Change everything

ChangeEverything.ca is a new community site based on the area around Vancouver. It's essentially a large community site focused on ideas about making the area a better place (although as a confirmed Vancouver-phile I find this concept perplexing). In some ways the site is similar to A year of living generously but it's not a not-for-profit project.

The reason I'm talking about it here is that, as much as it has a not-for-profit feel to it, the site is in fact funded by local bank Vancity. To quote from their part of the site (sorry, it's a bit long):

So maybe you’re wondering... why is Vancity creating an online community? Why would a bank care about anything other than its products and sales?

First of all, and this is important, this site is NOT a place where Vancity will sell you mortgages, term deposits and accounts. (To everyone who was just aching to find a place where we’d bombard you with annuities come-ons: sorry if we yanked your chain.)

Second, and more fundamentally, Vancity isn't a bank. We’re a community-based financial institution that is as interested in making our community work as it is in making money. And these days, community is more and more about what happens online, which is why we’re so interested in the Web’s potential for supporting community development in the Lower Mainland and Victoria.

We have a triple bottom line, which means that we don’t gauge our success merely on our profitability, but also on how we are helping the communities and improving the environment where we do business.
As an exercise in creating relationships with customers, I really like the site. It has a deftness of touch and confidence you don't see often. The writing is good too.

It'll be interesting to see how well ChangeEverything works in terms of community participation. It will live or die on how many people take up the idea and get involved. At the moment it has a relatively limited number of active participants but to be fair, it is new.

Personally, I wish it well.

Source: TechCrunch

When is a podcast not a podcast?

When it's a walking tour, a music lesson, a serial book.

Over on the Futurelab blog, Karl Long has an interesting article on uncommon uses of podcasting which covers these applications and a number of others. I particularly like Karl's semi-throwaway suggestion of an alternate commentary for movies – although why stop there, why not re-voice entire movies?

I also recently read of podcasts being used as pseudo-personal training guides. Handy when you need that little extra motivation to keep you on track – just...eight...more...push-ups...

I've also seen podcasts are also used as meditation aids – over at Zencast, one of the first podcasts they put up was a set of 5/10/20 minute silences which ended with a single bell chime. This solved the "I wonder how long I've been sitting here maybe I'll just look at my watch – is that all?" problem.

There is nothing to say that a podcast must follow the downloadable radio show format – this is like saying all websites should look like magazines. And with the expected growth of video podcasting (sorry, can't use the term vodcasting with a straight face) who knows where the technology will take us?

New news in news

It's an old tenet of the internet, information wants to be free. And for the most part it is. Sometimes overwhelmingly so. The deluge of information that hits our inboxes/feed readers every day is vast. Even when you screen out the messages inviting you to get prescription meds / buy stocks / grow your penis by two inches, there is still more coming in than many of us have time to deal with.

I remember years back first discovering the BBC news site. 'Great' I thought, 'everything I need in one place.' But there are times you want a different perspective, so you flit around from site to site. Then came Google News which nicely aggregated across sources and NewsNow which updated every 5 minutes.

But, of course, this was all controlled news with an editor deciding what I needed to know. Where's the fun in that?

Now we have social news, news by the people for the people (well OK for the most part links by some of the people for some of the people). The principle being that collectively, people are pretty smart (a Wisdom of Crowds thing). So we have user-driven sites such as Digg – with it's current controversy around users burying stories they disagree with – and Newsvine (my personal favourite).

And now we have Spotback which claims to be a new breed of personalised news service. Spotback is tag-based, you set in what you're interested in when you first go to the site. Then, with a bit of AJAX wizardry, the site generates your personal news page which essentially looks like many others. But, the thing about Spotback is that it learns what you like. You can rate stories, indicating your preferences, what you'd like more of and less of. The theory goes that over time Spotback will deliver just the kind of information you want. It's a nice interface which can be easily customised and can deliver news in an RSS feed.

Of course, when I have a service that can predict precisely what I want to see, feeding me the kind of news that I'm sure to agree with, the fear is I'll miss out on the unexpected, the challenging, the downright uncomfortable even.

Maybe it's time to go back to the BBC.

Have you got the 564-3Gz v2 in blue?

Ah the heady scent of the incomprehensible part number. It's taken some time but finally the tide seems to be turning against the SKU-reference-as-product-name.

LG renamed its KG800 phone, Chocolate. Apple has kept the development names (Panther, Tiger etc) for releases of its OSX operating system. And Dyson's latest 'hoover' was named The Ball.

These days, it's difficult enough for customers to remember even top-level brand names without having to memorise an essentially meaningless product name too. It's ironic that so many companies spend so much time and money investing in creating the right associations for their brands and then dehumanise them right at the point where a customer needs to buy-in enough to part with some money.

Of course, there are still a lot of 564-3Gz V2s out there but it's the others that will capture people's imaginations and increased market share.

Influencers, imitators and predicting product success

Whether it's tipping points, chasms or tornadoes, there's always been a keen desire among marketers to be able to predict the trajectory of a new product. But, of course, doing so is tricky (to say the least). While describing what's already happened is interesting (as the Tipping Point showed) applying that analysis to future scenarios is the real deal.

Well, in a new research paper, two academics from Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, have developed a mathematical model that predicts the pace of new product adoption. Warning: the paper is not for the faint-hearted, it is written with the density of a small star. But the information within is pretty interesting.

Many of us in technology marketing understand the role that the 'knowledgeable friend' plays in a technology sale. These are the early adopters, those that others turn to for advice. These days they are also the ones who blog about their experiences, contribute to price-comparison sites and get involved in user forums. As such, they are an incredibly important audience for new product launches. This paper terms these people influentials and those that follow their advice imitators.

Christophe Van den Bulle, one of the authors, comments,

"With our model, managers can see what will happen to sales depending on the size and behaviour of each segment. Also, managers do not need to guess these unknown parameters; marketing analysts can estimate them from data about older but similar products using standard statistical software."

While this sounds a little optimistic to me reading the paper, the theory is attractive.

Interestingly, the paper shows that the chasm theory is not the only option. The authors consider scenarios where adoption can dip between the early and later phases before surging forward. Also, adoption by influentials will not necessarily diminish rapidly after launch, so marketers may be missing a trick by swapping attention over to the mainstream imitators. And determining who is an influential and who is an imitator is not necessarily linear (ie it's not down to who adopts early or late).

The authors go on to look at the two-step flow process in more detail as well as the technology adoption chasm. They also talk about scenarios where imitators only imitate influentials, where imitators only imitate other imitators and where the two mix. They then lose me with a series of impressive looking, completely incomprehensible equations.

As I say, come at this one with a large coffee and a dictionary but there's some interesting food for thought in here – now if anyone knows a good statistician who can explain the rest to me...