comparing Google to Yahoo is very relevant! The unresolved question is whether the VR Index is a backward or looking-forward indicator.

OK, it’s time for me to bring my daughters to soccer practice. Happy holidays!

How far can you reach with IPTV?

Do you think that IPTV is television over the Internet?

If you said yes, sorry to disappoint, but you loose. IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television. It’s a transport mechanism that telephone companies and cable operators use to deliver a television like experience. For now, most of the operator-deployed IPTV systems are designed to be walled gardens.

The systems operators want to deploy in walled gardens to ensure quality of service (QOS) and limit hacking and piracy. IPTV over the public Internet is called “streaming video”. As mentioned in a previous post, Shelly Palmer describes these technologies and their application very well in “Television Disrupted”.

A predictable quality of service and control over content aggregation is very critical for advertisers as they want to enhance the viewing experience and protect their brand. They also want to have as good a knowledge as possible of who is viewing their ads. IPTV offers a two-way system that allows for census based measurement – as opposed to sample based like AC Nielsen – and transactional user experience. In addition, the deployment of IPTV systems on video game platforms, portable video devices, and the growing adoption of DVRs allows for a consumer-based time-shifted experience.

This is, pardon the cliché, a true paradigm change! Clearly, to be effective in this new framework requires to think in terms of addressable and dynamic ads… It also requires having tremendous creativity and imagination, as well as, good processes to keep budgets under control. I find this so very exciting: Better knowledge, more imagination and more fun!

If you think that I’m getting carried away, take a look at the IPTV Subscribers Wordwilde 2006-2011 forecast from iSuppli Corporation and eMarketer from April 2007. The survey predicts the number of subscribers worldwide to grow from roughly 4 million in 2006 to over 100 million in 2011, with 45% of the viewers in Europe, 39% in Asia and 16%in the Americas.