Trends for 2009: Radical Transparency | Blog | design mind

Trends for 2009: Radical Transparency | Blog | design mind: "Trends for 2009: Radical Transparency
By Tim Leberecht - November 16, 2008

Trends for 2009: Radical Transparency

Now that Barack Obama has appointed YouTube as his “Secretary of Video,” as CNET comments, it raises the question what does Generation O’s new transparency mean for businesses?

At first sight, well, it means danger. The airlines British Airways (BA) and Virgin Atlantic recently experienced that first hand. The Economist reports that several crew members were fired after making derogatory comments on the airlines’ Facebook forums about safety standards and passengers. The staff gushed about cockroaches on board the planes and shared other juicy details that -- if true -- were less than flattering for their employers. Public relations experts such as Aedhmar Hynes from Text 100 were quick to point out (in the Economist article) that online transparency can only be as radical as its regulation is regimented and that employee empowerment needs to go hand in hand with employee education.

Yet Hymes’ recommendation sounds like radical transparency that is not quite so radical, and may run counter to the very notion of transparency. Moderated radical transparency, so to speak, is as oxymoronic as, say, risk-averse hedge funds. So does this episode mark the beginning of the end of radical transparency? Not so fast. It’s all a matter of managing expectations. For starters, it is worth acknowledging that radical transparency can have radical implications. In fact, collateral damage should almost always be assumed; it is part of the game. If you’re not willing to take that risk, don’t take it! But note that in most cases (unless you’re a military defense contractor, the CIA, or another organization that needs to respect strict legal requirements), your customers may then assume you have something to hide. And, if you’re perfectly honest, that’s probably the case, no?

Airlines and other travel industry companies are especially vulnerable when it comes to bad PR because the perception of their service is so critical. Customer expectations are high, and every little interaction -- and there are hundreds of thousands every day -- is closely scrutinized. See Untied, the customer forum for rants about United. Airlines are also impacted by variables that are often beyond their control, at least partly. Remember JetBlue’s winter storm fiasco in 2007? The brouhaha around BA’s and Virgin Atlantic’s Facebook woes does not make for a case against radical transparency; rather it highlights an inconvenient truth: airlines – as well as the majority of service brands – are radically transparent by the very nature of their business.

If flight attendants complain about unpleasant passengers, then it reveals a bigger issue at stake that transcends the sole PR dimension: Radical transparency may bring out the skeletons in your closet. If the bond between your customers and your brand is just a bit flawed, you’re not only facing a PR issue, you’re facing a fundamental issue at the very foundation of your brand promise that can severely threaten your business. Staff members who think not so highly about their customers are the problem, not the fact that they are sharing their opinions on Facebook. BA and Virgin Atlantic did the right thing, and it was not a “fiasco,” as the Economist labeled it, but rather a cleaning of the system. Exposing black sheep among your personnel may hurt in the short term but can serve as a real benefit to your brand in the long term. When your business is in the service industry, those ticking reputation bombs need to be dealt with anyway. Promoting transparency is a valuable concept to preempt them and, well, promote the truth. It will come out anyway, sooner or later. And then radical transparency is not a strategy but the only real option left.

All that being said, reputation protection is only one side of the equation, and it is the defensive one. As much as radical transparency can underscore that you have nothing to hide, it can also highlight that you have a lot to show. In this respect, it presents a huge opportunity for marketers. Dave Balter, founder and CEO of the word-of-mouth marketing firm Bzz Agent, made a compelling case for corporate transparency in a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review: “(…) Companies put rules into place to hide their ideas. They think the rules give them control over people and markets. But that’s totally untrue today. There are so many communication routes that you can’t possibly control the information flowing through them. Furthermore, attempts at secrecy prevent the company from making use of those information flows. You can’t always foresee the benefits of letting ideas out into the world, but they often far outweigh any harm that may result.”

Indeed, in the brave new world of always-on social media, companies may need to share everything about their business, including complaints, profit margins on particular products, and specific corporate strategies. And they may increasingly turn to proprietary channels to do so, bypassing traditional media and becoming media companies themselves. Add to that the fact that customers “own” and manage brands and not companies, and it is time for a fundamentally new concept of “brand presence.” Proactive radical transparency can not only become the mandatory platform for authentic, trust-building interactions with all stakeholders (or “brandholders”) but also open a new avenue for marketers who understand that effective marketing needs to be conversational and open-sourced.

So, here’s an audacious future vision of what radical transparency in corporate communications could look like. Taking social instant messaging one step further than existing formats (such as the micro-blogging service Yammer that applies the Twitter model to the enterprise -- “what are you working on”?), companies could make their live email correspondence public. Let’s call it Reality Email. An open and interactive email feed may propel knowledge-sharing and collaboration but also an ongoing conversation that customers, partners, and media worldwide can join. Remember the “Cluetrain Manifesto”? “Markets are conversations” -- and so are organizations and brands. Reality Email would take this literally literal. Companies “going public” with live-email might create a powerful new marketing broadcasting channel for brand-building in the new age of radical transparency. Does this sound radical? Perhaps. Will it happen? You bet.

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ClearForest Gnosis :: Semantic Firefox Add-ons

ClearForest Gnosis :: Firefox Add-ons: "ClearForest Gnosis 1.0.20080623
by Gnosis ClearForest

Smarter browsing and in-depth research with ClearForest Gnosis, leveraging the Open Calais Semantic infrastructure...

Long Description

ClearForest Gnosis is the cutting edge of real time semantic processing for the web. By evaluating the pages you read – as you read them – Gnosis immediately locates key information such as people, organizations, companies, products and geographies hidden within the text.

By simply hovering over any of the identified topics, you can immediately locate relevant news, blog entries, maps, company information and Wikipedia entries.

After you install Gnosis and restart Firefox simply navigate to any site that you are interested in – one of the news sites listed below is a great place to start. Right click and select “ClearForest Gnosis” or click on the Gnosis button in the toolbar. After 1-2 seconds your page has been processed and you’re ready to explore!

Currently, Gnosis automatically processes pages from CNN, Google Finance, Wikipedia, Forbes, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post, Yahoo News, BBC News and Wikipedia. If you want Gnosis results on any other page – just click the button.

For power users the Gnosis Sidebar provides a constantly updated view of the key information Gnosis has located for you.

Privacy:
Gnosis does not retain any information on the content you submit for processing - including the address of the website submitted. We do maintain normal web server logs including the date and time of the transaction, the length of the content submitted and the submitting IP address.

Visit our Gnosis homepage at gnosis.clearforest.com or drop us a note with feedback and comments to clearforestgnosis@gmail.com.

Semantic Web - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Semantic Web - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.[1][2] It derives from World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.[3]

At its core, the semantic web comprises a set of design principles,[4] collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that are yet to be implemented or realized.[2] Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications.[5] Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain."

ClearForest Semantic Solutions for a Content Rich World

ClearForest SWS » About: "A brief note to introduce the beta of ClearForest Semantic Web Services (SWS-1).


The first question on everyone’s mind should be - “what the heck is a semantic web service?”. In this post we’ll try to at least start the discussion on what we mean by SWS.

The semantic web is an admirable goal. When it becomes real the web will be transformed from a mass of unstructured stuff into an amazing knowledge repository. Moving far beyond the hypertext library that is the current web - we will have programmatic access to a repository of information that dwarfs anything we can imagine today. But, there’s one catch: it’s not here yet and won’t be for a long long time.

We hate waiting. We know that there is an amazing amount of information out there that is begging to be retrieved, combined, enhanced and generally made use of. The problem is that the vast majority of that information is trapped inside text. Not structured text. Not clean text. Not standardized text. Not gramatically proper text. Just your normal messy everyday text. It’s trapped - and we aim to free it.

Over the last decade ClearForest has developed an amazing suite of natural language processing tools. Big organizations like financial publishers, banks and manufacturers use that technology to extract meaning from text. It works and it works well - but we want to"

Survey Records Shift in Blue Chip Marketing Spend to INTERACTIVE!

New Epsilon CMO Survey Highlights Shift to Digital Marketing;
Decrease in traditional Marketing Budget


NEW YORK, NY — September 8, 2008 — Chief Marketing Officers at many of the biggest brands in the nation are seeing a major shift in the marketing landscape. Almost two-thirds (63%) of the 175 marketing executives surveyed see an increase in their spending on interactive/digital marketing while 59% report a decrease in traditional marketing spend.

The survey additionally describes the tough challenges that top CMOs face in this current economic climate: 65% say that the money spent on advertising as a whole will decrease due to the current economy. In contrast, 94% of CMOs and marketing executives agreed with the statement, 'A tough economic period is precisely the time when marketing plays a key role.'

CMOs are shifting to more targeted and measurable marketing strategies. When asked how their firm determines their target market for each channel, 50% stated that they use data driven marketing techniques: 31% of respondents agreed with the statement: &quote You use sophisticated modeling tools to analyze existing customer data (behavioral, preference and demographic) 'and 19% said that they 'analyze past purchase behavior. 'In contrast, 28% said they made 'rough estimates based on past experience.'

According to Mike Iaccarino, CEO of Epsilon, a leading marketing services firm, "Epsilon's first survey of the nation's Chief Marketing Officers presents a unique look at the changing dynamics of the marketing landscape. In this economic climate, marketing executives are seeking accountability and measurable results. Data driven marketing is an increasingly important component of corporate marketing campaigns as senior marketers employ sophisticated segmentation strategies to recruit and retain customers."

The survey was conducted in August 2008. Participants included 175 U.S. Chief Marketing Officers and marketing executives of some of the largest brands in the nation. 27% of respondents work at companies with $10 billion or more in annual revenues last year.


Marketing Mix:

CMOs of the biggest brands have been early adopters of new media with social computing and blogs receiving the most interest whereas instant messaging and interactive TV ads were the least popular.

* Social computing (including word of mouth, social networking sites, viral advertising, etc.) was the most popular emerging channel with 42% of marketing executives expressing interest in adding it to their marketing mix.
* Blogs were the second most popular emerging channel: 35% of marketing executives want to pursue blogs and 19% already use blogs
* Almost one-third of CMOs mentioned Podcasting as an area of interest: 31% are interested in adding Podcasting to their marketing mix and 18% already have.
* Mobile devices also elicited interest: 29% are interested in Mobile Devices (Phones/PDAs) and 22% have added them to their marketing mix.

Facebook Tries to Woo Marketers - WSJ.com

Facebook Tries to Woo Marketers - WSJ.com

Despite its surging Internet audience, Facebook Inc. has yet to prove it can wring steady revenue out of advertisers. Now it's trying a new tactic to woo Madison Avenue.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company is rolling out a new ad format called "engagement ads" that further blurs the line between marketing and social networking.

The new ads appear on the main screen when a person first logs in to Facebook. They prompt a user to do something within the ad, such as comment on a movie trailer or RSVP for the season finale of a TV show.

If the user completes the action, such as adding Bravo TV's "Project Runway" show to a personal list of events, Facebook tries to get Bravo's ad in front of more eyeballs by sharing a notice about what the user has done with their friends.

Facebook has a lot to prove with the new ad format, which it began quietly testing in August and started making available to all advertisers this month. The company says 70 of the U.S.'s 100 largest advertisers have advertised on its site since 2007. But its share of total number of U.S. online display ad views was just 1.1%, according to market research firm comScore Inc., in its most recent report in June.

News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media Unit, which includes rival MySpace.com, is the market leader with 15.9% of display-ad spending, according to comScore. News Corp. also owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

"I haven't heard of anyone purchasing something off an ad on Facebook," says Angie Tulgetske, vice president of RE/MAX Preferred Choice Properties, which resells timeshares and spends thousands of dollars a month on search ads but avoids social-networking sites. "I wouldn't think any of my marketing dollars would be spent advantageously there."

Facebook's new push also comes as economic turbulence hits the online ad market. U.S. online advertising growth is expected to decelerate from 17% in 2008 to 14.5% next year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an internet-advertiser trade group.

Advertising on social-networking sites appears particularly vulnerable, analysts say, because advertisers are still searching for the right ways to measure the effectiveness of ads on those sites.

Advertisers say that buying ads on Facebook and MySpace generally costs far less than buying premium ads on media properties such as Yahoo Inc. or Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, although prices vary widely based on the type of ads and the target audience. Facebook charges more for the engagement ads than other display ads on its site.

The new ads won't appeal to all Facebook users. Heather Watson, 32, who lives in Nashville, Tenn., recently saw the engagement ad for "Project Runway." Ms. Watson says such ads "detract from the [Facebook] experience," and she clicked the "not attending" option to wipe the Bravo ad from her view.

Mark Zuckerberg

In public appearances, Facebook's 24-year-old Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg insists that his company remains more focused on expanding its user base than its revenues. The right business model for the site will emerge over time, he has said.

This year, Facebook's revenue is expected to more than double to between $300 million and $350 million, say people familiar with the matter. But the company has mounting costs. At an industry conference last week, Mr. Zuckerberg said the company didn't need to raise more money and wasn't planning on going public for a few years.

Still, Facebook has intensified its campaign to curry favor with Madison Avenue. It has hired top ad sales executives from companies including Yahoo and periodically hosts teams of senior ad executives at its graffiti-clad offices. It has also sent squads into online-ad agencies, such as Starcom MediaVest Group, to pitch products and generate awareness about its free research tools.

Ads systems are built over time through continual tweaking, says Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. She says Facebook's existing ad offerings are working well but "undersell Facebook's broader opportunity."

Facebook has tried many ad efforts in the past, starting with basic "fliers," the low-budget graphical ads users could buy to promote things like events. The company began building its own internal sales force in 2005, and in 2006 struck a deal to display banner ads sold by Microsoft Corp. It also added products like "social ads" in which Facebook shared a user's action with others on the site.

But many marketers stayed away, concerned advertising alongside user-generated content might tarnish their brands and that the site appealed only to college students. As Facebook has widened its audience, it has run into another problem: users weren't clicking on ads when they browsed each other's profiles. Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester Research, estimates the rate at which users click on Facebook's display ads is less than 1%. Mr. Owyang also describes Facebook's array of ad offerings as "confusing."

More recently, Facebook has seen some traction with an ad service for smaller advertisers that generally spend the bulk of their budgets on search-engine ads. The service allows users to buy targeted banner ads through a Web site. Facebook says tens of thousands of advertisers are using the system every month.

Online advertising agency G5 Search Marketing Inc. has used the system to buy ads for clients such as a California-based local storage company. The storage company in May found it ended up getting more visitors per dollar spent on Facebook than Google, says Dan Hobin, CEO of G5.

But he adds that only a handful of clients have tried Facebook, in part because Facebook offers to reach specific groups that are far smaller than the size of the audience his clients want to reach.