I had a really interesting conversation today with Adrian Chan (blog here). He is the owner of a design agency called Gravity 7. He has spent the last three years building an expertise in social networking design.   What's even more interesting is he combines a vast experience of web development with a knowledge of psychology and sociology. Those three elements together bring a unique perspective to social interaction design. He explained to me how websites often design for content management much the way a traditional website would work. But social networking should enable users to explore and find what they didn't know they were looking for. Quite a different point of view.

What's even more impressive is he knows what he knows and doesn't need months to complete a job. Where big agencies often quote months to complete the type of consulting we were discussing, he can do it in days to weeks. Now that's confidence. I love that.

In preparation for tomorrow's Oscar show I thought now would be a good time to post my choices. Here are my picks for the BIG ones.

Best Picture; Little Miss Sunshines (this would be the surprise of the list!)

Directing;  Babel

Lead Actor;  Forest Whitaker

Lead Actress;  Helen Mirren

Supporter Actor; Eddie Murphey

Supporting Actress; Jennifer Hudson

Animated Feature; Cars

I'm really excited to announce that starting on Monday I will be transferring over to the Live Spaces team! While I won't officially be an evangelist anymore (they will strip me of the title) I still feel like all of my marketing efforts are focused around evangelizing for MSFT. On my new team I will be responsible for marketing Spaces. I'm really excited by the challenge and expect to learn a lot about Social Networking. More to come on the new job but for now I say "DO YOU HAVE A SPACE?"

Guy Kawasaki does a great job of disclosing his last year of blogging stats, etc. When I started blogging a month ago I had no idea what success looked like. I'm trained to set goals in terms of metrics, page views, track backs, comments, etc. I don't post ads for revenue so I can honestly say I'm not in it for the money. But when I read Guy's stats for the year I was quite humbled. He gets an average of 6,200 PV a day. But then I thought, how liberating. If Tyra Banks can disclose her weight (don't even think of asking me) then I can find power in disclosing my numbers too.  So hear it goes;

Total Page Views since January 19th; 1448

Number of blog entries; 24

Comments; 10

Track Backs; 1

Let's see how I do next month.

I've named four things in my life, a dog, two kids and a website. I have to say I'm super happy with all my choices. But I didn't take naming any of those things lightly. Naming is hard whether it's a product, pet or person. You almost never get a chance to change your mind once it's out there. Of course we can think of examples of companies who have tried. Most recently Windows Live Mail announced it will return to Windows Live Hotmail. A subtle but dramatic attempt to maintain the brand equity built into the Hotmail name. But what about when you are naming something from the start. When I named Skyscrapr I used branding agency Siegel + Gale and I'm glad I did. There is another group here at MSFT that is planning to launch a new web site this spring and they have spent more time than you can imagine trying to come up with a catchy name. But does a name need to be catchy? How about just obvious, or memorable, or spellable! The one thing people give me crap about for Skyscrapr is that I dropped the 'e'. Every time you give someone the URL you have to say "Skyscrapr without the e". I did that for two reasons, 1. It made is a little different but more importantly 2. The URL wasn't available for Skyscraper. THAT'S the real reason.

If you haven't read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug you should. It's about web usability but the broader message is 'keep it simple'. Don't make your customers work to figure out what you mean.

My favorite new product name is Bebo. I have no idea what this means and I can never remember if it's Bepo or Bebo. But I'm sure the URL was available and it's in an industry where different and funky are required. I don't think P&G will be naming toothpaste anything like Bebo anytime soon.

What's in a name? A LOT.

Build it and they will come. Or will they? Over the last year I've spent quite a bit of time working on building a community website called Skyscrapr. What? Why? Where? How? I'll get to all that. 

First; why?  Our group was doing a great job of satisfying our current audience, the software architect. But one thing we weren't doing was taking advantage of the MSFT developer community which is very strong and passionate about MSFT technology. So my thought was what can we do to leverage the developer love and is there an unmet need in the marketplace for an introduction to architecture site? I did my research and found out that my hypothesis was true. There is an untapped market of developers and part time architects that are interested in architecture and vastly undeserved. There was no resource for them to go to to learn about how to become an architect and connect with other developers interested in architecture. So step number one of marketing 101 was covered. I had identified an unmet need in the market and one that could increase my share and brand.

What is it?  The exact value proposition I wrote was "Skyscrapr offers developers, aspiring architects and part time architects a place to find architecture guidance and be a part of an online community dedicated to learning about Architecture in a fun and inspiring way."

Where? Interesting question. For now, online. But in the future this is something that could easily be built into an offline offering as well. User groups meetings, etc.

How? This was the big one. I didn't know anything about community site technologies but found lots of resources around MSFT to ask. That investigation led me to Telligent which makes a product called Community Server. This is the technology Skyscrapr is built on. It's pretty good. They are in version 2.1 right now and releasing 3.0 sometime this spring. The technology allows for customer ratings, blog commenting, and other community activities. When we first launched a lot of the features I wanted weren't in version 2.0 so we wrote too much custom code. Always avoid this at any cost. It's expensive, time consuming and frustrating. We are now on a schedule that will add new features when a new version of CS becomes available and we've minimized any custom code development.

What is success? At first success was page views, plain and simple. Is there traffic to the site? Since this project was creating a new audience as well as a new website we had no baseline to compare traffic against. We set some pretty low expectations and surpassed them. We are still interested in traffic, but now KPI's are measuring community engagement. Are viewers commenting? Are they engaged in more than just viewing? How many register with the site? How many request to be blogger's on the site? What is return traffic like?

Lessons Learned

1. Content is king. Have a strong content management plan. It's not going to fall out of the sky! People will come in the beginning if you do good marketing but people only come back if you have something interesting to say.

2. Everything takes longer and costs more than you would ever imagine.

3. You will have to champion the program and continually resell the idea to upper management. These things take time to build. It's not like a banner ad campaign where the click through results are instantaneous. This is more like planting blurbs in the fall and waiting for them to pop up in the spring.

4. Big personalities help. We have a regular podcast show called ARCast that drives about 50% of the traffic, particularly through RSS.

5. Design good UX. Do your homework and don't rely on vendors knowing what's best. More is less with site design and a lot of vendors will sell you glitz but don't think about SEO and rendering times.

6. Review goals regularly. As the community gets stronger and needs become more apparent be flexible enough to re-evaluate KPI's.

7. Always ask for feedback. I recently read an article that said companies get better satisfaction scores from customers simply because they offered the ability to give feedback.

8. Have fun with it and your customers will to. I have cartoon strips. Need I say more.

John Edwards was on the hot seat last week for opinions expressed by members of his staff. Melissa McEwan and Amanda Marcotte are campaign workers on Edwards presidential campaign team that have expressed controversial opinions on their blogs.  What's really interesting here is that Edwards has come under fire for opinions expressed by his staff over the period of time before they worked for him. This begs the question, is anything a person says or does on the Internet fair game for judgment when it comes to applying for jobs, promotions, dating? You name it.  Should we be searching someone's history on the net before dating them? hiring them? I know people who do this now. It's becoming much more difficult to have a separate identity from work to home to play. Some people use alter ego identities so they can be a drunken porn star on YouTube and still keep their day job. But what happens when the drunken porn star's real identity gets exposed? Can he be fired?

There is no standard on how to use extraneous information on blog posts or personal spaces. In my opinion it was the right thing for Edwards to NOT fire the blogger's because of opinions they held. But what if he had? Did he have the right to? No one knows the issues that will begin to emerge as the Internet develops and an archive of our history is stored for all to see, and search.

I think people should be prepared to take responsibility for opinions they express online through whatever channel they may be using and assume that eventually all identities will be revealed (remember Loneygirl15). The responsibility lies equally between all parties to do your due diligence when hiring and be transparent when being hired.  Blogs can be an incredibly strong mechanism for driving change, influencing cultures and self expression. But that cuts both ways. Blogger's should be prepared to and expect to defend their opinions; good, bad, right or wrong. This is the right we all have, and the responsibility.

A fantastic book to get you thinking about customer service, ie. customer centric marketing. Starbucks is one of the top five global brands of 2006 but does little to no marketing. How is this possible? They have incredible word of mouth and brand loyalty. How do they generate such amazing word of mouth and repeat customers? By delivering a top notch product with white glove style customer service. This book will give you great ideas on how to take 'ordinary to extraordinary'. Joseph Michelli breaks down the Starbucks experience into five key principles; 1. Make it your own 2. Everything matters 3. Surprise and delight  4. Embrace resistance and  5. Leave your mark. He points out these principles are simplistic yet results-oriented. 

The book is full of examples that will get you thinking about what customer service CAN be. It shows Starbucks warts and all. They reveal big PR missteps and partners that didn't always say the right thing. What's more interesting his how Starbucks chose to deal with unhappy customers or communities where they were unwanted. Starbucks feels the worst thing you can do to a customer is ignore their complaint. They encourage partners to come up with creative solutions to problem solve situations. They don't ignore controversy but attempt to answer concerns and skeptics. It's funny to hear them point out the clean bathrooms as part of their customer service mantra, but it sure is one reason I stop at Starbucks when I'm on the road. I've even got my husband, who doesn't drink coffee, to agree Starbucks is the best place to stop for a potty break. 

Read this book with an open mind. How can you relate these suggestions back to your business? What do you do similar to 'clean bathrooms' that's got people talking?

Jon Udell comments on my plans to create an innovative blogging strategy. He has an interesting four part series on PR in the age of blogging.

Here is the podcast I recorded with Jon Udell as referenced in my blog on January 30th. I would be interested to hear what others think. I will blog more about my influencer marketing plan as things develop. We had our kick off meeting today.

Value propositions are a basic tool in marketing that is key to determining how a company is going to bring a product to market. A strong value proposition should move the product in the direction of the companies strength. Where a company goes wrong is following in the direction of the competitor. Don't get into a pattern of chasing competitors. Become customer centric with all value props. Focus on what value you offer your customer and this will sustain an offering longer than simply making a competitor play. It also weakens a value prop to focus on features alone. Someone can always come along and be bigger, smaller, faster, better. It's not a strong differentiator when it's easily duplicated by competitors.

According to Dipak Jain from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University there are three types of value based segmentation; economic, functional and emotional. Economic focuses on savings. What is the best deal? Price is the main driver. Functional focuses on applications. Features are the main driver. Emotional is the highest and most difficult to reach. Emotional focuses on peace of mind, it's winning customers hearts. It's when a person trusts a brand and feels emotionally connected to it. A strong value proposition will excel at one of these. The functional and economic segmentations are the easier ones to deliver but emotional is the one everyone wants. Win their hearts and you've got a customer for life. You won't win hearts by focusing on competitors.

There is a really interesting blog post from Parislemon about the lack of love for Vista to go along with the splashy launch this week. I think this blogger is spot on about MSFT's lack of enthusiast customers. It's important to note that MSFST does 80% of its business B to B and only 20% is consumer. We get a lot of love from developers and business customers that consumers never see. But having said that it's also important to be aware that everyone is a consumer. And brands live and die in the courtroom of public opinion. So MSFT has to realize that regardless of what our business customers think the consumer response is what will affect public perceptions.

One possible reason it's so hard to find MSFT love is that it's become a hobby over the years of taking down the guy at the top. It's much easier to pick on someone when you know they can take it. But MSFT hasn't made the game any easier for ourselves. We occasionally do stupid things and say things that get misinterpreted. We need to be better about seeing our actions through the consumers eyes.

I would challenge everyone who is in marketing, Microsoft or not, to think of the customer first. If you always use the customer first mantra as a gage for your decision making it should make the decision pretty easy to make. For example, what if Microsoft had taken the millions it spent on the launch activities and instead created a program where customers could bring their PC's in to a store and a trained technician would install Vista on their machine for free. The customer would buy Vista and MSFT would install it. We are keenly aware that a major pain point for customers is not being able to manage the upgrade process. So logically speaking you want to do whatever you can to remove that pain point. It's what e-commerce stores have had to do with shipping charges. They found that customers again and again drop out of the purchase process after the shipping and tax is revealed. So now some sites have gotten smart. They either offer free shipping (my personal favorite) or they show a calculator that instantly shows your total with shipping and tax as you go. There is no big shocker at the end of the shopping experience that causes customers to bail out.

Image the positive customer satisfaction MSFT would have gotten if we'd offered to install Vista for them. Now there's an interesting proposition...

Yahoo has announced it plans to build 100 individual web sites this year around entertainment brands.  That in and of itself isn't so newsworthy. What interesting about it is Yahoo doesn't own the brands they are planning to promote.  The first six brands they will lead with are video games "The Sims" and "Halo," TV shows "Lost" and "The Office," and franchises Harry Potter and Transformers. Yahoo says they are not asking for permission from the companies that own the brands and will not proceed if the owners object. This is what is really brilliant about their plan. They publicly announce they are going to use these popular brands that they DO NOT own to drive traffic to their sites, thereby getting impressions from the advertisements which drives revenue for Yahoo. They do say that they will honor any requests from corporations that chose not to be involved.  Let's play this out, shall we. Say The Sims decides they don't want to be involved. They own the brand and have a right to any revenue that brand may generate even if it's advertisement impressions. So The Sims contacts Yahoo and says please pull The Sims community site.  Yahoo already has the site up so now it has to explain to it's users that The Sims doesn't want to play nice and share the brand with them so they are going to have to close the site. Who gets egg on their face. Not Yahoo.

What I'm having a hard time understanding is why would someone who is interested in The Sims go to Yahoo to build a community when The Sims has a very good community site, as I'm sure most of the entertainment brands Yahoo is targeting does? What is the value proposition Yahoo sees by creating communities that already exist somewhere else? What can Yahoo offer that is going to be so compelling it's a differentiator in the market? Yes, I can see how initially Yahoo could get some increased traffic to their site. But at what point do people become over saturated with community sites? I listed in a previous blog post 21 different network/community building sites. That list doesn't include the thousands of big brand community sites.

Would love to know what others think.