Category: Interviews

What Your User Community Should Look Like

Posted on by Drew Neisser

In the hype that is social media marketing, it is often hard to distinguish between the braggadocio and the brilliant. Communities are launched with great fanfare only to slink away quietly into the burial ground of false promise. So to stumble across a vibrant community— one that predates Facebook and supports a B2B brand— is not just surprising, it is downright awe-inspiring.

Thanks to the support of an enlightened board member in 2003, the SAP Community Network (SCN) was able to overcome internal naysayers, and gradually grow into a 2.5 million-member social business juggernaut. Now heading community operations, Chip Rodgers, who I interviewed in advance of his presentation at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit, the SCN sets a high standard, revealing these 9 ways to know your community is truly awesome.

1. Adding members is no longer a key performance indicator
Because communities are still considered a luxury by some executives and a risk by many (rightly or wrongly) there is tremendous pressure in the early days to achieve scale. The SAP Community Network crossed this threshold in the last 24 months. Reports Rodgers, “Around the time we got close to 2 million, we stopped emphasizing the growth of the community.”

2. Community engagement is a daily activity
“If you build it, they will come,” is pure fiction when it comes to communities, which is why most wither away. Remarkably, the SCN gets about 1.5 million unique visitors per month and 3,000 to 4,000 posts a day. “Our activity numbers are really strong,” Rodgers explains. “I think that’s something we pride ourselves on as there are other communities that may have more members but feel like ghost towns; we have vibrancy.”

3. The community jumps in to defend the brand
It is inevitable that a brand will come under criticism for one thing or another once it opens up a community. Offers Rodgers, “We see this all the time where somebody says something negative or even a little wacky.” But rather than rushing out a brand response, “what ends up happening is a lot of community members [jump in saying] ‘This is way over the line,’ or ‘Nah that’s not really true.’’”

4. You can drive your own circulation
Building and maintaining a healthy community on the scale of the SCN is expensive so there is unavoidable pressure to demonstrate value to management. Rodgers notes, “One of our KPI’s is driving activity to webinars and that turns into real pipeline opportunity dollars traceable back to activity in the community.” In effect, the community acts like a media channel, supporting other marketing efforts and ultimately, top-line sales.

5. The community willingly embraces a direct sales channel
Purists worry that connecting a community with any kind of sales channel will dilute the value of the community. While there is a risk of being too “salesy,” an inevitable by-product of a healthy community are product discussions. Seeing these, SAP set up an online store called SAP EcoHub that started within the community and is now an increasing channel that drives real leads and revenue.

6. The community impacts product development
Customer-generated ideas have long been discussed as the holy grail of community activation, but getting there can be perilous. “The last thing we wanted to do was have a bunch of people contribute ideas and then have nobody listen or act on them,” Rodgers says. Working closely with the “proactive” product teams on selective topics, he has “gotten great feedback and contributions from the community that are already incorporated in the latest solutions.”

7. The marketing group wants in
Successful communities like the SCN are often started outside of marketing departments as a form of post-sale customer service. This orientation gives the community a head start since the emphasis is on creating content of genuine value and not pure product messaging. But with the heightened interest in having robust social media programs, it is not surprising that the SAP marketing department grabbed the reins of the SCN six months ago.

8. The community drives cultural change within marketing
Rodgers, who has run the SCN for five years, might have been apprehensive when marketing subsumed his group earlier this year, but you wouldn’t know it now. “Last year, our CMO said, ‘Guys we need to learn from [the SCN] and we need to have conversations and engage with our audience. We can’t just create another email blast with a bunch of creative and an offer.’”

9. The content developed on the community profoundly improves SEO
With a staff of 12 dedicated to developing formal content like white papers, articles and solutions briefs, Rodgers is able to keep up with his ravenous community, feeding it fresh content on a daily basis. And by optimizing this content for search, starting about 2 years ago, the SCN was able to more than double monthly site traffic. “I mean it was dramatic; it was unbelievable,” Rodgers observes with a sense of pride and awe.

Final note: It’s not often you hear about a huge B2B company operating with a B2C mentality for customer engagement. For my complete interview with Chip Rodgers, see my previous post here.  You can visit the SAP Community Network at and hear Rodgers yourself at the upcoming B2B Corporate Social Media Summit in Philly on October 12th.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.

The Anatomy of a Social Business Community

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Most brands dream of having a vital user community that creates on-going dialog between the brand and its customers.  But few have succeeded on the level of the SAP Community Network which is led by Chip Rodgers.  I interviewed Chip for an upcoming case study on FastCompany.com and in advance of his presentation at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit September 28/29 in Philadelphia.  The following is my Q&A with Chip. Admittedly, it is long one but well worth studying if you are thinking about creating your own community.

DN: Can you give some background on the SAP Community Network?
The SAP Community Network actually started about eight years ago, and so we’ve had a little bit of time to ramp up. We currently have about 2.5 million members, and it’s a very active community. We get between a million and a million and a half unique visitors a month and about 3,000 to 4,000 posts a day in discussions and blogs and wiki pages.

DN: Tell me about the membership of the SAP Community Network.
It’s about 50% customers and then another probably 30% partners and then we have a large group of employee members as well. There are also independent contractors, developers— just people who are interested in the SAP ecosystem. It’s open to anyone that wants to join. There are a few core pieces of information that we ask for and obviously unique email address.

DN: From a content standpoint, with all these members, are you constantly feeding this beast yourself or is it somewhat self-sustaining?
I have two teams. The content team works with about 400 SAP experts to feed the community with a lot of our formal content: white papers, articles, solution briefs, eLearning, videos, etc. I have a team of about 12 working with a group of stakeholders that are SAP solution managers or folks from support or people in solution marketing that have all the actual information, the expertise and are actually the ones that are building the content.  I’ve also got a group of six that are managing the community-generated content, so that’s our blogs and forums and wikis, and similarly they’re working with a group of about 700 moderators that are in the community.

DN: You know the scale of this community is kind of mind-boggling. Can you draw a direct line between your activities and your ROI?
More and more we’re able to show that there is a connection. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re running a lot of webinars on different topic areas, different product areas. We’ve really cut back with list-buying and some of those traditional marketing costs to get people to come in and listen to a webinar, learn about a new product area, and then take the next step as a pipeline opportunity.

Drew: You started this in 2003, which predates Twitter and Facebook, and I’m curious how you brought [them] into your community. Are they adjuncts or are they truly integrated into this?
Having this background of engaging with the community, when Facebook and Twitter came along, they were natural extensions and ways of engaging with the community. We now have a group that is really focused just purely on social media. We work together to leverage the community and our social media activity. A little bit more specifically, we do a number of things like, if you post a blog in the community, we have an RSS feed to a Twitter account so it automatically tweets the title of the new blog that was published. We think of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, even YouTube, as kind of extensions— concentric circles around the community— to reach community members and try to get the word out.

DN: Was it tough in the beginning to get management behind the community?
We laid a lot of groundwork for social media within SAP. We were fortunate that we had a board member that thought it was the thing to do and defended it every time. When we first opened the communities with blogs and forums and wiki, some executives were nervous – saying, “why should we create a place just for people to complain?”  But our feeling was that there are plenty of public places for people to criticize the company, why not create the place where we can be a part of the conversation?  And fortunately, our board defended it.

DN: Has the community ever defended the brand?
What we’ve found is if you work with the community and build trust, and you’re open about how you engage and you answer questions and address issues that come up, the community will support you. It’s not always SAP that has to defend [itself] when someone goes haywire.  We see this all the time where somebody says something negative or even a little wacky in the community, and your knee-jerk reaction might be, we have to answer that. And what ends up happening is a lot of other community members come in and say, “Well you might have a point here, but this is way over the line.”  The whole group kind of comes together.

DN: What are the other ways that you report on the success, or what are the metrics that you guys look at to rationalize your existence?
We actually have a few metrics. One is just purely in terms of activity and contributions in the community, page views, member satisfaction, things like that. We do those transactional kinds of things with the community to makes sure that we’ve got good content that people find interesting, so that’s one level of measurement. One of our KPI’s is driving activity to those webinars that turns into real pipeline opportunity dollars. It’s traceable back to activity in the community.

The third is a part of the community called SAP EcoHub (http://ecohub.sap.com). It started as an online store for our partners to set up storefronts and sell their products.  We’ve expanded it to include SAP products as well. It is connected to the community so that if there are conversations going on about certain product areas, we have links in those conversations going back to EcoHub. If you happen to be on a conversation you can see the product.  That is an increasing channel for us, for our partners and for SAP to drive revenue directly.

DN: You have a few people that are in the conversation, how do you make sure that they are all on brand?
We do have a social media corporate policy, guidelines, best practices case stories, and training courses.  We have an active internal social community, so there’s a lot of discussion and activity and assets [and] resources available to people when they start to put a toe in the water in social media.  A lot of those principles are similar to when anybody goes for media training, for example.  There are a few guiding principles like, “Don’t talk about things that you don’t know about.” And stay away from forward-looking statements like, “We’re going to do this,” or “We’re going to do that.”  But otherwise I think a lot of it is just common sense.

DN: You have this substantive, meaty community where people are actually participating, and you’ve already proven its worth and along comes Twitter and Facebook. Has there been conflict because [social media] is a separate group, and it’s not part of your group?
There is a social media group driving policies, best practices, training, reporting, and other aspects of social media for SAP, but we’re all part of marketing. It’s interesting because community and social media are somewhere in the middle of several traditional corporate groups.  It’s a little bit of marketing; it’s a little bit of communications; it’s a little bit of support, there’s an aspect of listening for product roll-in, and there’s an aspect of sales channel. So there are always discussions about where does it really belong. But community and social media are about people connecting – so if you’re doing it right, the entire organization is responsible for connecting with customers and partners in their respective areas.  So yes, we are separate groups, but we have a communities and social media council of leaders from each of those groups as well as social media ambassadors embedded throughout organizations and geographies at SAP.

DN: With 2.5 million community members, your activities are dwarfing anything SAP might have on Facebook [or] Twitter. How as the marketing/social team dealt with this?
We actually work very well together and leverage each other’s strengths on a nearly daily basis.  But it’s interesting that when we were first having discussions about Communities joining marketing, our CMO was saying “There’s an opportunity to learn from what Community Network has done.   We need to have more conversations and engage with our audience. We can’t just create another email blast with a bunch of creative and offers.”  It’s been a cultural change within the company.

DN: Have your content development efforts had a measurable impact on SEO?
We are very much SEO champions, and it’s been through experience. We had to figure out what to do on all those pages to do better with search engine: where things are laid out; how are we tagging pages; what are the titles in the pages, how are URLs formed. So many things factor into it. We had this three-month project just to go through everything and then get the word out to all the stakeholders and get everybody to update all their pages. I mean it was dramatic; We were bumping along at around 400,000 unique monthly visitors, and all of a sudden we shot up to like 900,000. It was unbelievable— just blew me away.

How to Build Trust with Clients & Prospects via Marketing as Service

Posted on by Drew Neisser

The following is an interview with Ken Shapiro, who along with his partner Tom Livaccari, have grown The Livaccari Shapiro Wealth Management Group at UBS through the judicious use of Marketing as Service. This interview focuses on their event series called Media & Technology CEO Summits which I’ve attended many times and always found useful.  [This interview is also the basis of my upcoming post on FastCompany.com.]

DN: Tell me what you call your event series and how it came into being?
The program began when more than one client asked us during the 2008 downturn if it was better to fire employees before or after Thanksgiving. Having struggled with the question ourselves when we were entrepreneurs during the internet crash in 2000, we suggested that we facilitate a roundtable discussion on this topic with a few other CEOs facing the same dilemma. They found this so valuable that they suggested other CEOs that they thought could benefit from similar discussions in the future. As this grew to 50+ CEOs at an event, we decided calling it a roundtable was a misnomer so we renamed it the Media & Technology CEO Summit.

DN: Describe the basic structure of these events.
The CEO Summits consist of a networking breakfast and then an interactive panel discussion consisting of industry leaders such as those that built Gilt Group, DoubleClick, About.com, Take 2 Interactive, and, Omnicom, to name just a few examples.

DN: What were your original goals for this program?
Our primary goal was to provide a forum that would help our clients be more successful and to reinforce for them that we go far beyond the norm to help them achieve their goals.

DN: How did you decide on your niche and what distinct value are you trying to bring to your target?
In the 90s we were both entrepreneurs of internet and tech companies ourselves and saw that we had needs that wealth management professionals were not fulfilling in a way that was of value to us.

Principally, having much of our wealth tied up in the illiquid and risky stock of our own companies, we always wished we could find an advisor that would in essence partner with us to not only conservatively manage the money we had already made, but as importantly be an additional member of our extended team of core advisors to help us think through the myriad of issues we faced while trying to build and maximize the exit value of our companies. These included everything from sophisticated wealth planning, to having a sounding board to help us think through critical business and personal issues to selecting the right M & A advisor to ultimately help us sell our companies.

Because of our experience [as entrepreneurs] we realized that if this was a problem for us then it likely was for many others. We therefore narrowly focused our practice on entrepreneurs and executives building digital media, marketing and technology companies and architected and built every component of our practice to provide them the comprehensive advice that we were not able to find when we were in their shoes.

We were confident that our unique perspective and approach would enable us to be an uncommon partner to these individuals and enable us to provide such distinct and value-added advice that would separate us from our competitors.

DN: What do you think these events say about your practice?
These CEO Summits have been a great way for us to foster a sense of community amongst our clients and other leaders in these niches. Clients tell us that these Summits have helped them stimulate meaningful ideas, make valuable connections and in one case even initiate a conversation with a party that later acquired their company.

DN: Have you been able to meet prospects and ultimately gain new customers as a result of this program?
Because our clients derive so much value from our CEO Summits they often ask if they can invite CEO friends who would similarly benefit. This ends up being a great way for new prospective clients to be introduced to us and our way of thinking. Ultimately, people hire us because the trust us, like us and believe that having us by their side with our differentiated approach will help give them the highest probability to achieve their personal, family and professional goals.

These events are an excellent way for us to provide prospects a window into the way that we interact with clients, put their needs first and help them with a wide array of issues that are not commonly addressed by others in our field. From these events prospects often begin a dialogue with us, as their situation dictates, regarding whichever matter is most pressing to them and over time this often leads to them becoming a client as they gain comfort with us and our thought process.

DN: How do track down your speakers and persuade them to come?
Speakers include clients, friends and other notable industry leaders. Because our attendees are amongst the most important and dynamic leaders in their niches, we find that speakers welcome the opportunity to participate and engage in a dialogue with them.

DN: How hard is it to get your target to show up to these events?  Does it beat cold calling?
Because the content and the other participants in these events are so relevant to our clients’ and prospects’ lives we find they are eager to join us. This leads to these events being excellent icebreakers which enable people to experience first-hand our consultative and value-added approach.

DN: Seems like these events must be time consuming to put together, especially when you consider all the pre/post event follow up you do.  Is it worth the trouble?  And if so, why?
Though these events take a tremendous amount of time and effort to organize and run, we feel they differentiate us substantially from others and are well worth the effort.

DN: How have you been able to keep the hard-sell out of these programs?
We begin each day thinking about how we can be most helpful to those with whom we interact. Because of our problem-solving mentality we never think in terms of sales cycles. We know that as long as we put our clients’ needs first then over time they become our best sales force as they share with their friends the positive experience they have had.

There is Something Funny About This Guy

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Tim Washer, Senior Manager of Social Media for Cisco’s Service Provider division is among the funnier presenters I’ve seen. And that’s no accident, Tim has spent much of his career in comedy, writing for Conan O’Brien, doing stand-up and helping IBM and Cisco find their funny bones. Here are some the highlights of my interview with Tim after the BDI B2B Social Communications Leadership Forum and in preparation for my [coming soon] post on FastCompany.com on Tim’s secrets to creating viral videos.

 

DN: Why do you think comedy is such a good idea for brands?
Let me first qualify, it is not for all brands. I have seen that it works well for large technology companies. It is probably not the best fit for a financial institution, for pharmaceuticals, those industries. However, comedy just has a way to connect with people like nothing else can. Of course you can create a connection through generating a sad emotion, but no brands want to do that. But if you can make an emotional connection with someone, it is an extremely powerful, and can build strong affinity, which is not easy to do in social media.

DN: So what are you goals for your work at Cisco?
With the humor, which is a very small part of our content, we are trying to start a conversation, be authentic, and show we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Once you show someone you’re willing to joke about some issues and don’t take yourself too seriously; you have gone a long way towards creating rapport. You also show you are transparent and authentic.

DN: Can you give me a specific example?
If you look at the [Cisco] TV Support Group video, look at all the coverage we got, we have big bloggers writing about it. But at the same time I am hoping it builds rapport with our audience. There was no product messaging in the video. We just hope the audience finds this entertaining. And if not, ok, thanks for your 2 minutes. What I do is service provider marketing – we work with very technical people. We work with the large carriers and engineers, and so a lot of what we need to produce for them is white papers, technical dry material. So we take 5% of our effort and lighten it up a little bit.

DN: What are the keys to successful B2B viral video?
The first thing is to not include product messaging, your audience can read that on your website. Try to keep the videos short – under two minutes is ideal, but not always possible. A rule I learned in stand-up comedy is to try to get your first laugh within the first 20 seconds. Comedy is about pain – focus on the pain points that your product or service solves, and you’ll mine comedy gold, and start a discussion that can be continued on your blog.

DN: Not trying to sell anything is rather…
Counterintuitive.

DN: Well that’s going to stop a lot of conversations right there.
Sure it is. Of course I have had these conversations over the years with people who own the marketing budget: “Now why in the world would we invest in something that we don’t put our brand on or mention the product?”. Personally I believe that’s not the best use of social media. What is successful in Social media is telling interesting stories and creating conversation. It is not necessarily the place to go out with direct marketing messaging that you would include on a brochure. I think the main goal is really to engage people.

That’s what we did with the TV Support Group video. We took one consequence of a problem and exaggerated it. In the past years, families have been moving away from their TV sets and using other devices for entertainment. So now your television set is feeling depressed and abandoned, which lead us to the concept of a TV support group.Being absurd and ridiculous will get you attention on YouTube, that helps you stand ou from all the other videos and noise.

DN: Do you know when you have a hit?
You just can’t predict what is going to be viral. You can’t set out and say hey let’s make a viral video. You know, [delivering] knowledge is very important. If you share knowledge, it tends to go social–people will share that. But another way is just being silly, ridiculous and entertaining.

DN: Ok so we have don’t try to sell anything, be silly and ridiculous, what are some other keys?
Not just comedy, but being authentic [is critical]. If you’re taping an interview with an expert, do not have him/her recite talking points but share a genuine conversation. I think while you do want to showcase your own experts, I think it is important to involve and invite other people, such as academics and industry analysts to be part of your conversation.

DN: How important is the story?
The story is the most important of all. Story trumps messaging. At the same time it is a challenge because most corporations believe getting the message out is most important, if you’re coming from marketing or communications. You need to set that aside if you want to create something that will work on YouTube. Not every case, but in some cases you need to set that aside and say let’s tell the story here. Whether that is the story of one of your clients, or of how you are having impact in the community outside of the product you make, that’s all good stuff.

DN: How do you manage internal expectations?
In social video and media, it is important not to burden the project with too many expectations. It’s also important to let executives know that there will most likely be some negative comments. Humor doesn’t appeal to everyone, and when audience members can be anonymous, it’s easier for them to heckle. it’s important, especially for companies selling products that cost six-figures with 18 month decision-making cycles, to assure execs that you most likely won’t close a sale with a YouTube video. Again, it’s about starting a conversation and reaching new audiences and maybe prospective customers. .At the end of the video, I include a hyperlink back to a blog where I try to continue the conversation. I think it’s important to send folks to a blog and not a product page on the company website. The other thing is I think, just like in advertising, you’re not going to appeal to everybody–you’re not going to get 100% retention. But you will get some of the folks, some of the people might go and look at your blog.

DN: At least people you like because they have a sense of humor.
That’s right. That’s why I so strongly believe it is important to experiment in social media. You have the rest of traditional marketing that’s already doing a great job for you, reaching these people though other channels. So diversify your approach a bit, and experiment on occasion, with some humor, and just see how it does.

Insights From a Serial Entrepreneur

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Eric Alterman is founder and CEO of Flow Corp, a start-up aiming to capitalize on the burgeoning needed for content curation, the topic of my upcoming post on FastCompany.com.  Eric is serial entrepreneur, having created companies such as MeshNetworks (acquired by Motorola for $230 million), SkyCross, TeraNex and most recently KickApps, the first “drag and drop widget builder.”

DN: As an serial entrepreneur, how do know when you’re on to something?
When I can’t stop thinking about a new concept for months on end and every morning brings new scribbles in my bedside notebook. Weaker ideas tend to come and go over the course of a few days or weeks.  For better or worse, the ideas that evolve into actual ventures tend to have richer theoretical implications that imply a broad vision with many possibilities.  Ideas loaded with many possibilities can actually be a liability (where do you focus first?), but it’s what holds my interest long enough to begin the heavy lifting required to launch a venture.  I think entrepreneurs need to be intentionally naïve during the conception stages of a venture.  Down the road the skill of listening is essential—at the beginning the skill of not listening matters more.

DN: Do you see any problems with the way content is currently curated via social media?
Social curation represents an undeniable paradigm shift in the realm of content discovery, but it has important limitations.  While the people I subscribe to on Twitter and Facebook fill my stream with content that’s often of general interest, social streams lack contextual relevance to my real-time interests—i.e. the information I need right now.  There’s lots of talk about the real-time nature of Twitter, but outside of breaking news social streams are not capable of delivering what I’m uniquely interested in at a given moment.  Social streams are great for browsing,  but only contextual streams can serve my immediate needs.  My belief is that a platform that enables efficient curation into highly contextual, aggregate (i.e. from multiple sources) streams is one of the next great opportunities, and it includes all content types (from blog articles and videos, to cancer research and cars for sale).

It might be said that traditional search is the solution to discovery of content matching my real-time interests (i.e. what I need to know right now).  But traditional search suffers from a number of different problems.  First, despite recent efforts by Google and others, search is not inherently a real-time solution.  It’s unlikely that a search for theater tickets will provide you a result that includes tickets that became available five minutes earlier, let alone 5 seconds earlier.  Beyond that, search is best at providing links to websites containing content deemed relevant to the three or four words typed into a search box.  Search engines don’t routinely provide content directly, they provide links to other web pages.  Even if a search engine properly disambiguates the pages it crawled days or weeks earlier, it may not have properly disambiguated the search request, itself.  By my own definition, the term curation suggests an explicit, largely human process with a result that is real-time and unambiguous.

DN: Can you give me a preview of your latest venture, Flow.com?
The Flow’s consumer experience (available soon at iFlow.com) is all about providing a simple but powerful application that invites media and commerce publishers to directly connect with consumers looking for specific content—real-time streams of precisely what they are looking for.  We call those streams “flows” and every piece of content moving through a flow is called a “drop”.  Flows and drops can be highly structured (multiple required or optional fields—e.g. year, make and model fields of a car being sold) or minimally structured.

Publishers can reach audiences very directly, without the inefficiencies of SEO and social strategies.  Consumers get the benefit of a new, highly contextual content discovery experience that is both radically new and yet very familiar for those already using social media applications.  It brings content out of stovepiped data stores and unstructured social streams, into a common data exchange organized by the intention of both publisher and consumer.

One of the most exciting aspects of the iFlow experience is the way consumers easily “remix” real-time content from many sources into their own highly contextual “flows”.  Those flows can then be shared by their curators (and audience) both privately and publicly with minimal effort. iFlow will provide automated ways for pro-sumer curators to populate flows, but manual, drag-and-drop curation will be the norm for everyday consumers.  My grandmother’s favorite aphorism is very true for curation: “many hands make light work”.  In the end we expect to bring the art of content curation to the widest possible audience.

The same Flow platform that powers iFlow.com will also be available to application developers in a platform-as-a-service model (PaaS). Our intention is to provide mobile and web application developers access to a modern  “data exchange” that allows highly scalable data sharing between many applications.  Our belief is that next generation applications will be curating content from many other applications to provide broader, more data-rich consumer experiences.  Imagine an apartment rental iphone app providing its users lunch coupons in the neighborhood they are exploring, information about local schools and perhaps a free cocktail during happy hour—seamless access to a diversity of real-time data is the enabler.  Consider what Multiple Listing Services (MLS) did to revolutionize the real estate industry with a relatively archaic technology stack—now extend those sharing and interoperability benefits to every industry and every data type using a modern, highly scalable real-time architecture.

DN: Why do you think curation is so important right now?  Talk to me about the benefits of human curation versus algorithmic curation (i.e. Google).
Curation is all about creating context and meaning from the terabytes of largely unstructured data generated every few hours by web, mobile and enterprise applications.  There’s a place for algorithmic curation, especially when users are searching for specific facts or answers to formulaic questions.  But anyone that has searched for something like, “1973 Firebirds for sale in Brooklyn” know that search can never deliver an aggregate real-time list of 1973 Firebirds for sale in Brooklyn from many sources, only a series of websites.  Similarly, only human curation can deliver a list of “funky artist parties in San Francisco tonight” or “the most interesting jobs for javascript programmers in New Jersey”.

DN: Where do you think the time for Flow will come from?  Out of existing social?  Out of other online activities?  Out of offline activities?
Unlike the voyeurism and serendipitous browsing of social media, Flow discovery is a relatively deliberate and intentional process—discovering real-time content that consumers are explicitly seeking.  That kind of activity disrupts a variety of less efficient modes of explicit discovery, from classified and message boards to websites and disaggregated mobile apps.  I  believe people will always make time for social discovery which serves an entirely different sort of emotional need.

Where do you think the revenue opportunities are with better forms of content curation like Flow?
We have a number of models in mind, from “freemium” upgrades to both our consumer and developer applications, to App and data marketplaces.  In the long term it will be hard to avoid “promotional drops” (i.e. advertising) given the very specific contexts the Flow provides relative to social media and even search.

How This Site Became a Multiplatform Ogranization

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Piers Fawkes founded PSFK.com in 2004 initially as a trend spotting resource.  Since then PSFK has grown into a multiplatform organization, well respected as a source of ideas within the creative community.  I was reminded of this when attending the recent PSFK conference in New York City which rounded up an eclectic collection of speakers that were engaging, inspiring and not over-exposed.

Give me the elevator description of PSFK
PSFK is the go to source for new ideas for creative professionals. Every month a million designers, ad folks, digital entrepreneurs and media mavens get inspired by our content.

What is your business model?  Or what do you sell and what do you give away?
We are a hybrid company – Publishing, Events, Consulting. They are symbiotic. We create content (some which is co-branded), we host events (some that get sponsored), we advise some pretty interesting brands about trends.

Would you say you are in the curation business? Explain a bit if you can.
Yes. Our job is to find new ideas and we present them up to 50 times a day on our site. For our consulting business we have given clients like Nike, Target and BMW their own PSFK. The key difference between our publishing business and consulting business is that we conduct pattern recognition on the data on our client’s PSFK’s and tell them what we think it all means.

You had some great speakers at the last conference. You must have had a lot of options to choose from, what was your process for choosing the ones you did?
I read PSFK! Honestly – I chose from the NYC projects that we were writing about – and I dropped the people behind them a line.

There is so much interesting content out there, how do you decide what content goes on your website?
Our higher aim is to inspire people to make things better.  Better business, better environment, better world, better lives. We have about 50 regular contributors to the site and they write about a wide array of subjects and geography. Their brief is to write about signs of change that lead to progress – or the people behind them.

How do you measure the effectiveness of your conferences?  Website?
The conference is still evolving. The speakers thanking me for being part of it is important as is the number of people who watch the videos after. Website effectiveness is traffic mixed with reach. How many folks passed on our stories.

Or how do you know you’ve done a good job curating content?
Traffic is better than yesterday. We sell tickets faster than the last event! It’s not always that easy. Most days we want to host an event or write stories on a topic we think are important rather than what will sell tickets/get eyeballs. I hope the audience respects that. And enjoys it.

Do you expect the need for the type of content you curate to grow over time?  If so, why?
I think more brands are wise-ing up to the need for lateral and future-forward inspiration. Consumer insights helps you optimize for today. Trends research helps you innovate for tomorrow.

Why do you think world-class curators like the New York Times are struggling when the need for quality curation is greater than ever?
Our business model is not based on paid-for advertising.  Advertising’s business model isn’t based on paid-for advertising any more. Companies need to shift quick.