Jonothan Stribling

When you’re one of the cool kids, it is pretty easy to forget that not everyone is in the cool club.

In fact, some people are so far removed from the cool club that they haven’t heard of Twitter, social media, ecommerce, WordPress, Android, the Nexus 1, or the RunKeeper iPhone application.

But generally, every human living in an advanced economy who can read has heard of Google and Facebook.

We’re so connected these days that it is easy to forget that there are a bunch of people who are not connected; who are yet to realise the liberating potential of the Internet.

And they know it. They know that no one uses the big yellow book to find a glazier or carpet cleaner. They know that their kids are doing things online that they might enjoy, that might make simple stuff easier but they haven’t made their move yet.

They are scared, intimidated and worried about looking stupid.

And all the cool kids reckon they are “stupid”. That’s why they are cool and not stupid, they are good at trying new stuff, seeing trends, labelling stuff.

Nothing online scares them. Except comic sans, fuscia backgrounds and being marketed to.

To me users should never be thought of as stupid. Rather, it is the marketers, designers and developers who make them feel stupid who are, well, stupid.

So many conversations in the tech, social, online communities concern the known world of tech, social and online.

It strikes me that it is a bubble where the people listening are the same people talking who are the same people publishing aphoristic thought bombs who are the same people reading the aphoristic thought bombs who are the same people thinking of the next aphoristic thought bomb.

It is exhausting, and to a complete outsider completely meaningless and uninteresting.

And because the same people are building the tools and selling the tools and dreaming up the next tools, the kids not part of the cool club are forgotten.

They are left to find their own way with poorly written copy, small fonts, poor documentation, badly handled errors, and unclear instructions.

And for anyone running an ecommerce site, a blog dependent on advertising, a remarketing program, or an online community dependent on user engagement and re-engagement this is not good for business.

Whilst Australia has high number of Internet and mobile users, future growth will come from people changing their habits and behaviours. This means they will go online, start booking stuff and buying online, connecting with friends online.

It is up to the people working to build online experiences on Internet devices to make this journey as easy as possible and remind all users that it is never the user, it is always the tool.

This means talking to people who you might not talk to often to find out how they use the Internet and if not why not.

This means looking outside the closed network for cool kids and digital hipsters to identify wants, needs, desires, fears and anxieties.

It means making sure that your website works for them and meets their needs.

It means having a presence in Google and Facebook which are two of the most common first steps online for a new user.
It means giving a voice to some members of the community who need it most by showing them how to setup a blog and start publishing.

The promise of the Internet and web 2.0 is social transformation for the better and we need to strive to make sure this promise can be delivered.

Once upon a time there was a Hollywood star called Tom Cruise who had the world at his feet.

He was famous, rich and in love with a beautiful young woman called Katie. Being rich and successful, woman loved him and men envied him.

Then one day late in 2005 whilst talking with talk-show host Oprah, Tom celebrated his success and the joy of life by dancing a jig on her sofa; by jumping the sofa.

Tom’s fans were appalled and ashamed for him. This irrational exuberance was not the Tom they loved and respected, it was a freaky guy who seemed to be more than a little self-absorbed. Gradually Tom’s fans turned away from him and stopped seeing his movies.

Jumping the sofa, much like jumping the shark for TV shows, was the beginning of the end of Tom’s glittering career. It represents the moment when his star had reached its ascendant and began to fall.

Tom had misjudged his audience and sent out the wrong message. He had the wrong idea about what people expected of him.

Jumping the sofa is pretty easy to do online.

All you need to do is veer off course into the ridiculous – unintentionally.

Change your argument halfway through a blog post.

Go off on an tangent about how there was this guy I went to school with who is now working in Amsterdam and reckons it is one of the greatest cities in the world, not for the drugs but the people.

Oops.

Get your developers to build something without talking to your customers.

Send an email campaign to the wrong customer.

Display the digital camera landing page to someone who clicked on the Ipod advertisement.

Launch a new product without talking to your customers or your market.

In fact it is easier to jump the sofa online than it is in real life (metaphorically of course, you could be jumping on your sofa right now and no one would care).

The easier it is to publish, the easier it is to be ridiculous, comical and absurd – and to turn people off.

There are quite a few examples of jumping the sofa online. Here is a very short list.

Facebook privacy policy change

In January this year, Facebook modified their privacy policy and automatically opted people out of the extra privacy setting that removed a user’s content from being displayed in search engines.

This shocked and dismayed Facebook users as it was a significant breach of trust for fairly transparent commercial reasons.

People need to be able to trust that the online spaces they populate with personal information. Facebook jumped the sofa and betrayed this trust.

Microsoft Vista

Microsoft Windows Vista was launched with a bang in 2006 and very quickly fizzled as users complained about bloated and slow software, random crashes, and pointless steps that made it harder to do things.

Under pressure to release a new operating system after significant market share gains by Apple, Microsoft focused on the flashy unimportant stuff like phat icons and forgot about the things that make an operating system a pleasure to use.

Microsoft jumped the sofa by focusing on pretty graphics and slick marketing at the expense of features that enhanced how people experienced the product.

Aol. logo

The merger between AOL and Time Warner is a great read about hubris overcoming commercial reality. Ten or so years later AOL Time Warner has demerged and AOL has relaunched as Aol., a content and media network polluting the Internet one crappy article at a time.

The story of Aol. is one of jumping the couch so high that a business that had 30 million ISP customers in 2001 is now a media company. Aol. is a great lesson in evolving with the market and listening to customers even if there might be some short term costs.

Google Buzz/Google Wave

Everyone loves Google. Sing it with me. Everyone loves Google.

The Google brand is so strong that they threaten to launch a new product and the Internet goes into meltdown chasing “exclusive” invitations so they can be among the first to get tell their friends about how great Google is and how Google are the next Google.

Sadly, most of these releases are overblown hyperbole. Google Buzz was an exception. Linked to GMail, Buzz had real potential to allow multiple conversations all easily indexable, searchable and findable.

Unfortunately Google forgot to listen to user concerns about privacy and automatically added email and chat recipients as followers in Buzz. This was fine except the follower lists were public.

The fallout was massive, providing “evidence” to many people that Google didn’t care about privacy.

To their credit Google fixed the problem very quickly and proved why they are one of the strongest global brands – they listen to their customers and admit when they haven’t.

These are just a few examples of how some brands have jumped the sofa online by getting caught up in their own hubris and not listening to their customers.

The Internet makes it easy to listen and even converse with your customers. Get online and research your next decision before jumping the sofa. Talk to your customers. Take a moment to think about what you’re trying to achieve.

Have a really good think before you climb up on the sofa and make like Tom Cruise. And if you still want to, then go right ahead.

An expert is an almighty and powerful entity. The expert arrives in town to the sound of cannon firing, jets displaying tricks above, an appreciative crowd and a gleeful clanging marching band.

A fexpert is a fake or faux expert (aka guru) and they tend to slink into town with no one noticing. Some Fexperts even carry their own one man band just to make sure you know that they are there.

Whilst some folks might specialise in an area and have a good knowledge of the tricks, the tips and the pitfalls, few are experts.

An expert, as the word implies, is someone who is highly experienced and has special skills and knowledge in a particular area.

An expert implies someone who has gained Yoda-like skills and has been recognised by their community as a living embodiment of Yoda himself.

They are kind of rare.

After all, if most people were experts we would be living in a state of blissful grace where the world was populated by short softly spoken experts with bad grammar.

And it would be really really boring.

There would be nothing to learn and learning stuff is what makes me get up in the morning.

How do you recognise a true expert?

An expert will never introduce themselves as an expert, “Hi John Smith, social media expert”.

An expert will have an awesome mastery over a subject area, the pitfalls, the opportunities, the tips, the tricks. This will be demonstrated by a long experience in their field.

An expert will be recognised as experts by their peers and may even be introduced as such.

An expert will always accept that there are limits to their knowledge and that they could learn more. They became experts because they were interested in learning.

An expert will accept and thoughtfully discuss alternate ideas. Experts are interested in ideas, not the world of opinions and being right or wrong.

An expert is likely to look just like you and me.

How do you recognise the fexpert?

A fexpert will introduce themselves as experts and be a self-proclaimed genius.

A fexpert will have some experience and reading in a subject area but not accept that there are limits to their experience or knowledge.

A fexpert is interested in being right so you recognise how smart they are. They will argue rather than discuss.

A fexpert is secretive, mysterious and dismissive. This is so you don’t catch them out.

A fexpert thinks you can be a guru without years practicing the spiritual arts and assembling a flock of disciples.

A fexpert is likely to look just like you and me.

How do you avoid being a fexpert?

It is quite simple. You stay interested in ideas. Your ideas, other peoples ideas, your kids ideas, your taxi drivers and your co-workers ideas. The world is made up of many wonderful new ways of seeing and understanding the world. As soon as you proclaim yourself as a guru, a genius or an expert, part of you is closed off to this magical world of ideas and you stop listening.

Google just released Google Buzz which has demands that we “go beyond status messages”.

To me this appears to echo the feeling many people had, including me, when confronted with micro-blogging sites like Twitter – so what.

It represents a profound misunderstanding of what a status message actually is. Status messages are really:

• part of a conversation
• the start of a conversation
• a cry for help
• a complaint
• a grandiose aphorism about what’s wrong with the world
• a proclamation of love
• and of course a comedy.

Whilst twitter and Facebook might appear to a Google engineer to be merely a system that accepts, validates and publishes status messages, these sites are much more than than that.

They are communications systems that helps people connect.

Much like email does.

I can see why the Google engineers and product marketing folks decided to use focus on doing more than updating and reading status messages. It is a good spin and a great reflection on Gmail’s strengths, which are that it’s very bloody easy to use and has a huge base of installed customers who are already having conversations.

What is missing from Gmail is a an ecosystem of third party applications which can help me share anywhere I like from practically any device I like.

Of course this wouldn’t sell any advertising.

And this is why I reckon Google wants to “go social”. The more people tweet or exchange Facebook messages the less they email and of course  Google has a reduced audience to display advertisements to.

After a long break from blogging which was sandwiched by two overhyped product releases, one from Google and one from Apple, I am feeling a little fatigued with product releases that are thinly masked market share grabs and do nothing to solve my problems.

And let’s not forget that Yahoo and Microsoft have had similar features for quite some time.

My first impressions from Buzz are that is pretty cool. The user interface is very slick and it is easy to do stuff like attach images, add people, comment, like, post links and browse posts.

My big complaint is that  I cannot update Twitter from Buzz although I can see my tweets in Buzz.

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

When Marx wrote the great line above he was describing the class struggle between the proletariat and bourgious for control of the means of production; he was describing capitalism and the paradoxical desire for continual change and improvement.

For Marx capitalism is a disruptive historical event that shatters existing social structures and illusions. Life is chaotic and fleeting. To survive, one must face up to the ‘reality’ of the world and ones place in it. You either have access to incredible wealth and resources by controlling the means of production or you earn a wage.

Whether you agree with the labour dialectic and historical materialism I think the idea of owning the means of production has particular relevance for how the Internet has changed cultural production.

That this modest blog can be easily published and made available to anyone foolish enough to read it is a great example of the liberalisation of cultural production. With the Internet, anyone with access to the Internet via a computer or mobile phone can publish stuff; anything they like.

Traditionally, the means, if you like, of cultural production have been owned and controlled by institutions and agitators. Institutions like the church, the media, corporations, and governments had the money and influence to publish and promote using newspapers, pamphlets, TV, radio and movies. Having exclusive access to the only mass communication tools is a very effective way of control and manipulation. The average punter was restricted to writing the odd letter to the paper, standing on a soapbox like a freak, publishing their own pamphlets, or calling the local radio station. The relationship was very much a passive relationship with the institutions calling the shots.

Without being too dramatic, the Internet changed the whole model. Suddenly
consumers could produce and distribute their own content on their own terms. A small business could be as visible as a large multi-national. The solid structure of cultural production had indeed melted into the air. This has caused much angst for traditional owners of the means of cultural production. Profits have been eroded as advertising has migrated online.

During the recent election protests in Iran, foreign journalists were expelled or restricted to their hotels. All information about the protests, some wildly inaccurate, came from Twitter and YouTube. This was then published by the traditional media.

Whilst there is much published on the Internet that is tabloid, inaccurate, racist, stupid, fanciful and grotesque the revolution means that previously passive consumers now have a voice.

I am positive that Marx was more into the labour dialectic than the digital dialectice but he would be impressed by the chaos and profanity ensuing from folks on the Internet finding their voices.

There was once a bar unique amongst others in Melbourne – Le Monde.

For a start it was a bar. The drinking culture in the old days was pubs and nightclubs; barns for drinking beer and getting messy. I spent many a happy night drinking, dancing and indulging in bad pickup lines. I was an expert at the bad pickup lines.

Le Monde was a tiny little place, dark and sleek it bought a European sensibility to the top end of the city.

I was lucky enough to work at Le Monde for a 6 months, the 7am to 12pm shift. It was perfect for a relaxing shift with great coffee followed by a knock-off Miller beer. I was told to order the Miller because it was the most expensive beer in the bar.

Now the same building houses a generic fast food outlet.

Once the canny business folk saw how successful Le Monde was the building next to Le Monde was renovated to create identical small bar spaces. Soon there were many small European style bars in the top end of the city. And Le Monde closed. What once was unique had become the norm.

Every innovator faces this problem. A visionary creates a new business from the spark of an idea, courage and a firm belief in the market need for something new, something amazing.

Then, should the idea be successful, the new space is populated with similar ideas all competing to do something better, something unique but still kinda the same. And the new market is commoditised.

What was once visionary is seen as old fashioned, boring.

Being a leader and innovator is hard. The risk is that having created a business in a clear fresh space, the innovator stops evolving and trying new things. They start to believe in what they tell themselves rather than what the market is telling them. Small signs are ignored; it may be declining sales, shorter visits, less buzz. They convince themselves that they are right, that they are still innovative in a clouded market.

And their copy-cat competitors win. They are expert observers of the market, of the strange dynamic between human desire and greed, and are geared to capitalise on every opportunity.

So the answer in my view is to never believe what you tell yourself but seek answers from your customers, the market and your competitors.

After all, being the local blacksmith was once a lucrative trade.

When I was 15 my chief concerns were sneaking cigarettes and my hair. I didn’t read the newspaper, rather I watched the TV news with my parents as bored as hell.

The Berlin Wall was to stand for another 5 years and Ronald Reagan was talking about God a lot, even though he didn’t go to church.

I was opinionated and selfish. Like most teenagers.

The announcement last week that some research about how teenagers consume media released by Morgan Stanley and written by a 15 year old intern was received with breathless excitement.

This kid had apparently clearly and succinctly identified the problem with media and worried European analysts who may or may not have just bought social media stock.

The kid, I may call him the savant, had claimed that teenagers do not read newspapers. Wow! Apparently they watch TV or get their news on the Internet.

Also, the savant and his friends reckon that advertising is “pointless”. Another amazing revelation!

He also claimed that Twitter is for old people not 15-year-olds.

The kids these days do not buy music, the download it for free – because they can.

They also love texting, or sexting if teenagers are still obsessed with sex the way I was.

The “old” media of TV, radio and newspapers are doomed according to the report. Shocking!

The young have always been cynical consumers of media. The fact that the “old” businesses are not relevant to them is a reflection of the short-sightedness of analysts and journalists. I know plenty of twenty, thirty and even forty year-olds who would consume media in the same way that our spoilt son of a banker.

The real issue is that newspapers, radio and to a lessor extent TV do not engage and entertain as much as You Tube, fmylife.com, the XBox or PlayStation or movies.

The “new” media places me in the centre of the universe, firmly in control of what I choose to engage with.

The old media could never offer this. It functions according to an elitist model of control and delivery. All consumers are passive subject, not active participants.

And the process has been happening for at least 10 years when our savant couldn’t spell consume, media or overblown hyperbole.

Sometimes something seems really really good but it’s actually really really bad; stupid in fact.

So stupid that when you realise that it is so, you feel like bashing your head against a wall and cursing the gods while shaking your fist at the sky.

Or something like that.

A “personalised internet address”. Wow. Are you excited. And guess what, you can get one from Facebook. Wow again.

So what does this “personalised internet address” look like? Well, it looks like a facebook URL as in facebook.com/yourusername. Mine looks like facebook.com/jonstribling and I am proud as punch.

Hang on I hear you say, isn’t that just a Facebook URL with a username appended?
And hasn’t Twitter had them for years?

And doesn’t MySpace have usernames and “personalised internet addresses” already?

And can’t I register my own “personalised internet address” as a domain name?

The answer is yes, yes, yes and yes.

That didn’t stop 500,000 people registering usernames in the first 15 minutes and 3 million registering in the first 24 hours.

That is impressive!

So why the excitement?

Perhaps it is simply the fear of missing out and the shameful memory of having to choose a hotmail address like garyrocks97@hotmail.com.

Perhaps it is the wisdom of the crowd (mob)?

Perhaps it is the next big thing in Internet marketing? Will this be the transformative event for Facebook pages?

Perhaps it is just hype and we all feel a little shamefaced, much like the feeling after a huge night out on the rails.

There is no doubt that for companies using Facebook to promote to consumers this may be a good thing. The pages may be more easily found using search engines and some might get lucky with direct type-in traffic.

But for most of the 67 million members all it may do is invite more SPAM and put their privacy at risk. Those folks who haven’t done so should get a their own domain name, get a blog through a good web host, add some Facebook widgets, add their CV and start publishing. Really start personalising the Internet.

The only “personalised internet address” is an address I own the license as in jonstribling.info or markzuckerberg.com. A URL provided by a company which then effectively ‘owns’ my content is not personalisation, it is bloody clever marketing.

Oh, get your real personalised internet address here at registerfree.com.

Each January the blogosphere is inundated with prediction lists.

It is a chance for each blogger to prove how smart they are. Some lists are hugely intelligent and some are hugely indulgent.

So in the spirit of indulgence I thought I would create my own list of predictions for 2009. But after some time pondering with a glass (or two) of wine I decided that a things that sucked about 2008 list would be the best way to look into the liquid crystal ball.

Google dominance
In 2008 Google consolidated its lead over other search engines. For a market to be truly open it needs to be competitive. With a 72.1% market share in U.S. in December and a higher share in Australia, Google has no real competitors meaning we will continue to pay more for competitive keyword bids.

I do not expect this to change much in 2009. CPC may even continue to rise as more and more businesses move their budgets online.

Less venture capital
US backed venture capital is at its lowest point in five years. This sucks because it means in 2009 there will be less investment in new ideas and innovation.

The sour economic climate has put the bean-counters firmly back in control.

Mobile
2008 was going to be the year. With the iPhone buzz it kinda was but it still wasn’t. 2009 is now the year. Enough said about that.

Ecommerce growth
Growth stagnated online for ecommerce sales proving online businesses are subject to the same buyer concerns as bricks and morter businesses.

Businesses that will do well are the aggregator sites that collect and distribute coupon codes, special offers and shopping catalogues. There will be more research done online before a purchase, particularily a major one.

Twitter
Twitter doesn’t suck. Not at all. I do get concerned about tech heads spending investors money to build something really cool with no business plan. It can’t last. I expect big changes here in 2009. Will the coolness be compromised?

Facebook
Facebook kinda does suck. There’s something I don’t trust about that Harvard drop-out. He’s too earnest, too smart, too rich, too powerful.

I do think Facebook have nailed it with Facebook Connect after the mess-up with Facebook Beacon. Connect plays to their strengths which is building open(ish) platforms for social interaction and engagement.

Web Analytics
There have been a whole lot of exciting analytics products launched in the past few years. Most have a freemium model. Some of my favourites are clicky, clicktale and exactfactor.

Google Analytics have made substantial changes that mean the product is very extensible and powerful. This doesn’t suck at all, so it shouldn’t be on the list but I wanted to mention it anyway.

Kevin Rudd
After the spectacular and long overdue sorry, sorry, sorry, Kevin was proved to be a political operator cut from the same cloth as John Howard.

Bastard! I was a believer in 2007. Now he has broken my bleeding liberal heart.

Wall Street Bankers
Those greedy bastards got greedy and bought financial products no one understood. They also forgot about something called the boom-bust-cycle. It was good to see uber capitalist Greenspan admit he was wrong.

I would like to see some public humiliation involving sandwich boards and tomatoes.

Summing up

So to sum up, for a great 2009 I recommend:

• Focus on web analytics and learning about your audience and what they are doing;
• Embrace social optimisation if you haven’t already;
• Invest in mobile technology;
• Write Kevin Rudd letters telling him 5% is not enough and web filtering is for autocrats;
• Watch your money very very carefully;
• Invest in innovation;

And, of course, keep on laughing.