Jeff Hawkins' "secret" project is coming next year

Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, gave a talk this morning. Afterward I asked him if we'll see next year the secret project that Jeff Hawkins has been working on. "Yes," he said, and moved immediately to another question.

Very little information has been released publicly about the Hawkins project. I know a number of very bright people at Palm moved to work on it, more than a year ago. Hawkins himself has dropped cryptic hints about something that would start a new category of devices, alongside handhelds and smartphones. I know some developers have been shown pre-release versions of the product, and the reactions were mixed. But nobody's discussing what the device actually is.

Apparently we'll find out next year.

I'll be interested to see it because I believe there's still a huge opportunity for new sorts of mobile devices. The mobile market is heavily segmented, so much so that mobile phones can't and won't eat everything. Other than Palm and Apple, though, there aren't a lot of companies that are both willing to experiment in new categories of mobile hardware and capable of creating full hardware-software solutions, as opposed to just tossing a hunk of hardware out there.

I'll post more about Colligan's talk later.

The Cluetrain Manifesto revisited

In April of 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger posted to the Web one of the most iconic artifacts of the Internet Bubble. It's called the Cluetrain Manifesto, and parts of it are so pompous that they read like a cross between the socialist Internationale and an L. Ron Hubbard novel. Here's the document's preamble:

"The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day. Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our world, our place to be. Whatever you've been told, our flags fly free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth, remember."*

No kidding, it really says that.

The body of the Manifesto is 95 truisms about marketing in the Internet era, modestly patterned after Martin Luther's 95 Theses that sparked the Protestant Reformation. This implied equivalence between web browsing and one of the founding documents of western civilization is a priceless example of the attitudes that prevailed in the Bubble era.

At the time of its creation, the Cluetrain Manifesto created quite a stir in the online community. Many prominent tech managers signed it, and it was turned into a book.

Seven years later, you don't hear much about the Cluetrain Manifesto. And yet, it's still a very useful document.

Parts of it are silly, and parts of it are just plain wrong. But a lot of it is brilliant. Once you pare away the BS and the posturing, it's a great document on the new world of Internet communication, and much of its advice is just as relevant and insightful today as it was in 1999. Maybe more so, because the technologies involved have matured.

Most companies marketing online still ignore the Cluetrain's advice, to their detriment. Over at Rubicon Consulting, we've been trying to combine the best ideas of the manifesto with our own thinking, to create a short document that companies could use to guide their online communication. You're welcome to check out what we've written; we'd appreciate your comments and suggestions.

I know it's presumptuous to mess around with an Internet icon like the Manifesto, but the original is too flawed and too weird to be taken seriously by most companies.

What I want to do here is take a leisurely walk through the 95 points of the original Cluetrain, pointing out the parts that work and those that don't. Fair warning, this is a very long post. But I hope you'll enjoy the hike...


1. Markets are conversations.

An outstanding observation, but it needs an amendment: Online markets can be conversations. Most companies still market in the traditional way, using traditional marketing tools. They get into trouble when they take their traditional marketing reflexes into the online world. Because online media can be two-way, it's very insulting to use it in a one-way manner (for example, e-mail messages that don't allow answers, or weblogs that don't allow comments). That's as rude as refusing to respond to questions at a cocktail party. And people online often take the insult personally.


2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

True. And a corollary is that because every human being is an individual, no one belongs to a single market. We're each members of a unique rainbow of different markets. Maybe you're a Volvo owner and also a fisherman. The web lets you play both roles, and lets Volvo and a fly fishing outfitter speak to you directly in each role.

In the old marketing world, we had to market to big segments like "males 18-25 years old" because mass media couldn't slice people any finer than that. When you're marketing online, mass market segments are irrelevant and inefficient because you can target much more finely.

Forget about the Long Tail – the online world is all tail.


3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

This needs some translation. The web lets you have conversations with your customers. You shouldn't put those conversations in the tone of a press release. Therefore, don't let your lawyers and PR agency write your online messages. Corporate-speak stands out online like a dead fish, and can be detected at the same distance.


4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

See point 3. In places the Cluetrain gets kind of repetitive. You get the feeling they were stretching it to get up to 95 items.


7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

Um, okay, I guess. Maybe this sounded revolutionary in 1999; now it's kind of quaint. Like listening to speeches by the hippies in People's Park in Berkeley.


8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

Okay. That's a little bit pompous, but there's truth in it.


10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

The real changes are just starting. Most people are not deeply engaged with online conversations, so the online impact on market behavior is spotty. If you're not careful, your online conversations can be diverted by enthusiasts who aren't a good proxy for the rest of the world. Remember Snakes on a Plane.


11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

This is just starting, and it's not always true. But there are cases in which the user community does indeed deliver better support than companies. I think the WordPress blogging tool is a good example.


12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

Yes and no. Definitely the Web gives a much louder voice to product enthusiasts outside of companies, so word about product flaws circulates faster than it did pre-Internet. But it's just a change in speed. Back before the Internet, there were these things called newspapers and magazines that were pretty good at spreading product information quickly.

And with the application of enough money and effort, it's still possible to keep secrets. Look at Apple.


13. What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called "The Company" is the only thing standing between the two.

Companies aren't just metaphysical constructs. They are organizations that pay employees money, and so they have a certain coercive power that markets can't match. I think there's a strain of wishful thinking in the Manifesto – because a lot of online people don't like traditional corporations, they're inclined to believe scenarios in which the corporation withers away. But I personally need to see the evidence to back up that belief, and it's lacking.


14. Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

Another repeat of point #3.


15. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

Well, it has been more than a few years since the Manifesto came out. Most corporations still speak in he same language, and they don't sound any weirder than they did in 1999.

Online, corporate-speak does sound weird. But in traditional media it sounds normal. The authors were making the mistake of thinking that the Internet was the future of all media. It's not – it's a series of new media that will live alongside the old ones for a long time.


16. Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

Baloney.


17. Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

Wow, we go straight from a statement that was stupid to one that's very insightful. Because of its potential for personalization and direct communication, the web destroys traditional market segmentation. It creates (or maybe more accurately, it brings to light) a lot of small vertical markets in place of a few big mass markets.


18. Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

That only applies to the customers who are deeply networked online – a small segment of the population at present. Come back in a generation and this statement will be much more true. For now we're in a transition.

But it sure is an opportunity.


19. Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

Um, no. A company gets an infinite number of last chances until some competitor wipes it out. Unfortunately, it's very hard to predict when that will happen, so companies that misuse online marketing are playing Russian roulette.


20. Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

Translation: Companies need to realize that a relatively small number of people online are laughing at them. But those people sometimes create YouTube videos that get forwarded all over the place, so you gotta watch out anyway.


21. Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

Unfortunately, most people aren't great at creating jokes. If they were, Robin Williams would be unemployed. I think what companies need to do is relax and act like themselves. If their reality is that they're a bit stern and somber, that's OK – as long as it's genuine.

Nothing is more pathetic than a CEO trying to pretend that he or she is hip. This is why you don't ever see Bill Gates break-dancing.


22. Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

OK, you're not really talking about humor at all. So why did you say to get a sense of humor?


23. Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.
24. Bombastic boasts—"We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ"—do not constitute a position.
25. Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.
26. Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

There's a nugget of absolute truth in that last point. Many companies are deathly afraid of having an uncontrolled conversation with their customers, mostly because they expect to be overwhelmed by complaints. Ironically, the best way to reduce complaints is to listen to them and respond. You can turn most complainants into fans pretty easily, if you're just polite and respectful to them. Try apologizing when you've made a mistake – it does wonders for a marriage, and it can help a customer relationship as well.

The Internet is a great tool for having this sort of conversation.


27. By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.

This isn't even a full sentence, and it just repeats the previous points.


28. Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what's really going on inside the company.

That's occasionally true, but the word "most" is a gross exaggeration and hurts the credibility of the manifesto. Most marketing programs are like someone going on a first date – you try to make yourself look good, and accentuate your best qualities. Most people (and most companies) won't outright lie, and fear is not companies' greatest motivation.

Greed is.


29. Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds."

Cute. Meaningless, but cute.


30. Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

No, no, no, no. This point implies that brand marketing is coming to an end. Brand marketing will evolve because of the Web, but well-run brands can and will develop deeper and more meaningful relationships with their customers. At the risk of over-stressing the metaphor, they can go from going steady to getting married.

I think that the manifesto went wrong on this one because a lot of the online crowd views branding as a form of pure evil; they think it clouds consumers' minds to the reality of product features. But most human beings aren't wired that way. They like being associated with a brand that shares their values, because it says something about them. The Web makes it possible to communicate values more thoroughly, so the bonds to a brand can be deeper.


31. Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

The first two sentences are exaggerations. In particular, unless a company is selling only on price, the Internet doesn't make customers any more mobile than they were in the past. But if you are selling just on price, watch out. All the more reason to use the Internet to form deeper ties with your customers.

The third sentence is true, by the way. The way I'd put it: "Never love a company -- it can't love you back."


32. Smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language.

I don't know what a smart market is. Markets can't be smart, people can be smart. People will indeed gravitate to suppliers who speak their language. But the outcome of this is going to be different than the online crowd expects – a lot more people speak the language of Wal-Mart than speak the language of Fry's.


33. Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference.

Yeah, okay.


34. To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.
35. But first, they must belong to a community.

Yes!! Those are two of the best points in the whole manifesto.


36. Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.
37. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.
38. Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.
39. The community of discourse is the market.

This is all pretty good. Item 37 is overblown, and I'm not sure what 39 means, but the ideas here are powerful.


40. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

Dang, back to the overstatement. Companies can survive without belonging to a community of discourse. For example, if they're the cheapest supplier people will buy from them even if they are rude to their customers (if there's a Fry's in your town, go there on a Friday night and try to get customer service).

But companies will get higher margins, make better decisions, and have more loyal customers if they participate in communities with them.


41. Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.

No. That's another gross exaggeration that hurts the credibility of the whole document.

First, not all companies make a religion of security. Second, companies want security for a lot of reasons. Competitive concerns have a lot to do with it, but so do financial regulations on stockholder lawsuits. And yes, there is some paranoia involved too.

The important point – the one the Manifesto fails to make – is that the benefits of heavy information security are outweighed by the advantages of open discourse with customers. When you're online, it's more efficient to be open.


42. As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.

Uh, yeah. But that's been true since the first corporation was formed.


43. Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.

The conversations also happen in lunchrooms, hallways, and next to water coolers. They move a little faster on intranets, but the difference is not enormous.

The benefits of intranets for driving internal conversations in corporations are substantial, but are not as great as they are for driving conversations with and among customers. Before the Internet, company employees still had lots of ways to communicate. There were even jokes about corporate gossip being the only thing that travels faster than light.


44. Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.

That's so stupid. Companies generally installed intranets to exchange e-mail. File servers and web access came later. HR policies were the almost last thing to go electronic, because HR teams are usually not very technical. Even today, in many companies you're more likely to get paper memos from HR than from just about any other company department. Paper feels more official to them.

Sometimes it seems like the Manifesto authors' main experience of corporate life was reading Dilbert.


45. Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.

A typical engineer's point of view, since they're the only ones in the corporation capable of building their own intranets.


46. A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.

First sentence is good, second sentence is dumb. A union is very different from an intranet, and has very different effects. One's not more radical than the other. That's like saying a dog is more radical than a cat.


47. While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to "improve" or control these networked conversations.

Oh, please. Intranets don't scare most companies witless.


48. When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.

Yes, but that's because engineers and technophiles tend to dominate the online conversation both outside and inside corporations.


49. Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.

Org charts are still mandatory in any corporation, because they designate who controls the salaries of whom.

There's a nugget of wisdom here, though. The Internet makes it possible for information to move more quickly, and for groups of smart people to coordinate their work directly. A properly designed company, taking advantage of electronic communication, requires much less detailed hierarchical control.

But somebody still has to write the performance reviews.


50. Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.

It isn't either-or. There's still an org chart, but there's also an informal network of people who share information and sometimes agendas. But that has always been true of corporations, an intranet just makes it more visible.

Every generation thinks its parents were stupid, and in the second sentence you hear some baby boomers saying their parents had too much respect for abstract authority. Go read some books, guys. See how soldiers in World War II felt about abstract authority in the military, or how workers in 1910 felt about their bosses. Better yet, read the US Declaration of Independence and pay attention to the part where they talk about the king.


51. Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
52. Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.

This is just posturing.


53. There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.

There are an almost infinite number of conversations going on. The Internet can actually reduce the number of conversations, because it consolidates them.


54. In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.
55. As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.
56. These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other's voices.
57. Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.

This thinking is dangerous, and not in a good sense. There's an idealized agenda in operation here, an assumption that bosses are stupid and that companies will make better decisions if the average employee talks directly to the average customer, and they then make a collective decision on what the company should do.

The reality is that bosses are sometimes stupid, and in those cases the company will indeed do better work if the bosses are bypassed. But those companies generally go broke eventually anyway.

In a well-managed company, it's important to draw a line between listening to input and making decisions collectively. Listening to input is almost always good. The internet can make for better input, meaning better decisions. That's fantastic. But making the actual decisions collectively is usually bad, because collective decisions reflect a compromised consensus. Products designed according to that process are often over-featured because they try to please everyone. An example: the Sony Clie handheld was beloved by online users but failed in the marketplace. Why? Too many features, too hard to use.

Companies are most effective when they have smart management, and that management has the authority to make clear decisions and have them carried out by the staff. If the Internet undercuts that, it's not helping the company or the customers.


58. If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few companies have yet wised up.

Companies don't have IQs. Their managers do. And a company manager who passively "gets out of the way" and lets the market drive his or her decisions is not doing a good job.


59. However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.
60. This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.

No, people want to talk to people. And it's good to enable that. But the company still has a role to play, and it needs its own decision-making.


61. Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false—and often is.

Translation: Come the revolution, the first thing we'll do is shoot all the marketing and PR employees. Spoken like a true engineer.


62. Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

If you substitute "customers" for "markets," this one is true.


63. De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you.
64. We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.
65. We're also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.
66. As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?
67. As markets, as workers, we wonder why you're not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.
68. The inflated self-important jargon you sling around—in the press, at your conferences—what's that got to do with us?
69. Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressing Wall Street. You're not impressing us.
70. If you don't impress us, your investors are going to take a bath. Don't they understand this? If they did, they wouldn't let you talk that way.
71. Your tired notions of "the market" make our eyes glaze over. We don't recognize ourselves in your projections—perhaps because we know we're already elsewhere.
72. We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.
73. You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

This is the weakest part of the Manifesto, in my opinion. The authors complain about flack, posturing, and exaggeration, and then go on an exaggerated rant full of posturing. Nothing to see here, let's move along...


74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

Yeah, sure. Tell it to Google.

Reality: Most people don't like advertising. That's not the same thing as being immune to it. If people really were immune to advertising, companies wouldn't do it.


75. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.
76. We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we'd be willing to pay for. Got a minute?

Good! But keep in mind that the people you can reach online are not normal customers. They'll have lots of ideas, but unfortunately they can't speak for your typical users.


77. You're too busy "doing business" to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Maybe.

Yes. Very well said.


78. You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.
79. We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party.
80. Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's not the only thing on your mind.
81. Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?

Groovy, baby. Join the love-in. This is starting to feel like that old episode of Star Trek, where Spock meets the space hippies.




82. Your product broke. Why? We'd like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We'd like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she's not in?

Fair enough. Now that it's possible to have candid conversations online, it'll be perceived as rude not to have them. Most companies haven't realized that yet.


83. We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

Believe me, every company takes 50 million customers more seriously than one Wall Street Journal reporter. But most of them haven't yet figured out how to talk to 50 million people online.


84. We know some people from your company. They're pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you're hiding? Can they come out and play?
85. When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd be among the people we'd turn to.

I agree with these. Most companies would come across better online if they allowed employees to communicate freely on the web. You can create some sensible guidelines (don't pre-announce products, label opinions as your own), and trust that most people will follow them. And if they don't, fire them.

Being open personalizes your company, helps people feel good about it, and helps you make better decisions. The benefits of this outweigh the risks.


86. When we're not busy being your "target market," many of us are your people. We'd rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing's job.

The answer here is not to get rid of marketing, it's to teach marketing how to operate in this new world. Because, in reality, the engineers do have some other tasks they need to focus on.


87. We'd like it if you got what's going on here. That'd be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we're holding our breath.
88. We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?

Again with the posturing.


89. We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.

Translation: "We are arrogant and we don't know it. We think we represent all customers when in fact we represent a slice of them. Companies would be stupid to take all our rhetoric at face value. But our influence is growing, it would also be stupid to ignore the potential we represent. We are noisy, we influence a lot of purchases, and we're increasing in number."


90. Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we've been seeing.

Well, it is to those of us who like to read and write blogs. But a lot more people watch TV. So in the real world companies will have to deal with both.


91. Our allegiance is to ourselves—our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that have no part in this world, also have no future.
92. Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can't they hear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.

Well, that one's a tad dated now.


93. We're both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they're really just an annoyance. We know they're coming down. We're going to work from both sides to take them down.
94. To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.
95. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

At this point you really expect John Lennon to stroll in with a guitar, singing Imagine...


Lessons from the Cluetrain

Don't be pretentious. Unless you're writing the Declaration of Independence for a new republic, you should leave out the cosmic rhetoric. It's ironic that a document telling people to speak like humans contains so much trippy rhetoric. (Or maybe that's how the Manifesto's authors really talk.)

Be careful with timelines. Like almost all tech commentary written in the bubble period, the Manifesto assumes that the Internet is about to take over all communication and be used by all human beings. In the real world it's growing, but other media will continue to exist alongside it for a very long time.

The Web is an accelerator more than a revolutionary. The Web speeds up conversations, and broadens their audiences. That's very important, and sometimes the increase in speed produces a qualitative difference. But our parents and grandparents were pretty clever, and most of the human principles we think we're pioneering online have actually been around for generations.

Keep it short. Ten commandments are a lot more memorable than 95 manifestos.

In that spirit, at Rubicon we've been working on a set of principles for communicating with people online, combining our thinking and what we think are the best ideas in the Manifesto. Here's our list:

1. Engage, don't sell.
2. Speak as individuals.
3. Be yourself.
4. Never lie.
5. Don't be afraid of passion.
6. Set your employees free.
7. The Internet strengthens great brands – and destroys false ones.
8. Forget about mass markets.
9. Remember that the Internet is still evolving.
10. Don't mistake the Web for the real world.

They're not nearly as colorful as the Manifesto, but I hope they'll be more actionable. You can read the details here.

____________

*As pointed out by the authors of the Gluetrain Manifesto (a satire of the Cluetrain), it's hard to have the sky open to the stars when clouds are rolling over you all the time. But let's not quibble. The Gluetrain is no longer available online, but a copy was printed at the end of a Cap Gemini / Ernst & Young document here. If you want to understand what the Cluetrain authors meant by that "clouds and skies" imagery, there's an essay here that sort of explains.

Symbian unloads UIQ, and the mobile apps situation gets clearer -- and uglier

As you've probably heard, SonyEricsson bought the UIQ user interface from Symbian this week. The only surprise in the deal was that it didn't happen a long time ago -- Symbian had been trying to unload UIQ for at least four years (they tried to sell it to Palm at least two times that I was aware of).

I haven't seen any online information about the terms of the deal, but at some point I hope it'll come out in a public filing. I'll be shocked if it turns out that SonyEricsson paid a lot of money. Knowing what it costs to create an operating system layer, I think it's very likely the UIQ team has been losing money.

With the UIQ acquisition, three of the top mobile phone companies now have their own operating system layers -- Nokia with S60, SonyEricsson with UIQ, and Motorola with whatever it's building on top of Linux.

Years ago, we were expecting to see the development of one or at most two operating systems that would run across all mobile devices. The idea was that that phones would become like PCs -- hardware decoupled from software, with low costs for consumers because the hardware was standardized and the cost of the OS and apps was spread across a huge base of hardware.

Instead, the mobile market is moving in the opposite direction, at least for now. Most of the major phone companies are creating their own OS layers, and they're not compatible with one another. I think this raises big questions for the mobile market:

What will Samsung and LG do? The other two big mobile phone companies don't have coherent software strategies, as far as I can tell. They specialize in copying others -- Samsung copies Motorola and Nokia, while LG copies Samsung. As the implications of the UIQ deal sink in, I think both Samsung and LG will start to feel they need software layers of their own. They could try to buy one, they could cut a deal with Microsoft, or they could try to write their own software layers in house.

None of the three options is attractive. There aren't a lot of mobile software layers left on the market to buy, Microsoft is well known for acting like a predator on its licensees, and creating user interfaces isn't exactly a well-known core competency of Asian hardware companies. My guess is that both Samsung and LG will continue to play the field by working with multiple operating systems, while they hope that mobile Linux will magically mature and solve their problems. But I wouldn't be shocked if one of them decided to take a chance and partner deeply with Microsoft.

What happens to Palm and RIM? RIM is going strong at the moment, while Palm is under moderate financial stress. But both are relatively small phone companies that rely heavily on software innovation for their differentiation. All that software investment makes their cost per unit a lot higher than the big guys. Their have to keep their products dramatically differentiated in order to maintain the price delta that funds their businesses.

Can they keep that edge as the big phone companies start adding more and more software value to their products? It's by no means impossible, and I wouldn't bet against the smart guys at either company. But they're both like small movie studios that fund their next movies directly from the profits of the last one. One major dud and the process could fall apart.

What about Microsoft? Theoretically, Microsoft should be cackling right now. Microsoft (and its then-buddy Intel) destroyed PC companies that were dumb enough to sell proprietary systems against the army of PC clones in the 1970s and early 1980s. Microsoft has heavy ties with the Asian phone manufacturing world, and should be able to help them produce devices which pair sophisticated software with commodity pricing. I think of this as the "HTC=Compaq" scenario.

But there are three problems with the scenario...

1. No IBM. In the PC world, Microsoft benefited immensely when IBM set a hardware design standard and then let everyone else clone it. Without IBM's help, Microsoft might never have created the clone PC market, and we'd be dealing with a much less standardized (and more expensive) PC market to this day. The closest thing to an IBM in mobile phones is Nokia, and it ain't about to let anybody clone anything, and certainly not for free.

2. No apps. The other key to Microsoft's power in PCs was the huge base of software applications that developed for DOS and Windows. People wanted Windows in order to run the apps, and Microsoft was the gatekeeper. In case nobody's noticed, mobile app sales for smartphones are miserably low, due to app distribution problems and the operators' unwillingness to allow truly open phones to be sold in mass volumes. If there's no big applications base, Microsoft doesn't have the leverage to force its software onto the world's phones.

3. Microsoft doesn't really "get" mobile. Although Microsoft's mobile software has definitely improved, the company still shows the reflexes of a PC company. It relies on cool technology to motivate customers, overloads its products with too many features for the average user, and counts on Moore's Law to bail it out over time (if you doubt this, check out David Pogue's review of the Zune media player in the New York Times). The mobile market rewards minimalist design in both hardware and software. I think that's not in Microsoft's DNA.

Is this good news for Symbian? Sure, in the sense that they've unloaded an irritant that complicated their relationship with their sugar daddy Nokia. Symbian seems to be on a path to try to make itself the embedded OS of the next generation of mobile phones -- kind of a super Nucleus. That's the only path its owners were going to tolerate anyway, so the Symbian folks might as well smile and make the best of it.

But there's no law of nature that says S60 or UIQ has to always run on top of the Symbian OS. In fact, as Nokia and SonyEricsson define more of their own application interfaces, and as the development of native Symbian applications continues to lag, there's very little to stop Nokia or SonyEricsson from moving their interfaces to run on top of a different OS. Maybe onto Linux, which doesn't charge Symbian's several dollars a unit licensing fee. The expense of supporting an OS layer team is very substantial, and only grows as the code gets older and you have to maintain it. That cost on top of the Symbian license fee is going to be pretty large even for a big phone company. The more units that Nokia and SonyEricsson build Symbian into, the more the Symbian licensing fee is going to bother them.

So Symbian is on a treadmill in which it will be under constant pressure to match the pricing of Linux. Unless Symbian can develop a big native apps base of its own, it'll have very little market power to keep its licensees loyal.

The most likely outcome in the near term will be a divided mobile market in which each of the major phone companies has its own operating system layer, with its own base of applications. Microsoft will continue to plug away with its Asian buddies, but without the critical mass to take over the phone market. We're looking at a minimum of five major OS layers (S60, UIQ, Moto Linux, Microsoft, Qualcomm Brew), plus smaller contenders (Palm OS, RIM). Oh, and don't forget Java.

This situation will drive independent software developers insane, because they'll have to rewrite their applications for every phone platform. This will drive a lot of the most creative software developers away from the mobile market; they'll continue to focus on creating web apps because they face lower barriers to entry, there's a single fairly unified platform, and they'll have more control over their own destiny.

Mobile phone enthusiasts like to point out how many mobile phones there are in the world, a much larger market than PCs. They say that larger market means the future of apps innovation will inevitably happen on mobiles. But if the mobile market is divided into five or more incompatible camps, and it's not easy to make money in any of them, the mobile apps market will be stunted indefinitely.

At some point, I believe one or more of the mobile operators will become so anxious to access the wealth of innovative web apps that they'll set up a fairly open garden for web apps developers. I don't know what software that garden will be built on -- maybe it'll be Adobe Apollo, maybe something else. But when that happens, I think we'll finally see a critical mass of third party mobile apps that will then force the other companies to deploy the same environment. It'll be a giant layer cake -- the web apps layer on top of the phone vendor's layer on top of the phone's native operating system.

The whole thing sounds incredibly baroque and inefficient, and it is. But it says something about how messed up the mobile phone apps market is, that this is the optimistic scenario for the future.

_____________

PS: Thanks to the folks at AllAboutSymbian for linking to my post on Sprint's Ambassador program in the latest Carnival of the Mobilists.

How to segment the market for a new product

If you're interested in new product design and/or market research techniques, the latest chapter in Stop Flying Blind talks about how to define the market for a new type of product. It's not as easy as you might think, because traditional market research is focused mostly on understanding existing markets, not on defining new markets that don't yet exist.

Clayton Christensen would probably tell you that it can't be done at all. I think it can, but it's not easy, and it's definitely not research as usual.

Sprint recalls an Ambassador

Summary: Lessons on how to market online, courtesy of the Sprint Ambassador program.


The e-mail from Sprint came right to the point:

From: service@ambassadormail.sprint.com
Subject: Sprint Disconnection Notice

Hi,

Thank you for your participation in Phase I of the Sprint Ambassador Program. We appreciated receiving your honest and candid feedback about Sprint Power Vision and services, as well as the Samsung A920. We have been able to pass on some very specific information to the marketers, developers, and "powers that be" within Sprint for future use in making a difference in our products and services.

Please note that your six months of free service associated with Phase I of the Ambassador Program will be disconnected on: October 3, 2006.

In addition, please note that you can assign any available phone number to your phone once it has been disconnected from the Ambassador Program - thus enabling future usage of the A920 device in your local area.

Should you wish to subscribe to a Sprint voice and/or data plan, please visit us at www.Sprint.com for pricing and promotions, including Power Vision packs with Live TV, Gaming, SIRIUS Music, and more (The Weather Channel, ESPN, Comedy Time, NFL Network, NBC Mobile, etc.)

[I love that part – even when they're throwing you out of the program, they can't resist inserting an ad for their services. That's how you know you're dealing with the marketing department. –Mike]

Your access to the Sprint Ambassador Feedback Form ( http://ambassador.sprint.com ) will be disabled in correlation with your disconnection date, so now is the time to give us any additional last minute feedback you may have.

Once again, we truly appreciated your participation. Please feel free to stay in touch with us at anytime at xxxxxxxxx@Sprint.com.

Thank you,

The Sprint Ambassador Team


That's right, I'm no longer a Sprint Ambassador.

In spring, Sprint had offered me and about 400 other bloggers a free phone with six months of pre-paid 3G service. They called it the Sprint Ambassadors program. There was no obligation on my part to do anything, but Sprint was hoping we'd like the phones and write about them. Some bloggers liked the phones. Some, like me, had a few issues with them.

Okay, a lot of issues.

Ever since I posted my comments, I had been wondering what would happen next in the program. Would Sprint continue it? Would they keep me in? Now I know the answers. Looking around online, it appears that people who said nasty things about the phone were kicked out. People who said nice things (and some who said nothing at all) were given another phone and six more months of free service.

Sprint is completely within its rights to do that; they have no obligation to give free stuff to people who have criticized their products. But the Ambassadors program is interesting to me because I do a lot of work at Rubicon helping tech companies figure out how to interact with customers online. And I think Sprint has missed a great opportunity. More than that, I think what they're doing is an object lesson in how not to manage an online marketing campaign.


About the program

The Ambassador program was designed as a "word of mouth" marketing activity, according to David Dickey, Sprint's Director of Direct, Email, and SMS Marketing. Mr. Dickey has been giving speeches discussing the program. One of them is available in a podcast here. It's an interesting talk, and I encourage you to check it out for yourself. Some highlights:

--Sprint determined that the #2 driver of wireless purchases is recommendations from friends and family. The salesperson in the store is ranked #10, and TV advertisements are #19. So why not divert some of that TV money to generating better word of mouth?

--Sprint contacted 400-450 of the most influential bloggers in wireless and offered each of them a free phone. Sprint thought so highly of the phone that it believed most of the bloggers would write positively about it.

--Mr. Dickey said one risk in the program was that Sprint didn't control what the bloggers would say. He said some Sprint executives were uncomfortable with that. Most of the online commentary, he said, was very positive, but there were some negatives that were very alarming to the senior executives. That "drives a lot of activity that's not particularly positive," Mr. Dickey said. I'm picturing some pretty heated meetings or emails.

--Mr. Dickey said 65% of the bloggers accepted the phone, and 90%+ wrote positive things. He cited Buzz Machine as an example of a blog that generated good publicity, and said that the overall program generated 389,000 Google hits. "It was very successful for us."


Testing the program's effectiveness

I was curious about these statistics. In particular, the "Google hits" figure stood out to me. I'm not sure exactly what a Google hit is. The term is often used to mean the number of results returned when you search for a term on Google (you can find some examples here). But the idea that just 300 bloggers could generate 389,000 Google links seems remarkable – that's more than 1,000 references per blogger. So I did a search on Google for the term "Sprint Ambassador." That yielded 26,100 links. The same search on Yahoo produced 26,900 links.

So already Sprint seems to be off by a factor of ten. But the picture gets trickier. After the first 280 links, Google reports that the rest are all "very similar." That means some of the 26,000 results are duplicate copies of the same posts, while others will be additional posts on the same websites. Those will pull a much smaller audience than new posts on separate blogs would. So the number of truly unique mentions of "Sprint Ambassador" is probably well under 26,000. I think that's much more realistic considering that Sprint sent out about 300 phones.

But then where did the 389,000 figure come from? I can think of two possibilities:

1. If you take off the quote marks, searching for the words sprint ambassador will yield half a million hits. But that pulls up any web page containing the word "sprint" and the word "ambassador" anywhere on the page. Most of the links would be irrelevant.

Sprint wouldn't be that inept, would it? Let's assume not.

2. Another possible explanation is that traditional advertising effectiveness is measured by impressions – the number of times you run the ad multiplied by the number of people watching or reading that media. Maybe Sprint tried to calculate the number of impressions created by those weblog posts. A few thousand citations multiplied by an average readership of a couple hundred people per blog would do the trick.


Whatever the actual number, even a few thousand comments could be very useful if they're wildly enthusiastic. But were they all enthusiastic? It's impossible to say for sure without reading thousands of weblog entries (let me know if you do it). Instead, I did some spot checks, and also read the top five search results on both Google and Yahoo (excluding links back to Sprint's own website).

I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of the comments I saw were either positive or neutral. Some people definitely liked the phone. But a large amount of the discussion – maybe the majority – was about the Ambassador program itself rather than the phone. A lot of bloggers wrote something like, "Cool, I've been made a Sprint Ambassador," but then never discussed the phone. Much of the publicity Sprint generated may have been due to the novelty of the program, rather than the phone itself.

Here's how I'd classify the top five posts on Yahoo and Google:


Top five Yahoo:

1. Marketing Shift (Jason Dowdell, an Internet entrepreneur). Talks about program, positive. Later posts are positive on the phone

2. Buzz Machine (home of Jeff Jarvis, director of interactive journalism at CUNY's grad school of journalism). Positive on the program but ends with an angry rant against Sprint (more on this below). Never discussed the phone.

3. Hyaline Skies (Eston Bond, an Internet designer). Positive on the program. No followup on the phone.

4. Paul Stamitou (a Georgia Tech student with a popular tech blog – good going, Paul). OK on the program, quite negative on the phone.

5. Pearsonified (Chris Pearson, a web designer). Very positive.


Top five Google:

1. Buzz Machine.

2. Paul Stamitou.

3. Justin Everett-Church (an evangelist at Yahoo). Positive on program, no discussion of phone.

4. Patrick Fitzgerald (a web and UI designer). Positive on program, didn't blog on phone

5. Tom Markiewicz (CEO of a web apps company). Positive on program, no discussion of phone


I thought it was ironic that Mr. Dickey singled out the BuzzMachine post as a win for Sprint. The post there is indeed complimentary about the idea of the Ambassadors program, but it ends with this paragraph:

"I TAKE BACK ALL THE NICE THINGS ABOUT SPRINT I JUST SAID: I just spent three — three! — hours on the phone with Sprint people because the phone I ordered for my parents a week ago was never put through at Sprint and I dealt with no end of cluelessness and no end of hold music and lost calls and bad attitude. You can have a good idea at the top of a company but if the culture still sucks below, your own company will torpedo you. Having subjected you to consumerist rants before, I’ll spare you the details on this one. I’ll just say that it doesn’t take much to burn up goodwill."

The post is followed by a lot of reader comments, many with additional complaints about Sprint. One of them is from someone claiming to be a Sprint customer service representative, saying that the company's customer service is indeed clueless.

I would not be quoting that one as a win.


All blogs are not created equal

But there's also another factor to consider – some blogs are more popular than others. An endorsement in a single very popular blog could outweigh ten negative posts. Unfortunately for Sprint, it ran into the opposite problem. It sent a first round phone to Joel Spolsky, CEO of a software company and author of a book on user interface design. He also happens to be author of the intensely popular weblog Joel on Software. Mr. Spolsky didn't write about the first phone at all, so Sprint sent him a second one, made by LG. He tried the second one, and had such a strong reaction that he felt compelled to write. Here's a small sample:

"All the publicity in the world is not going to help them foist on us a product that is utterly pathetic. The phones they send us are so lame there is literally no area you can go into without being disappointed and shocked at just how shoddy everything is and how much it costs and what a rip off scam they’re trying to run here with the music that costs too much and the movies that you don’t want to watch on the screen that makes them unwatchable and you just KNOW that if you call to cancel the extra $7/month, their customer service department is going to give you the phone menu runaround and then put you on hold for an hour and then you’ll get some cancellation specialist with an incomprehensible accent who will spend 15 minutes trying to talk you out of canceling the useless service until you just give up and let them have the goddamned $7 a month. No amount of pampering bloggers and calling them Ambassadors is going to get around the fact that you’re sending us plastic junk phones that look like bath toys. (Hey, does it float?) All the “tipping point” theories in the world won’t protect Sprint from the basic truth that the LG Fusic user interface could basically serve as an almost complete textbook for a semester-long course in user interface design, teaching students of usability exactly what NOT to do."

It goes on and on for pages.

The Spolsky post was picked up in a lot of other places, notably the very popular weblog of Robert Scoble ("Don't send bloggers stuff for free unless it's good"), and on CNet Reviews ("When bribing bloggers doesn't pay"). All of those are extremely high traffic sites. To put it in perspective, according to Alexa.com the CNet Reviews site gets about ten times the daily traffic of Sprint.com, while Scoble + Spolsky together are about half the volume of Sprint.com. So even though they count as only three links on Mr. Dickey's list, they outweigh the mentions from hundreds of lower-traffic blogs.

[By the way, I know Alexa's site rankings skew toward technophiles, but that's the crowd Sprint was trying to influence, so I think it's an appropriate benchmark in this case.]


Lessons from the Sprint Ambassadors program

Since we don't know what Sprint's goals were, it's impossible to say if the program was a success. In particular, I don't want to run Mr. Dickey under the bus, because in a traditionally-organized company the marketing folks are supposed to assume that the engineers create good products, and to market them as vigorously as possible. That's what Sprint's marketing department did. The problem is that the traditional stovepiped approach doesn't work very well on the Web. So I think Sprint Ambassadors was a missed opportunity because it wasn't nearly as effective as it could have been. Here's my take on the lessons:


Engage before you seed. You really need to understand the people you're seeding products to. I think Sprint was very sincere when they said they thought their product was wonderful and that everyone would love it. That just proves how utterly out of touch Sprint is with the computing community. Anybody who has studied the principles of good interface design, as taught in the computing world, would immediately spot numerous flaws in Sprint's interface.

This is a recurring problem for the mobile phone companies. They tend to operate in an inward-focused world where their only reference points are other phone companies. I experienced this vividly recently in an e-mail exchange with a website that focuses on the mobile phone industry. They gave an award to the Sprint online music store, the same store that Joel Spolsky and I both criticized. I asked someone at the website why they gave an award to the Sprint store. "It's so much better than Verizon's store," was the reply.

Silly me, I compared it to iTunes.

When you engage with bloggers, you're operating on their turf, and they will judge you according to their values. You had darned well better understand those values before you send them products.


Engage two-way. Companies use a lot of different communication media to talk to their customers – television, radio, print ads, and so on. But the Web is different from almost every other medium, because it's at least potentially two-way. Instead of just shooting messages out at your "target" customers, you can actually have conversations with them. This creates all sorts of interesting opportunities for learning from your customers, and for building very tight relationships with them.

But you can do that only if you dramatically adjust the way you plan and manage your marketing. If you're going to have a conversation with the customer, you need to have other parts of your company involved in answering back – it can't just be a project of the marketing department, because the customers won't want to talk about only marketing issues. And ironically, it's often even more important to engage with your critics than it is to engage with the people who love you. If you encourage a fan to spread the word about you, that's good. But if you turn around a critic, you get a double benefit – you gain more recommendations, and you cut off a source of criticism.

People who are active online understand the two-way nature of the medium, and expect others to understand it as well. They get offended pretty quickly if a company uses the web to communicate one-way. Websites that don't encourage comments, and e-mail messages that can't be responded to, are viewed as rude and depersonalized. As a marketeer, you may think you're reaching out to people online when in fact, if you don't make your communication two-way, the message you're giving is that you don't care.

Sprint's program was almost completely one-way. Although there's a web form that Ambassadors can use to send comments, the box is sized for about four lines of text. All of the messages the program sent out were impersonal group mailings from an anonymous sender. There was no effort to establish a two-way dialog, let along a dialog among the Ambassadors, and in most cases you weren't even sure if anyone at Sprint was listening to comments.

Here's what I think Sprint should have done. First, engage with a small group of bloggers, and make the communication truly two-way. Really listen to them. Then later, when Sprint expanded the program, it would have had a much better idea of what might happen, and the original members would have served as a core to orient everyone else and bring them into the conversation.

If Sprint had engaged the ambassadors in a genuine dialog, we would probably have given our negative feedback in private first. That would have given Sprint a chance to respond, and even if we had gone ahead and posted some negative comments, they would have been softer, and we would have felt obliged to point out that Sprint was listening to us and had some reasonable employees.

For example, can you imagine that Jeff Jarvis would have posted his angry rant at Sprint if they had given him the name of a real person to contact as part of the Ambassador program?

Some companies would say that they don't have the resources to engage this deeply, but it's only 300 bloggers and Sprint is a multi-billion dollar company. They can easily afford it. And besides, by engaging halfway they did just enough to stimulate criticism but not enough to head it off.

I worry that all Sprint did was to position itself in a lot of influential peoples' minds as yet another company that doesn't understand the Web.


Understand what life is like for major bloggers. Popular bloggers are inundated with messages asking them to review products. Mobile Opportunity is extremely low-volume compared to the popular blogs, but even I get a steady stream of messages asking me to promote products or link to posts. In that context, Sprint's offer probably felt to the major bloggers like just one more in a flood of efforts to exploit their blogs. I think that's what made Joel Spolsky cautions, and it contributed to the rant he wrote.


Get real about the statistics. Web statistics are a snake pit. There's no reliable source of data (even the Alexa figures I quoted are highly suspect), and companies quote whichever number makes them look good. But we should all use a little common sense. Is there any way that sending out just 300 free phones is going to generate 400,000 separate links? I think it's not physically possible. Besides, a ten-second check on Google and Yahoo showed the number was way off.

The sad thing is that I couldn't find any article anywhere questioning Sprint's number. Even CNet's negative article repeated it without a touch of skepticism.


What do you think? Am I being too hard on Sprint? Are there other lessons I've missed? The world of online marketing is still developing. We're spending a lot of time understanding and teaching it at Rubicon, but I don't pretend we have all the answers. Please share your thoughts...