Jan 24, 2013 | Branding, Marketing
“Graph Search” may offer the potential of a financial bonus to the beleagured facebook shareholders sucked in by the IPO hype, I suspect it is, but what were they thinking when they dreamt up the name?
A brand is supposed to convey a promise, be a memorable badge for the product, and in the case of a sub brand, add to the whole. Writing this post, and the one a few days ago, I had to return to the facebook page several times to remember what the silly thing is called.
Graphs?
Greater?
Giraffe?
“Grape search” (cab sav anyone)
I know that to insiders, a “graph” is a metaphor for the map of a persons networks, a diagram that represent all the friends, comments, reviews, updates, and connections, but not everybody is an insider.
Perhaps they shoul have snuck down the road and thrown some money at the branding boys at Apple, they seem to know what they are doing.
Jan 21, 2013 | Change, Governance, Lean, Operations
The maths are simple, do more with less, and you have more left over at the end.
Productivity is not just something you aim for in the factory, the opportunities to do more with less are everywhere, in every activity undertaken.
The catch in all this is, when you identify the opportunities, free up the capacity by doing more with less, and figure out how to make the necessary changes “stick”, you have a choice to make:
- You remove the now redundant resources, and pocket the difference, or,
- You sell the added capacity that is already “paid for”, so you get the added revenue at an enhanced margin.
Sounds seductively easy, but in fact it is a tough road, littered with challenges, and nasty potholes for the unprepared.
Jan 17, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
The value of Facebook has tanked since the IPO last year, largely because after the hype, people wondered how the returns would be delivered when the obvious source, advertising, does not really work on Facebook.
However, Facebook is in the throes of launching an extensively re-engineered search facility, “Graph Search“. This facility will enable placement of extremely focused advertising in situations where the search being conducted is for things other than friendly e-conversation. This change potentially removes the barrier to successful adverting on Facebook, the disinterest in anything commercial when interacting with friends.
This Wired article on Graph Search offers detail, but essentially, the new search facility reflects peoples networks as a graph, or network chart, and the search capability can interrogate the network, and answer questions, with extensive auto-complete suggestions based on your previous activity.
Google cannot get at the data held by Facebook, that is a huge resource of people, networks, preferences, links, and reviews that can now be leveraged in searches conducted from within the Facebook community.
Similarly, the power of Linkedin is the connections between people and their work. Want to see who is connected to someone at a competitor, supplier, potential customer, and so on? now Facebook will be able to do it, perhaps better than Linkedin, particularly for the under 35’s.
An underutilised aspect of Twitter is the search capability, when used well, it is an enormously valuable addition to a Google search, and contains links that enable a deeper dive from any starting point in a topic. Other services like Pinterest also now chase the available advertising dollars, making media choices a complex nightmare.
Graph Search makes the battle for on line advertising even more interesting, and will add some extra lead into the saddlebags of newspapers as they try to monetarise their offerings. News Corp is in the middle of splitting their operations, separating newspaper film and television assets globally, restructuring to enhance revenue generation options, already having paywalls in place for their newspapers. Fairfax is expected to introduce some level of paywall sometime in the next few months in an effort to stem the bleeding.
As the search capabilities improve, and paywalls emerge, the attraction of free sources of information will increase, with the minor irritation of the presence of advertising. Facebook now appears to not only to be in a position to cash in on their huge network, but to potentially extensively disrupt the current web and remaining legacy media advertising options.
Jan 16, 2013 | Change, Personal Rant, Social Media
As a kid, I built a series of model planes, mostly WW11 fighters, flown with 2.5 – 5 cc motors, on the end of a set of wires. Loved it.
I experimented with primitive radio controlled, built a Spitfire, and put some radio gear in it, some I had scrounged from older enthusiasts, a bit I had bought, at relatively huge expense, as the only money I had was earned refilling shelves in the local supermarket , 2 afternoons a week after school. The Spit’s first flight was a disaster, literally, and it ended as many real Spits did, as a burnt patch in the grass, ending the passion, although by that time I had started to see girls through different eyes, and the supermarket flying money suddenly had competition.
Well, a lot has changed from then, in the 60’s.
Chris Anderson, one of the great writers (Editor of Wired, writer of “The Long Tail“) and innovators, has commercialised what are now being called drones, but are really only modern versions of my Spit, with cameras onboard, and in the case of military versions, I suspect a bit of a bite. The stuff on his site, DIYdrones , is reviving the itch of a boy, but the 61 year old marketer is seeing enormous commercial and nefarious potential.
It seems to me that many familiar things from years ago are making a comeback in modern form, from the VW bug, to Malibu surfboards, and my “spit”. Only difference is the new ones outperform the old by a geometric factor.
Jan 15, 2013 | Personal Rant, Social Media
The institutional response to what they do not understand is usually to ban it, and prosecute, just in case. The US Attorney has some form in this regard, as do the US legislators, they respond without adequate regard to the whole picture.
The suicide of Aaron Swartz is a sad example of this disregard, and the post below makes the point. It is another sad lesson that what you do not understand is not necessarily dangerous, so spend the time to understand before you condemn.
The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime”.
As I said yesterday, Vale Aaron.
Clay Shirky on Jan 30 posted this thoughtful piece that should be required reading.
PS. July 18 2014.
There has been a movie made of Aaron Swartz’s life, a chronicle of an amazing, and way too short life. This is a link to the movie, and my thanks to Mitch Joel for providing the information in his blog that led me to this PS.
