Conversation Agent

Visualize Your Story Automagically

2013-06-11T06:00:00-04:00

Use your own script or find among an inventory of existing ones and create a storyboard with Amazon Storyteller.

As described on the site:

Amazon Storyteller is a new application from Amazon Studios that lets you turn a movie script into a storyboard. You choose the backgrounds, characters, and props to visually tell a story.

A successful storyboard can tell the full story of a script, or capture its essence in short form, like a trailer. Either approach can be a great way to build an audience for your story and see how people respond to it.

The tool is free to use for anyone on Amazon Studios. It looks like the battle for original entertainment content is on, complete with a time-tested review system. Amazon gives a whole new meaning to prime time.

And I can think of a couple of business applications as well:

creating visuals for a presentation
providing a visual summary for a report
using visuals to draw out the main concepts of a paper
illustrating interactions for a system

Amazon is ready for 'net natives, are you?

[source: Amazon Tumblr]

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

Why so Many Companies Fail to Deliver on Customer Service

2013-06-10T06:00:00-04:00

It is disheartening to experience such a race to the bottom.

This past week I made three separate inquiries about a recent booking to American Express Travel, the last one on Twitter because I was hoping against hope... No response.

From a company where I have been a loyal customer since 2002. American Express refers to its cardholders as members. Is the yearly fee customers pay the only sign of that membership?

Membership alone is not enough

According to a new survey by J.D. Power and Associates#, membership -- in the example is a club associated with a sporting goods retailer -- is not the critical factor in achieving higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Rather, it is an outcome. Satisfaction is a result of good staff, contributing 30 percent on the satisfaction index for Cabela's.

Nearly two-thirds (62%) of Cabela's customers say they "definitely will" recommend the brand, which is significantly higher than the report average of 50%. In addition, 51% of Cabela's customers say they "definitely will" repurchase the brand, which is higher than the report average of 44% and higher than that achieved by the majority of the brands included in the report.

Membership base should not be the only indicator of loyalty. Because if it is, a new service that focuses on creating and delivering better experiences will take that base. People talk.

Delivering results with confidence

Keeping promises already made helps an organization make better promises next. When a business bridges that gap, it builds momentum -- and the people who work in that organization have confidence in every action because the business delivers.

Customer service made simple sets premium brands like the Ritz Carlton apart. And culture is a big part of setting the tone in companies that deliver.

As the (fewer) examples of good service demonstrate, organizations that see customer satisfaction as much more than a number, are quite deliberate about creating an environment where it is possible to be of service.

One of the notable parts of the conversation between Swisher/Mossberg and Apple CEO Tim Cooks at D11 was about how the technology company looks at statistics about its products.

It's not just about sale numbers. Storage facilities and garages throughout America (and increasingly the world, alas) are filled with unused products gathering dust and taking up space. Even in a cloud-based personal future, the tools we don't use are not much use to anyone in that value chain.

The three key metrics Apple CEO Tim Cook tracks to understand whether they are shipping the best possible products, and customers are happy are:

sheer usage
customer satisfaction
eCommerce transactions

Why so many companies fail to deliver on customer service

Culture is a big part of it. Where is the company focusing from the top down? Treating people as valued customers and guests is the equivalent of welcoming them with a genuine warm smile.

Every industry, every organization has faced the need to apply staff reductions, and to do less with more in the last ten years. There's a conversation about market dynamics and the expectation economy here I won't get into at this time.

When it comes to customer expectations, however, organizations can do a lot to help empower employees, and customers with the tools to provide service on one hand and automate our own experience on the other.

The tools must work, though. If I did a paid heuristic of every site that breaks or otherwise sends you to a human being to fix a problem or answer a question, I would be a rich person indeed.

Automate everything -- and do it well -- except for culture. Systems can be upgraded, integrated, simplified, replatformed, you name it. Culture is a tough one to fix, because the wider the gap between promises made and promises kept, the lower the confidence it can ever be bridged effectively.

And rebooting the human spirit is a tough one to sort out.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

What I'm Reading Now

2013-06-09T17:39:53-04:00

Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy -- McKinsey Global Institute, cuts through the noise and identifies 12 technologies that could drive truly massive economic transformations and disruptions in the coming years.

The One Thing that Makes a Company Last Forever -- by Marina Krakovsky, Stanford Graduate School of Business. Staying competitive calls for ambidexterity. Instead of choosing between exploiting current opportunities and exploring new ones; you have to do both. The companies that last for decades, according to the author, are able to do so time and time again.

The Future of Human Centered Design -- by Nathan Waterhouse. [...] it’s time for design to take the next step and lead the way to Holistc Design. That means finding an approach that, like Design Thinking has done, transcends discipline, encourages collaboration across those disciplines, considers the whole system rather than just its parts, and takes a discovery driven approach to creating new solutions.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

Become a Master at Connecting

2013-06-07T06:00:00-04:00

Recently, I had the opportunity to meet two incredibly talented and generous pros in person. They both work in the field of innovation for growth, and we discovered we have many more things in common than we thought, even though we have lived in distant parts of the world from each other.

It's uncanny how that happens, isn't it?

This idea that making connections is also (and I'd argue especially) about helping others get what they want is a good practice.

Characteristics of good connectors

Good people are fairly easy to spot, even though they are usually head down getting the work done. By the very nature of how they spend their time mastering a set of skills and following their north star, purpose, they tend to work and connect with good people.

What characterizes good connectors?

Have had multiple careers

Thus they are familiar with the common elements that help people succeed in different environments. Among the side benefits of constantly learning new ways are:

gaining a sense of perspective
exercising humility
mastering diverse bodies of knowledge
being exposed to all kinds of cultures

A non linear resume or biography used to be a red flag. A sign you lack a clear sense of purpose. Many organizations still see it that way.

I look for the common threads within the larger story. When they're there, I spot a connector.

Create value and impact by connecting

Is their guiding principle with ideas and people. The ability to see and recognize patterns is part of identifying and making sense of growth drivers. Good complements to a focus on value are:

being purposefully generous
communicating an authentic desire to be helpful
keeping promises with confidence
developing the ability to make better promises in the future

Master connectors who create value an impact, contrary to myth, are not the super extroverts, or life of the party. In fact, quite a few I know are fairly private people.

Tim Kastelle, who I met recently in person after years of reading his work online, and vice versa, is a well traveled connector. Yet he would not define himself as extrovert.

Connect to add, not take

Spot a serendipitous attitude and you know you've come across someone who possesses this characteristic. The intent that powers this approach manifests as:

driven by curiosity, not scarcity
thriving in moments of need
overcoming obstacles by virtue of reaching out to others
getting practice on taking chances

By the time I met Greg Satell, I had read his blog cover to cover, if there is such a thing. He is even more dynamic and keen on adding in person.

As I said for many years, find someone who in more interested than keen on coming across as interesting and you spot a master at connecting.

Look for opportunities to connect people and be creative at spotting points of interest. In the age of social networks, it pays off to remember the mantra: don't expect, connect.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

Tapping into Your Sense of Purpose

2013-06-06T06:00:00-04:00

Purpose is a powerful motivator and ally.

Tap into your sense of purpose and there is no limit for better.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

Where Data and Creativity Overlap

2013-06-05T06:04:00-04:00

A conversation on data literacy between Hilary Mason, chief scientist, Bitly and co-founder of hackNY and Leslie Bradshaw, COO of the startup Guide.

I met Leslie prior to that as co-founder of the digital agency Jess3 when I spoke at FutureM, Cambridge, and I'll look forward to comparing notes next time we meet at an event on media and entertainment.

The graph you see here depicts the overlapping worlds of Mason and Bradshaw through data:

This page was a collaboration: Bradshaw, Mason, and their respective teams pulled together biographical facts, as well as stats about each person’s social media networks.

Then, we sent the info to research firm Beutler for analysis and story structure. Information design specialist Tiffany Farrant-Gonzalez created a wireframe blueprint and Milan-based studio La Tigre gave the final graphic its color and texture.

And that’s how data sparks creativity.

We have in common seven of the mutual connections and friends highlighted in the chart.

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With data, it is the query set that matters -- the questions you ask and set out to prove and disprove. That's my version of the data/creativity overlap.

[hat tip Fast Company]

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

New Technologies Change the Way we Engage with Culture

2013-06-04T06:00:00-04:00

We're so used to thinking of change with technology and the Web as fast, that we forget to remember its full impact and utility have a longer runway. The accepted time frame for significant changes in culture is about thirty years.

The reason, says Matt Locke, is that:

[...] cultural change is not just about technology or economics, but about changes in behavior.

The important phase of cultural change is not the adoption of new technologies, but about the way those new technologies change the way we consume or engage with culture.

It's often the case that the first cultural products for new technologies merely mimic old forms, and it isn’t until the majority of audiences have changed to the new technology that new behaviors emerge clearly enough to sustain new forms of culture, and in turn new business models.

Human behavior as the driving force

This means we're still by and large experimenting with digital products based on business model that harness the changes in attention patterns.

According to Locke, the bridge from old broadcasting media models to new patterns encouraged by digital is characterized and measured by "The Spike and the Like".

He defines the Spike as a huge rush in simultaneous attention, amplified by social media, and the Like as a single measure of attention that attempts to reduce the complexity of behaviors it sums up.Both are artifacts of an earlier era.

As the patterns of attention changed over the course of the last several years, the balance of power in the media and entertainment industry shifted.

Understanding audience behavior

I've been working on strategies to build tools and digital experiences around the four emerging patters Locke cited in his article.

While they are interesting studies of where we are in quasi real time (the content still needs creating), the very nature of these patterns suggests lack of sustainability over time.

(1.) The Binge

Watching a whole series of shows at once or over a few short sessions. This was mentioned by Josh Sapan of AMC in the context of understanding viewer needs in his keynote at MIPTV 2012. Binge watching redefines how a story is constructed along with how it is made available.

The audience has a relationship with the plot and the characters and wants to engage in the story at its own pace.

(2.) The Pledge

This second pattern is even more interesting to me. Because it flips the concepts of donating to support an existing program to offering to finance a concept to help make it a reality. This is possible through sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

As Locke observes, the time-boxed nature of these projects raises a dilemma of what to do with the patrons-as-audience that gathers around a project once it is completed.

(3.) The Long Live Event

Being well suited for digital, blogs, Tumblr accounts and digital experiences that are updated regularly are all examples of this pattern. Embedded or sprinkled in an environment that houses the overall experience are moments or spikes of high interest.

Bloggers making strong or provocative statements to attract a spike in attention are the equivalent of reality show producers who set up context to create drama.

People hang on the digital sidelines until they once again make a stronger connection with the material. The stream format takes care of providing the variety of spikes needed to attract different audiences or different kinds of attention at different times.

(4.) The Report

When you receive a reminder or status emails about what your friends are doing in social networks, those are reports. Data-monitoring services like the Nike+ Fuel Band, and mobile apps like Run Keeper are forms of reports.

Making smart use of data and audience input are critical aspects of this attention pattern. Indeed, this format seems to have the most promising future.

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Digital gives us the ability to see what people want to do, how they discover experiences, and choose to interact with stories and digital content, and (potentially) engage with these new patterns.

The question of what is next goes beyond the immediate desire to figure out how to monetize a new distribution system to the very fabric of how we construct experiences with audience involvement -- and sustain the evolution from real time to over time.

[image via KPCB Internet Trends]

[hat tip Neil Perkin]

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

100 Verbs to Connect

2013-06-02T23:46:51-04:00

The biggest and still unexplored opportunity with social media is that of helping make connections.

100 verbs to connect

make things happen
welcome relationships
suspend judgment
create experiences
use multimedia for learners and readers with different styles/preferences
use your content to elevate others
be helpful
show you care
introduce peers
tell stories
help readers rock
listen and ask questions
stay humble
keep learning
participate fully
accept
take responsibility
resist copying
liberate your inner fan
transform your attitude
challenge your assumptions
think community
collaborate freely
develop opportunity
stay passionate
be honest (especially with yourself)
be willing to change your mind
provide a platform for others to find people with like interests
build interactions
stay curious
stay offline when you're tired or argumentative
dream, think, do
facilitate conversations
build prototypes
invent possibilities
use engagement to accelerate learning
brag about your fans' products and services
evangelize your employees
observe more, judge less
learn to read the social triggers that make stuff happen
be more transparent
choose teaching over winning
open communication lines
prefer open understanding
keep your promises
go the extra mile for someone else
laugh more, especially about yourself
be courageous
stay with it through thick and thin
tell stories
respect privacy
find a cause
be original
celebrate common traits
want less, do more
become the person you'd like to be
stay soft on people, hard on issues
appreciate small gestures, they are a big deal
communicate more
amaze yourself
recognize talent
take more walks
take the high road
discover and highlight worthy projects
understand the power of silence
stay hungry
thank often and liberally
be patient
encourage exploration
make your writing a work of art
find mentors
practice what you preach
be flexible
adopt and credit good ideas
break down elitist walls
step out of formulas
reinvent joy
earn your stripes
face your responsibilities
recognize and celebrate differences
learn to think with your own experience
invest in building something
appreciate success is several years in the making
know your values
work with others
make someone's day
put people first
read more, react less
know your limits
find inspiration
experiment
adjust
be ready to be surprised
get to know your peers
inspire and find inspiration
know you make a difference
forget the numbers, you count
let others opt in
set a good example
raise your industry, community, readers

The highly connective people, the "power networkers", are not those who mastered the tools, those who make perfect and know all the answers.

They're those who elevate others. When you know why you're connecting, you benefit as well.

How do you connect? Has it changed over time?

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

Conversation Agent

Visualize Your Story Automagically

Why so Many Companies Fail to Deliver on Customer Service

Membership alone is not enough

Delivering results with confidence

Why so many companies fail to deliver on customer service

What I'm Reading Now

Become a Master at Connecting

Characteristics of good connectors

Have had multiple careers

Create value and impact by connecting

Connect to add, not take

Tapping into Your Sense of Purpose

Where Data and Creativity Overlap

New Technologies Change the Way we Engage with Culture

Human behavior as the driving force

Understanding audience behavior

(1.) The Binge

(2.) The Pledge

(3.) The Long Live Event

(4.) The Report

100 Verbs to Connect

100 verbs to connect

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