This isn’t a movie review, although I will talk about the movie “The Social Network” that came out last weekend.

Instead, in this short post I argue that everybody reading this post – and just about everybody who works in the interactive media and technology industries – ought to go out and see this movie in a hurry. “The Social Network” does for the internet biz what “Pretty Woman” did for prostitution.

It’s a terrific flick (take a date and save dinner for after so you can talk about it), but the other reason to see “The Social Network” is that this movie will define for the next decade how the rest of the world sees us, the people who make a living building and placing and optimizing websites and apps and display ads and emails and platforms of all sorts. The fact that the movie isn’t accurate doesn’t matter (there are abundant articles within easy reach of Google on this, so I won’t go into the details here): he who tells the best story wins, and this is a great story.

But it’s not a flattering portrait—more like the elementary school picture that still makes you cringe when you see it decades later.

Directed by the always-ominous David Fincher and with the trademark “Warning: You Must be a Mensa Candidate to Watch this Movie” rapid-fire dialog and crystalline structure of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, “The Social Network” paints Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as an arrogant and brilliant software engineer who effortlessly leads other geeks but can’t talk with a girl. The movie Zuckerberg doesn’t care about money yet steals the idea for Facebook from two rich jerks, improves it, lies about stealing it, builds Facebook with his best friend, later doesn’t hesitate to screw the best friend out of the company and gets sued by all the aggrieved parties. I saw the movie with my wife and she found the movie Zuckerberg somewhat sympathetic, whereas I had an easier time feeling good about Humbert Humbert, the unapologetic pedophile in Nabokov’s “Lolita.”

For those of us who has seen the real Mark Zuckerberg interviewed on stage or monitor (the hoodie, the discomfort) Jesse Eisenberg’s physical impression is spookily dead on. The movie Zuckerberg is not amoral or immoral—he just has a different moral code than most people, one that Nietzsche would have found cozy. This is the movie story about digital entrepreneurs that will define them for years. Justin Timberlake does a star turn as Napster-co-founder and Facebook Pied Piper Sean Parker, a vintage bizdev guy with a rolodex and no conscience. This too will stick.

The fortunes of the movie geek have improved over the decades. From Spaz in “Meatballs” to the entire cast of “Revenge of the Nerds” to Matthew Broderick in “War Games” and Val Kilmer in “Real Genius.” Up until now geeks have been socially awkward but moral, plagued by a compulsive curiosity that can lead them into bad decisions but willing to fix the problems they create. Not so with the movie Zuckerberg. This geek leaves bodies in his rear-view mirror and doesn’t slow down, but does so while building Facebook, the addictively engaging platform that many have open 24/7/365.

How the movie Zuckerberg defines a new kind of geek comes through most clearly in one of the films tag lines: “Punk, Genius, Billionaire.” When I saw that tag on a poster in the theater I thought, “Punk? Arthur Fonzarelli and Danny Zuko were punks. Sid Vicious was a punk. But… Mark Zuckerberg?” But if “punk” means somebody who lives outside the normal social order and pressures that order by being compelling and different, then maybe the label fits.

“Pretty Woman” came out in 1990. Five years later we saw “Leaving Las Vegas.” By this logic, we won’t see another movie about the internet biz this good until 2015, so go see “The Social Network.” And the next time you have to explain to civilians what you do for a living, remember that “The Social Network” is probably the ruler they’ll use to measure you.

[This blog is moving to www.bradberens.com in the coming weeks, so stay tuned and get ready to change your RSS feeds, if you have 'em.]

We’re now just over a month out from our San Francisco show and I’m excited about the changes we’re rolling out for our biggest show and the biggest show in the industry. In this post I’m going to do two things: 1) Tell you about how to save some money on the Conference and the Expo; 2) brag a little about the changes.

Save Money!

Register for a Full Conference Pass by the end of Friday, March 19, and you’ll save $200 over what you’ll pay later. If you’re just going to the Expo, register now and it’s FREE, but on the 20th it will be $50, and onsite it will be $100.

Kinda hard to argue with FREE, huh?

You can register here for ad:tech San Francisco.

So What’s New?

If you look over the Conference Agenda, you’ll see a lot of changes, including our new Marketing Masters series that do a two-hour dive into top of mind interactive channels and best practices.

Eight of the Marketing Masters series have a new component, which is a relationship with the Expo floor that includes a walking tour and also on-floor theater presentations from relevant exhibitors.

You’ll also see a lot of exciting new changes on the Expo Floor, including an “Innovation Alley,” and an “App Exchange” that will fight tooth and nail with the Conference for your attention.

And we’re throwing a party! This year ad:tech, SF/BIG and the SF AMA have joined forces to throw a party in Moscone Center immediately after the Tuesday closing keynote by Board Member Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer and Lori Schwartz of the IPG Emerging Media Lab—please join us!

Another significant change is that we have no panels at ad:tech. Instead, we have a series of single speaker presentations focusing on trends, statistics, case studies and best practices, with barstools on stage for people to sit on after they’ve presented.

We also have more sessions with a single speaker doing a deep dive on a relevant topic – Mediasmith’s David L. Smith on understanding digital metrics, for example – and when this happens we’ve programmed a “First Respondent” who will both introduce the speaker and run a 10-minute interview followed by audience Q&A after the speaker’s talk.

Our ad:tech Conference has always had fantastic speakers who have generously shared their time and insights. We’ve created these new structures to give our speakers better ways to shine and our attendees better opportunities to learn and to network.

See you there!

It takes moments to install and makes it easy to concentrate on the thing you’re reading by silencing the noise trying to block out the signal.

Here’s the best part: unlike many other plugins that seek to block online ads out of dislike for ads (and a short-sighted lack of understanding about how websites earn enough money to create content), Readability doesn’t wipe all ads from your experience– it just suppresses them when you’re highly engaged with the content.

While you’re navigating through a website, looking for something to read, letting your mind hummingbird around the monitor looking for a spot to alight, you’ll see all the ads. Only once you’ve decided to read the article do the distractions disappear.

Will advertisers still dislike it? Sure. Will some publishers? Yeah.

Tough. I love this plugin.

Take a look.

By the way: Arc90, the creators of Readability, just went high on my to-meet list.

Dear Jeff,

I’m a fan, a BIG fan, both of you and of Amazon.com. Want specifics? I got the very first Kindle and later the Kindle Dx. Love ‘em, and sometimes buy the same book in digital AND hardcover formats… both from Amazon. I’m a Prime member and think it’s the best $79.00 I spend each year. I prefer to buy mp3s via Amazon over iTunes, bought-and-downloaded the entire second season of Mad Men through your Unbox interface to watch on plane rides. I could go on, but I won’t, because I want to get to the point of this letter quickly.

Jeff, I’m begging you to create an Amazon Tip Jar that happy Amazon customers like me can use to reward the independent bookstores that Amazon is, quite simply and inarguably, killing dead dead dead. “Tip,” here means both the “ooooh, thanks for the recommendation” sort of tip and also the “here’s a few bucks for good service” tip. Your doing ths will be good for the Amazon brand, good for the world, the right thing to do, and technologically easy– combining your existing Associates program and Gift Card program.

Why should you do this? Here’s one story that, I hope, will make my point.

My guilty moment
About a year ago I was chatting with the proprietors at The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood, California (wonderful place: you ought to visit, here’s a map), where over the years I’ve happily spent a lot of money and, more importantly, received a ton of high-quality, personalized book recommendations that trump the “Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” advice from your ecommerce algorithms.

On this fateful day, the nice lady at the register suggested Gregg Hurwitz’s terrific mystery “The Crime Writer” and made it sound fascinating (it is!).

I could have spend $14.00 plus tax right there in the store, but instead I covertly checked my Kindle, found it and later bought it on that platform for $9.99. Why? My Kindle was relatively new, and I wanted to see if I could fall into a mystery on that platform (yup, sure could).

But man, I felt guilty. Later, after I finished The Crime Writer, I wanted to give the folks at The Mystery Bookstore a reward, a bounty, if you will, for such a great recommendation. I wanted to hand them $5 — yes, the book is THAT good — but I didn’t, in part because I couldn’t face the perp walk of shame to the register to confess that I took their recommendation and bought it for the Kindle, and in part because I couldn’t imagine what they would DO with five bucks. There’s no “random money” entry in most cash registers, and many people would simply pocket the money rather than have to figure out what to do with it.

Jeff, help me assuage my guilt!
You can solve this problem: with an Amazon Tip Jar I could decide to reward The Mystery Bookstore later by sending them a thank you tip for the Hurwitz tip. All I’d need to do is click on the “Send a Tip!” link at Amazon.com, enter the email address or physical address of the tip-receiver, choose my dollar amount, and then go through the usual, expedient Amazon buying process.

This would be entirely voluntary for the customer — which means it might fail — but tipping at restaurants is voluntary and most of us do it.

If I browse a copy of Michael J. Mauboussin’s “Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition” (it’s on my Amazon wish list) at the local independent bookstore and later choose to save $10.18 by buying it through Amazon, I could send $1.99 — the cost of an episode of most TV shows at Amazon or iTunes — as a tip to the local shop… that means I still save $8.19, which is a lot.

Think of the positive brand exposure for Amazon! You could even make actual little glass jars that a store could have next to the register with signs that read, “Tip Jar: See something here that you’re gonna buy from Amazon? Tips appreciated!” and have the store’s email address on the jar. And it doesn’t need to be limited to bookstores (although that’s what started me down this chain of thought): if a blogger represents a book, I could say thank you. If a speaker at a conference mentions a book and I buy it, I could say thank you.

Nobody would respect a $1.99 gift certificate, but a tip? Who wouldn’t smile at that and think, “gosh, that’s nice… thanks!”

Amazon is the undisputed king of ecommerce, the cradle of the long tail, the enabler of authors to get their books in front of people in a hurry, but what Amazon doesn’t do well is have a real-time conversation… the one when how the customer’s eyes light up while she talks about one book sparks another title in the mind of the merchant. Independent bookstore owners do that very  well. You can help keep them around.

Please think about it.

Sincerely from a fan and loyal Amazon customer,

Brad Berens

Today’s guest post comes from Don E. Schultz of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and Agora, Inc.

Universally acknowledged as the father of integrated marketing communications, here’s what Don has to say on this week’s topic:

****************************************************
Sorry I’m late in responding but have been struggling to develop a clever and witty response. Unfortunately, my muse is out this week (she’s busy unloading my GM and Chrysler bonds in Iceland), so I will respond on my own.

I agree with you, Doug and John… that is, it may be a better use of time to read widely and in other areas than simply trying to find the nuggets in the published business books.

There are some very good reasons for the level of business books we have available.  Here’s my speculation o why they’re like they are.

As Doug has said, in order to generate sales, business strategy books have to be simple and have some sort of whiz-bang mnemonic, i.e., the infamous 4Ps or Positioning or Porter’s five forces.  If the book is too sophisticated, with some really good ideas, concepts and approaches, many will extensively quote passages from the text but few will (a) have read it, (b) know what it means or (c) have any idea on how to apply it in their own organization.

So, if the question is:  Do business strategy books really help improve business or organizations or even the reader? I suspect not.  I think that is particularly true for those toiling in the interactive vineyards.  We have to remember that almost all existing businesses have been built on three pillars.

1. A group of assembled functional silos that often don’t work together very well
2. A business model based on a supply chain: i.e., find a way to sell what the organization makes or does. Customers are of interest only in terms of what can be extracted from them
3. The primary goal is to provide short-term returns for investors; i.e., the 90 day financial model

Given these three elements, interactivity is a problem.  It doesn’t fit the executive’s background, training or current situation.  Therefore, most business strategy books are designed to create incremental change in the existing business model, not to provide transformational change to a new approach.  Interactivity and all the things that go with it are an anathema to current business leaders who simply want to keep the silos happy, manage the logistical chain and generate short term profits… then, head off into retirement, with a well feathered nest, to work on their golf game.

The one thing business strategy books do, however, is keep people employed in publishing, printing and distribution.  In today’s economic climate, that’s probably not all bad.

In reflecting back on the business strategy books I have read, scanned, perused, flipped through or whatever, over the years, I’ve found the following.

1. Most of the content is generally common sense. That’s what many of Peter Drucker’s concepts were; i.e, a company is built to generate and hold on to customers.  The only thing he did was put the concepts in a way that seemed relevant, important and quotable.  Most of Drucker’s musings are as — or perhaps more — important today than when he wrote them 50 years ago.  The problem is:  few managers have the gumption or capability to implement them because of the three factors noted above.  Thus, not as much has come from his work as should have… with the exceptions of selected quotes used as chapter headings in strategy books.
2. The basic ideas of most business books, including strategy, is in the first three chapters.  For the most part, after Chapter 3 the books become, not just turgid, but, in too many cases, appalling. The concepts may be fine but the implementation is simply not there.  Again, when you’re stuck with an outbound-only business model, it’s hard to think very creatively.  It’s like the well recognized industry titans who want to teach at the university but find they only have enough content for a couple of lectures.  There really isn’t any magic bullet in terms of describing a good business plan.  The challenge is in implementing it and making it work.  The problem is: the basic principles are no longer relevant.  Customers are now in control, the marketplace is dynamic, markets are not linear, they’re networked, and I can’t see the smokestacks of my competitors if they’re in India or China– so I don’t know what they’re doing.  In this type of situation, incremental change isn’t the answer and that’s what most business strategy books are about.
3. Most of the business strategy books that succeed are successful because we, as readers, agree with the views of the authors.  They have said what we’d like to say, but haven’t or didn’t.  So, we like their ideas because they fit with our own, and so we quote them and advocate for them.  Or, we write blurbs for the jacket covers because we like to see our names in print, too.  Just look at all the quotes at the end of every email. The problem? When we agree with the authors, we’re generally agreeing to incremental, not break-through thinking.
4. No revolutionary business strategy book will ever be published.  It can’t because the publishers don’t think it will sell.  Let’s face it, publishers are in business to sell books, not to provide for the common good.  Publishers won’t touch a book if it is radical in its views or unique in its approaches anymore than you can get an academic journal article published through the peer review journal process if it challenges the existing literature.  We’re comfortable with things we know and uncomfortable with things we don’t know or haven’t experienced.  That’s why you see many of the posts, blogs, comments, articles and reports on the interactive marketplace focused on how to use the new forms of communication to solve or resolve the same old outbound only problems, i.e., how to get people to pay attention to your email blast.    As a result, we keep plowing the same ground year after year, with new graphics and perhaps a few new cliches.

In all the books I have read in the past few years, the only one that really stands out is “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” by CK Prahalad. It gave me a view of a world I’ve never really experienced.  And, for that, it was worthwhile.  The problem is, the topic represents about 80% of the world’s market, but I don’t see business people rushing to get into those markets. It doesn’t fit the business model they are committed to following.  If I were a business manager, could I implement some of Pralahad’s ideas?   A few have but for the most part, managers stick to established markets with known competitors, trying to sell to people just like themselves.

In looking back at this note, I realize I didn’t really answer your question.  Do all business strategy books suck?  If you’re committed to a traditional business model, they likely provide some incremental benefit.  If you think the world needs to be changed, i.e., interactivity and dynamic models, probably not.  But, in writing this response, I did answer some of my own questions.  That likely will be beneficial to me in the long run, but I’m not sure it will help anyone else.

In summary, thanks for the venting facility.  Hope this helps you and others.  It certainly helped clear my own mind.

****************************************************

More to come on this, and please join the party! Weigh in at will with comments and additions both here and on Twitter.

]]> http://mediavorous.com/archives/bizstratbooks-contd-4/feed 0 http://mediavorous.com/archives/bizstratbooks-contd-3 http://mediavorous.com/archives/bizstratbooks-contd-3#comments Mon, 04 May 2009 17:41:55 +0000 Brad Berens http://mediavorous.com/?p=576 The story so far (skip this paragraph if you already know): Last week, Brian Reich threw down a challenge about all business strategy books sucking, to which I replied, set up the Twitter hashtag #bizstratbooks, and additionally asked a few friends who read everything to comment. The first respondent was Accuquote’s Sean Cheyney; next was a response from Upstream Group and Upstream Habitat CEO Doug Weaver.

Our most recent addition comes from Catalyst:SF CEO and Managing General Partner John Durham:

****************************************************

Some of my favorite books are history, war strategy (several of which are so applicable to our business world today), but I do think there are many good books that are being published that address certain genres as Doug discusses.

As you look at the books in my library the majority are history and photography, and these allow me to bring those lessons/visuals to bear as I think about my business and my clients.

I read two to three books per week. While most of the business books today suck, there are usually one or two chapters that are worth the price on the Kindle or from Borders. I keep sending to my students every semester — I’ve done this for the last 17 years — a list of the 25 books that they should read in marketing/advertising over and above whatever textbook materials I assign.

Ten to 12 of these have not changed because their business-strategic relevance is pertinent even today. I sent this list to Brad about a year ago for an iMedia Connection column, and am happy to share it.

****************************************************

Note from Brad: here’s the link to John’s list.

More to come on this, and please join the party! Weigh in at will with comments and additions both here and on Twitter.

****************************************************

I’m afraid I would tend to agree with the underlying assertion.  Business strategy books do tend to suck for a couple of very logical reasons.  In order for a business book to sell well, it has to create the broadest possible audience and therefore (a) become intellectually accessible and (b) highly generalized in order to (c)reach a lowest common denominator readership that will pick it up at the airport bookstore.  It must also (d) be evergreen to preserve its shelf life, at the very time when business issues are highly time-sensitive and fluid.   Does this make business books worthless?  No, but it does challenge the reader to mine them quickly for nuggets of value and not look for overarching governing systems, as Brian Reich may have done.

There are two viable alternatives:  read lots of individual titles on the aspects of running a business (sales, operational excellence, finance, HR) and create your own strategic vision.   Or perhaps read history, architecture, individual struggle, politics and aim to bring a fresh perspective to the this whole ‘business strategy’ conversation, which frankly has become a  bit self-referential.

****************************************************

More to come on this, and please join the party! Weigh in at will with comments and additions both here and on Twitter.

Note: @kedwardson (Twitter handle for Kip Edwardson) nominated Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You as a terrific business strategy book that isn’t REALLY a business strategy book. I agree, although I think that Johnson’s Mind Wide Open is even better.

I took a big screenshot that you can find here, and here’s a sneak preview:

Kemp Obit with FB banner

This content-ad juxtaposition struck me from a surreal angle. Kemp himself probably had a BlackBerry later in his career — or an assistant who had one — and probably had heard of FaceBook, but what would his response have been to seeing such a twenty-first century ad placed next to a story about such a twentieth centure figure?

Note also the AT&T U-Verse ad at the top of the page.

Note#2: Kemp was 73, which USED to seem old.

For the inveterate readers out there, the gauntlet has been thrown down! John Durham, Don E. Schultz, Sean Cheyney, Doug Weaver, Jim Meskauskas: I’m talking to YOU… and to anybody else hearing this. What explicit business strategy books have you read lately (or ever) that were worthwhile and why were they worthwhile?

Thinking over my own reading, the books that most influence me tend to not to be strategy books either. When I used to teach writing at U.C. Berkeley, for example, I never found that books about writing were useful to my students or to me as a teacher. Instead, I preferred to use things like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as writing manuals.

There’s a reason for this: off-topic books (Tzu, McCloud) open the mind to think creatively about how to apply the lessons of one subject to a related but different topic. This is also how metaphors work: if you say “my love is a red rose” that statement doesn’t contain or transmit meaning: instead, it provokes your mind to think creatively about how your love and red foliage are similar (the philosopher Donald Davidson explained this usefully in his terrific essay, “What Metaphors Mean”).

So, the books that have most influenced how I think about the interactive media business over the last three years have been books like:

• Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, which explains how and why less can be more

• Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, which explains how the real metric for engagement requires people rather than server logs

• Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which explains the forces behind things like Wikipedia

In all three cases, the books have stimulated new thought, whereas when I tried to use David Allen’s Getting Things Done it felt like a set of prescriptions that hobbled my thinking rather than expand it.

So, here’s my question: what do you think?

I’ve created this Twitter hashtag to help us all track the conversation, if it happens: #bizstratbooks