Don’t get it twisted, I really like Google and respect the Android OS, I love Apple and love working on a Mac and am itching to come up with a reason to get an iPad. But I’m pretty stuck on the blackberry.

Why? Simple. Blackberry does one thing really really well. The Blackberry messenger (BBM) feature is whole heap of awesomeness. A lot of my friends are on crackberries and the fact that we can message internationally in groups for free wherever we are has a whole lot of other people hooked. Not to mention university students who love to use the BBM with their friends and family across the world.

Sure Blackberry does a whole lot of other stuff well, emailing with a proper physical keyboard is nice, and for business email management it’s a great service. But for me it’s BBM that keeps me as well as a lot of other people hooked. So much so that the Blackberry still outsells the iPhone and Android handsets in most markets – in the US last quarter, iPhones had 21%, Androids 28% and RIM 36% of all smart phone sales.

The lesson here is to do one thing really really well. Most companies that are really successful do one thing absolutely, phenomenally well. Google does search really really well, this gives them license to develop and build other great things like maps and mail. Facebook makes it simple to share stuff really well, it’s not the best picture sharing sight, it’s not the best for updates or events, but because it does sharing this content really well it enables them to do events and photos etc and get traction in these other areas.

So when starting something, make sure you have one feature that’s absolutely fabulous that makes it difficult to compete with and this will help grow and maintain your market share.

I’ve been hearing lot’s of people talk about how companies can be good or evil. A lot of this goes back to Google’s whole “Don’t be evil” line that was the unofficial motto around the company a while back. Part of it is due to Umair Haque’s manifesto’s and blog posts. Don’t get me wrong, I respect a lot of what Umair writes and I like a lot of what Google does, but I just don’t think it’s that black and white.

Companies are made up of people, and people are at the heart of the organisation’s direction and choices around strategy, marketing, procurement, M&A and everything else. Calling companies good and evil misses out on the spectrum between these extremes.

Google for example has made lot’s of “Good” decisions, for the good of costumers, for the good of partners, for the good of the developer community, but they’ve also made a lot of bad decisions, Buzz integration with Gmail without opt-in, what they did to Dodgeball and whole lot of other stuff could be classified as “Evil” by some people.

Apple, Twitter, Microsoft, Sony almost any media, technology company I can think of has done some things that I would consider good and some things that I wouldn’t. So classifying an entire company as good or evil just leaves me feeling a bit uneasy.

Here’s my suggestion, let’s ditch the whole good and evil and start talking about the character of an organisation. Let’s make it a spectrum and a scale. Are they transparent, sustainable, honest and consistent in their policies and actions? Do they value the community, employees, costumers, partners and the developers who may power their community? Are they closed or open – is that consistent across products and services?

This is separate to the quality and performance of the company’s goods or services. Nestle would probably score really lowly on the character scale but damn if I could resist their KitKats. Apple may also score lowly but I’ll still probably buy an iPad and add this to our suite of Apple products in the house. But at least I know it’s not a company with character, just a company with good products.

A company that is transparent and clear in it’s financial management and strategy, that has a sustainable policy and tries to operate in a energy efficient manner, which shows obvious care and concern for all their stakeholders and that works in an open manner with open protocols across it’s product suite would be the holy grail of character and would score a 10. Not sure if any company meets this but that should be the aim.
A company that isn’t transparent, doesn’t value stakeholders, is not green in any way shape or form, doesn’t prescribe to open protocols or integration with other services would score really poorly.

This is separate to the quality and performance of the company’s goods or services. Nestle would probably score really lowly on the character scale but damn if I could resist their KitKats. Apple may also score lowly but I’ll still probably buy an iPad and add this to our suite of Apple products in the house. But at least I know it’s not a company with character, just a company with good products. This is what separates discussing awesomeness versus character. Awesomeness can mean great execution, great products, but that doesn’t mean a company is “good”, what talking about character does is it gives us a clear scale and overview of a companies principles.

I originally wanted to call this blog post “Calling Bullsh*t on Good and Evil in Business” but heck who am I to suggest it’s bullsh*t maybe there is a place for it. I just don’t think it gives us as a community enough tools to discuss the principles of an organisation. So let’s try and stop all the good and evil clear cut analysis of decisions and talk about companies with colour, I think this would be more beneficial to the conversations and analysis that is happening about companies today. Just how much character does your company have?

People forget that social media allows and moves people to share information and content easily. An ad that is actual a social interaction can be shared with a network fare more than a search query.

Let’s look at an example; I do a search for Virgin America, because I’m looking for a flight from NYC to San Francisco and I’m using twitter because I want to see if anyone’s had any experience on Virgin America flights, I see a “Promoted tweet” from Virgin America saying something like – “20% off of flights between Boulder and Las Vegas from us for the next 24 hours” now I’m not flying from Boulder to Vegas, but that’s a tweet I would send on (or ReTweet) to my network. All of a sudden that one promoted tweet impression has turned into nearly 1000 impressions as it goes to my network.

Let’s say I see a starbucks tweet that says that on the 15th you can bring in a mug and get a free coffee, if I bookmark that, or favourite it, that means that Starbucks has a richer bit of information and knows that I’m interested in their brand and their promotion.

Don’t get me wrong, this is assuming that brands are serious about social media and are actively engaging with the community. Brands need to offer real value and give something of benefits to the audience. The brands that pay attention and give people serious value are the ones who will be able to have their messages amplified.

For the brands who do it right, social is going to be huge for traffic acquisition because of the ability to amplify a message. That’s what all the pundits are missing in their analysis of promoted tweets. The ability to interact with the tweet and send it on to my network is huge. In the same way that building an application for facebook for a brand get’s into the news feed and gets users commenting and interacting with the brand in an amplified way.

Social media does acquisition and engagement in a way that search can’t. And that’s why I totally believe that social media will only get bigger and better as a source of costumers for companies that are smart enough to use it well.

“Shoot for the moon, even if you miss it you’ll land amongst the stars”

I have to admit when I first heard of the Canadian Olympic Foundation’s goal of “Owning the Podium” at the 2010 Olympics I was a bit taken back, it just didn’t seem very “Canadian” to me. And even though I don’t believe the Canadians will own the podium (I don’t think it’s feasibly possible right now) they will definitely have more golds than the last two Winter Olympic games (I want to say ever but am too lazy to do the research).

This got me thinking about “failure”, I think “failure” shouldn’t have such a negative connotation. Stay with me, failure when you’re trying to achieve something basic that sucks. Failure when you’re trying to achieve something extraordinary and special that’s not something people should look down on. Whether in sports or in business, setting ambitious aims and then doing everything possible to achieve them should be seen as courageous and honourable.

This reminded me of Don Dodge’s post about goal setting at Google. Setting goals that seem impossible and then working your butt off to make something happen is not only fun, but it means your going to take more risks and be innovative in your approach to things. Unfortunately a lot of large organisations focus on “measurable and achievable” results that don’t really have much impact and then hurdling the low bar. Not enough organisations set out objectives that are out to change the world.

So while Canada won’t “Own the podium” it did have the right idea and should be heralded for trying to achieve something so ambitious. Are you working on something that ambitious?

“Whilst free traffic (as opposed to paid-for Adwords) is highly desirable – and we certainly do well from it ourselves – you should never rely on it as your primary source of new business.”

I couldn’t agree more. Not just because algorithms may change and the pipe you’re relying on may break as Duane writes, but also there’s just so many more ways to drive traffic and raise awareness today.

Let’s put SEM aside for one moment and talk about natural low cost digital traffic drivers. With Twitter, facebook, Linkedin, digg and other networks driving more and more traffic there’s no excuse for having SEO as you’re only digital marketing channel let alone on and offline marketing channels.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think SEO is important, and not just from a Google perspective. Naming pages appropriately, having simple readable code, good linking strategy, and making sure pages can be read by the search gods can also lead to users having a better experience.

But we’re seeing a shift from search to recommendations with Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and digg as other potential good traffic drivers. There’s others too. Have a solid interaction plan, interact with the other blogs with other great readers and leverage their audience. Don’t be a troll or a jackass but add value outside of your site and lead people to your content for more value.

It’s not just about executing a varied digital marketing plan it’s also about measuring, measuring, measuring! The great thing about digital is that there’s great tracking and analytics available so you can see which channels are really converting and which ones aren’t. I can check on my analytics tool and see that Twitter and Facebook are great drivers of traffic to my blog, I can also see that avc.com also drives a lot of users – and disqus as well. So I know what’s working when and how well, there’s no doubt that this can’t work for businesses as well.

Newscorp feels that Google should be paying for access. MSFT is talking about paying Newscorp for their content. The rationale being that perhaps this will make Google follow suit. Meh. Sorry Newscorp, Google’s not responsible for your declining newspaper revenues, no more so than it’s responsible for the success of Huffington Post.

What is responsible is slow versus fast. Murdoch himself said:

“The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow”

Google isn’t killing the news paper business, innovation is leaving it behind. Craigslist is doing more for classifieds with less. Ebay is doing more for selling stuff with less. Blogs, like the Huffington post, are doing more for real time news with less. These new businesses are eating the News business’s lunch and the newspaper companies are too slow to respond.

Rupert, dude, go ahead and block Google. Google’s not stealing revenue; you’re not capturing the potential of the internet. What you need to do, is get beyond the Google question, make your papers leaner, more cost effective and start leveraging the internet. Focus on innovation and new profitable revenue models. Ask the telegraph and the Guardian for tips. Do more with less faster. Until you do that you’ll continue to see your bottom line shrink.

First a survey on the Independent shows that on average people who admit to illegally downloading music actually spend more on music than those who claim that they never down music dishonestly. I totally buy this. People who download music illegally are probably tasting more music and making more purchasing decisions on music than those who don’t.

The music industry needs to give more of it’s content away to get users to fall in love with music and buy more. The music industry should be looking at other areas where they can make money (spotify and the like premium accounts, tours, merchandise etc). A witch hunt on illegal downloads is only going to hurt the industry by penalising some of the biggest spenders.

I just ponied up for a Spotify premium membership, Spotify is a solid alternative to illegal downloads and getting it on the go and here in Switzerland is worth the cost. But I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t experienced it for free and really loved the product. Which I do. So spending the money was a no-brainer. The music industry needs to do more things like Spotify.

Second, a blog post from Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark, discussing Google’s mobile OS and its new navigation system as a less than free model. This gives platform manufacturers a slice of the search ad revenue that Google will make in order to get market share.

Google is on the other side of the spectrum from the music industry. Here Google is saying, “here’s something that is charging the user right now, let’s open it up, offer it for free and make money on other, premium, or distributed services”, brilliant. During a downturn, Google’s working hard to get market share by offering value for free where others are currently offering less value at a high cost. That’s pretty ingenious if you ask me.

Give stuff away to the end user, but make sure that you’re offering some other services/products with a clear value to somebody in order to make sure you’re building a sustainable business.

I can see lots of uses for Google Wave (check out Louis Gray’s blog for some screenshots), call centres and help lines especially. The online chat component of a lot of help line sites are crap. Google wave could be a game changer on this, where timing and constant communication or feedback could add significant value. Also live blogging events, media, technology, sports. Imaging having a blogger courtside filling you in live via a wave. Could happen.

The point is, we don’t know jack today about what something will turn out to be like in a few months/years time. I call this Tip Black tech. Taking two well known books/concepts and applying it to technology. The Tipping Point when it comes to user behaviour, network effects and the fact that if enough cool people use something, enjoy using it and tell people about it, more and more people will use it and eventual you may have a tip into real usage and value. And the Black Swan where people believe one thing without really thinking about all the things they don’t know. We thought all swans were white till the black swan was found. So Tip Black tech is about watching who uses technology and what they use it for before declaring it a winner or loser.

With technology you have to give things some time and use before figuring out if there’s value in it. I’m a Libra, so maybe that’s why I find taking an extreme view on a technology or service in the first couple of days – where not everyone has the opportunity to give it a go – annoying.

Give new technology a chance, use it a bit, let others use it a bit and then call it overhyped. Just because a technology may not be for everyone doesn’t mean it won’t offer value to some or many people. So the next time you hear someone call a new tool a killer or a dud, think Tip Black Tech and tell then to wait and see.

Yesterday The London paper – News International’s London free evening paper – announced it was closing up shop, having made 14Million in revenue last year I was shocked that the paper had a loss of almost 13 Million and 16 Million in losses for the 10 months before that. What the…? 28Million in losses in less then two years? WTF?! Anyone who’s picked up a London free sheet like the London Paper knows that there is pretty much an ad on every page. Different sizes, shapes, frequencies, most of it irrelevant to the copy. It would have been nice to see The London Paper publishing the Heathrow diary by accomplished writers as I discussed earlier, or trying to create value for advertisers through focused content. Instead they focused on maximising ads on their sheets.

At the same time a number of publishers in the online market are experimenting with larger ad sizes. The idea being that more ad space is better. There’s an interesting article on Ad Age about why this is a bad idea. Again it would be nice to see some marketing innovation, getting publishers to work more with advertisers to do more content of interest to users.

The media business needs to rethink its business model. Advertising in its traditional current format needs to change.

But I think destruction and creation is going on beyond the media business, there’s an interesting article in the FT about the healthcare crisis in America and how hospitals and doctors have specialist after specialist come in and people get charged ludicrous amounts, mostly to avoid the potential for malpractice suits later down. The healthcare industry is so focused on this that it’s not comparing costs to value. The article had a great line;

“We have volume without value. There is no direct correlation between good health and higher hospital costs, doctors’ payments, drug prices and administrative costs.”

The gap is another company that has focused on volume without value, Gap is being pushed by the likes of Uniqlo and initially responded by adding more lines, more colours, more stuff. Volume without value. And sales haven’t turned with this strategy. So Gap’s now dropping lines and simplifying it’s offer, but is it too late?

Organisations all over the world, in whichever sector, should focus on doing different things, but less things to control costs and try to maximize demand, innovative things, create value and not worry about the volume of offerings they have.

Yesterday, Friendfeed announced that it had been acquired by Facebook. For both of these companies it makes sense, facebook is trying (almost to their detriment) to compete with Twitter and Friendfeed does have real time search and some great engineering talent. Buying Friendfeed helps facebook and gives the friendfeed folks a nice exit. Personally, I think facebook will open up status and content to people to search wider then just your friends circle, this could open up a nice alternative revenue stream for Facebook.

Dave McClure thought otherwise, and thought that Google shouldn’t have let this happen. Dave’s a really smart guy, who’s blog and presentations I read frequently and quote often, and I have a tonne of his stuff bookmarked on delicious (his start up metrics guide should be required viewing for all). So it was hard to disagree. I think Dave’s probably right (purely on odds if not on logic) so I wanted to make my point and invite him to disagree with more then 140 characters.

Dave said (redacted for the audience which might be sensitive):

“How the F*** does Google let Facebook acquire FriendFeed for any amt of $? GOOGLE U R A BIG F****** LOSER. Absolute #FAIL.”

I wasn’t the only one who disagreed with Dave on this, and we went back and forth a couple of times. He also discussed it with some VCs, one of which, Manu Kumar put it best:

“@davemcclure FF a better fit for FB than $GOOG imho. Also doubt the ex-googlers wd want to return to the mothership. #UnknownMoreAttractive”

That was my thinking as well, why would you want to go back to a company you left in the first place? But let’s explore this from Google’s perspective. Google probably has more users of Orkut then there are users of friendfeed and by a lot of accounts Orkut’s not as nice a product. Google is playing with communication using Google Wave. Google has strong search capabilities. Google has really smart engineering talent. As Fred Wilson might say, they’re doubling down on what they know and can do really well. So why would Goog want to buy Friendfeed? As a defensive manoeuvre? “We’ll buy it so you can’t”, good luck with that.

I’m glad friendfeed got bought by facebook, as a facebook user I’m interested to see what innovation comes out of this acquisition, as a user I’m also glad that Google didn’t buy friendfeed, it’s creating great innovation in more than just one company.

This brings me back to the sports analogy. For Facebook the buy is offense, but for Google buying Friendfeed would have been defence. I believe companies need to be mostly offensive with a dose of good defence. Sure defense wins championships (Celtics last year in the NBA) but like the Oilers of the 80s, most of the Larry bird and Magic years of the 80s and the Bulls of the 90s, great offences build dynasties.

Update: Dave’s calmed down a bit.