The Biggest "Don't" in Content Marketing

Don't waste people's time.

That's the big one. People are busy. They're looking for insight. Whatever they read needs to be informative and eye-opening from the opening line.

That means:

• Skip the platitudes.
  Don't tell a hospital security officer that HIPAA is important. She's knows it's important. Tell her something new or genuinely useful about how to avoid a compliance violation. 
• Don't be wordy.
  It's OK to publish long pieces, but they should pack a lot of information. Individual sentences and paragraphs, wherever they appear, must carry their weight. 
• Don't make distracting mistakes.
  Errors in grammar and spelling interrupt reading. Puzzling arguments and poor sentence construction frustrate readers. Don't give readers an excuse to look away.
• Invest in research.
  Know your subject, and know it well enough to tell your audience something they didn't already know. 
• Arm your readers.
  Here's something that absolutely doesn't waste your readers' time: Giving them insights, arguments, and hard numbers they can use to do their jobs even better than before. Help your readers justify a new approach or a new purchase. Help them become heroes at work.

When you're looking for writers, look for people who can:

• Write something original.
• Write concisely.
• Write well and build solid arguments.
• Research a subject and dig up non-obvious data.
• Provide practical and important guidance.

Spend the time to find writers who won't waste your readers' time. Your readers will thank you by turning the page and perhaps eventually making a purchase.

The U.S. Economy: Hanging In There

A good summary from The Economist:

The American economy may have slowed, but remains fundamentally strong, as it is buttressed by a healthy consumer. Personal consumption, adjusted for inflation, is up by 3% in the past year, having surged in April. The University of Michigan's consumer-confidence index . . . grew strong in May. Even before that, confidence exceeded its average during the 2003-2007 boom. According to a recent Fed survey, 69% of Americans say they are "doing okay" or "living comfortably", up from 62% in 2013. What is more, the rise has been most pronounced among those with only a high-school education.

Source: "When barometers go wrong," The Economist, June 11-17, 2016

IT Security Tip: Don't Use Hardware You Find in a Parking Lot

From an Healthcare IT News article on ransomeware attacks on hospitals:

"Department of Homeland Security officials recently conducted a test in which DHS staffers dropped computer disks and flash drives in government buildings and contractor parking lots to see how many would subsequently be used," [Bill Carey, vice president of Marketing at GoodSync] said. "Sixty percent that were picked up were plugged into office computers, and the installation rate rose to 90 percent for disks and drives bearing an official logo. The test revealed a huge security vulnerability."

Security tip: If you find hardware in a parking lot or in the street, don't plug it in.

You probably wouldn't eat a sandwich you find on a park bench. Apply the same caution with IT equipment of unknown provenance.

Movie Review: Spent: Looking for Change, A Film by American Express

This is the second of two blog posts by Madeleine Bennett about the unbanked and underbanked.

Thanks to CFSI, the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and other organizations, we have access to plenty of statistics about the unbanked and underbanked. Beyond statistics, though, it's a little harder for those of us living "banked" lives to get a sense of the daily struggles facing the unbanked and underbanked.

That's why we're pleased that last year American Express released Spent: Looking for Change, a forty-minute documentary about the unbanked population of America. By showing firsthand the stories of several unbanked households, Spent provides valuable, balanced insight into the lives of these financially challenged and underserved households.

The film opens with a montage of interviews and encounters spliced together, the stories of several households, each struggling to stay afloat in its own way. After the film’s title, the story begins: hard-working people who have never had access to traditional banking services continue not to use them, and families with savings and bank accounts are put in the red by sudden misfortunes such as illness. Instead of traditional banking services, they use check cashing businesses, an available alternative.

But the fees for check-cashing and other alternative financial services add up. "Underserved Americans spend the same percentage of their income on fees and interest as the typical American family spends on groceries," the narrator informs us. On top of the financial loss, one of the subjects compares the work that goes into being unbanked to a part-time job. A mother estimates she uses up a quarter- to a half-tank of gas each payday driving around to pay her bills. A man who uses a prepaid card explains all the fees he is charged to spend his money, sounding frustrated as he checks off a dollar for every purchase.

Next, the film addresses the many pitfalls of credit scoring. One family explains how their lack of credit cards, which helped them avoid debt, made it impossible for them to take out loans. The man with the prepaid card tells how he accrued credit card debt as a teenager struggling to support himself and, with no real options, failed to pay it back. A young artisan who pays her student loan bill every month is still handicapped by her mountain of debt.

As for smaller debt, Spent touches on the topic of the payday loan, a relatively small loan taken out with the expectation that it will be paid back on the consumer's next payday. The title loan is a similar service, but taken out with the consumer's car as collateral and with an amount supposedly proportionate to the car's value. These loans may seem like a logical way to get people through a rough patch, but, like many other Americans, the subjects of Spent testify to the cyclical nature of payday and title loans.

Toward the end of the film, we see households going into crisis. A single mother's car is towed, a young couple is unable to find a house that will accept their credit score, and a family with an autistic child is forced to pawn their beloved possessions. The film's tone changes when it introduces new ideas for financial services, such as new microfinance operations in San Francisco and New York, one for group lending and another that lends to small entrepreneurs. The film concludes with a plea to "Share this film, lend your voice."

Spent does an excellent job of illustrating how hard-working people can slip through the cracks of the American banking system and get stuck in spirals of debt and bad credit. It spends much less time on potential solutions. Unless the viewer visits the movie’s Web site, he or she is left more or less in the dark about what can be done to help.

On the Web site, though, a section entitled "Take Action" offers six options, from the promotion of financial literacy for young people to hosting a screening of Spent and discussing it. These seem to offer a range of solutions to the question that the viewer is left asking at the end of the film: "What can I do about this?"

Perhaps, however, the question should be asked not of typical online movie-watchers, but of financial institutions themselves.

CFSI Takes a Good Look at the Unbanked and Underbanked Markets

This is the first of several posts about innovation in the financial services market. Today's post was written by Madeleine Bennett.

Last week, an unusual sort of banking conference took place in Los Angeles: the EMERGE CFSI conference, presented by the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) and American Banker. The conference provides those who do business with the unbanked and underbanked populations of America with a venue to meet, to exchange ideas, and to attend panels addressing the needs, challenges, and opportunities of this largely untapped market. The forum has attracted a range of people involved in this market, including investors, retailers, executives, and consumer advocates.

As defined by the FDIC, "unbanked" refers to households with no checking or savings account, and "underbanked" to those with one of those types of account but who mostly use alternative financial services, (AFS) such as payroll cards, non-bank check cashing, and pawn shops to manage their finances.

The title "EMERGE," adopted at last year's forum, reflects CFSI's view that the term "underbanked" "no longer adequately reflects the scope and dynamics of this market." As CFSI explains on the event Web site, this is a rapidly expanding and diversifying market. Traditional banking services per se are no longer the sole concern of the financially underserved market. The forum site highlights the urgency of the need that exists for financial services tailored to the underserved.

Up to 28% of the American population is either unbanked or underbanked, according to the Batten Institute at the University of Virginia. In a recent blog post on Forbes, the institute's Gosia Glinska describes the disturbing trend of service vendors that target the underbanked charging exorbitant rates for their services. This practice essentially keeps poor customers poor by sending them into never-ending cycles of debt and borrowing. The article estimates that the average underbanked family spends around 10% of total household income on fees and interest charged by these predatory institutions.

The time is ripe for change. According to a 2012 CFSI market-sizing study, the underbanked market is growing by 8% annually, and larger banking institutions are beginning to take notice, as several recent announcements show.

In April of this year, the FDIC released a white paper on the potential of mobile financial services, (MFS) to impact the lives of the underbanked. They concluded that mobile banking could be an important tool in the maintenance of customer-bank relationships, but that the relevant technology was not well established in the marketplace. Still, mobile banking is a crucial component of the global microfinance market, used by such international pioneers as Grameen Bank. MFS has already proved itself in many a foreign market and may yet make it in the U.S. Some American companies, however, are already approaching the market from a different angle.
On May 29, JPMorgan Chase and Co. announced their partnership with CFSI on the Financial Solutions Lab, a $30 million project with a five-year plan for holding competitions in which social entrepreneurs "build products and services that will help consumers with their financial health." The project will focus on behavioral insights that will help consumers overcome the obstacles to better financial behavior and health.

On June 3, the day before this year’s EMERGE forum began, Visa announced a new prepaid designation, applicable to cards and other services, that they developed along with CFSI and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Visa Inc. President Ryan McInerey explained Visa's motivation: "We felt it was important to go beyond current marketplace regulatory requirements and bring transparency to this growing product area so that consumers better understand the fees, protections and benefits associated with cards." The new designation entails a host of features to ensure consumer protections as well as fee simplification and disclosures.

This year’s EMERGE conference has had an impact on some already, such as the reporters who were taken into low-income neighborhoods to participate in the same kind of transactions the underbanked do as a matter of course. Ronald Brownstein, in his article for The Atlantic described the discrepancy between the way his group was guided through high-fee AFS transactions and the total lack of information about financial health or security they were provided along the way as "like looking through a one-way glass." Too often, unbanked and underbanked customers lack critical information about fees, choices, and useful habits. In the future, through innovative products and perhaps new mobile apps, that one-way glass has the potential to become much more transparent.

Why Capitalize the Word Web?

Because it's a proper noun. It's the shortened form of the name World Wide Web. This is not simply any network or web of computers; it's the network that we connect to for sites like eBay.com, NYTimes.com, Google.com, and so on.

What about compound nouns like "Web site" and "Web protocols?" Just as we capitalize other proper nouns when they appear as part of compound nouns (e.g, "California beaches"), so we should capitalize the word Web in these compound nouns.

Here's another example of the same rule. The World Series isn't just any world-renowned series of games. It's the official name for the annual championship series for professional baseball teams in the U.S. We always capitalize World Series, even when it appears as part of other compound nouns:

World Series
World Series tickets
World Series paraphernalia

Thus:

Web
Web site
Web protocol

The word "Internet," another proper noun, gets the same treatment.

Internet
Internet security
Internet marketing

You might have noticed that the New York Times and other organizations with formal style guides capitalize Web and Internet. Now you know why.

Microsoft Surface, BYOD, and Laptops vs. Tablets

There's been lots of good coverage of Microsoft's announcement yesterday of Microsoft Surface, a line of Windows 8 tablets that will be available in the fall. (For a summary of analyst reactions, check out this article in the Guardian.)

Here are a few thoughts of my own.

Why Show the World Alpha-Quality Technology?
When Apple announces a new product, it's typically available within days or weeks.

Microsoft took a different tack yesterday, announcing a tablet that won't be available until some time in the Fall. Judging from the way Microsoft employees guarded access to the devices at yesterday's event (e.g., see this tweet of Danny Sullivan's), one can safely assume that the software and hardware are still in a pretty raw state. Why not wait until the device was ready to announce it?

Part of the answer, I expect, is a four-letter word:  BYOD.  About 70% of large organizations have adopted Bring Your Own Device to work policies, compelling IT departments to find ways to integrate consumer-class devices such as iPhones and iPads into the company's IT infrastructure without sacrificing security. The results have been mixed, but the BYOD juggernaut seems unstoppable. And now more businesses are re-thinking their IT purchases and wondering just how many users really need PCs or at least laptops when perhaps a $500 iPad will meet their needs for remote access. Even businesses that tend to be IT laggards--businesses like law firms, for example--are beginning to formally roll out tablet solutions built, typically, on the iPad. Users love the devices, so why not?

But now that businesses know that a Windows 8 tablet  is coming in the fall, I'm guessing that a lot of those internal iPad initiatives will be put on hold. Many IT organizations will consider it rash to move ahead with bulk orders of iPads until they've had least had a chance to give Microsoft's own offering a try. The Microsoft offering promises to be more familiar (unless the Windows 8 UI team creates an albatross like Vista) and will probably be easier to integrate with Microsoft business solutions like SharePoint.

My guess is a lot of iPad orders were just put on hold.

And the same goes for Ultrabook orders. Hardware vendors like HP are racing to develop new, ultra lightweight Windows laptops to compete with MacBook Air. But those buyers, too, will probably want to see how Surface turns out. Maybe a tablet is the best mobile solution, after all, if what you're after is an ultra-portable Windows platform.

And vendors like Acer and HP developing Windows 8 tablets of their own? Their coffee's probably tasting pretty bitter this morning.

This Isn't about Microsoft Office
Microsoft is reportedly preparing a version of Office for iPad that will be ready in the Fall. Which makes sense:  right now, there are tens of millions of potential users that don't have the option of buying the Microsoft programs they use most. And that's tens of millions of users who are getting used to alternatives like Pages and Google Docs.

Better stop that bleeding, too.

Will a Windows 8 Tablet Behave Like a Tablet?
That is, will it be fast and easy to use? Or will it simply be a Windows laptop in a different format?

I think the difference is important.

I have a decently powerful Windows 7 laptop. Lately I've had access to a low-end iPad.

If I want to sit down and check mail and such, I often need to wait 2-5 minutes for the Windows systems to collect itself and become fully responsive, even if it hasn't been put to sleep. The iPad, on the other hand, is always responsive immediately. Guess which device I find myself using more when I simply want to check email or headlines?

Substitute "Windows 8 tablet" for "Windows 7 laptop" in the passage above, and you see the problem.

All the Windows laptops I've owned have exhibited this same sluggishness. Will a Windows 8 tablet be different?

As with so much about this new platform, we'll just have to wait and see.

The Essential Ingredient for Every Start-up's Home Page: Proof

If you're working at a start-up and you're finally, finally, finally ready to launch your product or service, be sure to ask yourself this hard-nosed question: why should anyone visiting your Web site believe that what you're offering is worthwhile?

Sure, you're convinced you've created something great or close to great (otherwise why would you be toiling in a start-up?). But why should anyone else give your company more than a moment's notice? There are hundreds or thousands of new companies launching every day, each convinced that they've created something unique and compelling. No one, not even industry analysts or business journalists, can possibly give all these companies due consideration. So what specifically are you putting on your home page to seize your prospect's attention and prevent him or her from clicking away?

You need proof. Proof that you really have created something valuable to others (not just to you). And to be credible, that proof must be offered by somebody else (not you).

Here's a list of the types of proof you should post on your home page to demonstrate that you really are as worthwhile as you say you are:

• Customer testimonials - The ultimate proof—and if this doesn't appear after a few months, it doesn't really matter what other proof you offer. Preferably the customers you're citing paying customers, rather than users of a free version of your product or service. Ideally, they're leaders in their markets, so that when other companies see that these guys have bought your product or service, they'll interpret that investment as a serious endorsement.
• Major partners such as OEMs - While perhaps not as compelling as direct customers, evidence you have signed with resellers and other partners can suggest that you've passed a minimum level of scrutiny. Of course, the partnership has to be meaningful. Simply joining the partner program of a major network equipment vendor or database vendor, for example, doesn't mean a lot. These companies have thousands of partners. You may have passed some minimal level of scrutiny, but you're not necessarily valuable.
• Independent studies or benchmarks - Objective evidence that you really achieve the results you claim to achieve. Even better if the study or benchmark shows you outperform major players in your market.
• Praise from industry analysts - Again, nice to have, because it suggests that you've passed a certain level of scrutiny with people who know your market well. But some analyst firms have a reputation for selling their praise, so some members of your audience (especially engineers) may be skeptical.
• Investors - Like analysts, investors study markets closely. Their investment signals a vote of confidence. Their approval can at least make you a company to watch.
• Management Team - If your co-founders are recognized experts in their respective fields, the whole company gains some creditability. Eventually, though, you need to offer evidence of market traction—proof that your talented team has really delivered on their promise.

Take a look at your home page. How are you proving your value to visitors? Assume your visitors are lingering for just a moment before clicking away to Facebook or some other site. Can you hook them and compel them to learn more? If not, it's time to go back to the drawing board. You're probably not ready to launch.
Updated: April 23, 2012

Gesture Control for Tablets and Other Mobile Devices

Sometimes it's nice to be able to set down even a small device, even a so-called hand-held device, and control it from several feet away.

Here's a demo of gesture control of a music app running on a small laptop. This is a prototype; final hardware would be integrated in a tablet or other mobile device.



I like the idea of being able to control the volume of music without touching the device playing it. Nice demo.

To learn more about TYZX, the company behind this demo, click here.

Buying a Square Meal with the Square Payment System

"Do you have cash?" my wife asked me as we were driving through southern New Hampshire the other morning. "If you do, we could stop at the Farmer's Market."

I did have a little cash (twenty-something dollars), so we did stop. Just inside the door, we ran into an offer too good to refuse:  a local farmer selling frozen guinea fowl (odd-looking birds that, when prepared right, are more delicious than chicken). We wanted to buy a pair, one for dinner soon and one for later, but that would have nearly taken all my cash.

"Do you take credit cards?" my wife asked. Farmers here hardly ever do. The overhead and expense just isn't worth the trouble. For small farms in New England, margins can be thin even in a good year.

"I do," said the farmer, and he pulled out a Droid phone with a small white square attachment on it. I recognized it immediately as a Square credit card reader. I'd read about Square, but I had never seen one of their readers in person. Certainly, they weren't common at farmer's markets last year.

I knew they could be attached to iPads and iPhones and now I could see they could be attached to Android phones as well. The farmer swiped my wife's credit card through the Square reader. He handed her his phone and asked her to write her name on the screen using just her fingertip.

"Would you like a receipt?" he asked. We gave him my phone number, and he texted a receipt to it. A moment later, I felt my iPhone vibrating in my pocket. The receipt had arrived.

We strolled through the market and visited with friends. About 45 minutes later, our friend Liz sold us some lamb and swiped my wife's card:  Liz, too, now has a Square reader now.

The Square software recognized my wife's card and automatically queued up my phone number for the receipt. Liz said that if she wanted, she could use the camera in your phone to take a picture and have it sent along with the receipt. Again, my iPhone buzzed with a text message from Square.

You know a technology is easy to use and affordable when it shows up at a farmer's market in rural New England. Square's early adopters were in metropolitan areas such as San Francisco (where Square is based) and New York City. But if farmers in small-town New Hampshire—as hard-nosed and practical a bunch of business people as you could expect to meet anywhere—are adopting this technology, I think Square is going to be hugely successful. I know some of these farmers, and I could never imagine them, say, meeting with a overdressed salesperson who's offering merchant services entailing a set-up fee and monthly charges. These farmers would, however, jump at the opportunity to get a free card-reader that attaches to a phone they probably already have. Square imposes no obligation on merchants; it simply charges a flat fee (2.75%) on transactions. The guinea farmer sold a brace of birds he would have otherwise taken home in his cooler. The fee: 2.75% of $28.75: about 80 cents. Worth the sale at a farmer's market. And if I hadn't bought the birds, he would have owed Square nothing. That's the kind of risk/reward pay-off that even a skeptical Yankee can accept.

Square is clearly catching on. Though they launched less than 2 years ago, they've gained over 800,000 customers as of December (USA Today). They're processing millions of dollars of payments every day.

I'll toast them when I cook those guinea fowl.

Beyond Busy: A review of "Betterness" by Umair Haque

Looking for a short, compelling book to read now to get your thinking straightened out for the rest of the year? I'd like to recommend Umair Haque's Betterness: Economics for Humans. It's a pithy book, only about 60 pages long, and it's available as a PDF from Web site of the Harvard Business Review. It costs $2.99. Skip a latte and buy it.

If you're one of the 171,000 people following Umair Haque on Twitter (@umaihr), you know he's exasperated by the state of Western economies. Legions of people are unemployed or underemployed, work has become a grind, and corrupt organizations are working diligently to tailor laws and regulations to abet further corruption—the list goes on. Haque thinks we can do better. Betterness is a his critique of the status quo and a crie de coeur for doing work that is more satisfying and more beneficial for everyone.

Haque contends that a lot of our present trouble comes from focusing on the wrong thing:  a bottom line that measures the monetary accumulations of an organization, rather than the long-term health of the organization, its employees, its customers, its community, and the world at large. Haque would have us lift our eyes from our balance sheets and take a hard look at the world around us. We should recognize the rampant dissatisfaction, the talent being squandered, a natural world in decline, and plenty of unseized opportunities for individuals and organizations to make a difference. Metrics like GDP and stock dividends are too narrow to serve as guideposts for most meaningful work. We need broader indexes that accurately assess our general welfare. Haque proposes a new formula: "real human welfare equals natural capital, plus financial capital, plus intellectual capital, plus human capital, plus social, emotional, and organizational capital."

"Well," you might harumph, "this is all well and good, but a lot of this human and community welfare stuff (emotional capital?!) extends beyond the mission of our company. We're focused on shareholder value, after all, and we're legally bound to be so. We're not a 501(3)c). What you're asking for is even beyond the scope of traditional economics."

Perhaps that's a valid response, but Haque wants companies and the field of economics itself to broaden their scope. A hundred years ago, he points out, psychology confined itself to the curing of mental ailments. Now it's a holistic science that helps people live richer, more fulfilling lives. Haque wants economics to effect a similar transformation, becoming in the words of his subtitle, an "economics for humans."

Some organizations have already broadened their thinking beyond the balance sheet and are now generating what Haque calls "real wealth." He cites Apple, Google, Pepsi, lululemon athletica, Nike, Pixar, and Whole Foods as examples of companies that are working hard to achieve something greater than simply crushing competitors and reaping profits at any cost. Their idealism doesn't seem to be inhibiting their success. All these companies are financially healthy, Apple and Google extremely so. Of course, even these companies still wrestle with the demons of 20th century small-mindedness. Consider Steve Jobs' professed willingness to spend every last dime of Apple's cash reserves crushing Google for its supposedly perfidious development of Android. Even though the company spent around $100 million on this legal venture last year, at least for now the company's primary focus still seems to be building insanely great products. I don't know enough about Pepsi to understand why a soft drink manufacturer is sharing top-billing for virtue with a company like Whole Foods. But I agree with Haque that there are successful companies around that do distinguish themselves by thinking about the bigger picture.

Idealism can pay off. Customers are loyal to companies like Apple and Whole Foods in part because they feel that these companies share their values. People everywhere are looking for ways to make a difference, and they'll buy from companies that are trying to be virtuous. These companies are exemplars of capitalist organizations on the road to Haque's ideal of betterness.

How can other organizations follow suit? First, they need to re-orient themselves. Their biggest adversaries are themselves. Haque urges organizations to jettison their vainglorious, self-centered vision statements, mission statements, and strategic plans, and instead adopt an approach based on ambitions, intentions, constraints, and imperatives. Haque expounds on these terms, contrasting each one to its 20th century capitalist analog. Thus:

• "Ambition specifies higher-order returns concisely and precisely: which kinds of higher-order capital an organization will return and to whom it wishes to return them." Ambition is more than dominating a certain market or being thought of a certain way. Ambition serves consumers and communities, not just company share-holders. In that way it's broader and more inclusive than a traditional vision statement.
• "An intention expresses how, through the act of exchange, an organization will enhance the self-determination and sovereignty of its constituents by making them more capable of seeding, nurturing, and harvesting all the many kinds of wealth, not just sell them stuff that merely satisfies their short-term needs." With its more sweeping goals, intentions replace the traditional internally-focused mission statement.
• "Think of constraints as negative rights: rights that we, the organization, don’t have because they damage the potential of any or all of our constituents." Whole Foods carrying junk food, for example, or Apple selling products that they themselves consider mediocre, even if they would be highly profitable. For Haque, constraints are a virtuous replacement of 20th century corporate strategies.
• "Imperatives are timeless: they are actions we will always take." Imperatives are "daily commandments"—things people should do every day. For example, at Pixar employees work every day to create movies in which the story comes first.

I found Haque's mixture of idealism and pragmatism both refreshing and bracing. I appreciated his diligence and methodicalness in spelling out ways that organizations can shift their thinking from traditional values to broader concerns.

Betterness is available at the Harvard Business Review.

Gesture Control Demo

One of the nice things about visiting clients is getting a glimpse of new technology that will be showing up soon in our offices or our living rooms.

Case in point: Here's a demo of a gesture control system that uses stereo vision to detect people and objects at 60 fps. The TYZX G3 Embedded Vision—that's the small white camera mounted above the flat-panel display—enables a user to manipulate images simply by moving his hands.



The TYZX G3 camera system shown here works both indoors and outdoors.

For more information, check out TYZX.

QA Cafe Looks Ahead

I had the pleasure of having lunch yesterday with Joe McEachern, founder and CEO of QA Cafe. Joe's company has two main product lines. The first, CDRouter, is a test solution for Customer Premises Equipment such as DSL modems and wireless routers. Over the past decade, a truly impressive list of customers have adopted CDRouter to ensure that their products comply with RFCs and industry standards and are easy and straightforward for consumers to use.

The second product, CloudShark, which the company introduced at the SharkFest Conference at Stanford in June, is a virtual appliance for securely storing, cataloging, and sharing packet-capture files. Instead of leaving capture files scattered over the network, enterprise IT teams and service providers can upload them into a secure repository and share them with authorized users over the Web. Which means, yes, you can now analyze capture files on your iPad.

What's new in Joe's world? In the past 6 months, droves of CPE vendors have adopted CD Router's IPv6 solution. QA Cafe introduced its IPv6 tests a couple of years ago, but it's been only recently that organizations responsible for consumer products have shown a lot of interest. Joe's conclusion: the SOHO networking industry believes it's finally time to bring IPv6 to consumers.

The other big news at QA Cafe is the ongoing development of CloudShark. Joe's team is working with prospects and customers to turn this into a truly enterprise-class IT management tool. Watch for more announcements about CloudShark in the months ahead.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2011: Scenes from a Growth Market

When I toured the Exposition area at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, two things quickly became clear:

• There are a lot of vendors offering nearly identical social networking products.
  
• For now, the market demand for these products seems is big enough that all these vendors are surviving, and a market shake-out doesn't seem imminent.
  

Heck, the market seemed crowded when I first covered this conference three years ago. Though a few of these vendors have had layoffs and restructurings, the field remains just as crowded today, giving customers a lot of products and services to choose from.

With products are nearly identical (Facebook-like interfaces, support for Twitter-like activity streams, configurable user profiles, etc.), vendors are differentiating themselves by emphasizing implementation details (SaaS vs. on-premise), go-to-market strategies, a few especially advanced features, and pricing. For example:

• Blogtronix differentiates itself in part through its enterprise-class security, highly configurable customer profiles, and low pricing ($1/user/month).
  
• ClearVale by BroadVision claims to be unique in its ability to share information across internal networks and external networks, such as support sites (though other vendors claimed they could support this, too).
  
• IGLOO Software, which spun out of the RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie's Centre for International Governance Innovation, differentiates itself by its SaaS delivery and (perhaps not surprisingly) its support for the BlackBerry platform.
  
• Microsoft SharePoint offers integration with Lync, Microsoft's unified communication client, and with Office programs such as Word. Additional social media services are available through integration with software from partners such as Newsgator. Incidentally, SharePoint is apparently the file technology "under the hood" for Microsoft's new Office Live services.
  
• The Port, which had focused on non-profits in the past, is now focusing on providing social media tools that could be bundled in business platforms such as Netsuite and SAP.
  
• ThoughtFarmer, whom I've written about before, positions itself as a provider of intranet solutions. Co-founder Chris McGrath told me they're still finding customers who have primitive intranets (just few static Web pages and a file server) and who know they need something more modern, comprehensive, and flexible. At the show the company announced a new SaaS version of their platform.
  

Similar feature sets, different approaches. Customers can compare the offerings and pick the one that best meets their needs.

LiquidPlanner 3.0

Another Enterprise 2.0 exhibitor that I've written about before is LiquidPlanner. This Seattle-based start-up offers project management software that works with estimates and probabilities, rather than forcing users to work with "hard numbers" that all-too-often turn out to be incorrect guesses. Considering the complexities of any team project, LiquidPlanner's probability-based approach to project planning Just Makes Sense. At this year's expo, the company was showing off a new UI and a new feature that enables tasks to be shared across projects. If you're interested in improving the accuracy of your project management efforts, I would recommend checking them out.

Final Thoughts

The keynotes at the conference featured stories from big companies such as Deutsche Bank, and there's no doubt that the Enterprise 2.0 revolution is making slow but steady progress in global enterprises.

But when I hear ThoughtFarmer's stories about small companies interest in replacing an old IIS server with internal wikis and blogs, and I hear the Blogtronix folks talk about 20,000 downloads of their open source Sharetronix software, I can't help think there's an even broader revolution taking place across thousands of small companies interested in finding better ways to communicate and collaborate. That's a good thing for these companies and their customers. And how fortunate for these small companies that so many vendors are working hard to create innovative collaboration platforms that get better every year.

Smaller, Faster, Easier

Computing is going lightweight. The first laptops were more luggable than portable. You risked putting your back out carrying an early Mac laptop.

Over time, though, laptaps did really become light. And powerful. And thin. Now have laptops so thin that you can pack them in envelopes and call them Air.

But sometimes you don't need a device at all—even an iPad, netbook, or remote control wand.

The next generation of devices, such as televisions and some compute systems, will include 3D vision cameras that can interpret hand signals.

It's sign language for communicating with the digital world.

Here's a sign of the times: 3D vision company TYZX has received a Notice of Allowance for a new patent for using stereo vision (3D) cameras to read gestures for controlling systems such as televisions. TYZX's 3D vision systems work in variable lighting conditions and process data at 60 fps. A snap of the fingers in other words—or a wave that can be interpreted and acted upon.

The TYZX Web site has more information about their ultra-fast, ultra-compact visions systems, which are in use today in robots, interactive art installations, security systems, and more.

Photo of a hand by striatic. CC Some Rights Reserved.

The Erosion of Privacy on Facebook: Read the News and Audit Your Account

Could Facebook have grown its community to hundreds of millions of users so quickly if it had not promised to protect the privacy of its users? I suspect the answer is "no." Users trusted Facebook, and they signed up in droves.

Evidently, the company feels it has grown big enough that it can rescind its earlier promises about data privacy and weather whatever micro-storm of protest ensues. As has been much reported, the company is changing its privacy policies and—just as importantly—its UI for controlling privacy settings.

The policies now lean toward disclosure rather than containment. The new UI controls require one to click, click, click with the perseverance of a busy switchboard operator to regain most of the privacy one enjoyed a few months ago. Alas, it's impossible to regain all of it.

Facebook wants to ensure that it and its partners have access to as much personal information as possible. That's how they'll make money.

Their loosey-goosey manner of opening the floodgates leaves users vulnerable to all sorts of hacks, exposing private data not just to Facebook and its partners, but also to any hacker or marketer with sufficient diligence and cunning. (See Wired Magazine's article, Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook.)

Users, understandably, are unhappy. Fifteen organizations have banded together to file a complaint to the FTC. User defections are becoming more common and well publicized. Facebook management is scrambling to the respond.

For a quick summary of what's changed, what's new, and how exposed your own Facebook account is, consult the following.

Analysis

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline

Updated: Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information

Quote from this second article:

Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don't want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them. . . .

But even for an innocuous interest like cooking, it’s not clear how this change is meant to benefit Facebook's users. An ordinary human is not going to look through the list of Facebook's millions of cooking fans. It's far too large. Only data miners and targeted advertisers have the time and inclination to delve that deeply.

New York Times

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (a chart showing the hierarchy of Facebook's new privacy settings)

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

Report of Findings into the Complaint Filed by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) against Facebook Inc. Under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (2009)

Wired Magazine

Public Posting Now the Default on Facebook (December 2009)

Quote:

Facebook estimates that 80 to 85 percent of its users have stuck with the default privacy settings, which means hundreds of millions of users will soon be publishing to the entire net, by default when they type into their status box. The previous defaults for status updates were “Friends of Friends” and networks, including geographic ones with millions of users, while photos defaulted to everyone.

Audit Tools

Profile Watch: Scans your privacy settings and rates your exposure on a scale of 1 to 10.

ReclaimPrivacy.org: Scans your Facebook privacy settings and provides detailed analysis of your exposure, along with links to the Privacy Settings page on which you can make adjustments for a particular score.

If you know of other useful audit tools, please let me know.

Thanks to Sarah Evans for the link to Profile Watch and to Chris Marino for the link to Reclaim Privacy.

Photo credits:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/ / CC BY 2.0

A Gentle Critique of McAfee Product Marketing

Fifteen-second summary of the marketing lessons discussed in this post:

1. Write, chat, and speak in plain English.
2. Don't put populating fields in your CRM system above serving your customers.
3. Create demos that really demonstrate.
4. Build Web sites with tiers of information, so if customers want to dig for details, they can.

If you've already practicing what these lessons preach, feel free to click away and find useful instruction elsewhere.

But if you harbor a sliver of a doubt about your own organization's ability to do all the things I've listed above, then read on . . .

The Story

One of my systems needs to go into the shop for repairs. It's an old system, and it's got a ton of files on it. Some of the files are confidential, so I'd like to encrypt them. I don't need to encrypt the whole disk, just certain files and folders.

I know that there's disk encryption software out there, and I'm sure that David Strom (a writer I know and like) has written about this sort of thing, and I thought about digging up his old columns. But I'm a customer of McAfee's. Their AV software came installed on my laptop, and I'm pretty happy with it. So I decided to start there. Actually, I decided to look at McAfee, Symantec, and PGP.

Let's take these in reverse order. PGP emphasizes whole disk encryption and encryption for email (not something I'm looking for at the moment). Their disk encryption software, which I'm sure is very good, starts at $99 (though that page is a little hard to find; looking for it just now, I ended up on a page for a similar product costing $149). Not egregiously expensive, but more than I was looking to pay. After all, I just want to encrypt a few folders.

A quick glance at Symantec's Web page describing their security products for Home systems leads me to conclude that they offer a bunch of nice features, but not disk encryption.

Which brings us back to McAfee. Of the three vendors, McAfee's positioning for the home computer market seems to be the strongest. Their Web page design is bright and clear, and Web copy doesn't suggest that you need to place an order of 100 units or more to begin to be interesting to their sales organization.

Here's their Web page for their encryption product, which it turns out is called McAfee Anti-Theft.



I think this page is well done. (None of my quibbles concern McAfee's UI design but rather their UX design.) To call attention to just a few things I like about this page:

• It's clear and legible. There's a product shot and a check list of key features.


• There's a bright "Buy Now" button with a legible footnote explaining exactly what it is you're buying.


• The ribbon-like design treatment in the upper right reinforces the suggestion of trust conveyed by the gold badge. It looks like they've won a badge for merit.


• More technical details, such as the fact that the product supports AES encryption, appear below. (As they should. Headlines up top. Details down below.)
  

You'll notice that below the photo of the box, there's a View Demo button. That's where my trouble with trying to purchase McAfee Anti-Theft began.

The demo animation runs for roughly 2:30 (two minutes, thirty seconds). Of that, 1:30 is a slide presentation basically recapitulating the information that appears on the Web page. OK, fine. I realize you're selling to the home market, and you need to spell things out really clearly. The last minute presents a demo showing how to set up a "vault," assign it a password, and drag files into it.

The last minute of the demo—the real demo part of the "demo"—is good as far as it went. But it only showed a file or two being dragged into the vault. I wondered if I could drag whole folders. I mean, yes, almost certainly in 2010, I would expect that a product like this would accept folders, as well as files. But the demo didn't show any folders being dragged in. The Web copy doesn't mention "files and folders"; it repeatedly just says "files." The 2-page data sheet, which I opened as a PDF, does not include the word "folder." Which made me wonder: can you drag in whole folders? Wouldn't that have been an easy thing to show or mention, if it did?

Every now and then you buy a product assuming it will do X and Y, and you discover that no, it only does Y.

OK. This is a pretty straightforward question. Can I drag whole folders (preferably a multi-layer hierarchy of folders) into a McAfee Anti-Theft Vault. Yes or no? Yes, folders, or no, just files?

I click around the site. Suddenly there's a chat window popping up on my screen. OK, fine. I'll start a chat. This should be easy.

Here's a transcript. (With names changed: I have no interest at all in impugning any individuals here; I'm simply concerned with site architecture and process. I have a great deal of sympathy and admiration for people who work in call centers and help desks, and my admonition to myself [which I admit to sometimes failing to heed] is to always be unfailingly polite.)

Chat Conversation	Commentary
Please wait while we find an agent to assist you... Hello, welcome to McAfee Chat. My name is John Doe. Please briefly describe your goal or question so I can connect you with the best resource to meet your objectives.	Wow. Who wrote that? It's so stilted. It reads like it came out of a committee that drew a diagram on a white board analyzing customer requests ("some of the users will have goals and others will have questions, so our copy should reflect that"). It reminds me of a story a tech-writer friend told me about starting at a company where a fellow writer greeted her with the words, "I'll be happy to show you the supply cabinet where you can obtain all the supplies which you'll utilize." And it makes me admire companies like eBay who make a concerted effort to make their Web copy clear and friendly. McAfee's chat greeting is a cold bucket of corporate-ese splashed on a user who on the Web site was treated as an ordinary home computer user trying to protect his tax returns or pictures of favorite grandchildren. But this opening copy, though awkward, is important. The person I'll be chatting with is not someone who has answers; he's not even someone who is supposed to have answers. He's less of a support rep and more of a concierge who will direct me to someone who really does (supposedly) have answers. Two thoughts here: First, McAfee should make this process quick. This hand-off provides no direct value to the user; it's simply an implementation detail for McAfee. Second, let's explain this role in a friendly way. Something like: "We have a lots of different groups at McAfee. First we're going to connect you to a Customer Service Concierge who will find out what you're looking for, then transfer you to the right group. We'll make this quick." But for now, I need to describe my goal or question. Then I'll be connected to the best resource.
John Doe(the name I'm giving the rep in this blog post): How can we help you today?	That's better. "How can we help you?" Friendly and to the point.
Customer: Quick question. With the Anti-Theft product, do I have to drag files into the vault one at a time, or can I drag entire folders and subfolders? John Doe: Were you considering purchasing protection today?	Uh-oh. To answer my question, you shouldn't need to know whether or not I'm about to purchase. I'm happy to talk to a sales rep at some point, but a lot of inside sales people don't know technical details. But OK, fine. I'll go along with this.
Customer: Yes. John Doe: Ok, what I can do for you is transfer you to one of our Sales Agents and they can assist you in processing your order and make sure you get the appropriate product Customer: Before I buy it, though, I'd like an answer to my question. Customer: I'm comparing it to PGP's product, which apparently lets me encrypt folders. John Doe: A Sales Agent will be able to assist you with your questions as well John Doe: My purpose is to direct you to the best resource that can help you with your inquiry. By asking a few questions I can determine what kind of assistance you need, in this case our sales team Customer: OK. John Doe: OK, I will need to collect some information in order to manage your request appropriately. Can you please provide your first and last name email address and your phone number	So I'm in a chat session in which a customer service rep needs to collect more contact information so McAfee can answer a question about a basic feature of a product. Chat sessions imply instant service; that's why users join them. If I had wanted to get talk to a salesperson on the phone, I would have called Sales. But already we're talking about "processing my order." I still don't have an answer to my question.
Customer: I don't want a phone call. I just want an answer to my yes-or-no question. You can email me at [ email address ]. John Doe: As per your question you have to simply drag the files to the vault. Is anything else I can do for you? Customer: I know I can drag individual files. Can I drag entire folders? Customer: If I have a folder hierarchy with 120 files, do I have to drag them all individually? The demo on the Web site is pretty cursory, and it shows only individual files being placed in the vault. John Doe: If you need assistance with that you have to contact tech support, as I mentioned I am only an operator to direct you to the appropriate department to assist you. You can visit www.mcafeehelp.com or contact them at 1866-622-3911	They won't answer my question by email or by transferring me to another chat agent. They have to have a phone number. Or I can call Technical Support. What's wrong with email? Why offer the chat session at all? Why not just post numbers for Sales and Tech Support? Somewhat stunned.

Oh, if only that 2:32 video had been 2:37 and showed a folder being dragged. Unless, of course, it couldn't.

So I called McAfee sales. I spoke to a service rep. She asked if I was a customer. I said I was, but that it shouldn't matter: I was calling about a different product, and I just had a simple question. She said she needed my email address before she could continue. I gave her a valid email address. It turned out not be the one in their records. I asked her if she could direct me to someone technical who could answer my question. It's a yes/no question, I reminded her. She told me to look for technical information on the Web site. I told her I wasn't going to buy her product and said good-bye.

As I mentioned earlier, I was almost certain that David Strom had written about disk encryption products for personal computers. I surfed to his site, www.strominator.com, clicked on a few tags, found the relevant article, saw that he uses PGP Disk but also recommends some free open source products.

I found an open source product that supports AES encryption of files and folders. Installed it. Encrypted my files. Yes, the interface is not as friendly as the interface to the McAfee product, but it's the end of the day now, and my files are encrypted. I still don't know if the McAfee product can encrypt whole folders in addition to individual files.

And now, nor do I care. I've solved my problem. And my biggest expense was time dealing with McAfee marketing and customer service.

A Lesson

I understand the temptation of sales and marketing folks to capture every interaction in a CRM. Budgets are tight, and accountability is more important than ever.

But workflows shouldn't put collecting CRM data over fast, friendly service. A single rep with a good, old-fashioned FAQ or knowledgebase would have made my day more pleasant and McAFee $29.95 richer. That's chump change, I realize, but I wonder how often interactions like this play out across all the various call centers at McAfee.

A Reminder that Digital Doesn't Mean Forever

I enjoyed Alberto Manguel's earlier book, The City of Words, so now I'm reading his new book, The Library at Night. In a chapter called "The Library as Space," Manguel reminds us just how fragile digital data can be:

"The tools of the electronic media are not immortal. The life of a disk is about seven years; a CD-ROM lasts about ten. In 1986, the BBC spent two and a half million pounds creating a computer-based, multi-media version of the Domesday Book, the eleventh-century census of England compiled by Norman monks. More ambitious than its predecessor, the electronic Domesday Book contained 250,000 place names, 25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 3,000 data sets and 60 minutes of moving pictures, plus scores of accounts that recorded "life in Britain" during that year. Over a million people contributed to the project, which was stored on twelve-inch laser disks that could only be deciphered by a special BBC microcomputer. Sixteen years later, in March 2002, an attempt was made to read the information on one of the few such computers still in existence. The attempt failed. Further solutions were sought to retrieve the data, but none was entirely successful. "There is currently no demonstrably viable technical solution to this problem," said Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corporation, one of the world experts on data preservation, called in to assist. "Yet, if it is not solved, our increasingly digital heritage is in grave risk of being lost." By contrast, the original Domesday Book, almost a thousand years old, written in ink on paper and kept at the Public Record Office in Kew, is in fine condition and still perfectly readable."

It's sobering to think of all the business and family records transferred to CD-ROM, supposedly permanently, so that paper originals could be done away with. A great deal of copying lies ahead. . . .

Photo of the Domesday Book in public domain.

The Biggest Problem in Social Media is Content

Producing it, that is.

Without content, Facebook fan pages are as empty and hapless as a shuttered shopping mall.

Without content to link to, tweets are endlessly chatty and will likely fail to produce measurable returns.

Without a steady stream of content, blogs are updated irregularly, or with the turning of the seasons. Or perhaps those intermittent posts uncannily coincide with a product marketing manager's dental appointments, when he or she finally has some down time with a laptop and a mouth too numb to return calls.

We've all seen the pattern: Company X is won over to the importance of social media. They figure out what their blog will be about, who will write the drafts, what the approval process will be, and so on.

With much fanfare, the blog is launched. And the initial post sits there. And sits there. And who has time to write a second post? Or update the Facebook page? Or tweet?

To help company X (and companies Y and Z, as well, because this problem seems common), here are some suggestions for getting content on line.

Leverage What You Have

Has your company just launched a product, published a white paper, or hosted an event? Write a short description and link to the relevant Web page, PDF, or Flickr photo set.

(Speaking of Flickr photo sets, make sure someone on your team has a digital camera. Then set up a Flickr account and link to it from your blog, your tweets, and so on.)

Put Blogging on the Agenda

Track the production of blog posts, Facebook updates, and other social media content just like you track the production of anything else. Like any accountable activity, each content production task should be assigned a name and a date.

While your team is discussing projects, events, and announcements, ask what can or should be shared through social media. What could be published on a blog or Facebook page? What news or links could be tweeted?

Get in the habit of asking what social media content can be wrung from any major activity or milestone.

Let Us Join Your Great Conversations

Over lunch, you and a colleague had a great discussion about something relevant to your industry.

Share it with us. Ask for our comments. When we post comments, respond.

Make Jotting Ideas Down a Habit

Create a folder on your desktop for blog ideas. Or if you use a note-taking application like Evernote, set up a Notebook for blog ideas. Or simply carry a notebook or a stack of index cards.

When an idea pops into your head, jot it down. Then spend 15 minutes a day, sorting through your ideas and filling them out, converting your hasty note or outline into a short post of 250-500 words. It's best if you make that 15 minutes early in the day, before you're interrupted or trapped in meetings.

The nice thing about this approach is that you're suddenly able to accomplish big things (writing that content you haven't found time to write) by taking a bunch of little steps. You never have to face the daunting prospect of a Blank Page Expecting a Complete, Well-formed Piece of Writing (cue organ music and the Wilhelm scream). You're simply jotting down idea you've already thought of and that's practically begging you to record it, or you're developing an idea you've already written down and simply producing a short, pithy elaboration. And you're writing regularly. And your blog and your Facebook page are living up to your expectations. Wow.

What Have You Read or Seen that Inspired You?

Tell us. Ask questions about it.

Make Lists

Like this one. You can't only make lists. But a list now and then is a fine idea.

And The Most Important Thing Is . . .

Get going. Now.


Shopping mall photo credits:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/akasped/ / CC BY 2.0

Gandhi's Convertible Terms

A well known saying of Gandhi's is, "We must be the change we wish to see in the world." Often this is shortened to, "Be the change you wish to see in the world."

The shorter version makes the relationship between you and your effect on the world sound provisional. You have a choice. You can be the change (that is, you can be the way you would like the world to become), or you can not be. Perhaps you lack the motivation or rigor be that change right now. The world, in that case, will drift on its way . . .

Elsewhere in his writings, Gandhi links actions and ends more explicitly—and he doesn't let us off the hook. Gandhi says that means and ends are convertible terms. (In logic, convertible terms are terms that can be swapped.)

Your means are your ends; your ends are your means. Since you are always engaged in some kind of means (since you are always taking action, even if that action appears to be inaction), you are always shaping ends, and the nature of the former directly determines the nature of the latter, regardless of excuses, manifestos, talking points, or tweets.

In other words: Be the change you wish to see in the world? You are the change, right here, right now, whether you like it or not.

So how are you being right now? Because that's the way you are shaping the world.

Application for Business

No moment is a wasted moment. No interaction with a prospect or customer is unimportant. You are always shaping the company you hope to create some day.

Most people realize now that a company's brand isn't its logo or its Web site copy; it's the sum of its customer experiences. That recognition applies here, as well.


Photo of Gandhi statue at the S.F. Ferry Building by Yves Remedios. Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.