Bob's Blog

I’m flying today from Morocco to Indianapolis for my annual Final Four weekend festival. Having come close to buying the Washington Wizards a few years back, I got to see a side of professional hoops that was all about money. The contrast between the pros and the college kids is refreshing. Seeing the Albany kids play their hearts out against UConn, and the standing ovation that resulted highlighted what college athletics is all about.

My new favorite team is George Mason. After my dear friend Stephanie (someone who would rather run 5 miles in 40 degree weather than sit through a basketball game) fell in love with them, I knew the Cinderella story was perfected. These guys don’t have the size, experience or recruiting classes to be at the final four, but thankfully they have the heart. I look forward to watching them take on the Gators.

The two schools offer a lesson for us all in building a web presence. University of Florida is over 100 years old and one of the five largest universities in the nation with over 45,000 students. George Mason is just over 30 years old with 25,000 students. On the web, you would never know that GM is the newer, smaller school. GM has embraced the web, presenting their school with video, animations and great content on all aspects of their school. They used the web to demonstrate that they are every bit as credible a university as any top institution.

Consider this when you plan out your web site. Just because your company or your product may not be the leader in the market, don’t let that stop your plans for a great web site. The web is quickly becoming the primary research tool for purchasing decisions. Follow George Mason’s approach to the web and demonstrate to everyone that you have every right to have a place at the big dance!

I was reading through my collection of newspapers on my way back from a visit with our new client, Planning Factory at their Bermuda Operations. The great thing about our offices being on the Christina River is that we can cruise right from Bermuda directly to the rowing docks in front of the office. I understand that my dear friend Steve from Pfizer even saw our craft as we passed under I-95!

Back to my newspaper reading. The New York Daily News had an interesting article on a person who was concerned about what potential employers might see the crazy stuff said on her MySpace account along side her professional life on the web. While few of us would like our youthful indiscretions to be on display next to our professional accomplishments, Google makes no distinction. Keep that in mind as you explore MySpace and wonder what respectable job some of these people hold. I’m sure there is an attorney or two who might take the case suing a person for their own defamation of character.

Now extend this thinking to your own company communications. While your corporate web site has been scrutinized and sanitized, what other communications are attached to your company’s name? The blog craze has everyone wanting to create their own blog, including your employees. In trying to develop our own blog policy, I asked Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo for their policy. He passed along their policy, which I think is written in the plain English lawyers hate.

Again, Google makes no distinction between your polished site, and your employee’s discussion of alien invasions at work. In fact, the text rich approach of blogs makes them excellent sources of indexable content for search engines, creating a situation where your employee’s blog will rank above your company web site.

Other inadvertent connections can occur when employees use their work email address to post on message boards. Even though the posts may be personal in nature, your employee’s post on the ‘Vote for Hemp’ site has their email address, and thus your company’s web address after the ‘@’ symbol in the employee’s return email address.

What can you do? Think about your policies towards blogs and using work email addresses for personal items. Clearly communicate this with your employees. Finally, monitor (or have someone like us monitor) how your company is listed in blogs, web sites, and message boards.

In a quest to reduce my Starbucks intake, I have discovered the world of Yahoo Widgets, and I love them. I think you will as well, unless you are a Barista.

If you are like me, your web browsing habits are fairly routine. I fire up the New York Times Real Estate section, check the weather back home at Weather.com, read my favorite blogs and check the stocks. The process takes approximately one Vente double shot latte at the closest Starbucks. Enter Yahoo Widgets, and my time savings amount to simply getting an espresso.

Yahoo Widgets are little information buckets (or portlets) that sit on your desktop and are continually updated while you are connected to the internet. While some display text, the interesting ones graphically present the info. I particularly like the weather forecast chart. Now rather than surfing from site to site, I simply press ‘F8’ and see all my information on one screen. I can drag them wherever I want on my desktop to organize how I like. Take a peek at a sample from a colleague back at the office.

Yahoo Widgets were formerly called Konfabulator before being purchased by Yahoo late last year. They work on the PC and Mac (just like Patrick) and are free to download. Over one million people have downloaded widgets. Anyone can create a Widget as well, which means that some are good and some are not. Yahoo has a galley of over 2,000 widgets to choose from.

For anyone looking to keep in touch with customers, a Yahoo Widget might be a good supplement to email marketing. Create a nice looking widget that can broadcast your news, your podcasts, or even your event calendar. Maybe Starbucks will do one to remind me about my need for Lattes again.

I just received a new laptop to replace the one that fell over my balcony in my hotel and into the pool below. Who knew how many pieces there were in a laptop.

Firing up my laptop, it struck me how much marketing was being done using the ‘factory settings’. My browser was configured to start at the manufacturer’s home page. Clicking the ‘search’ button took me to a search page branded for the manufacturer. When I typed in an incorrect web page, the error page was, wait for it… a page branded for the manufacturer.

Sure I could change all of these settings, but I didn’t. This form of marketing, which I’ll call Default Marketing, is when the path of least resistance for your customer is the one that markets you the most.

Default marketing isn’t a new strategy. Your car likely came with a license plate from the dealership. Sure you could take it off, but that would take effort. As long as it doesn’t annoy you, you will leave it there, just as the laptop manufacturer hopes that I leave my homepage.

The key to Default Marketing is to market yourself in a way that drives the desired message without pushing the customer to a point of frustration. Default Marketing can backfire if you are too forceful or make removal too difficult (remember Spyware?)

How can you Default Market yourself to your customers? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Though I would never have given up the thrills of Torino, I was glad to take a call from a good friend of mine in New Orleans inviting me to be a captain in the Krew of Rex parade for the Mardi Gras Festivities. Anything other than snow was welcome - and I was glad to be able to show my support to some of the finest hospitality that this county has to offer. New Orleans was at its finest - certainly earning its reputation as "The City that Care Forgot".
While there - a good friend of mine, Butterworth (who just happened to be here when Katrina rolled through), brought to my attention a problem my industry is facing which I did not recognize until recently. He wondered where I stood on the question of openness. Blindsided by some of the sites at the tail end of Bourban Street - I wondered where he was going with this.

Apparently New Orleans had a problem during Katrina where they couldn't access a site because their software didn't recognize a seemingly standard webpage. Quite frankly, my initial reaction was that I could care less. I had more important things on my mind like the wine list and dinner at Cuvee', and how many more flashers I would need to ride through. The more we discussed it - the more I began to realize that many industries are facing a problem: what if the files I from my computer could no longer be read. What if the history I keep in Microsoft Word could no longer be read by my descendants - who would keep up the "Archer Standards"? What if Microsoft suddenly decided that previous versions of Excel were out of date and deactivated them just as easily as they activated them?

One person who is always up for a spirited conversation regarding all that is wrong with Closed-Source Microsoft is my good friend Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems. He is constantly calling me to find out a good strategy for knocking Gates-y down a notch or two. So I asked him about this openness question and whether the Microsfot Word documents I write are truly "Standard", even though everyone seems to have Word. Scott was so happy that I was asking that he dropped an eMail to me explaining this idea of making "open source" software mainstream and adopted by the big boys in corporate America. I was so impressed by his response - I gave it to my friends at the WSJ. It's a pretty convicing argument he made - Here was his letter:


Dear Bob,
Thanks for the pretzels. Those were the ones I loved from your party. Following up on our debate about your pal Butterworth, here were my thoughts: In principle at least, there is no controversy. No one would argue that content you create belongs to anyone but you. But, in fact, it doesn't.

That's the dirty little secret behind much of the software people use today. In business, in government, in schools and in homes all around the world, we entrust our work to software applications: word processors, spreadsheets, presentation programs and all the rest. And, too often, that's where we lose control of our own words and thoughts -- simply on account of the way we save our documents. Because we tend to store information in formats that are owned and managed by a single dominant company, in a few short years we may no longer be able to access our files if the format is "upgraded." Or we may be required to buy a new expensive version of the software just to access our own thoughts. We do it without giving it a second thought. After all, what's the alternative? A typewriter? An adding machine? A quill?

Think about it: If the Constitution were being drafted today, we would likely lose free, or low cost, or even any kind of access to much of the vital background in the Framers' correspondence to one another -- all because the file format will no longer be supported sometime in the future. A letter is more or less permanent, and easily transferable to different environments. An email is not.

Software appears to give us all the control we need over our documents -- until it doesn't. The problem shows up when we decide to try something different. A new way of doing things or a different software application. Something better. Something cheaper, more reliable, easier. But we're stuck with all these files in a format that's exclusive to the company from which we bought the first software application. In business, that's called a barrier to exit. Companies that create barriers to exit figure we won't notice until it's too late when the cost of switching is too high.

In the larger scheme of things, barriers to exit are bad for the consumer. It means that in the long term we often end up paying more than we should and getting less innovation than we would on a level playing field. Companies should compete on the value their products provide, not on their ability to lock customers into a proprietary "standard." At this point, some people throw up their hands and say that's just the way of the world. Nothing we can do about it.

Not so. There is now an open, international standard for common personal productivity applications -- spreadsheet, presentation and word-processing programs -- called the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Approved by an independent standards body, ODF has the backing of a broad community of supporters including consumer groups, academic institutions, a collection of library associations including the American Library Association, and many leading high-tech companies, but no single company owns it or controls it. (A "standard" created and controlled by a single company is not a true standard.) Any company can incorporate the OpenDocument Format into its products, free of charge, and tear down the barriers to exit.

Imagine being able to open any email attachment, read it and make changes, even if you don't have the exact program it was created in. That's the kind of interoperability the OpenDocument Format is designed to foster.

If this standard is to become a reality, we must insist on it. In the U.S., Massachusetts has been leading the way with a mandate that all software purchased by the commonwealth comply with ODF. Globally, 13 nations are considering adopting it. The reason is simple. The data belongs to the people, not to the software vendor that created the file format.

If you don't think this is an issue, take a look at what happened after Hurricane Katrina. People needing emergency services information found that some government Web sites could only be accessed from a single brand of Web browser. Important, publicly-funded information -- in some cases life-saving information -- was unavailable unless you used that specific brand. That's like being told you can't use the highway because you aren't driving a Ford truck. It seems to me that this is one of those times when a government mandate makes sense -- so that we can all use the road and choose what car we want to drive.

Am I guilty of oversimplification? Sure. But you get the idea. In an increasingly connected world, having a single, open standard is the only thing that makes sense. And if there are competing standards, as sometimes happens (and appears to be happening here), they need to be harmonized. The extra added benefit of open standards is that they encourage competition, which spurs innovation and economic growth. Nothing controversial about that, is there?

Keep the Pretzels coming. I look forward to catching another hockey game soon

Your Friend,
Scott
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All this heavy talk on openness - Thanks Buttersworth - you helped me write off this trip.