I’ve thought for some considerable time now about Twitter and how I feel it actually has more value than facebook with regards to advertising. The difference is context. However, I want to take a moment to look at it from a different angle. There is another key factor that drives the value of the network and the way you can monetize it, The authenticity of the network.

Facebook is as authentic of a network as you can have, you have you, you are you, you’re not FunChick21, or MotorcycleGuy42, You’re Craig Kerstiens. You have a birthdate, which is likely you’re birthdate, you have a job that is your job, you have friends that are you’re friends. Facebook is probably as close to a virtual representation of your true life as you can get on a social network.

Then you have Twitter. Twitter is probably as inauthentic as they come. You ARE FunChick21 or MotorcycleGuy42. You have that name, and that’s it. You have friends, but they’re up to you, it’s a one way relationship, not confirmation of friendship. For that reason you have 1,000,000 people following Ashton Kutcher, and he follows under 100. You’re friends could be celebrities, they could be friends, they could be random people that you liked their tweets.

Facebook from an ad perspective I know almost everything I could want to about you from an ad targeting perspective. Few sites could give much more demographic info that I’d want to target effectively. Twitter I have next to nothing, I have a user name, and the content of what you say.

So there’s an advantage to facebook. But then you have the context of what I’m trying to do. If you’re facebook, you have users engaged in the site not wanting to leave. If you’re Twitter you have users that won’t be on the site for beyond 60 seconds. Getting them to leave shouldn’t be an issue, which means if you can drive where they are leaving to it should work out well for you.

But there’s a final piece. It’s a heavily growing marketplace, that really neither of the major communities picks up on, and it’s virtual goods. Virtual goods exist in either form of network, but neither seems to take advantage, meanwhile it’s the entire basis behinds such communities as World of Warcraft. How will they start to roll into mainstream networks, that’s yet to be seen, but I’ll be curious if virtual goods can become dominant in authentic networks or if they’ll primarily reside in inauthentic networks as they do today.

I’ve done some recent advising for someone working on a site that’s of a social nature. The site is intended in some form to motivate users, the initial thought on this was to define a lot of rules, and send automated messages to users. To me this approach felt very 1990’s. So assuming that were true, then comes the question of how do you motivate users?

I think rules do usually come somewhere in the process, you need to know when to motivate the users, however the catch is how you expose the results of those rules. And in thinking about it there’s a variety of levels at which you can expose those rules from more raw data forms, to several steps of analysis or actions on top of them. Raw data works for analytical users, users that naturally consume data AND are already heavily motivated for the set goal. Lets say for sake of argument this is 10% of users. This means by exposing very little gloss, and mostly the data which the rules are run on you’ll lose 90% of users.

The other extreme is to almost entirely hide the rule and obfuscate this with actions that you know can lead the user back to their goal. I feel not quite this, but some derivative of it, in the form of social nudging could be incredibly useful for many different means. There’s many real world situations where people rely on each other for support, you can think of traditional AA type settings, or weight loss, or other groups with a central focus of accountability. But these forms of groups seem to be largely absent in the virtual space, or when they are present are realistic groups simple dropped into a virtual space.

What happens when users want some mixed level of privacy, but encouragement? What you need to do is to have your rules define when you need to have users get motivation from others. The fun part is how you drive users to interact at those times, this can be through a variety of options, all depending on your site. A very basic example of this is the birthday reminder on facebook. They’re not just reminding you of it for the sake of it, they’re reminding you, so you use applications to send virtual birthday cards to users and messages, therefore enriching the user experience. If other sites were able to apply this to goal setting, and use social nudging over system rules, users will feel more connected to others and it will likely increase effectiveness.

Three times in recent years I’ve had to micromanage others. Though probably in the contrary form to what you would expect. Most people think of micromanagement as their manager wanting to know every detail about their day, and be involved in every minute task. In most cases this form of micromanagement is never received well. Generally my feelings are that if I have to micromanage you, you don’t belong in the role you’re in, though I suppose exception cases may exist.

But the form of micromanagement I’m talking about is upward management. This could be needed for a variety of reasons:

• You’re being micromanaged already
• You’re manager is feeling outside their comfort zone and obviously uncomfortable
• You’re manager doesn’t understand the problem and maintains a distorted view
• You’re working with someone outside of your domain and they don’t have experience in the area

While at least some of this if not all should be more directly addressed, in my experiences that process has historically been out of my control and a slower process. What I could could control was my ability to be provided adequate time to do my job effectively. In most of these cases the manager is going to want to be too involved or drive the process in a direction you wouldn’t like it to go. Micromanaging upwards, may seem like an unnecessary amount of work at first, but it’ll allow you much more time.

First it’s helpful to start with a regular process. Sending status emails every morning or every afternoon, will keep them in the loop. It’ll prevent them from asking too many questions, and will keep them in the loop, but mainly with knowledge you feel is pertinent.

Discussions and calls with insider info will allow them to feel as if they’re driving the process. If you provide information as factual and provide the facts of how certain things have historically worked, or do would at a tactical level from you’re experiences it will help to steer the process in that direction. If they’re outside they’re comfort zone they’re going to take their best guess, it’s 50-50 if that’s the same as you’d see fit.

But, do let them drive the process at hand. If they feel as if you’re attempting to drive it, then they’re going to feel as if they’re authority is being challenged. It’s more a kin to telling them the directions of how to get their and letting them drive the car. If they’re slightly off path, but in the right direction let it go because otherwise you’re time will be consumed with trying to get the exact directions.

Most of my working career has been in what many would call an enterprise environment. Corporate structure well in place at most of them and in those cases any development followed closely to a waterfall methodology. You laid out requirements strictly and then built to those requirements. You essentially had nothing to show until you got to the end product.

Having been in the valley for several years and interacting with some startups and in other settings, I’ve seen a very opposite mindset. The “release early, release often” concept. First you never have clear requirements when dealing with anything a startup should be tackling, if it’s a very clear easy to solve problem, then someone else will have already tackled it. If you’re doing something new, which you should be you can’t gauge how users react, until you actually have something in front of them.

A prime example would be twitter. Twitter was a simple concept, yet it has been done before in many ways, what’s the difference in blogging and twitter? Well twitter requires you’re shorter, has no title, just content, and centralizes the data. It actually incredibly reduced what the user could do, and in doing that created new and broader functionality.

As a more general principle users don’t know what they want. Users will complain about how gmail doesn’t have folders, but they use folders in outlook only because they can’t properly search. If you take away something from a user, they’re going to complain about it. This is fine, it’s not a problem, as long as they didn’t actually use the feature, and there’s other steps you can use to manage this backlash.

But I’d believe the over arching key is that you can’t ask users what they want. If you presume to know you’re going to be wrong, so what does this mean. This means that you build something and you launch it. You don’t test it in user groups, you don’t test it in a lab, you don’t test it in an invite only beta, you launch it. You launch for users, and if they don’t like it, you haven’t upset thousands of customers because you don’t have that many. In consumer land you can launch something without anyone knowing who you are, and then truly test how users will respond, this is far more powerful than the traditional model used in enterprise. It’s the reason most of the biggest sites used today are emergent from startups and similar environments, because they built themselves on what users want.

Something I learned very early on in my working career, not so much from my experiences but from observing the results of others, was to engage at a social level as early possible. This doesn’t mean you have to take time after 5:00 to get to know someone, the best opportunity exists every single day during what you would already do, lunch! Everyone usually takes a break and eats lunch during the day, usually there’s two groups in an office. Those that always go out, and those that bring their lunch or meet others for lunch or maybe even work through it. If you notice those in the first group in your office my guess it’s usually easier for them to get things done, they’re normally a little more in touch with things that are going on. Especially if you can manage to branch out a little and go outside of the people you work with every moment of the day.

It’s generally one thing when you come to work and do you’re job. But no matter how large or small the company you can’t entirely separate the work from the personal, and personalities come out and it becomes some form of factor. Yes, most people are professional, but at the end of the day you’re more likely to help someone that you like even if you’re busy, than someone you don’t. Maybe you have a 50-50 chance of being liked, but I’d say by being disliked you’re not going to get help any slower really.

I know there’s a few people reading this and thinking, this is fine, but I don’t really want to spend money on eating out every day. In my experience the extra knowledge you gain is well worth the price. When you through an executive level person, a developer, a sales guy, a marketing person, and some middle management into a single lunch outing, all come away with a lot of insight into area’s of the business they had little exposure to. This come’s back to my post about leaders and developers, if the people in your business only understand what they do and nothing outside you’re as a whole going to be less effective. Most people in your company don’t think this way, by doing it you’ll become more effective than the average person.

And to think, it all starts with something as simple as going out to lunch. It’s the reason that from day 1, to being a veteran in a company, when someone asks “Do you have plans for lunch?” 90% of the time my answer is “No, when do you want to go?”

A few days ago myself and another were providing our thoughts and insight into a mockup that someone had created for a product they’re working on. At my first glance I noticed it and said wow, that looks pretty awesome. It wasn’t until a few minutes in that someone else said, if we all like this, you’re probably doing something wrong. Meaning that, we’re tech geeks, we’re silicon valley to a T, we like control and power, we like having the ability to set notification levels for every friend we have, for every minute of the day. But middle-america doesn’t use those features, much less they don’t use any products that have those features.

This quickly got us back to the question, who are you targetting, is it middle-america house wives, silicon valley geeks, busy executives. In any application that should always be your starting point. I’ll likely have much more on this piece later, but jumping back to the echo chamber users.

Probably the easiest way to illustrate this is twitter vs. friendfeed. Robert Scoble has said many many times FriendFeed is so much better, so much more than twitter. The biggest problem is that I can’t explain friend feed to my mom. I can explain twitter and she gets it. She can log in to twitter and understand it. Friendfeed there’s far to much a user has to do to get comfortable with it.

Any new mainstream application that launches should do everything transparent to the user. In that the application should seem like it’s almost doing nothing, it should be magic under the covers. A user should have to search to find the ability to configure it, you should gather information on your user, and make assumptions on what they want. If you get it even 50% right you’re likely to retain and engage more users than allowing them the ability to configure exactly what they want.

For some time I’ve planned to found my own company some day. It’s one thing to work your way up through other companies and potentially lead a company, but my strong suspicion is it’s an entirely different and rewarding experience to build something from the ground up. Two key things I’ve decided (as it will likely be a somewhat technical company i’ll found):

I want leadership that understands the technology

I want developers that understand the business

Let me explain each of these further…

Leadership

Leadership often has a solid understanding of the high level value. They understand where the business should be headed, they know at a minimum what customers must pay, and how large the market should be. Once they know these things their next step is to ensure the company can build a product that meets the needs of customers. While all steps are worthwhile, the one I often see bad steps taken are in this execution. It’s not because these people don’t know how to execute, it’s because they don’t understand even at a middle-level how the technology actually works.

I suspect there are many people that can build companies that do grow to be big and successful without having a hands on knowledge, however having the hands on knowledge seems to increase the odds of succeeding quite greatly.

Developers

In contrast developers at a lot of places are highly technical, they know the details and they’re happy to talk about them. There’s really two issues with this, neither are reasons development would go badly, but more of underutilized opportunities. If a developer understands the business then they don’t have to really hash over the details of requirements to the T, they have more of a critical mindset of how things relate to a user. This means you may have a more solid product, or can even spend less on a product manager as you have all your developers thinking in that mindset of how your product relates to the users.

The even bigger difference is sales/marketing. When young and a small company you have very limited resources, people are expected to do lots of tasks. Most people at startups know this, but I seldom see people expect engineers at startups to be able to market/sell the product. However when they are you will typically increase your sales force somewhere around 3-4 fold and reach many audiences you left untouched before. Often times these come in the form of developer conferences, where developers from your target market may be, but a marketer would not feel comfortable trying to sell into a developer environment.

While I would never expect any executive, vp, or manager to get incredibly hands on and code, I without a doubt want them to if truly needed be able to.

As for the developers, they definitely be able to succinctly explain the product and its value to a variety of audiences.

For some time I’ve always felt there was value in having a mentor. Though over the course of my life I’ve seldom setup a formal mentor, though looking back I supposed I could nearly consider many people such a person. Rather than just stress the value of having a mentor I’d like to look at the value such a relationship can provide. Whether you get those pieces of value in a formal mentor situation or just through dinner with people the key is to grow.

1. Find someone to learn from

The obvious first step you should take is to get face time with those that are more experienced and have done it before. This is usually something that younger people that have not been out of school long steer away from approaching those with experience. Perhaps its intimidation, perhaps its that you feel they don’t think it would be worth their time. But from my personal experience I’m normally more than happy to help anyone that asks, and likewise anytime I’ve asked someone I’ve gotten positive results. This is usually as simple as can we get dinner/lunch/coffee sometime?

It should be pretty obvious who you may want to spend this time with. If it’s not then start simply take a boss, teacher, or some manager/supervisor in a lateral department.

2. Articulate the input you want

In unusual cases you may have someone that just naturally helps people grow.  But it’s usually hard to get guidance and direction on the areas you want without articulating that those are the areas you care about. Even if you’ve got the right person, they need to know how they can help, if they don’t know this you’re chances of it being effective are almost non-existent.

There’s a couple of ways to go about this, the first is to simply say ‘I’m looking for someone to mentor me in areas, x, y, z’. Or you could more simply have some idea of the areas you want more feedback on, and in these cases it may make most sense to get more direct answers to what you are seeking. Each has their benefits with the former you may get new insights that you had never considered. Whereas with the latter you are guaranteed to get some form of answer you are looking for.

For a tangible example, if you were considering a new job. The former question might give an answer of career path options, but no insight into whether you should accept the new job. The latter might give you a direct answer on their opinion of if the new job is a worthwhile venture, but is likely to make you less self sufficient in steering you’re own career. Both have their time and place and should be equally balanced.

3. Engage in the conversation

If you simple sit back and take notes after answering a question, then you’re no different than a freshman student sitting in a lecture class. Half the value of a mentoring relationship is the relationship, it’s not just about soaking up information, it’s about the relationship you build. If you want straightforward how-tos go read a book. The value in the relationship works on both sides, it’s a rewarding experience to mentor someone and see them grow. So engage with the person you’re looking for guidance from, they’re normally more quick to offer support in areas outside strictly advice in these cases.

Having spent most of my early career in consulting and now being at a software company I’m realizing there were a lot of principles I picked up that I now readily apply in my daily happenings. As I find myself interacting with most of my colleagues, many of whom have only been in software companies, these principles are as evident.

1. Listen to the problems not the solutions

Often times in early interacting with a customer people will ask what do you need. As a consultant I would never ask what they needed, if they knew this I wouldn’t be there. Instead, I ask about their problems. It’s then my job to take what they tell me about their problems, their environment, and then steer them in the direction of an appropriate solution. While very basic this is the key to consulting, asking the right questions to steer your customer so you can provide value.

2. Take ownership of the process

If you develop on a project and follow exactly what the customer tells you, spending the time they tell you on each feature, but in the end have no single full functioning piece the customer is likely to hold you at fault. Even if they do not, they’re not going to exactly be happy and have a successful project. Once you’ve listened to their problems and gotten an idea on the solutions there has to be careful management of this process. A customer is going to be wanting every potential feature to be delivered, it’s up to you to ensure each early stage feature is delivered with quality and value. It’s better to deliver 80% of the features at 100% completion, than 100% of the features at 80% completion. Again, a simple concept, but a tight rope to walk when the customer wants you to simply follow as they say.

3. Don’t talk about the solution, talk about the value

Perhaps this is only because where I’m currently at is very engineering centric, but I hear so many times the discussion about the particular implementation. In consulting finding value in something was extremely simple, in fact I believe I learned it in one of my very first business courses. If it doesn’t make something better, faster, or cheaper, you’re not going to be successful with it. It’s your job to determine how you take the implementation and arrive at the value, but when the customer is getting down to the details of implementation there’s a good chance you’re not making best use of their time. It’s absolutely true at a point you’ll want to discuss all of the implementation details, but don’t do that until you’re absolutely required to, your first job is to sell them on the value.

While all of these are very basic principles, actually enforcing them is something that comes very gradually over time. Every interaction with the customer is going to be very unnatural to what you’re already doing. However, you’ll find yourself in more control of the full process, and having more satisfied customers when you follow these steps.

Google doesn’t understand social or collaboration. There’s not much more to it than that, though for the sake of making this a an actual blog post I’ll explain a bit more.

Blogger was huge, it was the place to go if you were creating a blog. There weren’t many www.mybloghere.com, many of the largest most popular blogs on the internet were on blogger. People had accounts, people registered to post comments, people had full fledged profiles that could have easily preceded a facebook profile page. Google bought blogger and had more than enough resources to grow blogger into a sizable social community. But if you visit it looks much the same as it did 5 and almost 10 years ago. 

Google spreadsheets is one of the best online spreadsheet programs, and you can even collectively work on a spreadsheet with others at the same time thousands of miles away. Who do you know that uses google spreadsheets that isn’t some form of a techie? It likely has a user base of under 1% of users of spreadsheets, and its not because it’s missing the power features of pivot tables and such. If you re-brand it as a collaboration tool when working and throw chat/video/whiteboarding in the same application google would have an instant growth 10 fold of users, but they don’t understand that a user seeing the same thing on a spreadsheet and seeing what the other types in a single document isn’t collaboration!

To jump ahead of the curve, counter arguments I’ve already heard are around ads and gmail. Gmail, google didn’t improve email, they simply give you lots of space for free, if gmail were to cease to exist tomorrow users would simply jump over to yahoo or microsoft. Ads, google changed the ad industry by making search effective, they’re good at algorithms and such, but they don’t get users and collaboration, and at their current rate they never will.

Wave isn’t meant to just improve email, it’s meant to be a tool for collaboration, to view a conversation as an entity, and google just doesn’t get the conversation part.