Krugman's misguided, interesting take on Ballmer's passing

Perhaps, it’s not so good to be the King

Last week Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer announced he will step down within the year. The news sparked excitement and agitation and even personal ridicule. Everyone, and with good reason, assumes Ballmer is being forced out. This week Paul Krugman piled it on. 

"This came very sudden and wasn't of Ballmer's choosing," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. "Any time there is an extended search announced, it means that it hasn't been planned."

Back in the 1990s Microsoft was so big, and so powerful many were throwing around monopolistic allegations, and it’s former leader Bill Gates was forced to fend off antitrust charges. It was the first official dynasty of the digital age. And Bill Gates was its King. An embittered Gates left the corporation, rising star Google and fierce rival Apple Inc., have in recent years chomped away at market share. So, with the fall of Ballmer, many are proclaiming the King and the dynasty officially dead. Krugman in fact has likened Ballmer’s departure and Microsoft’s overall stagnation to complacent villagers whose gates have been stormed by disruptive though innovative barbarians.
The trouble for Microsoft came with the rise of new devices whose importance it famously failed to grasp, Krugman wrote.

 “There’s no chance,” declared Mr. Ballmer in 2007, “that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”

Desert tribesmen... always have more courage and social cohesion than settled, civilized folk, so every once in a while they will sweep in and conquer lands whose rulers have become corrupt and complacent. They create a new dynasty — and, over time, become corrupt and complacent themselves, ready to be overrun by a new set of barbarians.

See how he pulls out a particularly ridiculous-in-hindsight quote to validate his point?

While I do agree to some degree with Krugman and others. Innovation is more difficult at larger organization. Complacency does at times fester. Smaller organizations trying to get to the top of the food chain are at time more inspired, and they are often more agile in terms of execution. But then Krugman goes on to predict the same decline for Apple Inc., whose leadership is also currently being questioned by its board, then predicts the same fate for Google Inc., and then says the cycle of complacency will continue to play out at nausea.

Krugman's a smart guy but he doesn’t always allow reality to interfere with a good analogy. Kind of like when he said the only problem with the stimulus was that it wasn’t big enough, and he essentially repeated the same notion when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act. In doing so, ignoring the reality that a larger stimulus was no more possible than a complete EU-inspired overhaul of the health care system. Here he ignores the fact that with the exception of the digital space, the same market titans have been dominating to Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000, for that matter, for the last 40 years. Once in a while, new products and visionary leaders may shake things up but the “barbarians” as he put it who are succesfully able to storm the gates of “civilization” are few and far between.  

There are more pronounced shits in the technology space but that’s not the result of complacency or corruption, but because it is a dynamic, ever-evloving marketplace that is defined by innovation. 

Anthropology aside, look at the mobile market. There was a time when Blackberry was King. It failed to adapt and was replaced by those who did. Take Apple Inc. It didn’t simply come into existence in 1997, it was reinvented in 1997 by Steve Jobs who returned to the company and personally led its innovative renaissance. Remember those old Apple computers? If you want to catch a glimpse of one, you will have to go to a dusty vintage store in Brooklyn there a kindly old shop keeper has fashioned one into an elaborate fishbowl. Back then, folks were writing the same tired out old eulogies for Apple. 

Consider Intel in the 1980s. With an infusion of cash from I.B.M., it  came back and remains a formidable brand in technology. Or what about I.B.M. in the 90s, discount PCs nearly sent the company into bankruptcy, yet it too recovered. Dell computers likewise has peaked, lulled and endured. 

Microsoft's troubles have nothing to do with Ibn Khaldun or North African history, it’s about leadership, vision, arrogance, and the fact that a “digital dynasty” is somewhat of an oxymoron. The market is driven by innovation and must always be led by innovators not cheerleaders. But you don’t have to be a barbarian to innovate, and even if you are a member of “civilization,” you don’t have to become complacent or corrupt.

Consider this, while Microsoft spends millions in marketing Bing, Google is working with automotive manufacturers to building cars that drive themselves, weird space-aged glasses (even though you will never catch me wearing one), and they are also invading a real monopoly, the telecom market, with Google fibre. 

Consider this, Amazon launched essentially as a bookseller at a time when the publishing industry was going through a downturn from which it has never entirely recovered and just a few weeks ago bought the Washington Post.

“I would argue Microsoft does have a financial problem, and it’s been the fear of losing those massive profits from Windows and Office,” said George F. Colony, the Chief Executive of Forrester Research. “By doing everything it can to try to protect those profits, Microsoft has taken a defensive position for more than a decade. And in technology, if you play defense you’re going to lose.”

Microsoft does have a problem. It lacks technical leadership. It seems to have conceded innovation, in recent years, to its competitors. In short, it could use a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates. It needs a leader who is willing to take risks, try and fail at new things, understands the “fierce urgency of now” and does not spend all its capital simply cheerleading old products in a market that is so clearly driven by innovation. 

That reality has not been lost on Ballmer himself. In a memo to employees he admitted, “One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made over time is not wanting to nurture innovations where I either didn’t get the business model or we didn’t have it.” 

So there you go, the one truism of the technology space: Adapt or die. It’s just that simple. But regardless of what Krugman thinks, Microsoft is a long way from being dead.

Content Matters....

How you engage with your customers matter, how you present your brand and represent your corporate DNA matters. We create content strategies that matter. 

Creating a content strategy

Step One: What have you got? 

What content do you have? For that matter, is it any good? Is something you tabled and filed away 3 years ago useful? Open up that folder deep in your hard drive and take a look. Put it in a spreadsheet and label it like so: Unique identifier, Page title/document/url, then Type (video, pdf, word doc., graphic etc.), and finally Notes (is it good? what it’s about?  This is our content inventory. 

Step Two: Who Are You Trying To Reach? 

You are not the audience, nor is your team. Your needs, motivations are likely much different than your customers and prospects. You may have a deft grasp on your industry, services, and benefits but your customers do not. 

Step Three: How do you reach them?

Google has tools to find keywords and phrases your potential customers are using to find information. For the most part your customers still have to come to you. 

Step Four: Embrace your inner geek

Create some customer and prospect segmentation in place. Think Demographics, psychographics, technographics, geotargeting, there are so many useful and nerdy ways of slicing and diving your customers. Remember this, we all like the series Mad men, but these days it’s way less about swagger and three martini lunches than analytics. Embrace it.  

Step Five: Know your customer's needs

Consider holding a persona development workshop. It’s simply skteching out the distinct groups of people you are trying to reach, labeling them by their wants/needs/circumstances, and assigning values to each one. With each persona, you form an outline of the content that will satifsy their needs (flesh out what type of content would most appeal to them, channels, etc. Do not limit yourself. Consider creating values as opposed to eliminating anything. 

Step Six: Mind the Gap

Now the difference between the content you have and the content your audience needs is your gap analysis. With this information, you’re ready to construct a strategy for the acquisition/creation, production, maintenance, and governance for your content marketing initiative.

5 ways to turn readers into content curators

Facebook "Likes," Google + 1 ups, Twitter followers are only worthwhile when they yield engagement. The initial engagement involves you and your immediate readers, people you make contact with or who make contact with you. But the real impact of social media is the multiplier effect. That is, when your readers take your content and shares it with their friends, followers and connections. The real trick, as heavy-hitters like TechCrunch and Mashable very well know, is creating content that is so valuable, accessible and enjoyable that your readers choose to re-post it and share it across various mediums and platforms. 

While many marketing types view content curation as the practice of packaging a broad range of issue-specific content, organic reader-driven, content curation is often more valuable.

Know your audience: 

The starting point of all communications is to think about the people who will read it. What are their interests? What does the majority of your audience have in common? What type of content, in what form, and on what channel would they find most useful? If you were them, what content would you choose to share with your network? Why? What do they want to achieve?

Content. Content. And Content. 

As everyone keeps telling you, content marketing is the next big thing or the next better thing. But too often content is immediately generated around what you want your readers to buy or do as opposed to fresh, accessible content they want to consume, know, or understand better. 

I am not saying that a direct call-to-action is not an appropriate element of your overall content strategy, but it will be ignored and may alienate your reader if it is not accompanied by value-driven content. First ask, what is your objective? Do you want to sell a product or build a relationship? If your answer is the former, then ask who would you be more likely to make a purchase from? A stranger or someone you trust and who understands your needs?

Timing. 

Automation is a great tool, but you can’t rely entirely upon them. Not only does it make real-time engagement more difficult, it prevents you from capitalizing on the organic ebb and flow of various channels. 

Do you know the peak hours for Pinterest users? Is that the same as Twitter? Do people log in more frequently to Facebook on the weekend or through the work week, after hours or during work hours? And for what purpose?

Most people use Facebook during the week and often times after work with Thursday being the peak day of the week. But the same is not the case for Twitter. And the truth is they are often less interested in branded messaging during those times but more likely to respond to geographically-specific display ads. Think for a second, it is Thursday evening and you are considering going out for a meal, and a Groupon deal to a local restaurant is on the side of the screen, are you more likely to click on it? But let’s say you are considering purchasing a car, wouldn’t you be more likely to peruse a digital showroom on the weekend? Or what about a home improvement project?

Timing is critical in the digital space as we are trying to create relationships and connections at the right time, and not simply contribute to the white noise that pervades far too many consumer experiences.

Headlines that pop. 

Generally speaking 8 out of 10 will read the headline while only 2 out of 10 will fully read the first paragraph. While a good Twitter headline differs from a good headline on a website or social bookmarking site, there are some general rules. 

• Be simple and direct. 
• Clever is good but only when it is appropriate. 
• Use puns with caution. 
• Use the active voice at all times. 
• Try to include keywords that work well with Search Engines. 
• Don’t get weighted down with numbers. 
• Don’t capitalize every word. 
• And try not to use colons and semicolons as they are notoriously unreliably translated on social bookmarking sites.

Consider the channel.  

Quite simply, social media channels are the same in a very broad way – they are virtual town halls in some respects, but they are different in very specific ways. They are only useful when you understand that. For instance, Pinterest is almost entirely visual where Twitter until recently was entirely character-driven…

Defining The Obama Doctrine: Of Doves and Drones

For a man awarded the Nobel Peace Prize within months of taking office, began
his second term with an impassioned vow to bring troops home from Afghanistan
and owes his political career to his opposition to the war in Iraq, President
Obama’s presidential Doctrine is murky at best.
Due to recently leaked Justice Department memo, we learned the Obama
administration’s infamous drone kill list includes U.S. citizens. To make things
worse, it took the administration a fews to agree to provide information to
Congress as to who is on that list and why. This has put Obama at odds with even
some of his most long-standing progressives allies.
Progressives were relatively quiet when Obama deemed closing
Guantanamo Bay politically unattainable and then expanded the Bushera
use of warrantless wire-tapping. Now, many are fed up. Every
decision short of putting troops on the ground -- from Iran to Syria to his
infamous leading from behind strategy in Libya -- is denigrated by the
right as weakness.
Obama appears to be, ungracefully, balancing drones and doves without bothering
to explain or justify the contradiction. He appears to be, while reducing the U.S.
military footprint in the Arab World, waging a covert war against individuals as
opposed to countries.
If playing the middle is supposed to help avoid the trappings of left and
right, it ain’t working.
As a progressive, I gotta say it’s not the drones. If 9/11, Iraq and
Afghanistan taught me anything, it’s that the war on terror is more like
the war on drugs than a traditional military engagement. There’s no
Terror country with a capital called Jihad. The enemy, I get it, is illusive.
When you find them, you don’t can’t just gear up an Army and storm the
Castle. The problem is Obama’s unwillingness to articulate his position.
I’m beginning to wonder if it’s just arrogance, or if there is a Doctrine at
all? Perhaps he is just a man responding to events?
The Bush Doctrine, even Sarah Palin knows by now, was simple. It was
all about the preemptive strike and this idea that our national security
depended upon our willingness to strike the first blow.
With Clinton, it was more nuanced but no less profound. From the escalation in
Somalia to Serbia bombings to invading the Haiti and all the diplomatic capital
spent on Irish and Middle East peace negotiations, Clinton believed instability
anywhere was a threat to stability everywhere.
Prior to sending troops to Serbia, Clinton famously said this:
“It's easy...to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that
valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa, or
some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of
our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether
we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is,
what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and
spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be
everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and
where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.”
Shockingly, Obama’s Doctrine is more nuanced than Clinton’s yet less
articulate than Bush. Obama can remain quiet on the drone issue if he
wants. He does not have to campaign again, and as long as the end result
is fewer U.S. soldiers killed, I doubt the political backlash will build to critical
mass. But the long-term repercussions of this policy could prove even more
hazardous than the Bush-era torturing of suspected terrorists, and
ultimately we, the American people, deserve an explanation.

Social Media for Social Justice

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What Trayvon Martin can teach us about social media as an agent of change

The new word I love and hate is Slacktivism.  

Wikipedia explains it as a pejorative formed out of the words slackerand activism, and describes "feel-good" measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction. I say It is undeniably themost addictive, lazy, and non-participatory of modern social justice engagement. See something strolling along your Facebook newsfeed, click ‘Like’ and it’s done. If you really care, you might even click twice and type your name onto an electronic petition or two. 

I love it because, unlike so many obtuse and misplaced attempts at categorizing, it’s just so true. Weird thing is, I hate it for the same reason.

In the last few weeks, due to two major social media/social justice campaigns, I’ve had slacktivism on the brain.  One, Kony 2012, illustrates the ridiculousness of social media as a vehicle of change. The other, Trayvon Martin, is quite the opposite. Kony 2012. If you are unfamiliar,  here’s the video.  

On the surface it seemed ingenious. Within days, the viral video had millions of hits. Yet within days of vetting, and largely due to the ridiculous antics of the video’s producer, it was more of a punch-line than call to action. In the end, it punctuated the absurdity of slacktivism.

This week the tables turn. Initially through social media, we learn about the case of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black kid who was gunned down in Sanford, Fla. by an overzealous, race-obsessed, wanna-be cop of a neighborhood watch volunteer named George Zimmerman. Unlike the Kony 2012 campaign, awareness about the Martin case was not immediate. At first, there were only a few posts. Soon it spread through the blogosphere with every progressive news website posting the tragic details. Then, it hit the mainstream media’s afternoon circuit. Then, state prosecutors are called in to investigate the case. And then a police chief is forced to step down... And even then, thousands march in Miami, calling for the arrest of Zimmerman.  As of the writing of this post even the President has weighed in on the case.

President says if I had a son he would look like Trayvon. 

It is organic. It is real. And many are not simply clicking “like.” They are trying to affect change in perhaps as fundamental a manner as we have seen, saving the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Arab Spring, in recent years. 

People often rail about the dangers of social media as it creates superficial connections that attempt to satisfy our natural and real desires for true connections. In the end, we may be more aware of the world around us but we are fundamentally more insulated from it and less affected by it. Slacktivism appears to be a furtherance of that disease where real involvement, engagement and activism is replaced by these effortless clicks that demand so little of us and arguably produce even less in the form of tangible results.

 The Trayvon Martin story is tragic and stands as a very poignant reminder of the dangers many young American men face while simply living their lives. 

Yet it is also somewhat hopeful...

Not only has the outrage to this crime against a black youth been somewhat color-blind, but it also serves as evidence that social media doesn’t have to be superficial, detached and non-participatory. 

As someone said recently, social media is the vehicle not the destination. In this case that was certainly true. Why? Because unlike Kony 2012 where we were asked to just open our wallets and give to some sketch charity, the ad-hoc organization that sprouted up surrounding Trayvon Martin asked us to speak out, carry a sign, make a call, demand justice. Slacktivism is a social media deficit when it comes to affecting change. But perhaps that is a function of the message and messenger and not the vehicle itself.

The key differences:

Objective: In the case of Kony 2012, Jason Russell said he wanted to make Joseph Kony a household name. Well perhaps he accomplished that. The problem is that's all he accomplished. Awareness is not the objective. It’s what happens next that is important. In the case of Martin, an entirely organic and most likely people-driven campaign, awareness was the means to achieving justice. It was clearly followed up by action.

Geography: Joseph Kony's atrocities are many... He’s a bad guy for sure. He’s a Ugandan warlord who uses children as soldiers. But the campaign was quite American-centric. By contrast, the Trayvon Martin case began in Florida and has organically grown from state-to-sate. The first people who reported the event was Martin’s parents and lawyer... The subsequent stories are, for the most part, originating from local and regional news sources. 

Participation/Engagement: With Trayvon Martin, there has been a clear call to action. The people behind the protests have clearly outlined what they want to see happen. They have made contact with the necessary officials and they have called for others to do the same.... 

Kony 2012: How could outing a bad man for doing bad things go so very badly?

When the KONY 2012 thing started showing up on my Facebook page by folks who I know spend very little time on Facebook and aren't quite savvy about the many ways and means that social media can fool you, I ignored it. I ignored it in the same way that I ignore other annoying Facebook apps like Farmville, Truths about you, etc. But the 100th time, I paid attention as it was associated with a group that I am somewhat familiar with and whom I actually respect, Invisible Children, or at least I thought I did.

Before this successful digital marketing campaign, Invisible Children was a reputable charity. Its tactics had only been questioned in fairly scholarly journals. The fact that it has been accused of misrepresenting the facts to get its point across? I had not heard anything. I, like most lazy Americans, showed my support for the organization by clicking a like button then went on about my day.

But the irony here is that the firm responsible for Kony 2012 brought so much visibility to Invisible Children that every skeleton in their closet is now being trotted out in the digital square. And the sad thing is that the message behind the viral video that sparked such interest is getting consumed by the scandal.

Here is the video:


How could outing a very bad man for doing very bad things go very badly?

Social Media, a Moving Target - Manufacturing Executive Community

Social Media, a Moving Target - Manufacturing Executive Community: "--Compared to just two months ago when the Council last discussed social media, some manufacturers are moving beyond thinking of external marketing applications for social media and are now contemplating how the technology can be used to stimulate and accelerate collaboration among internal groups and individuals."