Living in San Francisco we’re surrounded by technological early adopters, so it’s hard to believe that some companies are *still* asking this question, but it’s true.
In response I came across this awesome video from timetogetsocial that helps answer that very question.
If you, or someone you know, is still questioning the usefulness of social media for businesses, I think this video will get you one step closer to understanding its relevance for all businesses. Are you listening?
This 2009 holiday season, not only do we look back on accomplishments at work and in our personal lives, but we remember those we unfortunately lost. Here at Scout Labs we remember our teammate Matt Ericson whom we lost to Lymphoma this year. Matt was young and active when he headed to Europe for a 3-week vacation with his wife Kirsten. He returned from his European vacation and went straight from the airport to the hospital. He got his Lymphoma diagnosis, underwent treatment and passed away all within a nine-month span.
In fact, every four minutes someone is diagnosed with a blood cancer, and every 10 minutes someone dies from a blood cancer. To help find a cure for lymphoma and other blood-related cancers, Scout Labs is supporting a non-profit called the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). It is the world’s largest voluntary health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research, education and patient services. Our goal, hopefully with your help, is to raise $10K.
There are two ways you can donate:
Donate Securely Online
Or mail a check or money order payable to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to:
Attn: Randy Ksar
809 11th Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Remember, now - more than ever - your support is critical. We must accelerate our efforts to find cures for leukemia, Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphoma and myeloma, and to offer support to all those touched by blood cancers. Scout Labs is steadfast in our commitment to cure blood cancers and to improve the quality of life of patients and their families.
Please help us spread the word! That’s what we in social media are good at :-) Help us reach our 2009 holiday goal of $10,000 by donating here:
http://svmb.lls.llsevent.org/scoutlabs
Questions? Comment on this blog post or tweet us at @scoutlabs
Thank you for your support and have a very happy and healthy holiday and New Year.
— Jennifer and the Scout Labs Team
There is a large fabulous agency who has a large fabulous toymaker as a client. Together they are using Scout Labs to monitor various toy and doll brands, and some really interesting insights are coming back! Inspired by those findings, I thought I’d dig in to Scout Labs and see if I can find any other juicy doll and toy news to share with you all while demonstrating how Scout Labs works.
I started with the Bratz brand, as I keep hearing news updates about the epic trademark infringement battle between Bratz parent company, MGA Entertainment, and Mattel, the maker of Barbie.
For those of you who do not have nine year old daughters, the Bratz dolls — Chloe, Jade, Yasmine, and Sasha — are BFFs and are sassy / trashy younger versions of the Barbie doll. Way more bling. Way more color streaks in their hair. Lips that are way more plump. Way into fashion.
In Scout Labs, if you click on the Sentiment tab within a Bratz search, you actually see a mix of positive and negative views expressed.
But I wanted to know what moms, or parents, think about Bratz dolls, guessing that it might be a bit different. To do that, I created a search for “Bratz”
I have never been a fan of the Bratz doll line and we haven’t had them in this house since the first time my daughter received one as a gift — the baby Bratz doll was wearing thong underwear — eewww. So the recent news the Bratz manufacturer, MGA Entertainment, must stop producing the dolls because of a copyright infringement lawsuit from Mattel is music to my ears.
Even The Onion chimed in with this riveting piece that exposes how the Bratz dolls are warping the self-image of today’s young girls by making them want to have giant heads too:
As I scanned the Bratz-hating posts, I noticed some equally strong words about Dora the Explorer. Wait, Dora, the happy backpack-toting multi-lingual traveler beloved by preschoolers?
Yep. Another scandal!
Mattel has announced that it is “updating” Dora to create a hip junior-high girl (whose silhouette does really look an awful lot like a Bratz doll).
From their press release: “As tweenage Dora, our heroine has moved to the big city, attends middle school and has a whole new fashionable look.” OK, is that really necessary?
In case you were wondering what parents think of the change, you can look to Scout Labs’ Frequent Words module which summarizes the top conversations, and you quickly see that both “skank” and “skanky” made it into the top 20 this week!
Good to also note those are NEW terms (in orange) this week, meaning that we haven’t seen ‘skank’ or ‘skanky’ associated with Dora the Explorer in past weeks. Go figure.
So, yes, parents are outraged over this one, inspiring some very clever blog post titles, such as:
Dora the Slutty Explorer
Dora the Sexplorer
Don’t Bratz Dora!
You can sign the petition here.
Marin county had a teacher training day yesterday, crowding the commuter ferry with teenagers headed to the city for the day. I was crammed into a booth seat with five of them. Most of their conversation revolved around themselves and the remainder of their high school careers: who was going to college, who wasn’t, who was failing English, who was dating whom (only dating wasn’t exactly the word used), all conveyed with that teenage langour that is supposed to communicate just how little they care about anyone, how little they are shocked by anything, how very boring the world is to sophisticated sixteen year olds such as themselves.
And all of them carried phones. “Ryan’s meeting us at Peet’s in the ferry building,” says one to the group. Conversation shifted to Ryan for all of 30 seconds before “Al Franken won his senate seat by 215 votes!” said another. Conversation shifted in the Al Franken direction for another minute or so (“Who’s Al Franken?” asked a young woman whose outfit suggested the desire to evolve into more of a Donna Rice kind of politician). “My mom says me to be home by 7. Can you believe it?” “Shell says she’s driving in but she doesn’t know where to park.” “Dylan thinks we should see an IMAX. Lemme just see what Caitlin is doing…” murmured another young lad, all of them texting away on devices seemingly integrated into the palms of their hands.
Which is just what they are, of course. Fully integrated. Not with those particular hardware devices, but into the fabric of a world that provides the instant access to people and information via technology. My nanny’s sixteen year old kid routinely incurs mobile phone bills she can’t pay because 2000 text messages a month is “not enough.” As I understand it, she is far from alone. The speed and quantity with which teenagers create and consume these microbits of information seems astonishing to all us oldsters still tapping away at spreadsheets on the way to our job-jobs in the city.
But then again, maybe not. All humans are all social creatures. The main limitation on how often we connect, at any age, is our means of doing it. My 65 year old dad is still figuring out Vchat. Throughout my workday I am treated to glimpses of him cursing at the computer as he invites, disconnects, and reconnects: waltonjf has invited you to chat. “Hello? Margaret? Is it-” waltonjf has left the chat. waltonjf has invited you to chat. “G-dammit! How can you tell if-” waltonjf has left the chat. waltonjf has invited you to chat. My 80 year old neighbor types three sentence messages on yellowing index cards and leaves them stuck in the doors of people in the neighborhood, a sort of old-school Twitterer. She often watches for me to come home at night and knocks on my door for a glass of pink wine if I make it home during cocktail hour. Over Christmas, I visited my 95 year old grandmother at her home in Virginia. She is physically very fragile but still compos mentis. She told me that email was becoming difficult for her to manage, what with her vision and the arthritis in her hands, and not to expect emails from her any more. My eyes filled with tears.
“They’ll be coming from Zee’s grandson instead,” she said, beckoning forward her middle aged Ethiopian caretaker. Shyly the woman showed me a picture of her roughly 10 year old grandson. Buck teeth, black skin, intelligent eyes, a sweet smile and ears like giant antennae. “He comes over to use the computer after school. Are you on something called Facebook?”
Long live her inner teenager.
I am not one of those people who decorate for holidays. No fall wreaths on the door come October, no bowls of decorative Easter Eggs on the sideboard in April or green Jell-o desserts on St Paddy’s Day. Most of the year I can get away with this but at Christmas people find it shocking. Every person over my threshold after the first weekend in December invariably asks, “Where’s your tree?” So I explain about not wanting to kill even sustainably harvested trees and create fire hazards in the living room and spill water on the Ikea laminate flooring and that the kids are so small that ornaments would be a safety hazard and besides I don’t own any ornaments and we’re going to be on the East Coast starting on the 21st and…it all washes right over them. “You have to get a tree,” they pronounce, in tones of absolute finality. “For the kids. Everyone has a tree. It’s not Christmas without a tree.”
“They’re right,” my husband will say, after the door shuts behind every tree-happy visitor. “Everyone has a tree. Even the Jews next door have a tree.”
“Um,” I usually reply, looking over the edge of my laptop, or up from the floor where I am mopping up dried applesauce, or over from the couch where I am reading Ping to the kids for the 99th time. “You go right ahead.” But somehow my participation seems critical to getting it done and I just don’t prioritize holiday décor. I am Type A about enough things in my life that I can live with my lack of holiday decorating ambition. I put a dried wreath up on the front door back in November as my token offering to the season. It’ll get shoved on a shelf in the garage sometime before Valentine’s Day, missing a few more plastic berries and manufactured twigs, and I’m ok with that.
Back east for the holidays, the selection, erection, and decoration of the tree was a major event at both grandparental gatherings. While there is something magical about a well decorated Christmas tree, I was grateful to get on a plane and fly away from the post- Christmas cleanup ritual of picking pine needles and sap balls out of the rug, dealing with murky tree water and untangling light strings. Back in California, I found a box of secondhand tree ornaments on the front porch. They were a thoughtful Christmas gift from the aforementioned Jews next door, who apparently think we lack Christmas spirit and ought to get a tree next year.
All this got me thinking: Am I a Grinch? Am I the only mom in the world so lacking in holiday spirit as to NOT get and decorate some kind of tree for the holidays? Aren’t there other moms out there who are avoiding the tree ritual because they don’t have the time, the space, the desire, the sheer holiday energy to take on the whole tree thing when they are already baking and wrapping and cooking and shopping? Am I alone?
Turns out- I am alone. The only people who don’t have a Christmas tree are a) on antidepressants that clearly aren’t working, b) homeless, c) about to be abandoned by their feckless parents, d) victims of a natural disaster, or e) completely broke, in which case they are advised to decorate a houseplant or a build their own tree out of scrap wood. One of the greatest things about Web 2.0 is that you never really feel alone. There’s always someone else’s reality to immerse yourself in, a blog, a video, a flickstream, a twitter stream. There are people out there making aircraft out of bic pens and filming transgender OK GO tribute videos and raising worms on organic raisins. Somehow this awesome display of variety usually makes me marvel at the sheer range and exuberance of human endeavor, makes me glad to be a part of it all. This is first time it has made me feel completely alone.
Time to go scoop up some Christmas ornaments in the post holiday sales, I guess.
If my mom, my dad, my Aunt Mary, or anyone under the age of 60 actually read blogs beyond the Huffington Post, I would be worried that this post would blow my Christmas surprise, but I think I’m safe. I just ordered $2K worth of shoes for them from Zappos. I bought everyone multiple pairs and figured they’d get to keep one and that would be their present.
It’s not the down economy that is making me buy my relatively affluent relatives new shoes for Christmas. Nor do they “need” new shoes, per se. It’s that a) I’m a working mom and have NO time to shop anyplace but online and b) my favorite online shopping site is Zappos. I love the richness of the customer reviews, which help me feel like I’ve hit on just the thing for mom’s size 5 narrows, dad’s size 11 wides, and Aunt Mary’s bunions. I love the wide selection, so I can get a couple backup pairs. I love the free shipping both ways policy, and the well- engineered returns process, which makes buying from them so painless that the only shoes I’ve purchased elsewhere in the last 5 years have been bike shoes and Campers, neither of which they carry (I blame this on Camper). What also strikes me, after reading literally hundred of reviews of shoes in pursuit of the pair that will alleviate Aunt Mary’s suffering, is how almost EVERY review, whatever it says about the shoes, has to mention how great Zappos is. Here’s a random sampling of the Twitter stream:
just signed up for to be a Zappos VIP - free overnight shipping “till the cows come home!” yay!
less than 30 minutes ago
Kids Nike Skeet Jr. !! JUST MY SIZE!!! http://zeta.zappos.com/product/7416570/color/150475
less than 30 minutes ago
I did indeed sign up for Zappos VIP :) I have a pair of boots I’d like… will have to try it after next paycheck
less than 30 minutes ago
roxyyo, @jbillingsley, Great tip on adding live chat to 404 pages. We’re adding it to our Zappos Zeta 404 page: http://zeta.zappos.com/show
less than 30 minutes ago
zappos really is un-frickin-real in their access to consumers. Serious kudos to you guys for re-defining customer care
about 1 hour ago
Zappos is doing a great job of active listening- they have listened to what customers wanted and proactively given it to them, from free shipping to live chat on 404 pages. It seems like a cool place to work though I’m not sure how successful they will be in commoditizing their way of doing business. But compare this to Target, which also has great merchandise and where I actually began my holiday shopping journey:
Apparently I’m not the only one feeling a lack of love these days: Why ban mobile price checking? And check out this random dip into the Twitter stream for Target. Where is the customer joy?
while wearing a red sweater at target, a fellow customer asked me for help.
less than 15 minutes ago
Has to go to target before work to replace the christmas lights he broke last night.
less than 15 minutes ago
DealNews: Battery-Operated 4-Piece Flickering Tealight Candles for $14 + free shipping: Target offers t.. http://tinyurl.com/5cjpbn
less than 15 minutes ago
heading to target
less than 15 minutes ago
here’s my thing though…i need to stop at target to get a few finishing touches to my gift for my boss tomorrow.
Stupid Target.
less than 30 minutes ago
never going to Target in Newbury Park again… yuck.
less than 30 minutes ago
I’m just sorry to hear that Zappos, like so many other internet companies, in this down economy, trimmed their team. Hope it doesn’t erode the CS that has their customers constantly reviewing, blogging and tweeting about them.
Merry Christmas Zappos - you got my whole holiday budget.
PS: The new shopping interface is a definite improvement, but still needs some work. CALL ME!
Two weeks ago, our family went to Disneyland - the first visit for my 5 year-old girl, Fiona, and 3 year-old boy, Rowan. The kids were appropriately dumbfounded. They are still talking about how cool it was to see REAL Tinkerbell fly from the Matterhorm to the castle to start the fireworks show. They are still talking bragging to the checkers at the grocery store that they went on Thunder Mountain Railroad and Splash Mountain. Fiona is still dreamily recalling how wonderful it was to hug and banter with Belle, Ariel, Snow White, Cinderella and others at our “Disney Princess Breakfast” (Of course, poor Rowan thought that we were going to eat Disney Princesses, which explained his terror as we headed out that morning).
But I’m still talking about the trip too. What an amazing “product”.
1. Brilliant vision. Walt Disney had a vision for a family entertainment park that was so extensive and so complete, that even 50 years later, nothing has even come close to it in the world. Like Steve Jobs - or Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr., for that matter - Walt Disney was “all in”. He wasn’t doing a job. He found his “calling” and his work was an unconditional commitment. He worked tirelessly - obsessively - to bring his vision to life.
2. A complete experience. Disney has thought of everything. For example, when you order you tickets in advance, you receive a “welcome packet” for the family to open together around the dinner table. Pins, pictures, magical coins, an array of gleaming, beautifully-designed credit-card-like tickets, each one with a different character on them, plus a hand-written note from the person who prepared the packet for us: “I sprinkled extra fairy dust on this packet so that your trip will be the happiest of all. Jesse”. OK, if you don’t have kids that will sound incredibly corny, but to the rest of you - you know. They make it easy and fun to buy the product (Disney Vacation packages), they build excitement before you even get access to the product, and deliver an experience which is really beyond your family’s wildest dreams.
3. Execution with excruciating attention to detail. When we entered the park on the first day, we used our gleaming, credit-card-like tickets to enter the Main Gate. You scan your ticket under a barcode reader, but instead of hearing “BEEP” or “EH!!!”, we heard “Tinkle tinkle ting!!!” - the sound of Tinkerbell’s magic wand. How cool is that? The next day, we eager ly pushed though the Main Gate for day 2, and when we scanned our tickets this time we heard Jimeney Cricket’s laugh. OK, so Disney called the barcode scanner vendor and said, “I don’t want a beep sound. I want a catalog of sounds that we can upload and cycle through at different times on different days”. How much did that add to the cost of their entry system? Which brings me to…
4. An obsessive focus on product, not profitability. After exploring caves on Tom Sawyer’s island one afternoon, we headed back via raft to the dock at New Orleans Square. As we came off the raft, I noticed a man, dressed in swarthy coats leaning against a fence, playing a penny whistle. He wasn’t talking to anyone or doing much. But his presence - the lonely sound of his instrument and his old tarnished, (Disney) pocketwatch - transformed the place. In fact, Walt even invested in details that very few people ever even noticed. “Hidden Mickeys” are everywhere in Disneyland and their spotters form an elite community of fanatics. . A cost-cutting consultant would show up at Disneyland and have a field day. But they don’t show up at Disneyland, which is the point.
5. Operational excellence. Disneyland hosts 14.7 million guests per year. It is open every day of the year, some nights closing at midnight and opening at 8am. And at 8am, every morning, the place is immaculate. Everything is where it should be. Every piece of trash is picked up (I checked one day — that little ice cream wrapper in the corner of the castle moat was indeed gone at 8am the next morning). No paint is ever faded. And every cast member is “on”. Who cleans the moat at 2am? And when does Tinkerbell practice her zip-line “flight” from Matterhorn to castle? There must be a fake Disneyland / training ground somewhere where she can train? The scale, scope and level of quality is inspiring.
6. A team of people who live the vision every day. “Ahoy sailors! Looks like good weather for our voyage!” We are genuinely, honestly greeted this way by cast member Paul as we weave our way closer to the Finding Nemo Submarine Adventure. He is not tired, but downright jolly — not the way most people look at 3pm on a work day. This is the result of rigorous hiring and training practices as well as creative scheduling and staffing - cast members do only short shifts on any given ride to prevent monotony from setting in.
Obviously, modern Disneyland is the way it is because of the efforts of thousands of people, but Walt Disney started it all and grew a team with a similar quest for perfection. The following quotes from Walt Disney sum up his leadership style and approach to “product development”.
“Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.”
“When we consider a project, we really study it — not just the surface idea, but everything about it. And when we go into that new project, we believe in it all the way. We have confidence in our ability to do it right. And we work hard to do the best possible job.”
“Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.”
“I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.”
“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”
Kids or no kids, I think it’s time to plan a trip to Disneyland…
The guys at 37 Signals have a list of what they call “red flag” words that often come up in business communications and can get teams into trouble. Words like “only” and “can’t” (as in, it should only take you a day to add this feature, and we can’t ship the product without it) lead down rat holes of feature creep and finger pointing.
For me, one of those red flags is “what if…”
What ifs are the sparks that ultimately generate every interesting, fresh, unconventional idea. They are the stuff of all the brainstorm sessions and experiments that characterize the really exciting parts of the product development process. What ifs produce ideas, and ideas are easy, so when a team is in the slog of getting things done, it’s hard not to get way ahead of them with lots of big and interesting ideas. You start to anticipate every possible scenario and edge case. You think about ways your product might tap into new markets before you’ve even addressed its core market.
Ideas are also impatient. They pile up behind the older ideas, and they push and they push until a few get through. And then a few more, and a few more, and while you may have started with something simple, you now risk ending up with this (click image to enlarge):
You know you’re in trouble when your light switch requires written instructions (photo courtesy John Maeda).
On the other hand, what ifs can be part of a sanity check. Asking “what if…” can be like hitting the pause button, allowing you to step back, size things up and gauge whether they’re on track. What ifs can also help you subtract and simplify. It’s a great exercise to look at your ideas and ask, “what if we got rid of…” and “what if it just…”
I think the “It’s about time” clock is a great example of this kind of thinking:
These guys asked themselves how many people really need precision around what time it is and effectively said, “what if clocks only told you what you need to know - in plain English?”
This isn’t to say that thinking small is always better than thinking big. Each has its place, but either way, “what if…” is a phrase to look out for in business communications. When you hear it, make sure it’s leading you in the right direction.
Fred Shapiro,Editor for the Yale Book of Quotations has published his Top 10 Most Memorable Quotes of 2007. Ah, so many good ones. But “Don’t Tase Me, Bro”, a phrase that swept the nation after a U.S. college student used it seeking to stop campus police from throwing him out of a speech by Sen. John Kerry, made the top of the list.
This quote became pop culture in record time this year. Two days later, according to Wired:
The other most memorable quotes of 2007:
2. The tortuous answer by Lauren Upton, the South Carolina contestant in the Miss Teen America contest, responding to the question of why one-fifth of Americans are unable to locate the United States on a map: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and Iraq and everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us.”
3. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s October comment at Columbia University in New York, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”
4. Shock jock Don Imus comments about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team: “That’s some nappy-headed hos there”.
5. “I don’t recall.” — Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ repeated response to questioning at a congressional hearing about the firing of U.S. attorneys.
6. “There’s only three things he (Republican presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani) mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.” — Sen. Joseph Biden, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate.
7. “I’m not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody (Vice President Dick Cheney) who has a 9 percent approval rating.” — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat.
8. “(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom.” — Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig’s explanation of why his foot touched that of an undercover policeman in a men’s room.
9. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” — Biden describing rival Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
10. “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.” — Former President Jimmy Carter in an interview in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper.
I’ll have to do a 2007 Top Ten most painful moments for companies caused by regular old consumers and their new media, next…
