While I am involved heavily in business and marketing activity, I am a tech guy at heart.  I often have to stop myself from being overly influenced by technical concerns and perspective.  However, sometimes that perspective is broadly relevant.  One example that has been on my mind recently is the issue of scale – how to design and extend a solution to support (sometimes massive) growth.

Social media marketing is about dialog, not monolog.  Conversing, not  broadcasting.  It is about engaging at a personal level.  That is probably the most common message shared and passionately propagated by social media marketing experts and practitioners.  And I certainly believe it to be true.   But the implications of this message make the software architect in me uneasy.

In software development, supporting multiple concurrent dialogs (user sessions, transactions, etc.) is the number one factor inhibiting scale.  Content publishing sites (msn, cnn, nytimes) are relatively easy to scale because they don’t have to sustain ongoing dialogs with each reader.  But transactional and dialog-centric sites (ecommerce, gaming, social media) are very difficult to scale.  This is because each dialog requires memory, CPU cycles, and other finite resources.   Twitter is the poster child for the scalability challenges that come with dialog-centric systems.  They have had tremendous growth and success, but not without a lot of pain and frustration for both the company and the users.

I see a clear parallel between the scalability challenges faced in software and the challenges that will be faced by agencies and marketing organizations as they attempt to scale their social media marketing programs.   Brand engagement, at a personal level, is critical to success.  But brand representatives are finite and expensive resources.  As social media usage continues to grow, along with consumer expectations of brand engagement, consumer demand for attention will exceed brands’ ability to connect at a personal level. Brands can’t add marketers as readily as they add servers.  But without those personal connections, the social media marketing benefits are lost. If brands can’t scale their social media engagement and maintain personal connections, they will be perceived as using social media as a broadcasting medium – and end up fostering resentment, rather than affinity.

Fortunately, the consumers themselves are the solution.  Marketing agencies and organizations should include brand ambassador programs as central components of their long-term social media strategies.  The brand ambassador term seems to have many definitions and interpretations.  So, in this context, I’ll define a brand ambassador as a customer/consumer who is an active advocate and has been given some kind of official recognition or endorsement from the brand – usually for their product knowledge and/or passion.  They are part of an exclusive community that have a privileged relationship with the brand, and are recognized by other consumers for that relationship.

Again, I’m really a tech guy, so I’m sure a marketer could provide a much better definition.  But, hopefully, I’m in the ballpark – at least in this context.

One of the best examples that I’ve personally experienced is the Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) program.  Microsoft describes the program as follows:

Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community’s best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.

The program is run by Microsoft’s Community Support Services group – not by marketing.  While it was not conceived as an ambassador program, it very affectively solves the same problem of scaling customer engagement through social media.  Through this program, Microsoft has extended its reach into hundreds of communities and discussion forums where customers are interacting with and supporting each other.  MVP participants in these communities and forums are recognized and respected because of their relationship with Microsoft and are often sought out by other members.  Some MVPs have more respect and credibility with customers than many Microsoft employees.

While the MVP program is not a marketing program, it is a fantastic case study for the power and effectiveness of using customers to represent a brand and scale social media engagement.  I believe the fact that it is not simply a marketing initiative elevates the credibility of the program and the MVPs.

Sean O’Driscoll was the primary architect of this program.  Since it pre-dates the social media term and social media marketing era, you could say he was doing social media before social media was cool.  I had the pleasure of meeting him while working on Microsoft’s social media marketing platform for Windows & Windows Live.  He has since left Microsoft and is now President of Ant’s Eye View, a community and social media marketing firm.  Definitely a company worth following.

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  ~ Abraham Maslow

  That golden hammer mentality can be seen in the use of community platforms by many brands.  Broadly, there are three common business goals and uses for community platforms.  (Again, broadly – there are many more specific uses.)

• Support – enabling users to help and support each other.
• Research – gaining consumer insights and feedback.
• Marketing – generating awareness, buzz and word-of-mouth.

Each of these goals have unique requirements.  Yet most companies use the same community hammer for all three purposes.  Many of the community platforms can indeed be used effectively for each purpose.  There are several impressive platforms with both broad and deep feature-sets.  But there is a fundamental problem with existing community platforms when the primary goal is marketing – word of mouth marketing, in particular. 

The problem is these platforms create what I call destination communities.  Users have to navigate to a specific site/destination and interact with other users within the confines of that site.  In the physical world, this is analogous to gathering customers at a corporate campus or conference center.  That is commonly done and is appropriate for support (training), research (focus groups), and the awareness component of marketing.   But, to be effective, word of mouth has to be encouraged and enabled everywhere – especially off-campus.  Otherwise, your members are just preaching to the choir.   

The real value of word-of-mouth comes from influencing others outside the loyal customer base.  You want passionate customers and brand advocates to influence friends, family, peers and colleagues wherever they are having conversations.  Most of those (online) conversations are not occurring within the confines of a brand’s destination community.  They are scattered across multiple blogs, forums, social networks and other social mediums. 

Word of mouth is the most effective and, appropriately, the fastest growing marketing segment.  Unfortunately, it is not well served by existing tools.  Assembling, engaging, and activating a community of brand advocates is an important component of a word of mouth marketing strategy.  In that context, implementing a “traditional” community platform may seem logical.

In fact, most community platforms do provide relevant features to help community managers inspire members and motivate participation.  Usually this is in the form of a reputation system.  Reputation systems are prevalent on many forms of social media because they are highly effective at encouraging desired behaviors.  A great exploration of the reasoning behind this can be found in a research study by Sarah P.W. Sheik and Choon-Ling Sia, of The University of Hong Kong, entitled: Using Reputation System to Motivate Knowledge Contribution Behavior in Online Community.  Ultimately, they suggest that reputation systems play on the belongingness and esteem motivations described by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. 

Reputation systems are powerful tools provided by most community platforms, but their scope is still restricted to a single destination community.  Therefore, they are of limited value to word-of-mouth marketing initiatives.  Community platforms have attractive features and seem almost right for the marketing job.  But their confined scope is a significant marketing barrier.

Marketers need a new set of tools for building marketing and brand advocacy communities.  They need to be able to assemble, engage, and activate advocates across all the advocate’s communities and social networks and through all social mediums that the advocates use.  They do need features similar to existing community platforms (reputation systems, for example), but that can be applied to a broadly distributed community of advocates.  They need an alternative to the community golden hammer.

I’ve been looking into semantic web services to extract key terms and concepts from user-generated content.  Calais and Zemanta both offer rich web services, designed to help you find and integrate relevant and related content from around the web.  For my purposes, I’m just interested in the term/concept extraction – which is just a small part of what they provide.  Yahoo! has a much more basic service designed to do just that, appropriately named the Yahoo Term Extraction Service.

I decided to do a quick evaluation/comparison, using the following text, from one my delicious bookmarks:

Online Communities: Establishing a Community’s Culture – Online Community Report

We initiated the Online Community Culture study in October of 2008, as part of the ongoing research agenda of the Online Community Research Network. The intention of the study was to get a broad look at the factors that influence online community culture, and the steps community managers and strategists take in cultivating, and in some cases influencing, a community’s culture. We had over 75 participants in the research, representing many sectors, including software, tech, traditional media, social media and online community, and non-profits. Respondents seniority skewed towards Manager (44%), Directors & VP’s (12%).

The results from each were quite different.  Calais and Zemanta both seem to have more “semantic intelligence” and were able to focus in on the terms that were most relevant to the subject.  Calais offered a short, but all relevant list of terms – all extracted directly from the text.  Zemanta offered a broader set of terms, including some related terms not explicitly in the text, such as “social network” and “community management”.  Unfortunately, it also included some unhelpful terms, such as “computers” and “on the web”.  Yahoo! provided the broadest list of terms, but also the least helpful.  With all the resulting terms extracted directly from the text, Yahoo!’s service seems to be mostly a semantic parser, with the least semantic analysis.  However, Yahoo’s simplicity can be valuable, as well.  With other examples, I’ve seen Calais and Zemanta come up empty (no terms), while Yahoo! provided some relevant, and some not-so-relevant terms.  As with people, too much intelligence can be problematic.    Unfortunately, none of the services consistently provide ideal terms.  But combined, you might get decent results.  That’s something I’m continuing to explore.  For those interested, the resulting terms from each service are below.

Calais:

• Online Community Research Network
• social media
• online community culture
• online community
• Online Community Culture study

Zemanta:

• Virtual community
• Social media
• Online Communities
• Computers
• Non-profit organization
• On the Web
• Community Management
• Social network

Yahoo!:

• culture study
• community culture
• community managers
• research agenda
• ongoing research
• strategists
• seniority
• respondents
• vp
• intention
• sectors
• non profits
• participants
• community research network

Another great interactive marketing study from Razorfish was just published, with a focus on digital moms. 

Razorfish and CafeMom have narrowed the focus of our research on moms who are active users of digital and who regularly research and purchase goods online.

It is apparent that moms’ digital channel usage is influenced by their kids.  I would not have expected such strong usage of gaming.  You can read and download the full study here:  http://digitalmom.razorfish.com/publication/?m=4248&l=1

In support of Mediassembly’s upcoming product, I’ve been doing a lot of research on community marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, and various other forms of social media marketing.  The deck below, from Agent Wildfire, provides some of the most compelling statistics I’ve seen – justifying an aggressive social media, community, and WOM strategy.

Visible Technologies posted a list of some of the best Social Media industry reports of 2008.  All but one of them are free.  The first, from my former Razorfish colleagues, is quite comprehensive and insightful.

• Razorfish: FEED: Consumer Experience Report: This study focuses on understanding how technology impacts today’s digital consumer experience.
• Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008: The long time industry standard, this year’s report analyzed trends and themes of blogging and surveyed bloggers about how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially.
• Universal McCann: Power to the People Wave Report 3: This excellent study measured consumer usage, attitudes and interests in adopting social media platforms and technologies.
• Forrester Research: How to Connect with Bloggers: This paid report helps brands understand bloggers and their motivations before kicking off outreach programs.
• MarketTools Insight: How Americans are Socially Connected on the Web. This report covered the link between socially networked consumers and purchasing decisions.

Also from Razorfish:

Due to popular request, today we are releasing Meet The Connected Consumer, a PDF download that contains our Digital Consumer Behavior Study *and* all of the data. This includes the majority of questions we asked respondents and a detailed quantitative breakdown of their responses.

The FEED Consumer Experience Report includes much of the Meet The Connected Consumer content.  But the Connected Consumer report includes the supporting data.

In my last post, I suggested that Microsoft embraced social influence marketing (which includes participatory marketing and word of mouth marketing) in a bold and unique way with the launch of www.windowslive.com.  This post will provide some detail on the solution that was developed.

As demonstrated by the proliferation of Microsoft product team and employee blogs, the MSDN Community, XBox Live, and other social media outlets (including the Windows Live products, themselves), Microsoft has recognized the value of social media for some time.  But, with the re-launch of www.windowslive.com, Microsoft is demonstrating a much stronger commitment to social media as a strategic interactive marketing channel.  Led by Marty Collins, the Windows group assembled a dedicated team to focus exclusively on social media marketing.  Along with the Windows Live marketing group, Marty engaged my team at Avenue A | Razorfish in late 2007 to help define the social media strategy for Windows Live and develop a web site and services platform to support it.  Let’s start with the goal, as stated by Marty:

We really want to connect people who are doing cool things with Windows Live to other people who may be inspired to try creative things of their own. By giving engaged customers a place to share their experience and knowledge we hope to inspire others while recognizing those that have been great customers. In addition to inspiring people we will look to the community for product feedback to help us continually improve our products. The main goal is to simple: get closer to our customers.

To support this goal, we designed a custom solution enabling Microsoft to engage community members, aggregate, rate, and syndicate their blog content, and recognize and reward their contributions.

Engaging the Community

Through email invitations and posts on product team blogs, Microsoft initially invited over 10,000 of the most active Windows Live users to join the “Community Clubhouse”.  The Community Clubhouse is the main hub for community interaction.  Members of the clubhouse are asked to:

• Tell stories about how Windows Live makes their everyday life easier and more fun.
• Share tips & tricks for using Windows Live products and services.
• Help “newbies” (new users) learn how to connect and share with Windows Live.
• Respond to challenges to blog about specific topics, such as new beta products.
• Rate and tag each other’s posts.

In return, members are recognized for their contributions and rewarded by having their posts showcased in front of millions of users.  Members activities and contributions are tracked by a reputation system and awarded clubhouse points and achievement badges.

A key objective of the clubhouse strategy was to make participation as easy as possible.  Rather than requiring community members to maintain separate blogs and post content in multiple systems, members contribute content by adding posts to their existing blogs and including technorati-like tags in the post.   Posts that are tagged appropriately are aggregated into the clubhouse through RSS feeds.  Each clubhouse post must have at least three tags – the word ‘clubhouse‘, at least one Windows Live product/service name, and at least one content type (technical ‘how-to’ or inspirational ‘story’).   Members are encouraged to add additional tags to identify other topics covered in the posts – whether they are product related or not.  (Examples include ‘wedding planning’, ’sports’, ‘college’, ‘photo stitching’, ‘red eye’, etc.)

Members visit the clubhouse site to read and rate all the content contributed by the community.   Posts are rated three ways: they can be flagged as inappropriate, given a qualitative star rating, and given a content level.  The content level suggests whether a post is appropriate for new users, everyday users, or power users.

Marketing with the Community

Many companies are, respectably, working to create or foster active communities.  Most do so by appending a “Community” tab/menu to the primary navigation and sending users to a section of the site, or a separate site altogether, that is focused exclusively on community content.  They maintain very clear and distinct barriers between their brand/marketing voice, and the community voice.  This keeps the brand safe from “rogue” community members or content.  However, with this approach, customers have to explicitly seek out the community perspective and navigate away from the more structured editorial content they might also be interested in.  This barrier reinforces the “marketing-speak” mentality.

Microsoft, on the other hand, pushed to blur the lines between marketing and community perspectives.  A fundamental component of the strategy was to tightly weave community and editorial content throughout the site.  Recognizing that social influence is more powerful than marketing influence, incorporating relevant community content should elevate marketing message authenticity and trust.  Community members control a good portion of the content that is displayed throughout the marketing site.  In fact, there are only two pages on all of www.windowslive.com that do not include user-generated content (UGC).

The tags in the original posts and the ratings that were applied in the Clubhouse are used to dynamically route posts to various sections of the www.windowslive.com marketing site.  While all community content is visible in the clubhouse, only content that has received a certain number of ratings and exceeds a minimum average rating threshold is promoted to the marketing site.  This assures that the community content displayed on a marketing page is contextually relevant, appropriate and useful.  As you can see from the image below, the tags also drive other parts of the UI, such as the “Featured in this post” module.

While Microsoft is engaged with the community, they are not moderating the content.  The community is responsible for self-policing.  Microsoft will not edit or remove valid content – even if it represents negative opinions.  While that is a scary proposition, Microsoft has confidence in its products and respect for its community.  In turn, Microsoft hopes to cultivate community trust and support.  The value of that trust will outweigh the risk of occasional un-flattering posts.  If there are legitimate concerns, Microsoft wants to know about them.

In addition to being integrated throughout the marketing site, community content is syndicated out through RSS, advertising placements on MSN and Live.com properties (Hotmail, Spaces, etc), Windows Newsletters, and Hotmail email footers.  This provides reciprocal value for Microsoft and Clubhouse members.  The community provides valuable content assets and generates word-of-mouth for Microsoft and, in turn, they get exposed to millions of users.  One community member received over 10,000,000 views on their blog in one month from a single post that was featured on the www.windowslive.com home page and syndicated through ad placements.  For bloggers looking to grow their readership, this is a great opportunity.  And, obviously, we felt this was a great opportunity for Microsoft to generate positive social influence and word-of-mouth.

The response from the re-launched www.windowslive.com was much stronger than we expected.  It exceeded the traffic projections and server capacity we had planned.  So we had to struggle to support the load for the first month.  But that is certainly one of the better problems to have.  Marty has already announced that the program is being expanded to support www.windows.com, and the entire Windows family of operating systems and online services.

I have spent the last ten months working with great teams at Microsoft and Avenue A | Razorfish defining and executing a strategy for employing social media in marketing and engaging and empowering consumers to share their product insights and experiences.  This effort culminated with with the re-launch of WindowsLive.com.  With this strategy, and this site, Microsoft has made a giant leap of faith in Social Influence Marketing.

Consumers are blogging about Windows Live products and services, sharing their opinions and experiences, and offering guidance and tips to get the most from the products.  That part is not unique to Microsoft.  Many companies have added discussion forums or other community features to their sites.  What is unique is that Microsoft is not segregating user content from marketing content.  Rather, Microsoft is tightly integrating marketing content and user-generated content.  Users and their blog posts are being featured right along side marketing content throughout the entire site.

Wanting to protect their brands, nearly all Fortune 500 companies (all that we researched, in fact) keep very distinct walls between marketing content and user-generated content.  But social influence is quickly overtaking brand influence online.  Microsoft is making a bet that integrating consumer content along side marketing content will elevate brand authenticity and trust.  As Frederic Lardinois observes on ReadWriteWeb, this strategy is not without risk.

It is interesting to see that Microsoft is willing to experiment in this area. On WindowsLive, it allows Microsoft generated content to stand next to user generated content, which could potentially open Microsoft up for some embarrassments. At the same time though, if Microsoft holds true to its promise of not censoring legitimate content, then this represents an important step forward in how Microsoft interacts with its customers.

As one of the authors of that strategy, I obviously think it is a smart bet.  I’ve blogged before about the contrast between Microsoft’s and Apple’s employee blogging policies and suggested that Microsoft’s open policy will help build stronger and more intimate relationships with customers.  Microsoft gave its employees a voice through an open and encouraging blogging policy and by supporting blogs.msdn.com and a host of other community sites.  With WindowsLive.com, Microsoft is giving its customers a voice, right along side its own.

In the coming days, I will write about various components of this strategy and the solution that was developed to execute it.

The common mentality with respect to creative and technology process integration involves a relatively solid line that separates the two disciplines and work streams.  Creatives do their concepting, draw up wireframes, create visual assets, and then toss them over the line.  Technologists pick these up, create the front-end HTML, create the back-end code, and wire them up to create the system.  That is an extremely over-simplified description of both sides of the line – but it represents the general perception of many clients and peers in our industry.

The agile movement has made great strides toward integrating project teams.  But the focus here has been on bringing business and end-user representatives into the process and advancing the project through small, iterative cycles.  (Again, a dramatic over-simplification.  I’m a huge Agile proponent.) The iterative cycle keeps all disciplines (plus business stakeholders and users!) engaged throughout the project.  Great progress!  But, within an iteration, the line often remains.  Both the creative and technical teams are tightly engaged with the business and user representatives.  But they’re only loosely engaged with each other.

There are many reasons for this.  On a given project the creative and technical teams are often from separate internal organizations – at best.  At worst, they’re from separate companies altogether.  Beyond that, they often think, talk, and act very differently – making it hard to relate.  Right brain, left brain stuff.  There is hope, however.

One of the most satisfying things about working with Avenue A | Razorfish is experiencing the blurring of the tech/creative line.  As a company with strong marketing, creative, and technology capabilities that are integrated on many projects, we’ve learned through experience how to work and communicate with each other.  That is one of our strongest value propositions to customers.  We’ve proven that the line can be blurred and there is significant value in doing so.  However, it is within the last year that I’ve seen the most substantial fading of the line.

This can be attributed to the popularity and demand for rich Internet applications.  RIAs require a much greater level of cross-discipline understanding and cooperation.  Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML have done the same thing for desktop applications (and the web, with Silverlight).  There is a great whitepaper on the WPF designer/developer workflow entitled The New Iteration.  Definitely worth a read.  It specifically addresses WPF, XAML, and the Expression tools, but many of the points apply more generally to RIAs, as well.  The value proposition is well stated:

“Ultimately, the new collaboration means that iteration of a project can now happen in a much more fluid way. There is no longer the “one-way street” where a change to a specification downstream means a radical reworking of the entire application. The result opens up new possibilities for collaboration between the designer and developer, where a kind of dialogue is possible with the potential to foster greater creativity.”

It is that last point – the potential to foster greater creativity – that excites me the most.  Technologists are often in a restricting role.  We have to set boundaries that the creative team must work within so that we’re able to deliver on their promises.  Rather than promote cooperation and collaboration, this can create an “us versus them” mentality.  However, with RIAs I have noticed a great change.  Technology and creative teams are pushing each other to expand the solution horizon, rather than constrain it.  Both teams are equally invested and sharing their unique perspectives, which results in far better solutions.

It may be intuitive that a shared sense of ownership, varying perspectives, and close collaboration will have positive results on a project.  As a consultant “back in the day”, when the Internet and HTML were new, I saw the same level of enthusiasm and collaboration between technical and creative teams.  But as technology and creative techniques matured, the tech/creative line solidified.  As a result, the solutions became somewhat cookie-cutter.  That’s not to say companies weren’t launching sites with great creative and technical work.  But truly remarkable solutions are conceived when both the technical and creative limits are stretched and combined to produce something truly unique.  I’m thrilled to be back in this sweet spot.  The industry as a whole seems to be following suit.  But unless a deliberate effort is made to avoid falling into comfortable patterns, truly remarkable solutions may once again join the endangered species.

With Microsoft’s recent bid to acquire Yahoo!, there will be a plethora of Internet doomsday concerns.  Those are to be expected.  But there is at least one aspect of the deal that intrigues me… integration of their respective social media products and perspectives. 

User frustration in navigating between the wide array of social media sites has resulted in a new product category some say will be the killer applications of 2008:  Tools for Managing Multiple Social Networks.  There certainly is a need for such products today.  However, that category should have a relatively short life-span, as it addresses problems that should be eliminated. 

Many industry experts consider social media to be the defining element of “Web 2.0″.  I believe that to be true.  But the current state of social media platforms reminds me of the AOL and CompuServe heydays.  Ultimately, the closed, proprietary nature of those networks conflicted with the open nature of the Internet – which led to the failure of those platforms.  I expect the same will happen to the current batch of social media networks if they don’t open the platforms for integration. The good news is there is evidence of this realization by Yahoo! and Microsoft, and many of the other players. 

Yahoo! recently launched support for Open ID, which provides users with a single digital identity that can be used across multiple, unrelated sites.  Microsoft has a similar but proprietary solution with Live ID.  Microsoft representatives have told me they were looking into Open ID integration, but didn’t have any specific plans or timelines.  Hopefully, this merger would elevate Open ID’s relevance to Microsoft and accelerate Open ID / Live ID integration. 

Microsoft recently announced it was joining DataPortability.org, which promotes standards for data portability and exchange (such as friends lists).  Plaxo, Facebook, and Google have announced support, as well.  But Yahoo! has not.  Hopefully, the Microsoft merger would elevate DataPortability.org’s relevance to Yahoo!.

If the merger results in both Microsoft and Yahoo! supporting Open ID and DataPortability.org, it would be a huge win for social media integration.  This should create tremendous momentum for both movements and influence other organizations to follow suit.  People can certainly conceive of negative consequences of the deal.  But I’m a “glass is half full” kind of guy.  And there is evidence that both parties see relevance in open standards.    

Avenue A | Razorfish (my employer) held it’s first-annual technical summit in Austin today.  With this event, we invite clients from around the country to spend a day with us and get our perspective on the current state and future direction of Internet and digital media technology.

The keynote speaker was Tim Bray, who is the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems.  His speech was entitled: Understanding, Deploying, and Integrating Web 2.0.  He had several interesting comments regarding “Web 2.0 and the culture of contribution“.  He provided a great quote by one of Sun’s founders.  (Who’s name I unfortunately don’t recall.)  The quote is:

Wherever you are working, all the smartest people are somewhere else.

The point he was making is that companies should harness the power and influence of communities on the Internet, rather than try to compete with them.  He highlighted Sun’s employee blogging policy.  On blogs.sun.com, you’ll see:

Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.

That is a pretty darn open policy.  Many companies are still struggling with the idea that relinquishing control of communication is a good idea.  Microsoft has a similar policy with blogs.msdn.com.  Microsoft and Sun each have thousands of employees blogging and are thus having very active and intimate dialogs with their customers. 

Apple, on the other hand, maintains a death-grip on any sort of non-sanctioned communication.  I find that quite ironic, as the common perception is that Apple is a very customer-centric organization, while Sun and Microsoft are technology-centric.  Apple is a great company and certainly has a marketing leg-up on Microsoft right now.  Even Microsoft employees can’t help but laugh at the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads.   But I expect the close relationship Microsoft is cultivating with its customers through this informal communication channel will become a strategic advantage over time.  The quote above might appropriately be rephrased as “Don’t think you’re smarter than your customers“. 

Apple and other companies may invest heavily in focus groups to understand customer needs and behavior.  In doing so, they may feel appropriately connected with their customers.  But the quote still rings true.  Whichever customers you engage through focus groups, the most important or influential customers are likely somewhere else.  I think the point is you should leverage all available channels to understand and build relationships with your customers.  There may very well be unpleasant communication trends or threads of discussion in employee blogs.  But if they are isolated to a few, they will be lost in the crowd.  If they are not isolated, they are likely highlighting legitimate problems or opportunities that should be addressed.  That information is extremely valuable.  It is much better to hear both customer and employee complaints or pain-points and address them, than to pretend they don’t exist.  Both will give you their trust and loyalty if they see that you’re listening and acting on their feedback. 

In my last post, I tried to emphasize the business aspect of the technical lead role in enterprise software development.  You may be a technical genius, but if you have no interest in business you should redirect any ambitions you have for technical leadership and perhaps pursue a specialist role of some sort.  You can’t divorce business objectives from any decisions you make as a technical leader.

I originally intended to get into technical design and development best practices with this post.  But before I talk about what they are, I want discuss why they are important.  In discussing best practices, I doubt seriously that I will enlighten anyone with something they haven’t already heard at least once before.  However, it would seem their importance is not appreciated by many who choose to ignore them.

There are actually at least two business domains that you must concern yourself with as a technical lead.  The first and most obvious is the business (or line of business/division) you are serving – your client.  The second is the IT organization.  IT can quickly degrade from a positive investment to a negative expense if the IT organization is not run as a business of its own.  Running IT as a business is a current mandate of any CIOs worth their salt.  Unfortunately, the business objectives of the IT organization are often discounted or disregarded by project teams.  The majority of the team will be narrowly focused on the current project, or even more narrowly, on the current feature/deadline/milestone/etc.  However, a good technical lead will keep IT business objectives in the forefront and balanced against the client’s business objectives.

It is the pursuit of IT business objectives that has cultivated the current array of software development best practices.  Like any business, at the most basic level, IT organizations aim to maximize their production while minimizing costs.  The majority of best practices for software development process and technique were developed in pursuit of these goals.  The current industry focus on agile methodologies, design patterns, test-driven development, and continuous integration (among other development techniques) has emerged through the pursuit of these objectives by hundreds of industry experts.  It is the consensus of the most qualified and experienced people in our industry that following these practices provides the best chance of executing projects predictably and efficiently while minimizing the long-term costs of operating, maintaining, and enhancing the systems we develop.

Re-read the second half of the sentence above, starting with “while…”.  It is not just about meeting deadlines.  The initial development cost for most enterprise systems is dwarfed by the long-term costs.  Yet many technical leaders will easily and regularly make decisions in the interest of short-term goals and priorities without consideration of the long-term impact.  For some, now is always more important than later.  But that is often the wrong choice.

Let’s use an example.  Assume you’re buying a custom-built car.  You are given the choice to drive off with it today and get 10 miles per gallon or wait a couple weeks and get 40 miles per gallon.  All else being equal, what would you choose?  What if having it today meant you would have to leave it in the shop for a few weeks each time you need an oil change?  Or a few months each time you need new tires?  What if you had to pay $200 an hour for each technician that worked on your car during those weeks?  Seems like a pretty easy business decision – to me, anyway.

Of course, the real world isn’t quite so simple.  Missing a deadline can have significant business costs and implications, as well.  But the point is all business factors must be considered – long term and short term – for both the client and the IT organization.  Even business and IT managers can loose sight of this.  A good technical lead will aggressively defend doing the right thing for the business – even when the business occasionally doesn’t see it.  In the end, you will gain respect and credibility whether they followed your guidance or not.

Okay, I’m hung up on this business stuff and still haven’t discussed anything truly technical yet.  That’s because in my experience mentoring technical leads, this is by far their biggest obstacle.  They have already proven their technical aptitude and ability to meet deadlines, or they wouldn’t have been promoted to a lead role.  (Yes, I know… that’s not always the case.)  But for many of them, being a technical lead just means more authority.  For the most part, they’ll continue doing what they were doing before, but they’ll get to make decisions on their own and tell a few others what to do.  Many will think industry best practices are just hype and won’t take the time to learn them.  They will continue to keep their business blinders on and will make decisions based on personal interest, the path of least resistance, or serving the crisis of the moment.  With that mindset; they will inevitably fail.  Or, worse yet, the business will fail.

If done right, the technical lead role comes with a huge amount of additional responsibility and a small amount of additional authority.  You may be one of the few that knows better than the majority of experts in our industry.  I’m certainly not.  And if you aren’t, you will be best served by learning and embracing the current industry best practices.  In my next post, I’ll discuss some of those practices.

I’m presently working with a client to help mentor and transition one of their senior developers into a technical lead role. I figured I’d share my thoughts with the community at large. So this is the first of what I expect to be several posts about the role and responsibilities of a technical lead.  (I don’t make a distinction between architects and tech leads.  In my opinion, they are just variations on a theme.)

The traditional definition of a technical lead in IT goes something like “an individual with responsibility for the technical architecture and design of a system or sub-system and for leading a development team to implement it within the time allotted.” However, that definition does not adequately represent the business aspect of the role. In enterprise software development, a technical lead is one who has responsibility for pairing business objectives with technical solutions. You serve as a bridge between technologists and business people. You must help the business make educated decisions based on technical options and constraints – and must help the development team make educated decisions based on business objectives and constraints. (Note the use of ‘objectives’, rather than ‘requirements’.)

To be affective, you must work hard to stay intimately familiar with both the business and technical domains. Many people fail in this role because they consider themselves, at best, loosely associated with the business. That loose association is represented solely by the requirements they are given to implement. However, there is a significant distinction between business requirements and business objectives.

When interviewing technical lead candidates, one of my standard questions is: “Which is more important – delivering a solution that meets client expectations or one that precisely delivers on all the requirements?” I suppose this is a spoiler for any future candidates that read my blog, but the answer is meeting expectations. Unfortunately, most candidates make the wrong choice.

Requirements represent a means to achieve one or more business objectives – not the objectives themselves. And, more often than not, requirements are incomplete and open to interpretation. If you don’t understand the business objectives, you will likely miss-interpret the requirements. The expectations of business representatives will be aligned with business objectives, not software requirements. If you deliver a system that addresses all the requirements but is not aligned with business objectives, you will have failed from the client’s perspective. Sure, you can defend yourself by holding the requirements up as a “contract” for development. That will likely stand up in court, so to speak. But that adversarial attitude completely misses the point and fosters bad will between business and technology organizations. If you’re a consultant, that will likely result in forgone future business. If you’re an IT employee, it will make your next project more difficult.  Regardless of your employment arrangement, you are partnering with a business organization to solve business problems. A good technical lead will invest time in understanding the business domain and objectives and will help interpret, define and revise the requirements to make sure the end result is aligned with the business objectives.

If you are in the enterprise software business – whether you are a direct employee, contractor, or consultant – all of your decisions should be guided by business objectives. Fortunately, that does not conflict with making good technical decisions. In my next post, I’ll extend the discussion beyond requirements to technical design.