Filed under Water Cooler

One of the speakers at this year’s Web Content Conference proposed that Web 1.0 was about connecting people to content, Web 2.0 about connecting people to each other, and Web 3.0 will be about connecting content to people. While everyone feels differently about “Web 3.0,” and some think we should just do away with the versioning altogether (the Web is the Web is the Web), it is undeniable that content is important and will be even more important as the Internet continues to evolve. Google’s Dick Costolo talks about “hypersyndication” - a world where all content is shared, remixed, socialized and distributed everywhere. For that scenario to be possible, there has to be quality content.

Even media conglomerate Time Warner realizes the importance of quality content - its strategy is now to focus more on “content creation.” According to Time Warner’s new CEO, Jeff Bewkes, “in a digital age, content becomes more valuable, not less, because it’s becoming cheaper to deliver.”

As the headline of the New York Times article boldly proclaims, “content is back.”

I’ve been harping on the importance of fully integrating social media tactics with your company’s marketing strategy and business goals for awhile now. This week, I came across two examples that illustrate my point.

Apparently, Cartier is the first luxury brand to market itself on a mainstream social network – MySpace. My first reaction was: why MySpace?! It’s interesting that out of all the social networks to choose from, Cartier had to choose the one that had a reputation for being: creepy, sketchy, sleazy, and full of perverts, pedophiles, predators and porn. The article talks about how Cartier had to police the people who were friending the brand in order to “respect the brand’s objectives” (if you have pictures of yourself drinking beer at a party, sorry, you can’t be a friend of Cartier). Again, why MySpace?

Taking a step back – why market on a social network in the first place? How does that fit with Cartier’s business goals or branding strategy? It’s true that the current recession has hit luxury brands hard, with people cutting down on spending across the board. Even Louis Vuitton advertised on television for the first time. But is having an official presence on a social network to reach a younger audience worth the risk of diluting the brand? (Unofficial fan pages created by users are a different story for another post.)

At the other end of the spectrum, there is Threadless, a company that grew organically from an online community and is built on a social network. Users submit their T-shirt designs, vote for their favorites, and those favorites are produced and sold. Unlike most retailers, Threadless doesn’t have an inventory problem – and why should they? The T-shirts that are produced are the ones the community has already indicated a desire for. It is the pipedream of every retailer – to be able to know beforehand exactly what consumers want.

In the case of Threadless, the social network and community aspects are so fully integrated into the company that “the Threadless brand is not the shirts but the community experience,” writes Max Chafkin. Jeff Lieberman, quoted in Chafkin’s article, goes so far as to claim that “to say it’s just a T-shirt company is absurd. I look at it as a community company that happens to use T-shirts as a canvas.”

Not every company will be able to achieve the level of integration of social media that Threadless has. In fact, most probably won’t. The point is that social media tactics need to be part of something bigger – part of the business strategy and goals, and part of the company’s culture, from top to bottom.

With the recent release of iPhone 3G and the launch of Apple’s App Store, location-aware social networking applications will be making their way into the hands of more people than ever before.  The ease of use and simplicity in downloading new apps means that Apple has virtually removed the tech know-how barrier to participation.  Many of the launch day applications are free iPhone versions of popular social networking web sites.  Just about every major player has an app available for download either now or in the near future - Facebook (links open in iTunes if installed), MySpace, Twitter (via a third-party), Pownce, Flickr (via Exposure, by a third-party), and Loopt, who presented their app during Apple’s keynote announcement.  Most of these apps use your location in some way, opening up some exciting possibilities for extremely localized search, directions, and more applications hitherto unimagined.  All of these location-based apps are opt-in due to a restriction in Apple’s iPhone software development kit - the phone will prompt you if the application wants to gain access to your current location.

Of those mentioned above, Loopt has created a bit of a debacle and garnered a great deal of ill-will this week by broadcasting your phone number and current location to everyone in your contact list.

The point of Loopt is to be able to let your friends know where you are so you can get together (without having to actually communicate with anyone via text message, phone, or email).  I for one am a bit reluctant to constantly reveal my current location, even to friends, but by sending SMS text messages to everyone whose phone number you’ve ever added to your contact list, Loopt breaks a social contract by violating their users’ privacy.

Even without installing the Loopt app on my iPhone I’ve been barraged  by text messages from others who have installed it and unwittingly been sending out scores of SMSes without knowing it.  Aside from privacy concerns, sending and receiving text messages costs both the sender and recipient money.  I pay for a 200 text message plan, but after that texts are $.20 to send or receive - imagine the costs involved if you have a lot of contacts in your contact list!  Since contacts are one of the easiest things to sync to my iPhone, I have a lot of contact info for people that I don’t necessarily want to spam with text messages asking them to join a service so they can spam other people with costly SMSes.

Given the backlash on the Internet, it will likely be just a matter of time before Loopt corrects this issue, but in the meantime, be very, very careful which networks you trust with your sensitive information, including your current whereabouts.

UPDATE (16 July): Loopt has announced that they will disable the feature that automatically sends invites to everyone on your contact list in their next update.  No word yet on updates to their SMS service that will respond to the industry standard “STOP” message so non-subscribers can stop receiving spam from them.

Last week IBM’s developerWorks ran an article about The Future of PHP about the upcoming PHP 5.3 and 6.0 releases. While the new features in PHP6 may be underwhelming in terms of sheer quantity, the release marks a major milestone for PHP: Unicode support. Since Unicode recently surpassed other character encodings on the web, having every PHP function support Unicode will greatly improve the ease at which content may be managed within an application. There are numerous other efficiencies and optimizations added as most of PHP’s built-in functions have been overhauled, which should increase performance for existing code, as well.

What’s in a name(space)?

The biggest gain in PHP’s upcoming releases, however, is the addition of namespaces to the object model. Because class names must be unique, we’ve previously had to use naming conventions as workarounds to avoid naming collisions (which could be common when you include third-party class libraries), writing classes named such as:

class DuoConsulting_WebService_Xml_Parser

With namespaces, you can specify a namespace to keep class names shorter and saner:

namespace DuoConsulting::WebService::Xml;
class Parser
{
...
}


Then when you use these objects the code is more readable and less error prone. You can also use aliases to assign a shorter keyword to a long namespace:


use DuoConsulting::WebService::Xml as xml;
$parser = new xml::Parser();


You can read more about the PHP 5.3 implementation of namespaces in the CVS repository.

What’s Missing?

Nearly all of the features that have been removed in PHP6 were already deprecated in PHP5, which means you probably shouldn’t have been using them for the past three years anyway. Most PHP5-only code (such as the Zend Framework) should require no modifications, whereas some code ported from an older PHP4 codebase may need to be updated to run in PHP6. Since it was bad practice to use the vast majority of removed features even in PHP4 (such as <code>register_globals</code> which automatically created new variables based on GET and POST parameters such as those passed through a URL or web form) their removal should only reinforce better coding practices rather than break existing applications.

The near future looks bright for PHP, and since the biggest changes to the language are going to be coming in the next major point release, I suspect it may not be long before 5.3 is the de facto minimal version under which a number of applications will run.

If you wanted to know the absolute latest information on what was happening in the nail biter Democratic Primary in Indiana, there was only one source. And it wasn’t CNN or FoxNews. It was a blog from The Times in Munster, Indiana. And Google returned the blog as the second choice for the search “Indiana Election Results”

One commenter’s opinion:

Melvin Says: May 6th, 2008 at 11:00 pm

“BTW- I have definitely switched from both CNN.com and FoxNews.com to your website- much much faster updates! Kudos!”

We felt aftershocks in the office at around 10:15 this morning. The search term “chicago earthquake” is “spicy hot” right now according to Google Trends. Search activity peaked about 6 hours ago … what’s interesting (and note that the timescale is P.S.T. and we are in C.S.T.) is that search activity picks up immediately after the earthquake occurred. I experienced an earthquake in 1988 while living in upstate NY and we had to wait an hour, glued to the radio, to learn whether or not I was hallucinating. I’m not sure how quickly official news of the quake was posted, but many turned to Google for information as soon as the event occurred.

Surfing around I found this great USGS user contributed data earthquake experience map. If you felt the quake post your experience.

Robert Cringely has a great post this week, “The Truth About IT Consultants”.  He talks about the general state of IT consulting, but I think it applies nicely to the web content management system world.  As I read the article I grew concerned that this was just another trash the IT consultants rant until I came to this paragraph:

“The best consultants are the ones who come with a portfolio of products and tools. Their trick is to have a really good portfolio of stuff that really works, is really good, and can be sold and implemented quickly in a very cost-effective way. So it isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all when a consultant offers to sell you tools, as long as they are the right tools and the consultant really knows how to use them.”

Exactly what we are all about!

Now and then companies feel compelled to send a blanket untargeted email to everyone whose email address they have ever acquired. Well, control that urge. But if you’re going to do that, here’s a hint: Don’t share your email list with all of your recipients.  If you put everyone’s address in the “To:” line, you’ve just given your list away – and possibly worse!

I received an email from a Chicago public relations firm announcing their office move. In this email, they gifted me with over 130 email addresses of clients, prospects and friends. Thank you. Pretty stupid I thought. And from a PR firm yet. Wow.

Not more than 2 hours passed on the same day when I received an email from Lewis Lin at Google. Lewis addressed his email to me and over 300 of my Google marketing peers. This time, war broke out as opportunists among the 300 began to solicit the list they’d just received. Aside from the emails going back to Lewis telling him what an idiot he is, this one message among the skirmishers captured the general sentiment: “Contact me again and I will make sure that our lawyers contact you…Failing this … will result in me adding your domain to black lists.”

The best practice, of course, is to send targeted emails to opt-in subscribers who both expect and value your email. Preferably, you will send these emails using an email service provider that provides the technology to properly deliver and track the delivery results. But if you feel the need to blast your trusted business partners with an email, do yourself a favor and conceal the recipients. To do otherwise puts your organization, its reputation and your proprietary client email list in peril.

Years ago Paul Simon sang of “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” And there are probably as many ways for an email newsletter publisher to offer its subscribers a way to leave – or unsubscribe from –  future mailings. Until today, my favorite bad email unsubscribe practice has been “Guess my email address.” This bad practice requires that I tell the email publisher what my email address is.   Then they tell me whether I guessed right in telling them which of several addresses that float into my Outlook client is the one to which they mailed. Chances are you have your own favorite but un-amusing bad email unsubscribe practice.

But I submit there is a new and undisputed king of bad email unsubscribe practices held by a leader in the technology field. In an email from Adobe System Incorporated came the following option:

"This is an advertising message from Adobe Systems Incorporated, its affiliates and agents ("Adobe"), 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, CA 95110 USA. If you’d prefer not to receive e-mail like this from Adobe in the future, please mail your unsubscribe request to:

There it is, the winner and king of bad email unsubscribe practices.  If you want to get off this email list, send them a letter. Can anything compete with this?

You may have caught the incredible PR coup that Amazon enjoyed a couple weeks ago when New York Times columnist Joe Nocera shared a first-hand account of his experience with a company completely focused on client delight.

Unlike a lot of these testimonial stories, this one wasn’t placed by a well-connected PR firm. Rather, it was actually misplaced. That is, it was a misplaced delivery and a leap to save the day (and forestall the Christmas Grinch) by Amazon that won them this priceless ink.

I was humbled by this story. Every day we work to find ways to deliver delightful client service. It is easy to mouth the words, “client focused” or “customer-centric” or any number of phrases that, at worst, become clichés or company kitchen poster slogans. The truth is, clients are a tough and demanding crowd. So achieving this outcome doesn’t just happen with a smile, a thank you and an annual holiday card.

Customer satisfaction is not enough.  Fred Reichheld in his book, The Ultimate Question asks “Would you recommend us to a friend?” Only a 9 or 10 on a 10 point scale is considered a positive score. And the value of this personal referral is the path to sustainable growth. Having a national columnist make your business the object lesson of client love is certainly remarkable. But the same activity happens daily among millions of businesses, and I hope Duo is one of them.

At Duo we are focused on client satisfaction.  We hope to understand our clients’ needs and goals, and respect their knowledge of their business. We are committed to setting achievable customer expectations, and ensuring that commitments to customers are met.  If you are a client – let me know if we delivered on this expectation.  If you’re not yet a client and want to put us to the test, please give me a call.