10,000 hours

May 21, 2012 in Best Practices, Clients, Culture, Industry by Barbara Bates
Malcolm Gladwell's pivotal essays

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

I’ve had a blog post in the works, halfway done, for the last week. It’s about “a day in the life” here at Eastwick, and what my schedule looked like on one particularly interesting day. I want to share it, not in any competitive “my day was fuller than your day” sense – but because we, Eastwick, by nature of the type of work we do and where we do it, happen to be a pretty good barometer of the market: its level of activity, the heat map of various technologies, the pace at which people are looking to shape their markets.

And right now, the needle is tipping high on all three counts, and my schedule – as you’ll see when I post – shows it.

At a pace like this, we need to move and think more effectively than we do during quieter times. Demand on my hours means I need to hold myself to be more efficient and decisive than I normally would be. I say no to meetings I’d actually like to take. I don’t hesitate when I trust or know the truth of something – I don’t pad it with the layers that I might in a quieter time. Some people might not like this about me. I’ve been called out for it, and sometimes I’ve hated that, but these days – I like it. This time is too good, too strong to be taken lightly. We’re building a new level of strength here in the Valley and if I mess around I’m not going to give it the level of value it deserves.

We have a lot to contribute and I’m committed to contributing it wisely, effectively, with the right people, and in a way that fulfills my vision for Eastwick.

And on that, I thought of the 10,000 Hour Rule: Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion about true insight and expertise being traceable to practicing a specific task for 10,000 hours.

Over the last 20 years, how many hours have I sat with tech visionaries, everything from bright-eyed founders to weary late-career executives, and listened to them describe their dreams, their obstacles, their roadblocks, and above all, their stakes.  Maybe they’re prospects, maybe they’re clients, maybe they’re investors or good industry friends – whatever the case, I’m at the table with them and they’re sharing something they want to change and asking me what they should do to change it.

If I assume 10 such meetings each week for one hour each – and that’s a safe lowball number for me (I can think of times when it’s been much more) – that’s 520 meetings a year. I’ll take two weeks off for vacation and to make the math easy. We’ve been in business for 20 years now (actually, almost 21), so if I multiply those numbers, I’m at it. I’ve done my 10,000 hours.

And, if you think of all of the hours I’ve spent brewing in this stuff, not in meetings but in team conversations, talks with reporters and journalists, check-in with industry friends, and the countless initial screening calls that I filtered out before level two – yeah, I’ve done the hours alright.

This realization hit me today with a sense of surprise at first, but then clarity and calm. When I sit across the table later today with a new prospect – one whose story slowed me down and made me say, “Woah…” – I’m going to go full throttle. They don’t have time to mess around and neither do we. This is the time we’ve all worked for, that somehow all of the learning and struggle and vision in the Valley have conspired to create. We’re in it, better than we’ve ever been, and pardon me for saying we’ve earned it.

We’ve done the work. Practiced our 10,000 hours. Learned how to tell a good company from a great one and to help whichever one it is become better – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. And though I wouldn’t mind dialing back the pace of my days, I wouldn’t change a thing about the things we hear, see, enact and deliver. In a sense, the fun is just beginning. From the platform we’ve built, and the opportunity we see at this time, this is an important moment in the story of the Valley.

Leveraging what we’ve all learned is what it’s all about. The hours may be full, but – especially at a time like this – I’m making the most of every one of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Solar-Powered 8-Ball (or why Eastwick believes in solar)

April 26, 2012 in Uncategorized by Ellen Leanse

Let’s face it: none of us can predict the future. We can speculate, call on past experiences or histories, cite business cycles or run algorithms or confer with experts…or just trust our guts. But at the end of the day, nobody knows. A researched thesis or a Magic 8 Ball? Who’s to say which is better at validating an outlook?

So take these thoughts for what it’s worth, and consult your own 8-ball. But I’m writing about why I’m bullish on cleantech, and most specifically, solar.

Lucky me. I arrived on the personal technology scene early, in 1981, not early enough to watch the Steves debut the Apple II at the Homebrew show (reenacted here), but not far after.  So I remember the days of skepticism and doubt, of fringe crowds gathering at ragtag shows and meetups, of financial wariness and audience resistance. Owning a computer then meant risk, not to mention financial outlay. It also meant uncertainty about the future: early Apple buyers couldn’t know if the geeky little boxes on their desktops would become agents of the future or relics of a would-be past.

Certainly Commodore, Franklin, and Apricot caused buyers to believe in the demise more than the potential of a sea change – or a market opportunity. But their failures didn’t signal the end of an industry.

Back in the day, when Apple would invest in showing up at a trade show or similar event, I’d often be there in the booth, watching people’s eyes widen at their first view of Visicalc or AppleWriter. Hah! How I laugh now. Most people today can’t imagine the sound of a world cracking open at the first sight of these early apps, carefully inserted into a “floppy disk” slot on the face of a textured beige wonder-machine any more than they can imagine lugging a two-pound, $4,000 cell phone into their DeLorean.

Looking back, it’s easy to see many expressions of a vision – bringing personal technologies to the masses – appearing on the scene, most of them destined to glimmer for but a moment in time. But look across the “portfolio” of expressions – start-up companies clamoring to gain traction, and big companies moving in to throw their weight at the opportunity – and even then we knew: something big was going to happen.

In solar today I hear an echo. Not just the crowded showroom floors, cluttered with me-toos and false starts, dotted by a few bright points of innovation and vision, together in the risk-mix. Looking at most of the booths, I think “no.” Most of them won’t make it, will confirm the belief that solar is a bad investment, too big a risk.

But looking at the industry, at the momentum of the total portfolio, sparks a different thought: that this industry is here to stay, or at least to shape something that will stay, in a way that causes a few future shapers to win big.

If that’s true, and my 8-Ball tells me it is, then the question becomes: what will it take for those few to win big, and for those of us who are betting on solar to identify them early?

For that, back to the ‘80s. The companies that will win are those driven to lead and to reshape, to blow through assumptions and to think different. Companies that aren’t bridled by the limitations of solar today – solar that I believe will one day be seen as “legacy solar” – but who innovate as they look to ways to harness the power of the sun.

Our good friends at Enphase – “the Apple of solar energy,” as Xconomy dubbed it – and other microinverter suppliers? They’re looking for new ways of making energy capture and management more efficient, safe, and intelligent.  Companies that streamline installation or integrate solar into non-traditional settings? They’re directly confronting the cost and practicality obstacles to choosing solar. Big thinkers attacking conventional assumptions about solar production? They’re taking on the production cost and material consumption parts of this equation and (as our client Twin Creeks is proving) catching their breath as they witness the results.

As I look to the future of solar, experts and 8-Balls probably agree: a point will come where the value exchange clicks into place, and some group of companies is going to win big. When? Don’t know. How? Judgment reserved. But here’s what I believe: the breakthrough will be driven by engineering, design, and innovation, and will emerge from companies committed to thinking differently about the way they use technology to solve problems and improve lives.

That’s a pattern we at Eastwick know well, and that’s why we’re committed to building our solar, and overall cleantech, practice today. The entrepreneurs who are pushing the edges of today’s solar are likely to be the ones who also redefine its financial outlook, too. We’re believers, and we know how to help. It’s our mission to help tomorrow’s most future-shaping companies connect with the audiences who matter most. Today’s cleantech visionaries deserve this, and – much as we helped some of IT’s leading companies find their way through uncertainty and doubt, we’re committed to contributing to their impact and success.

 

 

 

 

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NAB Show 2012: The Time Is Now For Online Video

April 26, 2012 in Clients by Sian Blevins
Ooyala Airstream

It’s a generally understood fact that what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. So my two dinner buddies, who shall remain nameless, need not worry – the bacon story is in the vault.

Every spring, approximately 80,000 people from the world of broadcast technology converge in Las Vegas for the National Association of Broadcasters Tradeshow. This was my debut on the tradeshow circuit and lucky for me, I was invited to attend with Eastwick client Ooyala.  (As background, Ooyala provides technology for online video management, publishing, analytics and monetization. Its integrated suite of technologies and services give content owners the power to expand audiences through deep insights that drive increased viewer engagement and revenue from video.)

The Show Floor:  Focusing on the Future

After speaking with “show veterans,” some who had been attending for upwards of 20 years, it became clear that NAB 2012 represented an undeniable shift in traditional broadcast models and overall thinking about the future of the industry. One message I heard loud and clear is that online video is no longer a theoretical business opportunity sitting in the distant future waiting to take center stage, but rather: it is here now.

The tech and media folks shaping the discussion generally acknowledged this shift in video consumption, but what I found most the interesting were the varying predictions on how to best approach this rapidly changing industry.  Forecasts about how much television consumption will be taking place online in the years to come (and subsequently how advertisers and cable operators will have to evolve to fit that model to stay relevant) were debated. Dialogues about the explosion of mobile devices and how to reach that rapidly evolving customer highlighted a need for content personalization.

Ooyala predicts a substantial increase in television consumption over IP by 2015 and with good reason. The company has been gathering and analyzing millions of unique user analytics (on a global scale), and gleaning rich insights into viewership trends across devices. Ooyala envisions a world of “every screen personalized,”  meaning to create a unique content viewing experience for each user  which not only allows people to engage with the content they find most relevant, but also to allow advertisers to optimize efforts and bring home the bacon. (Last bacon joke– maybe it’s “what happens in Vegas ends up on the Internet?”)

Through the whirlwind of activity, I did manage to chat with Ryan Lawler from GigaOm at one of our tailgates and while we discussed the show in general – he said in a recent NAB show article:

“I’ve always attended NAB with a view toward the digital future — and over the years, I’ve been frequently frustrated by how the industry doesn’t seem to “get it.” This is the first year where I’ve felt that the show and attendees were having real discussions about the future, the first time someone acknowledged that the big broadcast and cable networks weren’t the only ones who held the keys to the future of video.”

Ooyala on the Scene

Ooyala exhibited at “The Airstream” – their custom booth uniquely outfitted as a tailgate party, complete with a vintage, branded trailer (fondly dubbed the “silver bullet”), picnic tables, umbrellas, and a white picket fence.

Sean Knapp (Center), Panel Appearance

Sean Knapp, Ooyala Co-Founder and CTO participated in a panel, “Monetizing Viewership in a Multiplatform Environment,” along with Joe Alicata, Senior Director Product Development for ESPN, Steve Raymond, CEO of Big Frame YouTube’s Premium Funded Channel Initiative, Jeremy Helfand, Vice President of Monetization Adobe Systems, and moderated by CNBC Media and Entertainment Reporter Julia Boorstin. 

Sean shared his vision for the online video industry and the importance of personalizing content to optimize engagement. He said “it’s not about 100 channels. It’s about a billion channels: 1 for each viewer.”

All in all, NAB was a great experience. I had the opportunity to immerse myself even further into the trends and happenings of the digital media industry alongside a talented group of people. Vegas trip = slam dunk.

Lastly, a quick (and well deserved) plug for my buddies at VideoMind. VideoMind is Ooyala’s thought leadership blog dedicated to industry news and views. Check it out for coverage from the show floor (and foolish road trip shenanigans.) Be cautioned, side effects may include laughter and jealousy – you’ll pretty much wish you had been at NAB.

 

 

 

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How NOT to be a Dodo

April 18, 2012 in Best Practices, Culture, Industry by Barbara Bates

We count on our friend Francine Hardaway for unfailing reality checks on what works and what doesn’t in business (and much more). Often her thoughts resonate with issues we’re discussing at Eastwick, or concerns we have about (and sometimes for) Valley companies or business models.

Her latest post for Fast Company – “Why Agencies are Going the Way of the Dodo” – shares her signature tough love. In essence, Francine calls out agencies for ruining (my word, not hers) social media by replacing branding and conversation with performance-based social strategies. (To translate: many agencies are shilling “pay for results” social strategies, meaning they only get paid for their work when a brand’s friend, fan, or follower jumps through some brand-ordained hoop. A “Goal!” bell rings and the agency gets a coin. Essentially a CPM approach to social media.)

For anyone considering this approach, I offer a short word: DON’T. I agree with Francine that this model is inherently flawed and will go the way of traditional online ad models (and other dodos). What to do? Allow me to offer some perspectives.

1. Learn from experience.

Observe the evolution of online advertising and read the writing on the wall. The category is growing but engagement is waning. As Francine says, nobody pays attention. I see dozens of thoughtful articles each day on how online ad models are failing and how companies are scrambling for the next thing that replaces them. We talk to countless companies looking to ship the next “aha!” that will save the model: incent response, increase efficiency, generate broader terms, etc. For a while, maybe. But most won’t sustain; on that I agree with Francine.

Looking for “solutions” to the waning ad model “problem” suggests that the goal really to help the digital (or social) marketer to rush breathless into their CMOs office proving that they’ve scored the numbers that signal “success”? Maybe they can’t get that 0.0X clickthrough rate on banners anymore, but dang it, they’re going to get in on social, and, good news: they only have to pay their agency if they get that result.

Beware, marketers, the danger of this thinking. As the saying goes, each time I hear about it, a kitten dies. To think of relegating social media, an unparalleled platform for true conversation, interactivity, and trust-building – all of which build momentum and action – into…what?  Compare your favorite farmers’ market to QVC and I think you’ll see what I mean.

Eastwick doesn’t do that, and we won’t. We believe that social platforms give brands an unparalleled way to communicate openly and honestly, to ask for input, and to track the way conversations evolve over time.

Based on these conversations, we learn about sentiment (how people feel about our clients or their products). We learn about concerns. Competitive issues. Opportunities – heads’ ups on things they should know about or even places they should go. We track how this shapes things like Share of Voice, topicality, and preference over time (that’s the NEXT thing I’m going to write: my manifesto on measuring success), and we watch, sometimes literally smiling, as these conversations get generous. People openly sharing with each other. Responding and helping. Providing information that otherwise would be hard to find or expensive to source.

And we track how this leads to actual engagement and conversion: to filling sales pipelines, driving online sales, and otherwise building business results. Sustainably.

Think flock, not dodo.

I’m not saying it happens overnight, but with vision and commitment: it happens. Our clients see it and acknowledge the momentum, the results. And I’m ready to assert that – unlike the waning efficacy that Francine forewarns in her post – this type of social interaction will grow in value and impact over time.

2. Share the LOVE.

Francine calls agencies to help their client/partners “design love into the product or service.” Thank you again, Francine. At Eastwick, we use the word “generosity,” but heck: “love” works too. Differentiate with openness and proactivity. Invite. Collaborate. Encourage.

Don’t those words hit you differently than things like Drive, Incent, and Close? I’m not saying that we don’t use those words: we do. But we put them into context of a generous, proactive strategy that begins with serving an audience’s best interests (AKA “Love”) and not simply seeing them as “consumers” of what we want to push or serve.

How does this work? By understanding the people who are part of the audiences our clients serve: what interests them, what matters to them, what’s essential to their satisfaction or success. Then: story development – how we talk about this in terms that reflect our grok of and respect for these audiences. Sure, Francine: journalists CAN go straight to the source…but if the source hasn’t evolved the story to the point where it connects with the audiences, that access doesn’t matter.

This, by the way, is very different for a communications agency than it is for an advertising or even digital firm…but that sounds to me like another future blog post….

3. What killed the Dodo?

I’ve waited a long time for this. Now I get to share some tough love right back at Francine.

Francine, it’s easy to blame agencies for what you describe in your post, but we all know better. Agencies are like any other business: they need to be a business. That means selling something (typically services, aka “people’s time”) at a price that the market will bear.

For most agencies, that means pushing work down to the junior ranks, minimizing strategy, and willingly saying “Yes!” to business relationships that don’t position them as intellectual and implementation partners to their clients.

We all know what I’m talking about. Eastwick team members have written about the phenomenon in recent posts asking if “tech PR is broken” and challenging marketers to demand more out of social (and themselves). It’s also why I declared my independence as one of the few hold-out agencies in Silicon Valley who continues to do things a different way (I loved the positive feedback on this, by the way).

If agencies are going the way of the dodo, Francine, then we need to remember what caused their demise. Dodos didn’t stand up for themselves. They stood there looking dodo-like as they were hunted to extinction.

 

In a way, what Francine describes in her post reveals a much larger problem in business today. The online world’s inherent connection to data, and the ease with which we can access, analyze, and understand it, has created a “hyper-quantitative” approach to marketing that I believe undervalues qualitative insights in determining success. As a good friend says, “Analytics are the pepperoni slices on the pizza of business results.” I’m no vegetarian, but I wouldn’t want an only-pepperoni diet, or even an only-pepperoni pizza. It’s the balance of the ingredients (quantitative meets qualitative, if you will) that makes the pizza taste great and worth ordering again.

As you read about the Dodo, think about the big picture that’s causing agencies to choose a role that they probably know is a fail-in-the-making. They’re scared as they watch their traditional models being disrupted and by direct connections between businesses and the audiences they serve. They’ve lost sight of their true value as data and analytics (awesome as they are) have shifted the shape of their craft. And they’ve let that happen by reacting to demands rather than committing to the value of their work and upping their game to make it even better.

So they’ve let themselves get cornered into accepting roles that ultimately shrivel up and die, like that dodo, almost like some twisted self-fulfilling prophecy proving that their models don’t work.

Here, Francine and I agree. THAT, actually, is the brokenness of most agency models: the “servitude” that prevents them from being of true service. How did that happen, and why did some of us allow it? When agencies can sit across the table from clients and share perspectives like I’ve shared above that say, “Actually, I don’t recommend that. And here’s why,” in a way that helps these clients make better decisions?

That’s when the model will get unbroken. That’s when it works.

Thanks to Francine for a thought-provoking post, and for helping me articulate another reason that I’m committed to sustaining the way we do things at Eastwick.

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Why We Are Focused on Green Technology

April 16, 2012 in Uncategorized by Mike Kanellos

Michael Liebreich, the CEO of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, earlier this year urged green technology companies to redouble their efforts–and increase investment and mindshare–on a particular aspect of business operations.

Namely, public relations.

Public relations? Surely, you must have misunderstood him, you’re thinking. Green, like virtually all other technology industries, requires titanic, world-class scientific breakthroughs and interesting business models. If you don’t have a good idea, public enthusiasm follows.

But take a look at his seven-point plan for clean energy, as reported by GigaOm. It was the centerpiece of his keynote speech at Bloomberg’s annual green conference. The seven recommendations were:

  • Messaging about clean energy should be about affordability not subsidies.
  • Messaging about clean energy should be focused on the greater economy, productivity, security and health. Not “green jobs.”
  • Messaging on clean energy policy should be about deregulation of all energy, not regulation of clean energy.
  • Clean energy needs alliances with other sectors, like auto, telecom, retail and real estate. Systemic change can’t happen without the change happening in other sectors.
  • The audience for clean energy messaging needs to change. We need to stop preaching to the converted. Fifteen percent of people will make more energy efficient and sustainable choices because it interests them, while 85 percent will not make a new energy efficient choice if it costs more money. It won’t help to scare people into changing their life. We need to focus on the mainstream.
  • Embrace media. We need to own the airwaves and the politicians. “You can’t soar like an eagle and poop like a canary” (not exactly sure what that means but like the quote).
  • And, finally, support sustainable energy for all, not just a niche sector or demographic.

Five out of seven of his recommendations directly call for better messaging and communication and another (number 4) revolves around reaching out to other sectors, a job which invariably starts with a communication efforts. Put another way, 85 percent of Liebreich’s advice revolves around framing discussions.

I had a similar experience at the conference sponsored by the Carbon War Room, the nonprofit think tank created by Jigar Shah and Sir Richard Branson, in 2010. The conference broke attendees—mostly investors, engineers and execs–into six groups. Each group was charged with coming up with a three- to five-point plan for tackling a major problem like energy waste in building or the inordinate amount of diesel consumed in shipping.

At the end of two days, each group shared its to-do list. “Better communications” was on every single list.

This failure to communicate has already begun to take a silent toll on many sectors of cleantech. Look at the energy efficiency industry. Numerous studies show that homes and commercial buildings consume approximately 39 percent of all of the energy in the U.S. and that 30 percent of the energy consumed gets wasted. Tools exist to solve the problem and consumers and businesses in many instances will see a payoff in a few months. Yet it remains far easier to get someone to upgrade a year-old cell phone than install weather stripping or change a light bulb.

Green startups are discovering you can die of indifference just as easily as you can from a flawed strategy.

Why is communications such an Achilles’ heel? Partly, it derives from the replacement nature of the many green products. Consumers already own cars. If they buy a hybrid, their lives won’t be appreciably different. An energy efficient air conditioner works just like a water-chilled clunker. The IT world has it much easier. Word processing and email marked huge advances over typing and mail. Word-of-mouth and true-life experience sold those products.

Consumers and businesses, also, sadly, get distracted easily. When gas approaches $4 a gallon, national debates about efficiency and national security get ignited. And then the debate ends when the price drops to $3.25. Food riots or climbing bread prices spark debates about water scarcity, food stockpiles and potential refugee movements. Two weeks later, it’s a forgotten topic.

But it also comes down to a failure of imagination. There is a way to engage consumers and business buyers without boring them with product specs or risk hectoring them about the danger of climate change. And it’s the reason I became a reporter and have now moved into corporate communications.

And I will share that it my next post.

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