Memories of London

Here’s a small selection of photos that I took on my recent visit to London:

#Fail: why social media marketing campaigns fail

I’ve previously posted on how to measure the success (or failure) of a social media marketing campaign. But why do social media campaigns fail?

This is an apocryphal quote – and I can’t find the source – but I’ve heard Alexandra Samuel talk about the default state of a social media marketing campaign being “fail” … mostly because it ain’t easy.

But why?

I recently read a great list by Darren Houle at Communicopia. In brief, he lists 5 reasons for social media marketing failure:

1. Lack of organizational buy-in to company culture
2. Lack of organizational tie-in to company goals
3. Short-term objectives
4. Lack of planning for the inevitable sticky situations that will arise
5. Quitting after the first failure … “we tried that, it didn’t work”

The reality is the same one facing those who want to get rich quick, become famous quick, become an instant expert, or go from 90-pound weakling to 240-pound Schwarzenegger: it does occasionally happen, but only fools plan on it.

Social media marketing campaigns that are successful over the long term arise out of a company culture, mission, and vision that is conducive to openness, creativity, responsiveness, humor, and change. This takes time. This takes effort. It’s not as easy has hiring an SEO firm and writing a check.

The biggest clue
Successful social media marketing campaigns aren’t campaigns at all. What do I mean?

I’m simply saying that they’re not episodic, they’re not short-term, and they’re not something that you can pick and one day and throw away another day … like a magazine ad or a TV spot.

Successful social media marketing, like all great marketing, tells a story that draws in an authentic way on the larger, longer story of a company or organization. It’s a chapter in a book, an act in a play. There was one before, there’ll be one after.

The biggest question – as in all marketing – becomes: is your organization’s story worth listening to?

Connexions – ripping, mixing, and burning school

I recently met Doru Ilasi at eLiberatica 2009. He’s the executive manager of Aplix Software, and we chatted about open source and education for a few minutes.

He had mentioned a TED presentation on creative commons educational material, and just today passed on a link to the movie. It didn’t click for me when we were chatting, but when I watched Richard Baraniuk give the presentation, I remembered checking out the Connexions website a few years ago.

Here’s the video – it’s well worth a few minutes. Inspiring!

People I want to remember from eLiberatica

I met such great people on my recent trip to Bucharest for eLiberatica 2009. There’s something about conferences and trips: you compress so much experience into so short a period of time that you feel like old friends with people you met just a few days before.

Here’s a few that I want to remember and stay in touch with …

Georg Greve
Georg is passionate about free and open source software … and also passionate about good user experience. Totally unexpectedly, we completely connected, discussed software and life passionately and humorously … spent a lot of time together. It’s funny, but in the way we joked about each other and poked holes in each other’s ego, he kind of felt like a brother.

He’s the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, a great speaker, and about as smart as they come (he was trained as a physicist and was planning to go into nanotechnology before being seduced by free software).

Anca Luca
Anca is a software developer for Xwiki, a corporate collaboration company/community in Romania and around the world.

She’s wicked smart – working on a better online word processor/text editor than currently exists on the market – and is very definitely totally switched on. (I know something about the challenges about creating word processing capabilities in a browser, as I’ve done that for a past project. I’ll be very thankful not to have to do it again in the future!) She’s also extremely articulate, and I told her she should be on the panel of speakers for eLiberatica 2010.

Jeroen van Meeuwen
Jeroen is a geeks’ geek. VP of the Fedora Linux association for Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, he coordinates a ton of open source development. He’s also very funny and personable … and definitely knows how to party. I’ve heard, however, that trying to out-drink a Finn is like trying to win a land war in Asia: don’t even bother … and I think Jeroen might have discovered this fact.

Monty Widenius
If you know open source software, you know Monty. He’s the co-creator of the MySQL database. He’s an extremely successful software developer as well as entrepreneur … but here’s the thing: he has no ego. Zero.

Or maybe I should say attitude. He’s got some programmer’s ego about technical stuff, although he’s always willing to listen to other viewpoints. But he’s got zero I’m-a-bigshot attitude, in spite of having created absolutely iconic software and successfully selling his company to Oracle.

David Axmark
David is the other half of the creation of MySQL, and he’s very similar to Monty in that he has absolutely no attitude … he’s a regular guy, approachable and easy to talk to.

He’s a fairly avid photographer – has 6 cameras – and was always taking shots of people from odd angles when least expected.

Oana Iordache
Oana is part of the Agora team, along with Anca, Marina, and Andreea, who took amazing care of the speakers at eLiberatica 2009, and made everything else in the conference run smoothly as well.

More than that, she’s a funny, patient person who accomplished the gargantuan task of teaching me a couple of dance steps when we all went out Saturday night. As I mentioned on Flickr, when I dance, women faint, strong men weep, and small children run away screaming … but I think I made a scrap of progress that night. Thanks!

Romulus Meier
Aside from having about the coolest first name you can get in Romania aside from Vlad, Romulus is the general manager of Agora Media, the company that puts on eLiberatica conference. He’s smart, engaged, and isn’t unwilling to have a little fun, too, which is important in a leader.

He’s also an amazing dancer, and told me that if I came for 10 eLiberatica’s, then I’d probably be pretty decent as well! I really appreciate the fact that he and the Agor team absolutely made the event an experience to remember for me, and I think all the other speakers as well. And he fed us like kings. Wow …

Danece Cooper
Danece is the “open source diva,” and she had an excellent, excellent talk on open source success stories in government and corporations.

She’s worked for just about everyone in tech … Sun, Microsoft, Apple, and other companies, and is currently with a start-up – a new experience for her. Funny and friendly!

Ismael Alea
Ismael is the kind of guy that you can meet for 30 seconds and be talking like you’ve known each other all your lives. He’s Spanish, and very definitely has a high-tempo Latin personality … passion, excitement, laughter, and lots and lots of hand talking!

. . .
. . .

There were others as well … I’m thinking of 10 or so people that I met and chatted with during the after-conference party on Saturday night, whose name I either don’t know or can’t remember, and who I don’t have photos of. But they’re in my memory, fondly.

. . .
. . .

Staying in touch is a hard thing to do across a continent. There’s Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more …. but it’s not like face-to-face. Monty won’t be able to try to convince me to have some 60-proof jet fuel online, and Georg and I won’t be able to riff back and forth the way we did in person.

But I’m hoping to stay in touch, and meet each of these people and more in person again. Perhaps eLiberatica 2010?

We’ll see!

Carpe diem: on spontaneity

The best things in life happen by accident. Or, at least, partially by accident … to those who are open to opportunity and change.

Last Sunday I was wandering around old Bucharest when I happened on the remains of Vlad Tepes’ old castle. It’s a fascinating place, and as I wandered around, checking it out, I struck up a conversation with Radu, part of a troupe of medieval revivalists who put on demonstrations of medieval arts and warfare at the site.

Vlad Tepes, as you probably know, is better known to North Americans as Dracula, and he was an integral figure in fighting off the Turks and helping the region we now know as Romania win its freedom.

For whatever reason, the show didn’t go off that evening, but Radu and I kept chatting. After a while, he offered to give me some lessons in medieval longsword fighting. Hardly believing my luck, I jumped at the chance and spent the next hour learning how to attack and how to defend myself with a 5-kilo training sword.

I learned the standard defensive and offensive postures … he taught me the basic arm and upper body techniques for defense, and a couple of different options for offense.

It was hot and we were both sweating profusely by the end, but this was just about the most incredible and wonderful experience of my whole trip.

I also learned that a swordsman never touches the blade of his sword with his bare hand, as the oils and sweat of your skin can corrode the blade. That lesson was rammed home when I inadvertently touched the side of my blade with my hand after a few ringing slashes and parries, and got a piece of Romanian steel inserted under my skin … which I had to dig out with a needle the next day.

On every single trip I’ve made (and it’s got to be close to a hundred by now) I’ve had the most amazing experiences by first learning a bit about the location, thinking of a couple of possible things to do before I even get on the airplane, and then completely going with the flow when I’m actually there.

The pre-work ensures I don’t miss anything that’s an absolutely must-see (from my perspective, not some guidebook), and forms a basic background of knowledge about the destination. Then, when I’m actually on the trip, I have some backstory, some clue, as to what might be a great experience or not. But it can all go in the fire if something that appears better in the moment turns up.

The reality is that you can’t plan for your moods, for who you meet, for the weather, or any of a hundred other factors that play into what will be the most amazing opportunity. So planning a trip – or a project – extensively and sticking to the plan robotically is a waste of time.

I think it was Clauswitz (and if I had internet connection on this airplane I’d verify it) who said, “In battle, planning is essential, and plans are useless.”

I think that’s true about a lot of things in life.

Bucharest photostream, part 1

Here’s a selection of my photos from Bucharest.

The first few are people, and if you want the details on who they are and what they do, you might want to go to Flickr to see all the notes. The majority of the photos, however, are of the city and architecture …

Click the expand button to go fullscreen.

The unfinished joke …

We did a very fun thing on the last day of the eLiberatica conference: Werewolf. Danese Cooper led this game in which audience members do quick 3-minute impromptu speeches on a topic of their choosing. Natuarally, Jeroen van Meeuwen pushed me forward and signed me up against my will, and I found myself in front of a room full of people.

I spoke about optimizing personal SEO through proper use of social networking tools such as Twitter and LinkedIn. But at about the 2:30 mark, I ran out of material. So someone suggested a joke.

I immediately started telling the below joke, but since I had no punchline (at the time) I dragged it until the 3 minutes were finished and I was in the clear.

Here’s the joke, now that I slept on it and dreamed up an ending. It draws strongly on the fact that Romanians know how to party like few other people on earth …

3 guys walked into a bar, a Canadian, an American, and a Romanian.

The Canadian was a cheap bugger, and as they walked in he said, “I wonder how much the drinks are here. Maybe they’re cheaper at the next bar.” The American was a sharp entrepreneur, and as he stepped inside he looked around and said, “I wonder how much it would cost to buy this bar. I’d pick it up, do a licensing deal with Beck’s, expand the second floor, and double my money in a year.”

While they had been chatting just inside the door, the Romanian had walked up to the bar, found a seat, tossed back his first beer, and was starting on his second when finally he yelled in their direction: “I wonder how much time you guys are going to waste until we start the &*%$# party!”

Naturally, I do not condone the use of profanity and vulgarity, so you’ll have to fit a word into that last line yourself …

I think it would have brought the house down, especially since with hecklers and other fun, we had been laughing most of the 3 minutes already.

Memories of eLiberatica …

As I look past the wing of the airplane down to the patchwork German countryside, I can almost believe the illusion that the earth is sliding past while I and the plane are stationary. It’s an easy illusion to indulge in, because as I leave Romania and Bucharest the experiences I had there in such a short time are so vivid in my memory.

All the memories jumble up as I try to record them here … arriving at 11:30 PM and strolling, jet-lagged, through midnight streets … photowalking through old Bucharest … swordfighting at Vlad Tepes’ castle … lunches and dinners with amazing people like MySQL founders David Axmark and Monty Widenius, Free Software Foundation Europe president Georg Greve, Fedora EMEA vice-president Jeroen van Meeuwen, Spanish open-source advocate Ismael Olea … the list goes on and on.

“Open source diva” Danese Cooper is a really fun speaker to listen to, and she’s worked for practically every company that matters (except for IBM, as she told me).

The people at Agora Media were amazing as well … Rom (the first person I know who is actually called Romulus, which for a guy with a modest dose of Star Trek Virus™ like me is pretty cool) Maier … Anca, who took care of us as no-one else could … Andreea …. Oana, who took pity on me and showed me a couple of dance moves so I didn’t make a complete idiot of myself at the club (hey, 99% is NOT 100!) … and many others as well.

But it was a great thrill to see the people of Romania, especially the students and IT people who came to the conference. Smart, dedicated, passionate … they are intensively switched-on. It was such a privilege to wander the halls during the conference and meet them, ask questions about what they were studying or working on, and learn about their worlds.

The after-conference party was a ton of fun, and while I don’t have a hope of remembering all names of the people I met, a bunch of us have already connected on Twitter and I’m looking forward to staying in touch that way.

I’m going to put other recollections and thoughts, along with photos, in other blog posts …. keep posted.

Business models: proprietary vs OSS

Valer Mischenko of NLnet is speaking at eLiberatica on free and open source business models. One slide in which he contrasts business models particularly caught my eye:

 
Interesting! I’ll have to digest this a bit and see if I totally agree.

With love from Romania

It’s 2 AM in Bucharest and the dogs are barking in the distance.

I’m in town for eLiberatica, a conference on open source software, and I’ll be speaking tomorrow today, but I’m fully jet lagged and in spite of the fact that I was up and traveling for about 32 hours straight, my body has no desire for sleep. This is going to be interesting.

The hotel is an interesting mix of modern art/decor and 19th century eastern European. The spaciousness, funky color scheme, and contemporary furniture is the modern part; the unhappily combined lack of adequate A/C and window screens is the 19th century part. I’m not quite sure where the pirated stations on the 20″ CRT TV or the pulsating rhythms of the first-floor bar fit.

I came in at about 11 PM last night, was massively overcharged by an unscrupulous cab driver who expertly inferred my lack of local savoir faire, and took a brief stroll around midnight before coming up to fail miserably at the one task that matters right now: sleep.

At least the location is good – I’m about a block and a half from the Romanian Palace of the Parliament. Here’s a pic I’ve filched from Wikipedia:

And the neighborhood is intensely … interesting, from what I could tell of it during a late night stroll. Lots of graffiti, which makes you think a bit, but also lots of people including couples and women out late at night. Some amazingly interesting architecture – I can’t wait for a daytime photowalk. At the risk of over-generalizing from an insufficient sample size, I’m guessing turn-of-the-century Romanian design was not about minimalism.

Ah well, it’s now 2:39, according to my trusy iPhone connecting to RO Vodafone, and 6:39 “home time.” Time for another attempt at counting those bloody sheep.

Good night, or something …

Psychedelic: Apple releases WebOS

Classify this as a happy accident:

I just happened to accidentally align a Mac OS X finder window with the TwitterMass website … which just happens to have a very similar color palette. After a couple of seconds I did a double take and realized what was happening.

Funny!

Friendfeed growth rocketing?

What is up with FriendFeed?

After perhaps a year of having a FriendFeed account but doing very little with it, I’m suddenly seeing a huge jump in activity. For the past 12 months I’ve pretty much put FriendFeed on autopilot, receiving data from my other social networks and media activities, but not paying too much attention to it or getting much attention from other FriendFeed users.

But in the past month or so I’ve been receiving subscription requests from FriendFeed users almost daily.

I’m wondering what’s going on – is FriendFeed growth exploding? Checking Alexa shows steady growth of 134% over the past 3 months … good, but nothing compared to the stratospheric take-off of Twitter, which has been growing at well over 1000% annually.

Maybe the growth in numbers is not the story. Perhaps more and more occasional users of FriendFeed have – like me – started to use it more and more over the past few months.

Either way, FriendFeed is a social network/aggregator to watch … perhaps it will not be limited to a geeky, connected audience after all.

Never, never, never microwave your cell phone

(Saw it first on BoingBoing.)

The real Ashton Kutcher effect?

Well in the wake of the Ashton Kutcher 1 million followers on Twitter event, BusinessWeek is making a big deal about celebrities powering social networks.

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr win big when celebrities participate; no wonder they’re wooing famous users.

While it’s self-evident that fans follow stars … it’s also obvious that many joiners are also quitters. I was wondering if the masses of extra users that flood on to an online service are major contributors to social network drop-out.

As Nielsen reports, in Twitter’s case that drop-out is as high as 60%:

Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent.

Turns out the Ashton Kutcher effect is NOT related to the poor Twitter retention numbers. As Nielsen discovered by tracking users during and after the Oprah experiment,

For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

In fact, Ashton Kutcher and Oprah are contributing to social media stickiness and enhancing retention.

So much for the democratization of the internet!

Entrepreneur? Study yourself!

I already re-tweeted … but I have to post this.

In a great Open Forum post on How to Escape Mundanity (which is actually about how to start your own business), there’s this great quote from Pamela Slim:

If you are in the very early stages of thinking about a business, spend your time getting to know yourself. One of the best things I learned from author Jim Collins is to study yourself as if you were a scientist observing a bug. Pay very close attention to the things that either make you feel great or feel crappy. Note the kind of environment, work, people, topics, industries, schedule, and activities that make you thrive. When you start your business with this awareness, you will feel natural energy and clarity which will make all the next steps of the process like choosing a business idea, figuring out the money, planning your business, identifying your customers, and creating a marketing process a lot easier.

Pamela Slim, you say? Yeah, that’s Pamela escape-from-cubicle-nation Slim.

To me, this quote – and the post – is not so much about becoming an entrepreneur and starting your own business as it’s about finding what you love and doing what you’re passionate about.

That’s escape enough for anyone.