In this week’s episode of Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio we examine energy-related jobs and the 5 Hour Energy Drink product through the lens of Jobs-To-Be-Done.
Bob talks through how the Kano Model can be used to categorize dimensions of value once the jobs have been defined, and the pitfalls that can be avoided by doing so (spending time and money optimizing around the wrong product attributes). We also discuss how to approach the identification of jobs that have a ritualistic or emotional aspect to them.
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Next week we’ll have a special guest on the show to discuss how he has applied the Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework in his role as the platform manager at a software company.
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In Case You Like Reading More than Listening
All right this is Douglas Crets. We’re back with Re-Wired Radio or as we like to call it at the Re-Wired Group, Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio, and we’re talking with Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek, two of the partners at Re-Wired Group. We’re doing another Jobs-To-Be-Done discussion about competitive sets involving things that consumers choose to get jobs done for them.
The last time we talked we were talking about LinkedIn and Quora and the competition for the Q&A for consumers. Sort of like what are those two things doing to get the consumers Q&A job done.
Now we’re talking about the difference between competitors in the energy drinks space. The ones that come to mind are Red Bull and 5-hour ENERGY® and coffee. Bob, why don’t you bring us into this little set up here? Why are these things different? And why are we trying to search for the difference here?
Bob: I think part of it gets back to how do you take a very powerful thing like 5-hour ENERGY® and walk into a space where there are very big competitors and literally disrupt it?
It’s to really articulate the different thinking that 5-hour ENERGY® from the outside and throwing the Jobs Framework on it, how it actually becomes so successful despite the fact that if you were to look at the category you’d say, “We don’t need another energy drink.” Yet it’s there.
Part of it is to realize how do you look at spaces and find those cracks were things like 5-hour ENERGY® can go in and have a very dominant position despite the fact that Red Bull and Monster and Rip It®, there’s all these different kinds of energy drinks that are out there and literally they’ve got a very solid position in the market.
Most people would say there would be no opportunity, yet 5-hour ENERGY® has come up to say, “There is a way to get to it.”
Doug: Okay. Is there a way to just… I would like to make sure that people listening maybe for the first time or even people who have come back. Can’t you just briefly, Bob, tell people why do we use Jobs-To-Be-Done? Is it specifically to find room for competition or is it room to find innovation? Help people to understand that and then we’re going to figure this energy drink thing.
Bob: The Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework really is about almost taking the telescope and looking through the other end. Most of the time when you are developing products you look through your product out to the market and say, “Who needs this product? Who needs this software?”
Then you basically ladder and connect based on looking through the product lens. The Jobs-To-Be-Done lens really is irrelevant to the product form that you’re looking at and irrelevant of the set. It’s really about what are the situations where people are looking to pull products into their lives? What are they thinking about as a consideration set?
All of a sudden you realize that people don’t think in product categories. They think in solution terms. So what is the true solution set and consideration set that people are looking to hire from?
The Job notion comes that people hire products and services to do jobs for themselves irrelevant of product types and is understanding that hiring process and the important cues and considerations and then how well those products and services do the job is basically where growth comes from. They steal from other categories or steal from other things that they stop using.
Doug: Great.
Bob: So the notion… Chris, do you want to add anything?
Chris: No, I think you’ve got it spot on. Let’s dive a little bit into 5-hour ENERGY®. I don’t know if we just want to pontificate on some of the jobs, but it’s just by looking at their advertising and the way that they have wedged themselves in, it is somewhat obvious that they are attacking a couple of different segments are personas that they have identified such as we see a lot of advertizing around the “two o’clock feeling” or the “three o’clock feeling,” or, “I’ve got to get myself through this last part of the day.”
Then we also have, I think, more recently seen a more frontal attack on the coffee market…
Doug: Yep.
Chris: …where you have people who are drinking in the morning when they don’t have time for coffee but they need but the boost and it’s an easier delivery mechanism.
One thing that struck me as really interesting when, Bob, you and I started talking about this last week, was the attempt at displacing something that has a habitual or ritualistic nature to it.
Bob: Right, going after coffee, is like, “Oh my gosh, how would you think about going after coffee?”
Doug: Yeah, I love my coffee. I’m a little personally offended at it, if I’m to be honest.
Bob: Right.
Chris: Yeah offending interests works. At the point at which Bob and I talked last week about this I was actually was in my home office, had my laptop open, was going through the morning Wall Street Journal. I had coffee with cream in it and we started down this path of 5-hour ENERGY®.
I had the same sort of feeling of, “You’re going to displace this incredibly indulgent, rich experience that is warming. It’s winter here in Detroit. It’s soothing, it slowly wakes me up with this shotgun blast of sugar and syrup and all that sort of thing.
It was one of those things where, I was able to kind of understand my situational context in my moment. I won’t say it was a slow morning because no mornings are really slow but I had the time to make the coffee. Enjoy the coffee. Read the paper. Get on the phone. That sort of thing and it obviously felt very foreign to be able to think about injecting something like 5-hour ENERGY® into that.
Bob: Right and to that point, really you’re not hiring something new. You’re enjoying the moment with the coffee. So to think of trying to wage 5-hour ENERGY® into that moment isn’t there.
But if you think about moments where you wanted to have a coffee and you didn’t, so if you look back over the last week and say, “I’m running out the door. God, I’m not going to be able to get a coffee. I’ve got to run to the airport. I’ve got to do this, and this. I’m not going to be able to have my coffee until I get to the airport, or whatever.”
The fact is all of a sudden it’s what we call the “nonconsumption opportunities.” Where you wanted to have coffee but you didn’t that literally a 5-hour ENERGY® can slide in there.
Doug: Yep.
Bob: It’s those things where, again, I don’t think it’s to try to take a frontal assault to coffee, I think it’s trying to look at those nonconsumption opportunities where, “God, when did I want have a coffee and I didn’t?” Or, “When did I want to have something, and I didn’t have it with me?” It’s small enough. It can be with you. It’s almost like your “on you, with you” kind of energy, your own battery, if you will.
It’s a very interesting around going after what I would call nonconsumption. Instead of trying to say, “We need a coffee flavor version of this for the morning because customers want it this way.” The reality is that if you really go that route you’re going to kill yourself. It’s the fact of staying separate and going after those nonconsumption moments that are crucial.
Doug: Let me…
Bob: Oh, go ahead, Doug.
Doug: I just wanted to ask a question though. I can kind of understand that intuitively. That there might be a spot in my day where I don’t really know what I want to use to fill that opportunity but I know I need something like that.
Bob: Right.
Doug: So what happens from the standpoint of, “Wow, 5-hour ENERGY® drink really got successful at tinkling that opportunity for me.” Do you think that would change my feelings about coffee and then I would start reaching for something else instead of coffee more often? And change that landscape?
If that’s true what happens then to finding new opportunities? Does 5-hour ENERGY® drink sort of drift along the spectrum of those opportunities?
Bob: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s the notion of hatching a new product versus seeding a new product. I think once you get into the consideration set it’s now all of a sudden in the morning, “Do I have time for my coffee or do I go to my 5-hour ENERGY®?”
It’s the first couple of times they get people to think about it. A lot of times people are not actually taking the time to look through their consideration. You could have a Coke, there’s a lot of other things you could have. Once you seep into the consideration set it’s now all of a sudden there’s explicit choices being made.
So part of it is it’s those moments where you really want a coffee but you can’t. It’s like hitting those really high emotional opportunities where it’s like, “I’m dying for something but I don’t have time.” Once it’s there it’s like, “Hey, I’ve got that in my backpack or I’ve got that in the office.”
All of a sudden it becomes part of the, “All right, what am I going to have? Am I going to have a Red Bull?” In our office we have Red Bull. We have Coke. We have water. We have 5-hour ENERGY®. We have vitamins. We have kind of all those different kinds of things. Literally now it’s an explicit decision to say, “It’s 2:30, what do I want?”
Doug: The other thing that we can touch on, not to get too far off topic, the idea of actual behavior change is rooted in this.
What would actually be a tipping point in a consumer’s life where because there is the introduction of this new solution, can I actually change my morning routine by saying, “The 5-hour ENERGY® is not nearly as indulgent as the cup of coffee. I do enjoy the cup of coffee but, can I actually sleep in 15 minutes later because the 5-hour ENERGY® will get me going and I don’t have to brew the coffee and make the coffee and find my travel tumbler that I’m going to take in my car.” I can actually rearrange my morning and say I’m still going to show up at work energized. I can ditch the coffee. It doesn’t happen all the time but it enables that behavior change to occur.
Bob: One of the things it has actually helped me with is the notion of I don’t have coffee until you go downstairs for breakfast.
I have an elliptical upstairs where I work out. All of a sudden you start to realize, I can hop in bed. Have my 5-hour ENERGY®. And actually I find myself getting up earlier and working out. Actually the advertisers, they gave me the notion of it because usually it’s like I need my coffee to go work out. It’s like I need to wake up. It’s one of those things that’s really interesting that it’s now enabled me to do some different things.
This is a personal thing, but for the most part once it gets in that repertoire it’s very, very, you start to realize you can do a lot more things with it.
The other thing it does though it’s 5-hour ENERGY® and it’s seven o’clock, “Yeah, I don’t want one of those because I want be up at midnight.”
There are some places where I would say you have nonconsumption opportunities with it to say, “Boy, I need the energy but I don’t need it to last as long.”
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: It creates its own barrier in some cases.
Doug: That’s happened to me countless times. Most specifically just traveling and doing consulting work. You end up in a situation where you probably woke up and got on a plane in the morning, it’s now seven o’clock at night. You’re either going to dinner with your colleagues or the clients and you need to make it till 9 or 10 o’clock at night but you know after that, or possibly later. If you energize too much, you can’t fall asleep. You have a full morning of work ahead of you the next day and you’re just going to be toast because you’re going to be up all night. There is that little, once again, it’s like a data point of one.
Bob: But it’s where you reach for it. The nonconsumption is really the point that we’re trying to bring out. There’s opportunities when you go to reach for something and when you don’t. That’s an opportunity to say, “Well what else could you have had that would’ve allowed you to do it? It literally sneaks in to allow you to make progress in new ways.
This whole notion of the push of the situation and the notion of the idea and anxiety of that solution, the dynamics of that really is very powerful to look at, to understand.
The other thing I want to actually just touch on for second is some work I did a long time ago with Dr. Kano and what they call the Kano Model.
The whole notion is that people spend so time worrying about how much people like a product. If you really understand the job that’s going on here, it’s not about how much they like the flavor of the 5-hour ENERGY®, it’s actually really is part of the experience. Nobody would say they like the 5-hour ENERGY®, especially on the first couple times. It becomes a learned behavior.
The whole thing is this. It’s almost like you need to understand what they call the dysfunctional side of it. Most people talk about how much they like the flavor from 1 to 9, or whatever. The reality is, it’s “How much do you dislike to flavor?” As long as it’s something you’re not going to spit out, it actually adds to the value of the product. It takes it away from that hedonic state.
They can spend a lot of time saying, “How do we make this taste better and better and better?” People aren’t going to actually consume more of it because it tastes better. They’re going to consume more of it because it works for them in the job context.
The flavor aspect as much as people would say, “Oh, I don’t like to flavor,” it’s one of those things where as a company you would say, “Oh, we need to work on flavor. It’s the number one complaint.” My aspect is, “Don’t waste your time.” Find new situations where they can do it.
There aren’t people who aren’t drinking it because they don’t like it. They’re not drinking it because it’s not the right time or it’s not the right thing. As much as consumers say one thing, it’s about behavior and what they do. Kano actually offers a way in which to look at these attributes that consumer say and really put them in context so you don’t over invest in trying to say, “All right. We need to come up with 15 more flavors to do this.”
I can see if a big corporation was to take 5-hour ENERGY® that’s the first thing they’d do. “We need to get top two box on “liking” for the “liking” list.
Doug: Against, against, Red Bull and Monster.
Bob: Against Monster and it would be like, “Why are you wasting your time?” It’s one of those things where they will spend millions of dollars to fix it but they won’t.
Doug: Let me bring it back really quick to something because as a layman here I would have something that confuses me, but I think that I understand.
Intuitively I’m thinking about progress. I think what you’re saying, Bob, is a lot of the companies that are trying to find our position their brand in the market are trying to find progress for the product. “Let’s make it better, and better, and better.” They think of progress as, “Oh it’s just such a great product that nobody can say, ‘No’ to it.”
Bob: That’s right.
Doug: You’re saying something more about consumers need to seek progress.
I guess where I’m getting a little washed out in my head is, “What qualifies as progress? Is that singular to the individual? Or are there certain things that when we’re talking about energy drinks for example are obviously examples of progress? Can someone doing this kind of interviewing with the consumer say, “Oh yeah, yeah, that’s progress.” How do you pinpoint that stuff?
Chris: Just to close the loop on the Kano Model. I think I’ll let Bob answer that question. I think that the biggest point is that you need to understand the way that consumers define the progress in the situation.
Doug: Okay.
Chris: If you’re going after the wrong dimension. If flavor is obviously one of the obvious dimensions of value of something that you’re going to consume or drink like 5-hour ENERGY®. It’s how most of the experience actually occurs outside of the packaging. It’s an easy thing to gravitate towards to say, “Hey, we can help consumers make more progress by making this taste better and then they’ll drink more.”
I think what Bob is saying is when you tease out all those different dimensions of value, portability and speed and absorption, and all that sort of thing, taste is probably going to be one of those things that is probably at the bottom of the list. It’s like one of those fundamentals that you can’t violate it and make it taste horrible because then we’re just out of the running completely.
Doug: Right.
Chris: But it can’t be at the top. I wanted to clarify that. You might’ve already been clear about that.
Bob: The ultimate thing of how do you actually find people and how they find progress is… The way we go about it is we actually actively seek what we call struggling moments. Where do people want to do something but they don’t? Or where are they doing something and they know that it’s not the best?
Where do they struggle in their life? Struggle implies that they want to do something better. Those are the things. I can’t talk to people about Tide® if they are using it all the time. Where they struggle to switch, “Yeah this isn’t getting good enough. I’m going to switch.” Or “I’m struggling. I just switched because I can save some money.”
Then they are struggling on different dimensions. It’s understanding where they, and how they struggle. At that point that’s the thing where they can’t make the decision to make the progress.
So we always talk about the switching mechanisms and understanding where people have switched recently. Again, it’s not about saying, “Tell me what you like about coffee. When do you drink coffee? Let’s talk about energy and coffee.” It’s more about, “Tell me about the last time you wanted a coffee and you drank something else.” “Tell me about the last time you wanted a coffee and you didn’t get anything.”
What you find is throughout the day, if you ask people about it. We have a process we will pull out over a week people will diary struggling moments. You realize that people struggle a lot on a lot of things. They’re not big things but there’s always these considerations of how to make the decisions and how do they actually frame it? When do they actually make the decision versus they think about the decision?
Part of it is always talking to people about that process of making the choice and delivering on it as opposed to talking to people who just say, “Yeah, I want to move but I haven’t moved yet.” Those who don’t tell me anything, I have to…
Doug: Exactly.
Bob: Struggling moments who’ve actually overcome the struggle. Embedded in that struggling moment is the value code of what they are willing to trade off in order to make the progress.
The value code is the secret part of this thing. Once you understand the value code, you realize, “I don’t need to work on flavor because it’s not about flavor. It’s about the fact that they can have it with them any time and it be with them. I’m not going to compete against coffee. I’m going to compete against the fact that they like coffee, and can’t have it.”
Doug: Great point.
Bob: That’s the opportunity!
Doug: We have a few more minutes, Chris, maybe we can lay some things out for our future call. Also maybe you can help us wrap up what we may have learned here in this discussion.
Chris: Sure. On the next episode I think we’re actually going to have a special guest on from the software world that actually is a platform manager, a platform director that manages a portfolio of software products and he’s actually applying the Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework in some pretty cool ways.
Doug: Great.
Chris: We’re definitely looking forward to having him on. Why don’t you wrap it up?
Bob: To me the thing is that a lot of times the Jobs Framework, it’s not a silver bullet. What it is, it’s a way in which to look at a market and be able to understand how to take technology and apply it to a market so you can find the chink in the armor. Find the crack that can literally allow you to grow it to something else.
As much as there’s all this, I’ll say, marketing research that will help us find white space, this is about being able to see the white space with the right thing because it’s where people struggle. To me the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework is a very powerful thing to be able to find where people are willing to switch and allow you to see the white space so it can grow into a big business like 5-hour ENERGY®.
Doug: That’s wonderful stuff. If anyone wants to follow up with this and if they want to listen to more of these podcast they are always going to be hosted at TheRewiredGroup.com. You can listen to the Quora and LinkedIn podcast we did last week. It’s already up there.
And for a full range of articles about what Jobs-To-Be-Done means, those are also housed on Rewired.com. You can follow @bmoesta on Twitter. You can also follow @chriscbs on Twitter. You can follow me at @DouglasCrets on Twitter and there’s also a Re-Wired account on Twitter at @rewiredinc.
If you have any questions and if anybody wants to suggest topics or has advice to give on things that they’d like to hear about, please shoot us an e-mail or leave a comment on the blog or get in touch with us on Twitter.
Folks, it’s been a pleasure. Chris? Bob?
Chris: Let me say one more thing. I think that the point is that I’m working with Clay. Clay is really trying to emphasize the point of we need to get the word out more about this and so that’s partially why we’re doing this on radio, but, really the interaction of people, to be honest, if you would like to come on and be a guest speaker, let us know and let us know the topic and would love to be able to talk about that.
Any topics, again, we can be as generic as we need to be but one of the challenges we have is that we have to pick things that we are not bound by confidentiality to talk about.
The more as you listen to these if you can suggest topics we’re more than happy to kind of throw our lens and our frame on this and have a conversation about it. Please, reach out to us and let us know.
We’re been trying to do one of these, sometimes two a week. We can get more and more of the practitioner base aware of what’s going on and build practitioners.
Bob: I think a couple of other things, too, and is, one, Doug, you’re never going to be able to do that nice clean wrap-up that you always wanted to do.
Doug: I know.
Bob: I think we’re always going to interject a bunch of stuff when you get done with your cool little outro.
A couple of things to add, one, I think people really should go on to Quora like we talked about last week and followed the Jobs-To-Be-Done topic. Beyond just us, there’s a ton of people contributing and asking some cool questions.
Also for iPhone and iTunes users, we are in the iTunes library as a podcast. So if you search for “Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio” you can find us there.
I had a third one but I can’t remember. I think that’s it.
Chris: Great, thanks, Doug.
Doug: Okay. No problem. Here’s your outro, “See you all later. Bye.”
Chris: Yep. See you.
Bob: Bye, Doug.
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In the first episode of the Jobs-To-Be-Done radio show, Doug talks with Bob and Chris about how LinkedIn and Quora compete for the job of getting questions answered online.
The discussion includes some tactial-level ideas on how LinkedIn could better understand the job, and how the timeline of consideration and consumption could be constructed using Jobs-To-Be-Done interviews.
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Coming Up Next Week
Next week we’ll discuss 5 Hour Energy Drink, and the challenges that come with targeting a ritualistic job (morning coffee).
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In Case You Like Reading More Than Listening
All right this is Doug Crets and I am bringing you live this Re-Wired Radio podcast and we’re joined today by Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta who are partners of the Re-Wired Group which is an innovation think tank based in Detroit, Michigan. Chris and Bob, we’re here to talk about Quora and LinkedIn broadly speaking. I guess maybe the clue in the audience here, we had talked at some point last week about what is the difference really between Quora and LinkedIn and why does it seem that Quora is so much better at bringing people together and sharing viewpoints?
Why don’t we start with Chris? Chris, you and I started this out and we actually went to Quora and we actually asked this question and we got one answer. The guy, Fred Landis, said it was because LinkedIn is about 100% promotion, self-promotion, and Quora promotes ideas. Do you buy into that? Why don’t you just share with us your viewpoint?
Chris: I kind of buy into it. Let’s do a little bit more background. I think the listeners might be interested.
Doug: Yeah.
Chris: I think the conversation was pretty cool between you and I when we were at the Re-Wired offices in Detroit. It was mostly about were trying to share as much information about Jobs-To-Be-Done as we can. So we started the LinkedIn group and got a ton of members that joined right away. I think we were both pretty impressed that people did join the group.
Doug: Yeah.
Chris: And then we tried to seed it with discussion, it kind of fell flat. Anytime we wrote a blog post, we put it up there and said, “Hey, what you guys think about this?” And just crickets.
It’s like there’s a bunch of people looking at this and nobody really engaging and participating, which is weird because we know people want to talk about this.
On a whim we kind of started the Quora discussion more just prompted by people asking questions on Quora and us grouping them together on one topic. It seems like it just took off to the races immediately.
That kind of prompted us to have this discussion. It seems like all the professionals are obviously on LinkedIn. They hang-out there. They update their profile. They engage, but we can’t get discussions going.
What are the kind of critical differences between these two platforms that make Quora really powerful for discussion and LinkedIn fall flat? I like the answer that you just read, or that we received.
I actually had a conversation with another colleague at lunch who is kind of a social media maiden. I posed the same question. He had a similar answer in that he said he thinks people like platforms on the web that are singularly focused.
That comment to me has a number of pitfalls, but when I boil it back so he wasn’t speaking in jobs language, I almost want to say I think people like platforms on the web that do a particular job for them. I think that is what we’re here to talk about. Somebody wanted to chime in. Bob?
Bob: If you think about it, there’s, I’ll say, a pretty complex notion of who is giving and who is receiving. If you think about LinkedIn and all the people who signed up, they have hired it to be in the stream, but not to contribute to the stream.
LinkedIn is one of those things that’s like, “keep me connected, keep me up to date, keep me what’s going on.”
Doug: Yeah.
Bob: For the most part if you have a question you don’t go to LinkedIn to say, “I want to ask this question out there.”
Some people are doing that and it’s working okay but for the most part it is the self-promotion. You need to be able to ask questions people can answer. It’s more about people try to promote what they know, as opposed to Quora is really about, to me, “I don’t know about this. Let me go there and see if I can find somebody who’s willing to help me with it.”
I think, Chris, to your point of it being very focused, it’s like when you have a platform that does multiple jobs, the thing is they are always going to be vulnerable of somebody who’s going to be focused on the singular job and can do it on one dimension differently. It’s because Quora is more focused on, “help me find an answer to a question I have,” even though LinkedIn can do it, it’s not the primary job of what it does. It does a lot of different things.
It’s stealing share, more or less, from LinkedIn. Quora is stealing share from LinkedIn only in the context of, I think, it gets back to consideration set up when you’re thinking about the problem or you’re saying, “I need to get some help answering this.”
Yahoo! Answers, to be honest, is one of those things that I think was a really great platform but it just went so down market in terms of going after the kids and helping that side of it. I think Quora is the business version of Yahoo! Answers. It’s like, “I’ve got a question and somebody is going to help me.”
Doug: If I could jump in then, Bob, do you think that actually Quora could actually answer the other job-to-be-done with what LinkedIn is trying to get done for people? Which is, “I need business networking.”
Bob: I think that, again, it can overlap because at some point you are connecting. “Who is this person who answered the question, and what’s their credentials?” My belief is that people are going from Quora to answer the question and then jumping back to LinkedIn to say, “Who are they and should I connect with them?”
I think they’re actually synergistic but if you think about the initiation of it. The initial job is, “I have a question and I’d like an expert to help me with it,” again LinkedIn still has the, I’ll say, the overall persona around it is a networking and job site where you can put your resume up there. I don’t think people are thinking about it as a serious idea exploration platform.
Chris: We’ve highlighted I think what is an interesting challenge for platform managers and strategists.
Doug: Right.
Chris: I think it’s a pretty common conversation that occurs when you talk to people in the web world around new features. Not to simplify it too much but you could almost imagine the conversations that occurred at a platform like LinkedIn. Where it’s like, we have all the professionals in the world have a profile on LinkedIn. What’s the next logical step? Let’s get them to engage with each other. Let’s get them to ask each other questions. Let’s get them to join groups and to communicate with each other more.
Because of what Bob is saying, “What enters the consideration set when people want to engage?” you get this against the grain sort of feeling. I think they had this huge push around LinkedIn Questions but because it wasn’t in the consideration set when somebody needed to have something answered, even if it was the central location for all the professionals, people weren’t going and engaging.
I know they did get some engagement. I think it’s fallen off when you compare it to Quora, but it is a huge pitfall that I think platform managers need to avoid because it’s such an easy thing to connect at a high level. We have everybody here, of course we’re going to try to get them to engage in new ways.
I think it could be the demise. If you start to look at all the dollars spent and resources allocated to try to get people to engage in that new way, even though it seems ancillary and a close cousin, you can end up spending a lot of money building out features that you just get no adoption in.
Bob: To me this brings the importance of understanding both the platform and the brand side of it. I’m a big fan of David Aaker’s stuff where he talks about the brand architecture.
The whole thing is that I could see LinkedIn either an endorser brand or an ingredient brand to Quora. It’s like Quora powered by LinkedIn.
As you think about Quora as answering the question and the thing is when you try to make the brand do too many things it literally blurs the lines of what consideration it goes into. Is it really going to do what I want it to do? It’s like the Swiss Army knife. It does so many things but I need something that’s really going to be a lot better than that. I need a screwdriver.
Doug: Yeah.
Bob: You know the Swiss Army knife has a screwdriver, but you know I need… If you are really going to build a platform you need to think about if the jobs are different and whether you need to have the endorser brand, the driver brand, the descriptor brand, or the ingredient brand.
You need to figure out how to play that out so in the consumer’s mind when they have the job they can put the right image or brand in their head to say, “Do I go to Quora, or do I go to Yahoo! Answers?”
It’s like, “Well, no, I’m not going to go to LinkedIn,” and again, I think that jobs is all about how people make decisions to make progress.
Doug: Yeah
Bob: The branding is the shorthand of how they consider things.
Platforms start small or new products or new things start small and they try to add features. They actually whittle themselves out of the market and they don’t even know it. It happens in consumer package goods. It happens in all these different industries as well, but I think…
Doug: Yeah.
Bob: … you’re starting to see that where as platforms gets so big. When I say AOL it’s like, “Oh my god, is that antiquated?”
Doug: Well, let me jump in and throw a little bit of a curveball here. We were going to talk about Quora and LinkedIn but, Bob, your comments made me think about Yahoo!. What about this portal approach? Yahoo! as a portal was really the sort of frontier of the web.
Now we’re moving into a space where it’s basically the ab space. We have Foursquare now we have. We have Instagram. What happens to a Yahoo! that’s really always trying to be all things to all people because, “suck everyone into the web.”
Bob: Right. That’s a great question. To be honest there’s many, many examples of this.
Doug: Yeah.
Bob: It’s like the big company that literally gets eaten one bite at a time by people who make it easier, more convenient, or cheaper on the dimensions of value that literally it becomes where the only people left are the people who appreciate, “I only have one place to go which is Yahoo!.” The fact is Yahoo! keeps spreading their resources thinner and thinner and they add features as opposed to make the features better and eventually it just collapses.
Think of it as this big cookie that everybody’s taken a little bite of that eventually there’s nothing left. They literally are running around in circles trying to solve because they are reacting to everybody else’s strategy except for their own.
Doug: Bob, let’s get back to Quora and LinkedIn for just one second. We’ve had countless conversations over the past couple of months basically people coming up to us saying, “The Jobs-To-Be-Done theory is obviously powerful. I understand the theory. I’ve read all the articles. I get the milkshake story. Give me the tactical level steps that I need to go execute it.”
Bob: Yeah.
Doug: It’s like I’m up to my ears in theory. Let’s play it out. We don’t have to get really deep but put yourself in the seat of the platform manager at LinkedIn. How do you approach it using the “Jobs-To-Be-Done” framework? Do you attempt to understand the job of the question-and-answer?
Are you trying to make a decision whether to play there with LinkedIn or if there is another that LinkedIn could do? Who do you interview? What do you go do?
Bob: The first thing to me is we don’t talk about what people want like, “Tell me what you would like in a question-and-answer platform.” “I’d like it to be easy to post. I’d like it too easy to sign in.” You get all that kind of crap.
You need to talk to people about what they do now and where they struggle.
The first thing is, Chris, you and I would build a protocol around recruiting people, to tell us about, “Tell me about the last time you posted on Quora.” Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: Find people to tell us the story. It starts from, “When did you have the first thought about…?”
I should go to Quora and ask that. You want to get the first thought and then you want to walk through how long did they have the thought before they actually did something about it?
What was in the consideration set when they actually went there? What was the experience when they finished it up? It’s not like customer satisfaction survey where you are looking back on the experience. You’re trying to make sure you capture the “going in” view of what were they thinking about, what were they valuing, and how did they choose.
In a lot of occasions people can have value that they didn’t anticipate in the experience and the reality is it won’t help them choose that one necessarily next time. You want to understand how they are choosing ultimately.
Chris: So, how…
Bob: Go ahead.
Chris: How far back? We always talk about the drawing of the timeline and slowing down the consideration and moment of choice.
If you are interviewing somebody and you put the pen in the timeline and you say, “Okay, this is the moment that I first thought about, I’m going to consider posting a question on Quora.” How far back can you go before that moment to figure out, “When did you first have the notion that you needed to answer this question?” Can you go back real far in time or do you need to?
Bob: In some cases I would say you would say people would say, “Yeah.” I’ve been asking this question to myself for six months and just talking to people about it.
The whole thing is to get, when did they have the first thought and then when did they articulate it to somebody and then, when did they have, what I call, passive conversation. Then, when did they actively go to seek to go to the next level and what are the events that led up to them wanting to actively seek a new way in which to do it.
My belief is that most people will, and this is from anecdotal (people we’ve talked to), most people have a conversation with somebody else first around the question. When they are not either getting the answer that they want or they want something deeper, they then go to Quora.
At some point in time it’s like, Chris, I call you and say, “Hey, what about this?” And it’s sufficient enough, “Yeah, okay.” But it’s at something where it’s like, “I want a little broader perspective.” It’s that bigger picture or “I didn’t get the answer I thought” or “I want to double check.”
Part of it is understanding the reasons why they go to Quora. I believe it’s really the extension of the conversation you would have with somebody that now you are opening it up to the audience.
I think in LinkedIn’s terms though, if you read the question, the questions in LinkedIn are more scaled questions. They’re almost like I feel like they’re trapped. You know what I mean? “Hey, who knows about Jobs-To-Be-Done,” and what they are trying to do is get people to comment on it so then they can comment more about it. You know?
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: There are consistency issues around it where I feel that because LinkedIn being like we talked about earlier, being a promotional thing, it’s trying to understand the genuineness of the question and the genuineness of the answers.
The key is being able to get people to talk about what they posted and what else they would have considered. If Quora wasn’t available what would they have used? Would they have actually used anything? What’s the progress they are trying to make when they’re posting it?
It’s like, “Now you get these answers, what are you going to do with it?” Does it make them feel better? Is it that they can do something different? Again, everybody’s hiring it for different reasons, emotional, social, and physical reasons.
Chris: So, Bob, if someone is actually using this Jobs-To-Be-Done approach, how do you identify for them when, as they are doing this research, they have actually picked a moment when someone has actually hired something? How do you define that moment of choice where they’re moving towards getting that progress? How does that flag for someone who might be looking for this stuff? What does that look like?
Bob: The starting point is always about, “Tell me about the last time you…” And then you fill in the blank.
You try to make sure that you’re thinking about you’ve got a consideration set. As you start to have people tell you stories, and it’s about collecting the stories, and then analyzing the stories from a motivational and a drive and an energy drive perspective. You start to realize that as you pile the stories up you realize that there are patterns in it.
To be honest I started as broad as, “Tell me about the last time you posted on Quora,” to “Tell me about the last time…” There’s two sides of it. “When’s the last time you posted a question on Quora?” To “Tell me about the last time you actually contributed to Quora?” To “Tell me about the last time you posted on LinkedIn?”
To me, as you hear the stories and the consideration sets, you start to broaden your horizon of, “Tell me about the last time you…” Again, what you are looking for are the moments where they struggle and where they had an expectation and it wasn’t… Where they hired something and it didn’t do what they wanted it to do. That’s where the opportunity and the innovation exist.
Chris: I think one other important thing to point out is, even if… We’re kind of constructing a job’s interview protocol as we talk through this. This is how it naturally happens. One thing that it brought to mind is even if you seed the timeline with a question like, “Tell me the last time you posted a question to Quora or LinkedIn.” As you go back in time you will still capture the entire consideration set.
It will be, “I tried Yahoo! Answers and I thought about e-mailing my buddy in San Francisco and I thought about posting on an expert forum and getting…” Even though you start halfway down to make sure that you’ve got people who are participating and you are interviewing the right people, you’ll get this huge slot of different things that they consider pulling in that our competitors to something like Quora and LinkedIn.
I just think that’s an important thing to point out.
Doug: Why is that important, Chris?
Chris: It gets back to cross category competition. A lot of times when you get down to the strategy we always talk about Snickers and Milky Way. It’s that when you look at buying media and designing products and way things compete, I’m going to CPG for some weird reason, everybody views it as these two items are similar so they compete with each other.
A lot of times you will lose important dimensions of value because you’re not really truly understanding all the different things that could do this job for this person. Quora needs to be acutely aware, like Bob said, they’re competing with a phone call between the three of us, or the two of us.
Doug: Yeah.
Chris: They’re competing with an e-mail that I send out to 10 of my friends and I say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. What you think about this?” I mean there are a million ways you can go and get information.
If you’re just looking at LinkedIn Questions Answers and Yahoo! Answers, those are my two big competitors. I need to compete with them on features and we need to be developing faster than them. That’s a dangerous road to go down. You’re really narrowing your scope.
Bob: The key is not that you want to compete with e-mail but the reality is, “Where are they using e-mail and it’s not working? Why is it not working? What else would they consider? What would be a better choice?”
It’s finding those moments of struggling that’s the key. The thing is most people say, “Well, it’s too broad. We can’t compete with Microsoft Outlook.” That’s not the point. It’s finding the chink in the armor that says, “This is doing this really well and they’ve literally innovated to try to use it to do something and it’s not doing it.”
The fundamental belief is that consumers innovate all the time. We need to understand where they are struggling and their hiring thing and it’s not doing the job. But they didn’t expect it to do the job in the first place.
Chris: I’m glad you made that point of clarification. The other thing I think that’s important to point out, ongoing little bit off-topic though, I think it’s also possible for Quora to develop themselves into the same quandary that LinkedIn might be in right now if they decide to compete directly with LinkedIn.
Bob brought up the important aspect of, the questions that are posted on LinkedIn feel really pitchy all the time. “Who knows about CRM?” Then people pile on. The same thing as possible, If LinkedIn would decide to say, “Hey, we got all these people contributing and answering questions. Why don’t we become the next business profile website?”
It’s very possible for them to end up in the same place where, “Now I have everybody participating on Quora really populating their profiles and making that a powerful page.” Then you’ve connected things in people’s minds as far as, “Hey, I can go spam this community now. Now that everybody can see my information on Quora, why don’t I pull some questions that are really tightly related to exactly what I’m selling and seed the community that way?”
You could see the quality of the Quora question-and-answer community deteriorate drastically if they ended up in that same spot. I just think that’s another important thing to think about.
Doug: Okay. We have time really for one more question. I guess what I wanted to throw out there is, going back to Quora and LinkedIn, would it be okay for you guys to share with us what is the job that Quora is getting done for you personally? And, in which one of those two are you more engaged? Are you spending more time in LinkedIn or are you spending more time in Quora?
Chris: Go ahead, Bob.
Bob: To me, LinkedIn, I hire it for very different reasons than answering questions. There’s a couple of platforms for me. One is it’s just about seeing what’s happening in my professional network. I’m on LinkedIn probably more than I am on Facebook or any other platform. Just trying to see what’s going on? What’s moving? What are people reading? What people in my network are reading? It’s the pulse of my network.
At the same time, there are one or two forums which are groups that I will interact with, and to be honest, they’re more hobby-based. One is the Robust Design Engineering one and it’s more that I have a lot of experience in that area and I want to share. It’s more where I will answer questions there than I will post anything.
Quora on the other hand is if I want to be able to help refine my idea. I’m hiring it to help me make my ideas better. I’m putting things out there. I find that I get better, more professional answers, more thought-provoking answers from Quora.
I have probably hired LinkedIn twice with questions and I just feel like I’m getting sale guys answering me. I have literally fired it for anything where I’m trying to develop an idea or get some background on something. Quora seems to be so much more genuine. People aren’t trying to sell me, they’re genuinely trying to help. It’s not really good to say it that way.
Doug: I can echo that same, with regards to LinkedIn I think I’m pretty close as well. I think I am most active actually in a group of professionals that are all cigar smokers, jJust because I own another business in that space.
My interaction there is, I will say, pretty sales pitchy. So people are asking questions and I’m throwing my answer in and I’m not expecting a whole lot of really powerful dialogue going back and forth. I am participating just because I think people are reading it and pulling it off.
Quora on the other hand, I will say I am more of an “answerer” than I am an “asker.” So people will have pretty specific Jobs-To-Be-Done questions about execution and theory and that sort of thing. I will participate in that. It does the job of shaping up ideas for me just because I have to formulate what I think is a clear and reasonable answer to these people’s questions that always forces me to challenge my way of thinking as I answer.
I will say that I have lot higher expectation with Quora. I know when I post, people are going to pick apart. They’re going to write back with something either challenging it or adding to it.
Bob: Right.
Doug: It really is powerful from that idea shaping aspect.
Bob: It’s a higher standard. It’s almost like if you put too simple of a question out there, “Okay, I’m going to get lambasted for that.” It’s almost like you’re going to your peer group at Quora where I think the other one is more like a subgroup of some sort. I can’t, it’s not easy to articulate.
The whole notion is that, “Wat I do before LinkedIn and Quora?” It was either e-mail are because I am dyslexic, it’s all phone calls. To me it usually was one-on-one conversations with people about these things. Now, literally, what Quora has done has allowed me to vet an idea and have 50 conversations in a couple of days, where I could never do that.
Doug: Yeah.
Bob: It’s very, very efficient and also the people out there that I would never be able to get on the phone. It’s widened your ability to get perspective faster. It’s faster and easier in which to vet ideas. It’s very, very powerful.
Doug: Well, Bob, I know you’re going for a hard wrap-up here because of our time considerations.
Bob: Yeah.
Doug: I just want to throw in, before we sign off, Bob and I had a pretty interesting conversation early this morning about how Red Bull is competing with… I’m sorry, not Red Bull, 5-hour ENERGY® drink is competing with coffee, and how those jobs are shaping up. We might have a topic for next week’s Re-Wired Podcast. I just wanted to throw that teaser out there for all of the.…
Bob: Yeah, I think it’s a good example. So next week let’s plan to talk about how 5-hour ENERGY® is literally going to the places where people struggle to drink their coffee or something else to get that energy. Literally, they have snuck in and stole share from what most people would say are outside the category. Well, they’re not coffee, it’s outside the coffee category and it’s in the drink category.
Literally they found places where people struggle. They literally have come up with a solution and they are now positioning to find other jobs it can do it. It’s very, very interesting.
I think that should be our next topic next time.
Doug: Yeah, I totally look forward to it and if anybody actually wants to follow us and keep these conversations going, definitely stop by Quora and type in “Jobs-To-Be-Done” and you’ll get the Jobs-To-Be-Done theory group, which is actually growing quite progressively, pretty fast.
They can always follow Bob on Twitter at “innovative Bob“, that’s one of your Twitter accounts, and they can follow Chris at “@chriscbs” on Twitter. I am @douglascrets on Twitter.
And folks, you could always go to the ReWiregroup.com and follow our blog and also look up information on Jobs-To-Be-Done theory and some of the innovative stuff that Bob and his group is doing in Detroit.
Bob: Yeah.
Doug: With that we’ re going to close… Go ahead, Bob.
Bob: Doug, just that the one that I tweet most on is @bmoesta is the one that I do most. So I don’t do much at InnovativeBob.
Doug: Okay, forget that InnovativeBob. It’s at @bmoesta. Right?
Bob: Thank you, yep. Thank you. Sorry
Doug: Okay. Well, thank you, guys, and we’ll be looking forward to that 5-hour ENERGY® drink versus coffee discussion next week. they’ve hired it
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Image via CrunchBase
One of the great joys in sifting through the social networks in search of meaningful discussion partners is the arrival at a great resource for a specific subject area. I found that in Cody Boardman, a sales specialist I discovered in a conversation group in Facebook. Putting out compelling content often brings compelling people into the fray, and this was the case with Cody, whom you can follow on Google+. Put him in your circles.
Cody and I exchanged a few messages, but this particular message stood out for me, before I have even had a chance to talk to him in great detail. I wanted to know how he viewed sales, because the Jobs to be Done theory suggests that sales is not a solution pushing system. It’s about finding opportunities within problems that consumers / customers experience.
Perfect for a sales person, and something that seems an inherent part of the sales function.
Cody proved me right. He is able to solve problems, and find opportunities. He’s not there just to complete an equation of Boss needs this + Well, i got this, do you want it = We’ll buy it. He tells me in this message that sales is really about finding out the Why behind a purchasing decision, and filling in the blanks with meaningful opportunities linked to the product being sold — AS THEY RELATE to the business that will be using it.
I’m a sales person by trade so let me break my response to your post down in two ways (again):
Professionally, I sell various analytic solutions to marketers now but have sold in other industries the last eleven years. In present context at Webtrends I help solve problem in SEM, site/social/mobile analytics, custom dashboards for executives etc… it’s in this space that I find people working on initiatives (all the above) with little more for a business case than their ‘gut’ and a handful of soft business requirements driving them. This goes for the ma/pa boutique all the way up to the global brands. It’s magical when someone can effectively answer the question ‘why’ as in why they are engaging in a project/initiative etc…
Personally, I listen to people from all walks and talks of life. Bodybuilders, Powerlifters, husbands and wives, men and women, Christians, Mormons, Buddhists etc… the ‘channels’ are most often in-person and via Facebook but I’ve spent a lot of time conversing in forums and a couple of blogs too. My experience, regardless of the context is that when a specific objective is set, one that is based off fact and not opinion initially, is most likely to achieve the goal/resolution etc… When it’s an organic discussion, that’s good for personal conversation but horrible for anything originating from a person with an agenda/point, one that was not well stated enough that people could ‘get it’.
If I had to establish a specialty, it’s in getting people who know they want to get from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ but don’t know in many cases ‘why’ beyond “My boss said this is where we need to go” even when their boss is also (and secretly) unsure why too. I’ve worked in various capacities (some as an interviewer others as a problem solver) with the General Counsel, Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Compliance Officer’s, VPs of Audit etc… of some of the worlds biggest companies (Kraft, Cargill, Alcatel-Lucent, Yahoo, Apple, Kodak etc…).
A sales person is a person looking for specialty in what he does, but also he is someone looking for the meaningful touch points that consumers experience in their emotional experience in the world.
Cody is an excellent conversationalist, and if you have the chance to engage with him on these social networks, including the comments on this blog, you will find that he’s very good at teasing out ideas by offering feedback, stories and suggestions.
Consummate sales!
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Wahooly Logo, company created by Dana Severson
If you have not heard about Wahooly yet, you will. It is the first “social” incubator to use the registering of quality followers as a strategy to help startups build brand value and equity. The company launches its initiative tomorrow at midnight.
What does it do? Users trade their social influence to act like beta users for new startups. At exit, there is a conversion strategy that will convert that particpation and influence-sharing into equity that is paid out at the company’s exit. An example from the Wahooly web site.
Let’s say that a new socially-driven photo sharing service is in need of initial users. They would contact Wahooly. We would ask them a series of questions, determine their potential in the marketplace and negotiate a percentage of equity that they’ll provide to these initial users.
Once the details have been ironed out, we send the opportunity for you to check out. If you like it, you signup. If you don’t like it, you do nothing and wait for the next one.
For the sake of the example, let’s say you liked it.
Now, this new startup offered up 5% equity for 5,000 users. That means that you, along with 4,999 other users all own an equal share of that 5%. Not too shabby for simply signing up.
What if you wanted a bigger piece of that pie?
As a shareholder, you hold the key to how much of that 5% you own. These startups are looking for active users, but more importantly, users that are willing to become advocates for their brand. So, using our secret formula (aka: a real geeked-out algorithm), we track how big of a brand advocate you are. This is real-time tracking that you can monitor at any time by accessing your personal dashboard on Wahooly.com.
Your dashboard will provide you with the latest information on all of the startups you have a share of, along with your piece of pie. (Tracking it will be your new addiction.)
How did the team at Wahooly come to this conclusion and what did they do to shift the company’s offering to do this? The story line is interesting. We pick this journey up at the Wahooly Google+ page. Through trial and error, the Wahooly team learns, or decides, that “numbers of users” is really not that useful to a new company. It’s actually the quality of the users.
Version two came together about the time that a Minnesota business plan competition (MN Cup) was accepting entries. We submitted a plan that essentially did the same thing as version one, however we incorporated the notion of social sharing. In other words, if you signed up, you became part of an equity pool. But, you could increase your portion of the equity by sharing it online. Again, there was a problem with the idea. The notion that sharing is valuable is based on the assumption that influence can truly be measured by RTs and follows. We’re not convinced. By the way, we never made it past round one of the competition. What a shame.
It wasn’t until a bit later that we realized that we weren’t actually proposing to deliver users at all, in fact, that really isn’t all that valuable to companies. I mean, ultimately, that’s what they become, but our value proposition is that we’re delivering acceleration via advocates. It’s a quality not quantity equation. We needed to build a system to bring the best out of influencers, which is what most companies struggle with. The key was the power of combined influence, which is how trends begin.
Most worthwhile companies get a fair amount of tweets, mentions, posts, etc., but the tipping point is when those actions can occur concurrently and repetitively. In general, there is little sustainability when it comes to brand advocacy in users, attention is fleeting. Just like in traditional advertising, messages need to be repeated before actions are taken. What we’re talking about is delivering 1,000 mentions over a single day rather than over a year. And then repeating that behavior.
In the end, we decided that, we’re not delivering users, we’re delivering acceleration in the market.
Image via Wikipedia
The Wahooly post doesn’t say how they got to this idea. That’s the thing we would want to know, since that would tell us something about how their values found a sweet spot in the market, in a place where there was non-consumption. we know the place of non-consumption. It’s in the place where they realize there is a quality vs. quantity differential that is not being taken advantage of. But what was the feedback?
We’re not into guessing here, but understanding this will tell us something about the value that went into this equation to come up with this ingenious idea.
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There have been incredible changes to knowledge frameworks in social media, and one of them has been the development of a trend that pushes knowledge away from a static site operated by a company or an indvidual to a social platform that is geared towards conversation and sharing.
Chris Spiek, a partner at the Re-Wired Group, has created a topic area in the Q&A site Quora for Jobs-to-be-Done Theory and it’s starting to thrive, with 11 answers and more than 20 followers.
Visit the Quora topic for more information about how people actively use Jobs-to-be-Done Theory to manage innovations and find opportunities in areas of non-consumption ( and more ) in different industry verticals.
Quora connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new content and share content from the web. We organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you.
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Zynga, the company that brought Facebook users Farmville, spent $120 million on marketing in 2011, inside the world’s biggest self-service marketing platform.
Efferman Ezzel looks at why Zynga should be focused on why and how their users play social games and not on how to use more marketing dollars to keep them engaged. As new user retention numbers slip, Zynga has started spending $300 — or losing $150 — for every user to marketing costs.
I had asked him earlier this weekend, why would any company spend that much money per user, or any money at all, re-socializing the marketing in an already social system?
He writes:
Why is Zynga spending that much money to market a “social game”, and why are they spending that much money to market a “social game” on Facebook? I believe they’re doing it for two reasons: 1) because they don’t understand why new user retainment is falling (why user growth is plateauing, why there’s a low conversion rate of users who become paying customers, why new user engagement is shrinking), and 2) because they assume increasing Zynga’s market presence will assure new user retainment upon trying their games. As was said in the Edge Magazine article, “The really hardcore [players] are, perhaps, finding themselves trying FarmVille, Castle World and CityVille. The newer audiences are trying and finding that this is all the same and leaving”. It is obvious Zynga needs to redirect their focus from new user retainment to new useradaptability, because they appear to be approaching user retainment from the same understanding they had when user growth skyrocketed, and that was when it was attached to the rapid growth Facebook experienced.
Zynga was supposed to be a dramatic re-imagining of gaming. Social and baked into the world’s largest social graph platform, Zynga offerings seemed like a capstone on any problems that might have been created when a new gaming company had to tackle distribution.
Image via Wikipedia
But the one constant thing about Facebook is that user expectations of what it does for them will change. And that’s without even factoring in that Facebook itself changes all the time.
A gaming company like Zynga that depends on Facebook is going to be out in the cold. And it looks like they have been.
Read more of Ezell’s post to find out what he thinks the company should be doing. Basically, find out what has changed for users. I would put a finer point on it. Find data, take down some narrative, and use the Jobs-to-be-done approach to find out what is causing non-consumption inside Facebook. Is there non-consumption within Facebook, in general?
Facebook Suscribe Button and the Rise of Streamed Feeds
My hunch is that Facebook users are becoming much more interested in using Facebook as a platform for understanding the real world and the world around them.
I have 18,646 subscribers to my public Facebook feed. Many of these people are people outside of the United States. They want a look into someone else’s life.
Facebook is moving away from a platform will you will have fun with friends. It’s trying to fashion itself into the place where each individual is a media hub for publishers and advertisers. It’s challenging every company it can think of, from Google and it’s Google+ offering, to Yahoo! Search and branded content.
As it moves in that direction, say goodbye to Farmville. That experience is way too static. It’s not real. And it doesn’t keep people interested or engaged in finding new people with different lives.
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Today Apple came out with a slew of new technology products for education. They will surely do more to provoke change, if they don’t do enough to help teachers improve their impact on children’s lives.
I had only one really big bone to pick with TechCrunch writer Matt Burns, who argued that iPads have no relevancy for teaching things like math or sentence structure
Image via Wikipedia
.
He misses the point, and I say so in this radio broadcast, where I argue that it’s never been the case that tech was supposed to teach. Teachers teach. Educators will always be the deciding factor in a child’s learning curve, not the technology. Quit making it about the technology.
More radio rants and musings to come via the Douglas Crets Flipzu channel.
Others on Google+ have made similar arguments that it’s the teaching and the way we use technology that matters. This great discussion about whether the iBooks 2 launch will be cumbersome reveals that people are using ebooks differently. It also points out that our understanding of school is a structural one. We are never that concerned with the meaning being created in school. We are always focused on how it’s done.
That’s because when we were younger, I would bet that 80% of our learning was spent learning how to exist in the education system.
My argument with tech innovations in education is that tech innovations will free all of us up to do what we want to do in education, and find the sources of our own learning, which is a hybrid of ourselves, our teachers, our communities, and the things we are passion about.
Ready to start learning? Credit to Steve Kovach and David Brennan for a great Google+ discussion.
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Vadim Lavrusik, the journalist ambassador at Facebook, today pointed to a well curated media expereience that focuses on the #SOPA fiasco.
I think the curation was a great idea, but I have concerns about how Facebook manages curation and how it organizes search to find curation.
Right now, Vadim and I are talking this out in a comment thread on his profile, but I want to take my points and put them here.
This is what I expect if I am seeking a curated moment in media. Notice that my comments evolve in to ideas about how Facebook could be better at search, what I believe to be a key component to curation. How will you find what you need to find?
There are several expectations that I have as an audience or a participant in curated themes, news, items, or content:
1. Relevancy: is it easy for me to discern at what point in time this is relevant? Was this from an age ago? Is this now? Is this later? (Search rears its head here, because Search allows me to filter backwards in time in some cases)
2. Is the content meaningful? Curation handles his well.
3. Structurally, is it easy for me to identify that the curated media is about the theme? Or, is it about the curator? In Facebook, it’s usually about the person filtering, because things are classified primarily by personal identity. The ticker highlights both the person curating and the comments around the curation, but not often the thing curated. Notifications serve to deliver people to a person so that people are constantly reinforcing a personal connection. I believe this is the marketing language around much of Timeline when Mark Zuckerberg spoke at F8, and later.
4. My other expectation is that I can constantly visit a theme or a curated idea. In FB, I find that hard to do. I can’t — here is search again — go back to a specific point in time easily. I don’t know where to look. If I had a search capability that would allow me to input “theme” and find the themes, rather than the people, being discussed I would have an easier time locating a curated experience. Facebook actually doesn’t have to choose
Image via Wikipedia
between being about people or being about media content. If they are trying to make people in to remote controls for video and TV content, or music content, or if they are trying to make people hubs for publishing legacies, then they need to find a way to blend it so that it can be approached form both sides of the fence. You are doing really well at being a marketer for the journalists who need an audience. This will eventually pull much of the media content from legacy publishing platforms into Facebook. But the experience and the “searching” for that experience is disorderly.
Right now, I found out about SOPA curating through you. You are a person. Unless you are on some robotic schedule I can’t depend on any person to consistently deliver me to the right thing every time. But if I search for it, I will find it every time. IF it’s set up to be searched.
And Lavrusik responds, roundly, with a good point, though I don’t think I am missing the point. My point is that the average user may not know these expectations because they are not given the ability to experience the result of having them. Says Lavrusik:
You’re missing one of the big points here. Much of the discovery happens through people you’re connected to and not search…for the average user. You’re not the average user, so it’s important to remember how the average user interacts with content. It’s usually not the same way we do
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An MBA grad might look at the retail business and define success as increasing revenue, decreasing overhead, eliminating cost overruns, etc. The casual observer might even look at stories about the decline of retail and make the judgement that online is beating offline to death simply by offering price satisfaction and ease of use.
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It turns out that maybe these are not entirely clear lines in the sand. We have had a series of conversations online and offline with some retailers, consumers and analysts, and we have created a collection of interesting perspectives on the jobs that retail (online and offline) get done for people.
It turns out that success will come to retail box stores and even retail online through the practice of relevancy, something that online media does well and that retailers everywhere are learning how to deliver.
In the offline world, relevancy is the emotional core of choice. It’s like content, but it’s normally delivered through people. It’s subtle. It’s based on a gentle push and pull of asking questions and seeking answers.
What relevancy in shopping does is it shifts the job of retail shopping from one of just getting a product to one of resolving an emotional “why.” We found this out by asking people about their experiences.
We asked Quora members following the Jobs-to-Be-Done Approach what was missing in the current retail experience in big box bricks and mortar stores, and we found two great answers. I also talked to Alexandra Mysoor, co-founder and CEO of online retailer Generation Orange, an online-only retail store for natural products.
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Angry commenters get a lot of air time, and they can drain you. But what if you are looking for just smart and helpful people?
Imagine if you could conduct a global search for anyone commenting on anything in any comment field on any blog or web site with a content engine built into it. Imagine if you are not looking to have an argument about baseball or truffles, but you are actually looking to start a business, or figure out a line of code?
Can you do that by trawling through the billions of comments on the web? Maybe you will soon.
Type in your search query in a search box, and then suddenly you see all of the people who have commented on, say, “education.” You not only see who said what, or where they said it, but you also see the commenting context around it.
It’s coming. William Mougayar has created the beta test for this in engag.io. And it’s remarkably prescient design, as it focuses on what I believe will be the central task of web engagement in the next few years — finding experts you know you want to know, but whom you don’t know you know.
I interviewed him today to figure out what is going on with engag.io. In short, they are soon to move from beta to something more global, though specifics are scant. What I can say is that he’s the inspiration for my thoughts here. I include some writing about what we talked about, and at the end I tack on a Q&A I sent him.
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