One would assume there is some sort of predictive power in Twitter’s firehose, given that Google, Microsoft and a bunch of stealth startups seem willing to pay for special access to the data stream. But my take, based on Twitter traffic and trends as they stand today, is that insights gleaned from Twitter actually LAG more conventional online media. Here’s why. Continue reading ‘Twitter: A leading or lagging indicator of business trends?’
Yeah, AOL. The company best known for littering the planet with signup disks. Or, if you’re a student of the fast and loose business practices of Web 1.0, the company whose revenue shenanigans helped land a number of startup execs in the big house (remember homestore.com?). I know it sounds crazy, but read on.
I’m getting really tired of pundits claiming that big companies can’t innovate, and that startups are the saviors of our economic future. I’ve worked in/with big companies and startups, and have seen tons of innovation and many brilliant people in both. The biggest difference is a simple and obvious one – big companies become conservative because they have something to conserve, and startups take big risks because they have nothing to lose. Their respective shareholders expect these behaviors, and this difference in operating model – not lack of innovation or smart people in big companies – explains the difference in outcomes. Otherwise said, big companies don’t bet the farm, simply because they have a lot more mouths to feed than startups do.
The latest article of this genre that set me off was in Silicon Valley Insider. Henry Blodget pimps a video of Kevin Ryan talking about “Why big rich companies can’t crush tiny startups“. I posted a long comment that focused primarily on the fundamental logical flaw in the kind of reasoning Ryan (and many others) use, and thought I’d share it here also.
Continue reading ‘Big companies can be just as innovative as startups’
Social media marketers (all 100 million of them, if my Twitter count is correct) are bending over backward to congratulate themselves on the effect the 4M YouTube views of a song about a broken guitar had on United Airlines. Some social media PR types are touting the enormous brand damage done by the incident, and a journalist at the UK Times Online has even connected a 10% drop in United’s stock price with the spread of the YouTube video.
This reminds me of a similar case of social media overreach in which Vanno was directly involved. Remember the now infamous Michael Phelps bong incident? Not long after Lou Dobbs highlighted how Kellogg’s Vanno rank (a social media measure of company reputation) dropped precipitously after the bong incident, someone connected a drop in Kellogg’s stock price with the social media buzz/outrage around Kellogg’s decision to drop Phelps. Continue reading ‘The broken guitar had no effect on United Airlines’
As someone who has hired literally dozens of MBAs from first tier schools over the years, I was puzzled by the buzz around the Harvard Business School MBA ethics oath. It was always my impression that a moral compass came as a standard feature on a base model MBA. Now, it seems, it’s being offered as an optional upgrade.
But given its availability, going forward no one would hire an MBA who hadn’t taken the oath, right? I don’t think so. My last experience with MBAs under extreme temptation leads me to conclude that such an oath would actually do more harm than good because it trivializes the issue of business ethics. Here’s why. Continue reading ‘The MBA oath trivializes business ethics’
Meet my friends.
Our screen names make us sound like a gang of comic book figures, a League of Cyber Superheroes in a virtual Hall of Justice — names like FlyFisherGirl, mulgi, doranka, pinkuff, shaunsayers, kjripp, joflynn, VicinSea, Cheesehead. Together we are the Vanno Elite Influencers, and actually, cyber superheroes is not too far off the mark.
What we have in common as do-gooders is the power to change the world, one opinion at a time. Each time we post a story, share a bit of news, make a comment or even just vote about something going on in the commercial world, we can alter public opinion.
We’re sort of like a modern-day version of the Nielsen family, but instead of representing the way the world rates TV, we represent the way the world of consumers looks at businesses. And let’s face it, businesses bank on their public image — enough so to do the right thing, if it means it will boost their reputation.
VicinSea, for example, uses her superpower to fight for the environment. She battled Monsanto, leader of the GMO empire, for their proposal to use Agent Orange, and Chevron for their phony news reports about the disaster in Ecuador. She also praised the green efforts of a soap company that reuses bottles, and Dell Computers for not exporting its hardware waste.
Our savvy consumer, FlyFisherGirl, forewarned friends about wrongful finance charges by Chase, or the way executives are laying off workers in small waves to avoid the bad press caused by massive firings. She also spread the good news about WalMart worker bonuses and Fedex giving away free résumés, and let us know where to get a good cheap girdle and some free shoes.
Doranka’s bio says he is interested in how business can make the world a better place, and he is doing just that at Vanno, by encouraging better business practices like supermarkets extending labor contracts during this tough economy. Mulgi is keeping it green with stories like Disney planting trees or the decline of plastic bags.
StevenLowell works in the media industry, doing voice-overs, and adds his voice to the debates on Vanno. He has an insider’s perspective on commercials like the BK spots featuring square butts and Mexican wrestlers. Pinkuff shares his e-expertise with submissions and tech talk about IBM, Kindle/Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Kjripp is keeping it real with stories like the DQ “sweet deals” that aren’t, or the killing of true stories and the writing of fake reviews. Joflynn is not afraid to stand up to Big Brother, and let the markets do their thing : “As long as it’s not a government regulation, I’m all for it” he wrote of commercial nutritional standards, and echoed in comments about prescription drugs, clean energy legislation and bailout bucks.
There are others in our ranks: skunkworks416, robbob, mattbennett, RoyC, dlhm, worlfram, push123, markw1, jkj, phils, GBS, Steven, glee, christhm, jcolman, tomh, jon, denny, descon, annette, truckeetrapper, and each of us contributes our own special perspective and influences the rest of the network in our own unique way.
We are, literally, trendsetters — Vanno uses our voices and our votes to create the Vanno Company Intelligence, a trending tool that charts the way consumers perceive corporations. The longer we use Vanno, and the louder we get, the better businesses will become as they have the opportunity to listen in. Little by little, we can make a difference.
You don’t have to be a superhero to change the world. But it helps.
Twitter has announced – to much fanfare and discussion - that it wants to build a reputation ranking system for its users in order to bring more credibility to its trend and search tools. In fact, Twitter trending has been one of the hottest topics on – Twitter. Having thought a lot about how to measure reputation and extract trends from social media, we wondered how Twitter planned to do this given their terse, unstructured activity streams.
Issues of users gaming the system aside (which we’ll address in a later post), 140 characters, no tweet categorization other than voluntary hashtags, and no community feedback (e.g. voting) on tweets doesn’t leave much to work with. To add a trustworthy reputation ranking system to the existing service, Twitter will likely have to introduce more structure and categorization in tweets. This will force users to work harder, and will almost certainly impact the fast, free-form ethos that now characterizes Twitter. Ironically, one of the main things that drove Twitter’s phenomenal growth – input simplicity - may be the biggest impediment to making searches and trend analyses of tweets trustworthy.
What exactly do we mean by “more structure and categorization” of user input? Well, what better way to explain it than to look at how Vanno determines the reputation of Twitter the company? To be clear, we’re analyzing the activity stream around a company to measure the reputation of a company, but the process is the same for analyzing the activity stream of a user to measure the reputation of the user. Continue reading ‘Measuring Twitter’s reputation’
Remember that old Paul Simon song that goes something like: …”When numbers get serious, you see their shape everywhere… “ We couldn’t find a better explanation anywhere of what Vanno is about. Recall, for example, the online chatter about Kellogg, peanut butter, bongs and Pop-Tarts on the Web and in the blogosphere? But it took numbers - ranks dropping from 9 to 16 to 32… – on a graph to crystallize what was going on in the minds of consumers and the media. That now famous graph got a lot of heat for it’s cartoon-like form, but it’s substance was clear and effective.
Well, we’ve been working on our graphics skills, collecting and processing stories, votes and comments from our community and are now ready to make all our trending data available to the general public. We call it Vanno Company Intelligence. It includes amazing features like real-time reputation trend graphs for each of the 6000+ companies in our database, with interactive links to all the underlying stories, the ability to see the different aspects of reputation contribute to overall reputation and a tool to compare trends for multiple companies. Check out the details here.
We’re offering Vanno Company Intelligence on a subscription basis. The cost? Well, if you are an active Elite Influencer in the Vanno community, you’ve already earned your subscription. After all, without our community, we’d have no scores, no ranks and no trends. But if you don’t have the time or inclination to participate in the community, we’re offering the service on a “pay what you think it’s worth” basis. Seriously. It’s not a gimmick, but an approach that’s based on an economic theory called “participative pricing” that is being used in online music (think Radiohead), restaurants and theaters. And we think it’s particularly applicable in our case, partly because we’re new kids on the block, and partly because the value of insights gleaned from social news and social media is clearly different for different people. So we’ll watch and learn, and in the meantime you can be sure you’re getting your money’s worth, because you’re setting the price.
And to be very clear - registered users will continue to have free access to the entire Company Reputation Index, best and worst company reputation lists, membership in the Vanno community, the ability to follow specific companies and users, ReputationCheck widgets and email alerts.
So we invite you to have a look. Let us know what you like and don’t like, and what we can do better.
Between the “Colbert bump,” Ashton Kutcher out-tweeting CNN, and Oprah’s toppling of Twitterdom last week, it looks like Vanno voters finally have twit fatigue.
Forget the February love affair with the cool, elite tech trend that went mainstream faster than cell phones. (Does anyone remember phone booths?) Vanno users were smitten with Twitter’s being used to raise money for a safe drinking water charity, and they cheered the chatter about the company’s political activism and use as a customer service tool. “Amazing,” wrote one Vanno voter about the teaming of Salesforce.com and Twitter to help make customer service smoother for Salesforce software, a service actually paid for by the venture capitalists waiting for Twitter to take off.
That love didn’t last. After tiptoeing into Vanno’s top 1,000, Twitter’s image took a hit when talk turned to money. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told Stephen Colbert last week that they still don’t have a business model for their venture, but Vanno readers could smell the difference between last week’s media buzz and an actual marketing blitz. As they tried to build up enough critical mass to make Twitter profitable in some way, they seem to have alienated at least some of their former fans. “I can say ‘who cares’ in a lot less than 140 characters,” commented nicemarmot, and FlyFisherGirl wrote, “I am so tired of Twitter.”
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, who helped Oprah with her inaugural tweet, brazenly called the technology “the democratization of media.” But does it really empower the people? Or is it just letting them stroke celebrity egos and send mass text messages to friends while the company figures out which tweet of the cash cow they can milk money from?
That’s because they can’t really go any lower than they already are. Here’s a graph that shows BK and Dominos reputations already near the bottom of Vanno’s rankings, and trending downward even before the now infamous square-butts, TexMex and cheese-in-the nose incidents. Continue reading ‘Burger King and Domino’s antics don’t really hurt their reputations’
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