Who is Farhan Lalji?

I’ve been interested in the concept of business ethics for a long time. The idea that business can operate in a “good” way versus operating in an “evil” way has been revolving in my head for sometime. With Google’s “Don’t be evil” internal motto, MSFT’s reputation as the “evil empire” and a bunch of the work by Umair, Fred, and other bloggers fuelling my thoughts, I’ve reached the conclusion that “good and evil” isn’t necessarily the right way to frame the question – at the end of the day all businesses are run by people and people don’t just fall into good and evil camps. I think it’s more about operating with the best interests of the customer versus the best interests of the bottom line.

I’m convinced that long term sustainable success is driven by being totally focused on what’s good for the customer, staff and the community, whereas short term unsustainable success is driven by making an extra dollar / pound / euro / franc / dirham / rupee etc.

The problem, I’ve found, is in large publicly traded companies there’s a responsibility to shareholders and showing that the business is operating with the best intentions for profitability but there’s no impetus to show that the business is delivering to the needs of all their other stakeholders – i.e. customers, staff, the community.

When I was in business school I wrote my dissertation on valuing the social and ethical return of business. Personally, I believe that businesses should be valued on a triple bottom line, how profitable they are, how sustainable/ethical they run their business, and the utility they provide customers. Only then do you get a true value of the company and its ability to be successful over the long term. Unfortunately there is no standard for such a valuation right now – there are way too many ideas for me to list on this blog post. There are so many different thoughts on how to value social returns that no one does it and so we all suffer.

Umair’s been spending quite a bit of time talking about good and evil, open and closed, Microsoft and Yahoo, and Facebook and Google. A very basic synopsis would be that open is good, Microsoft, and increasingly Facebook, have bad DNA and this will prevent them from sustaining success in the long run. Whereas Google has being good in it’s DNA and this will enable them to succeed in the long run. It’s a pretty smart analysis and I think its pretty spot on.

However, one company that has kept its doors closed and managed to succeed is Apple. iTunes has to be the most closed bit of software I know. And DRM is just plain evil, very evil. But yet Apple kills in this market and is showing no signs of letting up.

So my theory is that design can trump good and evil in the short term. If you ensure that users have a great experience, and that it’s simple, efficient and effective users and the community in general will overlook the fact that it’s closed, proprietary and evil - how else would you explain DRM? The iPhone is another example of closed and well designed but yet super successful. The fact that Apple was bricking unlocked phones is another great example of evil but well designed.

Is this sustainable? I don’t believe so. I believe if someone comes up with a really useful, easy, super smooth system that has a wide variety of content and is good, open, basically DRM free, then iTunes could go down. And if someone (RIM/Nokia I’m looking at you) comes up with a phone that meets the standards Apple has set for usability for browsing and interacting online on your handheld device and is open as well, well then Apple could go down there too. It’s not easy, because Apple’s set the design bar so high, but it’s not impossible.

This morning I saw a headline and story that bothered me on my feed reader,

Obama under fire after fundraiser remarks (Reuters)
Reuters - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama came under fire on Friday for saying small-town Pennsylvania residents were “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion,” in comments his rivals said showed an elitist view of the middle class.

But then I went on twitter to see what Obama News had to say about it. And sure enough there’s a posting with the response from the senator in Indiana where he clarifies that:

“And for 25, 30 years Democrats and Republicans have come before them and said we’re going to make your community better. We’re going to make it right and nothing ever happens. And of course they’re bitter. Of course they’re frustrated. You would be too. In fact many of you are. Because the same thing has happened here in Indiana. The same thing happened across the border in Decatur. The same thing has happened all across the country. Nobody is looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you. And so people end up- they don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington. So I made this statement– so, here’s what rich. Senator Clinton says ‘No, I don’t think that people are bitter in Pennsylvania. You know, I think Barack’s being condescending.’ John McCain says, ‘Oh, how could he say that? How could he say people are bitter? You know, he’s obviously out of touch with people.’

And a YouTube clip so you can see the full context.

This is what I mean by the web facilitating democracy, it’s the transparency in stories that wasn’t there before and is there now. Before you would have seen the story in print media and had nowhere to turn. But today you see the story, and through the power of the web you hear straight from the source and make up your own mind with more information.

It’s here and it rocks. I heart Flickr a little more today.

More information on the Flickr blog and there’s a video group that has some great content already.
Personally I think this will be different to the other video sites already online (thinking YouTube and Facebook) because the community on Flickr is pretty strong and puts up solid content. People on Flickr are passionate about photos and getting the same people to put up videos will lead to great video content.

Loving Dunstan’s beach close ups for example.

Jason Fried over at SVN pointed an article on why the internet won’t be nirvana by Cliff Stoll from 1995. In it Stoll makes the point,

“Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople”.

That really got me thinking about salespeople. Could there be a more unauthentic role in capitalism then that of the traditional salesperson? I get shivers just when I hear the word.

But the internet is changing the sales perspective. No longer is it a person who goes around knocking on doors or cold-calling people. Everyone is becoming a salesperson.

I think in part it goes back to Umair’s point about interaction; everyone can interact with a product at a minimal cost. And then if you add the fact that sharing information has become super cheap and easy too, well then everyone becomes a potential salesperson.

By talking about NCAA basketball on my status on Facebook, by adding a bookshelf widget, by writing about 37signals on my blog, by adding feedback on a book on Amazon, by… you get the point. I’m a salesperson and so too is everyone else on the web. So if everyone is a salesperson 2.0 then no one needs to be a traditional salesperson and a salesperson is no longer needed. Finally, no more shivers.

Henry Blodget and Kara Swisher have two great videos on Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker.

On the first they’re discussing the mentality of Google’s founders in comparison to other founders. Their DNA and how they’ve moulded the company in their own image. Basically, how they’ve kept it authentic.

My take, well duh, authenticity and value people, authenticity and value!

Second one is looking at how a lack of innovation has ended up biting Dell in the behind. You have to invest in research and think long and convince the market to understand the value of research. HP, Apple and Google do this well, the list of companies who don’t is too long.

Enjoy the videos embedded below.

SAI had a post the other day talking about how much the US presidential candidates were raising and spending online. The bottom line was that they were spending little but raising lots.

That’s been my whole argument around interaction and brand advertising. The candidates don’t need to spend money to get their messages online, but online is a powerful channel to make money.

Did a back of the envelope type analysis of the 3 main candidates still in the running and how they were doing on one of the most powerful channels online, YouTube. A search on “Barack Obama” brings up over 50,000 results. Just looking at the first five, there have been over a 1.2 million views, and they all average 4.5 stars. For Hilary Clinton, again over 50,000 views, the kicker here was there was one video with over 4.6 million views and nearly 25,000 comments, but the video was a mash up from the community taking the apple 1984 superbowl ad and using Clinton’s message as Big Brother, ending with a mashed up Apple logo for Barack Obama. The other four messages are fairly positive for Clinton though.

That’s the Democrats, the Republican candidate (or likely candidate, I still don’t get how this works fully) John McCain has over 11,000 videos. The first five videos all paint him in a pretty negative light.

What’s my point? It’s that you don’t need to spend online to have a huge presence online. The candidates have over 20,000 videos online, many of them put together by the community. Then there are the tens of millions of views of these videos, and hundreds of thousands of comments around these messages. Putting display ads on sites for this many views would have cost the candidates hundreds of thousands of dollars at moderate costs per thousand impressions, but they don’t have to spend this amount online. Because the message their pushing, because interaction with these brands, because the user base community driven campaigns online are much, much, much more powerful then a banner ad could ever be.

Now if only companies could focus on delivering engaging user focused interaction rather then trying to spend money on improving the brand maybe they could leverage or harness the real power of the internet.

News from the blogosphere hit one of my favourite tv shows today, ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption – I say TV show, but I listen to the podcast here in the UK. The news was that Greg Oden(GO), a basketball center with the Portland Trailblazers, had publicly endorsed Barak Obama on his blog. The post was followed by over 170 comments (mostly positive) and a bunch of other blog posts like this (mixed results).

Both hosts from PTI were giving GO dap – i.e. credit –for taking a political stance and being vocal about his political leaning. I was born during the later stage of a time when many athletes were thought leaders, to a certain extent, in the US. On PTI Michael Wilbon rattled off the names Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, and basketball players like Bill Russell, Bill Walton and Bill Bradley (who’s now in politics, not just talking politics in the locker room) who were all vocal about their political beliefs. Before these athletes there was Jackie Robinson, the black power salute at the Olympic Games, and other acts of politics and sport mixing. Whether you agreed or disagreed with these athletes you had to respect their strength in character to discuss their views. Some, like Ali, even suffering financially and reputationally (yes I know it’s not a word, don’t care) because of their views.

Today, I can only think of one other athlete, the Canadian 2 - time MVP of the NBA - Steve Nash, who also has made his political views known on occasion and has suffered some backlash for some of his views.

Personally, I think there’s too much money in endorsements for professional athletes today, and an athlete today can suffer significant financial set backs by saying the wrong thing or upsetting the wrong person. Being like Mike meant drinking Gatorade, wearing Air Jordans and buying into Brand Jordan not believing in some of the things that Mike believed in. Being like Tiger means wearing an expensive watch or investing a mutual fund or whatever else Tiger’s associated with. I’d love to see GO’s stance to be seen as a new trendsetter, one of athletes speaking their minds.

Maybe I’m a little partial to this as I’m reading Obama’s Dreams of my Father right now and I like the fact that he comes from a diverse background, something I can really relate to. Not to mention that I think he could do a whole heap of good for America’s reputation across the world and… well this wasn’t meant to be a political post so I’ll stop there. Maybe I’d feel differently if GO had endorsed McCain or Clinton on his blog. Don’t know, can’t say. But I like it in this case.

So Google’s the biggest brand in the UK as well as the world (pdf 800+ kb). To me this signals a huge shift in advertising.

I think Umair nailed it when he wrote about interaction being so cheap that building a brand through traditional advertising is no longer necessary.

For new technology products interaction is dirt cheap, even free, for traditional products access to these products is cheaper but information about the product is so accessible that if you have a crap product people will not only know they’ll tell other people.

We – technologists, marketers etc – need to focus more on creating phenomenal experiences and less on advertising perceived benefits through ads. If you focus on building great experiences the brand and the market come cheap, just ask GOOG.

I found it really interesting to see that Union Square Ventures was recruiting their new analyst through their blog. Fred and his crew really get it. I really like the evaluation methodology - candidates were asked to send a link showing their web profile.

Personally, I think the best way to tell if someone gets the internet is to see their web footprint. Which is why I’m always surprised if someone in the space doesn’t have a solid blog, delicious, facebook or Linkedin profile, even worse is when I search for someone who claims to know the internet industry and I find little or no results.   I call this a web footprint and someone who get’s the web should have a sizeable web footprint. If not do they really know what they speak of?