Bart is on twitter

Not Bart simpson but BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is on twitter. It says a lot about how fast this site is spreading around.

For the moment they are twitting on services updates (such as 10-min. delay between Concord & Pleasant Hill in Pittsburg & SFO directions due to equipment problem. Get all advisories at bart.gov/alerts.), other BART news, give-aways and promotions, pics and videos related to BART or trains...You can check it out here.

Are we social capital pack rats?

On a previous post, A note on "branded" email, I mentioned the study I carried out together with several classmates on the value proposition of social networking. Thang has spotted an article on The McKinsey Quarterly, When job seekers invade Facebook , that touches on two of the subjects we dealt with in our study.

The first subject is The transferability of "Social Capital" from offline to online. In our study we supported the thesis that, amongst other benefits, the value proposition of social networking has to do with accumulating social capital. As the article reads "Anthropologists tell us that it’s impossible to maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people." True! Of course users do not maintain stable social relationships with all of their contacts. In-depth interviews with users showed us that usually social networking websites like Facebook work as a repository of potentially useful contacts.

In other words, we collect acquaintances, people we think we might reconnect with, be it for leisure or professional purposes. Given that storing contacts is virtually free, why not doing it? Who knows if I might need those contacts later?

[ Side note 1: Facebook uses a rigid and awkward mechanism to manage people in our network. Facebook forces us to label such an heterogeneous set of online contacts as friends. What about mimicking the offline categories we already use: friend, relative, work colleague, acquaintance.... "Contacts" could be the generic or default term. This taxonomy would allow users to manage privacy and content-sharing permissions in a more natural and transparent way. ]

[ Side note 2: Something that intrigues me are the psychological / sociological reasons behind this "contacts-collector" behavior. Does it have to do with a culture of not giving up choices?]

From a business perspective it results that within our social networks we have a humongous amount of potential value that we rarely convert into anything real. Deeper friendships, job opportunities, favors, or even romantic dates go unrealized. The biz question is very straight forward then: is there a way of materializing that diffuse social capital? In a meaningful way, beyond casual apps, I mean. The entrepreneur in me has a couple of ideas about it...

Let me finish with another quote from the article: "Overall, online social networking, with its support groups and trusted access, is governed by a culture of sharing, not selling." That also appeared as a clear conclusion of our user research. Does that mean that business models that rely on selling are completely preempted in social networking? Well, that is the second subject of our study I alluded to at the beginnig of this post: Creating and capturing value: Specialized vs. generalized social network platforms. I better end this post here or I would have to rename it as the never ending post... Audience, the discussion is served...anyone?

Lululemon and customer nakedness

Last week I was shocked to see real customers' pictures in the shop windows of the Lululemon shop close to where I live. When I say real customers I mean people that I know. Apart from a fair and bare amount of their skin, they revealed their dreams too. Over the black and white pictures of their semi-naked bodies all those people had written a concrete personal goal: "I want to become a lawyer by 2016". "I want to be more compasionate"...

Lululemon is a retailer of yoga-inspired athletic apparel. I had the chance to study their business model as part of one of my classes project. They have a powerful mission statement: "Creating components for people to live a longer, healthier, more fun life". Something that sets them apart from other retailers is their strong focus on grass-roots relationships. Their shops try to become rooted in the community they cater to by holding community events and offering free yoga demonstrations and classes. They appoint ambassadors and offer product discounts to athletic instructors.

There is a couple of things that struck me from the "customer nakedness" campaign in the shop windows:

• Lululemon's brand power and connection with their customers. It takes a whole deal of familiarity and credibility as a brand to convince your customers not only to take off their clothes but also to expose, yes, to publicize, their most personal challenges. This would not happen without an authentic personal, one-on-one relationship between the brand representatives (shop owner, sales associates) and the customers. What a credible and consistent-with-brand-values testimonial campaign.

• The participants behavior is the reflection of an interesting sociological trend. Obviously there can be a myriad of personal motivations when volunteering for the pictures. My personal take on it: we need to have our own voice and we need everybody to know. We need to feel beautiful and worthy of praise, admiration - or desire -. Part of the popularity of blogging may have to do with this too. Not many brands are able to provide this unique benefit, and this is an open question for my readers: what brands do you think are giving their customers the possibility of feeling different, unique...you name it?

A note on "branded" email

In Spring 2008 my classmates Alexandra Levich, Jenny Xu and Thang Troung Minh and I carried out an independent study on social networks. The study was supervised by Professor Rashi Glazer, our marketing professor at the Haas School of Business.

The goal of our study was to identify and validate the value proposition of online social networking. Our overarching question was What is the social networks' value proposition and how is it perceived by consumers?. Apart from the explicit, several focus groups unveiled interesting implicit behaviors of online social network users.

the explicit and the implicit

One of these behaviors consisted in that a given user employed facebook.com's messaging system to communicate with the same recipient he has just emailed one minute ago. This modality of "branded" email struck us. Beyond pure use, and despite a clunkier usability than regular email, there seemed to be a lot of hidden meaning.

From an elements-of-communication perspective, it seems that context plays an important role. Facebook, as the context in which this communication happens, has managed to create a new interaction space with its own rules.

In its form of "branded" messaging, the content of a facebook message can potentially be the same as in a traditional email. The channel itself, although clunkier, is technically similar to that of email. Nevertheless a facebook message serves different purposes, and can have different recipients than those of conventional email. Your friends tell you certain things over facebook and other things over email. People who would not email you, contact you via facebook messages. Maybe it is perceived as less intrusive?. Regarding time, my view is that facebook messaging is also perceived as more asynchronous, i.e. less aggressive, than email.

From a marketing point of view this case constitutes a great example of differentiation. Differentiation enabled by the facebook brand and the context it creates, but driven by user behavior. Fascinating.

Innovation communities

OK, this post is going to be "drafty-ish" but a bad post is better than no post at all, right? Today, I attended a lecture in the Open Innovation Speaker Series at UC Berkeley. Stephen Benson from Innovation Exchange explained, amongst many other interesting things, how innovation can happen around platforms and software, events and communities. He quoted Chris Townsend (Forrester) regarding these three innovation archetypes.

Innovation Exchange and Innocentive are examples of innovation communities. Companies post their innovation challenges in these online innovators' meeting places hoping for someone to "crack" their problem. Alpheus Bingham, from Innocentive, also in this speaker series two weeks ago, gave some clues on why there is a high level of user engagement regardless of the low probability of actually "cracking" the problem. He compared it to a lottery ticket: just a couple of bucks for, yes, only a remote dream, but...we all love to dream if it is that cheap.


Salesforce Ideas, and other providers of software solutions for ideas / innovation, works under the platform archetype although there is something cool about the event you can generate with it (see the myStarbucksIdea execution. Given the strategic turnaround that the company is facing, this initiative received interesting coverage in the media)

I have just bumped into a piece of news about one innovation event, the 2008 IdeaFestival in Louisville, Ky. The festival "brings together creative thinkers from different disciplines to connect ideas in science, the arts, design, business, film, technology and education."

Cross-fertilization seems to be a key ingredient in the innovation magic potion and mixing is one of the premises of this blog. Hopefully I will bring in the diversity of my readers' comments to spice up the mix.