Browsing Tag

Focus

What is Universal Search? An increase in productivity.

I know we all have been noticing a mix of images, text, news and video on our search returns from google. This is changing my life as a web user, it’s been live for months on Google and basically exposes content you may not have known you wanted to see or even existed. The real world continues to morph towards rich media with embedded videos in [tag]powerpoint[/tag] or sound, so too is the web and now it continues to get richer online thanks to [tag]Universal Search[/tag].

Universal search uses traditional text returns, but with other tagged media driving a global folksonomy which is getting more and more important/valuable for finding the RIGHT content. What are tags? Tags are not some cryptic header code or HTML syntax – its a human readable plain english way of simply explaining what something is, typically used when uploading files to [tag]YouTube[/tag] or posting to a blog. Tags are increasing the relevance of [tag]Folksonomy[/tag] and provides the web as people see it, not machines or coders.

So times they are a changing. Old world surfing is going the way of walking the stacks as the library. I put the original search inline with the Dewey Decimal system, I know it’s far more complicated than a rigid and almost incomprehensible system which required librarians to assist, but the old search just wasn’t scaling to meet the requirements of users.

So will universal search create new jobs? Probably, not just for technologist but for generalists (folksonomist). Think about it – library science is a discipline, so search has an opportunity to be a new soft science as well.

So where am I going with this? Universal search is transforming EVERYONE’s online experience from a linear browsing activity to multi-threaded surfing adventures. The other big win is the tab concept first deployed by [tag]Firefox[/tag] and now part of Internet Explorer.

Many corporations don’t yet realize the lost productivity due to not having IE 7.0 or allowing Firefox installations, I did an non-scientific exercise and I think universal search and tabs have a productivity lift of about 15%, for not good searchers – the control group was my wife it looks like perhaps even more like 20-25%, so this is low hanging fruit for many organizations since both apps are free.

A user can now conveniently tab out content from a search for rapid non-linear review/assessment leveraging multi-media search returns. This means no more do we just look at the first one, hit the back button, look at the second one, hit the back button….slow…. The other option was the only slightly more productive shift-click to pop a new window, but you then had to close windows and often got lost, a totally crowded desktop and often closed the wrong window – not fun.

We are able to get a rapid review of search returns and explore within out losing our relative location in a search initiative.

So marketers have new opportunities with universal search, but the real opportunity is for users. So go get a tabbed browser, and rss reader and welcome to the new web. What is an RSS reader – watch this video

The productivity lift by using a RSS reader is exponential.

October 6, 2007 by
(1)

MediaTemple Outage – lemons into lemonade…

I like nice companies, [tag]Media Temple[/tag] had an outage/slowdown which impacted nearly all protocols and caused time outs and unfriendly latency. Not a good thing, but up to their usual good service here is what they did:

—–Original Message—–
From: (mt) Media Temple [mailto:no-reply@mediatemple.net]
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2007 3:36 PM
To:
Subject: One month credit has been applied to your account

As per the last incident update on (mt) Media Temple‘s incident tracker system, 24 hours have passed and we have seen no further latency issues on (gs) Cluster.2

(mt) Media Temple is issuing 1 month’s credit to customers affected by this issue (INC# 285). We would like to take this opportunity to once again apologize for the unexpected access problems. We understand that our customers run web dependent businesses on our systems and that slow or inaccessible websites or email are simply unacceptable. We would also like to convey once more that this incident has spawned numerous internal reviews, new monitoring points and new adjustments to our cluster growth formulas. The primary aim for (mt) Media Temple is for this to never happen again.

We thank you for patience and your continued business.

Regards,

Demian P. Sellfors

CEO

(mt) Media Temple, Inc.

You may review the full history of the incident log at the special incident URL:

Very cool, take care of the customer – a novel thought, perhaps the customer IS always right! The other cool thing about this scenario is they proactively notified me and continuously updated me on the status – now this is good [tag]customer support[/tag]. I know I lost some revenue, but the $0.82 I would have made on google ads pales in comparison to the $40 I’m going to get.

Wait does it include the container or just the hosting – maybe it’s only the base service, thats ok too. Getting greedy is not good, but [tag]Demian Sellfors[/tag] isn’t really specific. I doubt he just blew away 1/12 of his revenue, if so he’s way cool.

October 4, 2007 by
(0)

Kill the cheerleader – improve communications

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Despite multiple people informing me to the contrary – I consider myself a man of the people, with that comes some union stewardship activities within the organization. Not a true beat people up with baseball bats union role, more of a “hey, I’m noticing “X” in the organization and blah, blah….”. Essentially I’m always willing to hint “maybe we should look at X” to management kinda guy. I know, how un-[tag]proletariat[/tag] of me – but I do think [tag]middle management[/tag] has the best position to drive change and improvement.

th-4.jpg

Nevertheless – so what is the cheerleader? It’s both a persona and a group mentality, at some point, I’ll write on the persona as part of Stuck in the Middle, but it’s the Corporate Cheer Culture which represents an erosion of corporate-wide execution and what I want to rant about today which may help middle managers be more effective and improve corporate communications.

The cheerleader mentality can easily be recognized: it’s when just doing your job – the job for which you are paid for – becomes a corporate-wide messaging platform from which senior executives send ad-hoc, real-time blackberry-driven snippets to the organization to prove who is the most transparent and dedicated member of the leadership team. Let’s put it in context of [tag]Bring it On[/tag]:

Isis: Where we come from, ‘cheer’ is not a word you hear very often…
Lava: They should call us ‘inspiration leaders’ instead.
Jenelope: Ooo, that’s deep… I like that

Often it starts with the line executive who feels the need to send a “who’s awake” message and prove that they are not really sleeping in their bed, with the initial non-global email that declares project completion at 2 am on a Saturday, which get escalated to the whole organization due to him/her having global distribution list sending rights.   The two word “GREAT JOB!!!!” [tag]email[/tag]s lack originality….

Missy: You ripped off those cheers!
Torrance Shipman: Excuse me, Missy, our cheers are 100% original. Count the trophies!
Missy: Well, your trophies are bullshit, and you’re a sadass liar.
Torrance Shipman: All right, that’s it! Get out of the car, I’m gonna kick your ass!

Communication of project accomplishments should typically remain internal to the group participants or team and leverage a more formal vehicle for corporate-wide communications to be done by the CEO or a similar GM level role.   Not all projects are worthy of corporate-wide communication, and some departments, by their nature have more “projects,” which if the communications plan and policies aren’t well managed, could ultimately suggest a preferred team over another.  For example, IT has all kinds of projects, but Collections…not so much.

Unbalanced, ad-hoc and unstructured communications to an entire organization does not solve for the “you don’t communicate enough” complaint which is never satiated by more communication – really!

Effective communication should start with middle management and be group-oriented. While not an article on general communication on a Hill and Knowlton blog, it is still an important framework to use for the “great job team” stuff, paraphrased:

  • How do you manage culture change/improvement?
  • Where are the middle managers in the communication process?
  • How can you increase your credibility as communicators and the credibility of your communication channels?
  • How can we better use measurement to bolster our communication?

If a “great job” communications plan for the whole company doesn’t address the items above, then it basically degrades to promoting and public recognition for a team which is essentially doing what they are paid for.

If, however, middle management institutes a post-completion, “lessons learned” step into the project plan that promotes coaching and further growth, the company will be better off – every project has coaching opportunities, and global “great job” emails minimize the opportunity to strengthen individual teams and eliminate the effectiveness of more strategic corporate-wide communications which leverage formal or established channels.

Think about it – if the VP of Human Resources sends a 1 line great job email and the line Executive rights a missive on great execution, a little hard to coach most people. Everyone has an ego and an artifact in their inbox to PROVE they did well, regardless of the opportunity for improvement.

Corporate cheerleaders need to determine when and how they will communicate encouragement and appreciation to the entire team.   Again another Bring it On thought:

Sparky: I am a choreographer. That’s what I do. You are cheerleaders. Cheerleaders are dancers who have gone retarded.

Perhaps group email love-fests for the whole organization are just bad choreography from a limited leader who wants folks to know what they are doing and how important THEY were in organizing/leading the effort.  There are more sparky’s than one would think on most [tag]leadership[/tag] teams.

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September 30, 2007 by
(1)

Pump up the Volume, not the Meeting Noise

So after reading that product and process centric piece from Howard, I thought a bit around this topic and ultimately landed on meeting noise as a concept. Again, not that I agree, since I think it’s the mix of the process and product components which drives work satisfaction. So what is meeting noise?

I wish it represented an engaging [tag]meeting[/tag] where people were thoughtful, active and productive which ran a little long and loud – its not. It’s that bazaar re-occurring meeting that only 1/12 of the invitees attend. It’s typically a low priority project which is far away from the revenue center. It has [tag]cost center[/tag] all over it!

My take is we pay smart people to do this kinda stuff, so it’s better to allocate your time towards money and not hang out in a intrinsically internal meeting such as how to market an internal event like team appreciation day. I’m not saying team appreciation is bad, but the 9 weeks of planning and 24 hours of scheduled [tag]meetings[/tag] are a little much. At the end of the day, get good [tag]tchotchkes[/tag] for folk – exceed budget on this line item, it’s worth it on many levels.

That being said, trust the people that do this and let them go. The dollars saved on poorly attended meetings with resource usage justifies going a little over budget. So unless theirs contractors on the project or a weak player on the project let them run with it and encourage less is more on statusing the project.

So I waxed philosophical for a second, back to the meeting. So when you attend the first one – everyone is there, all 14 people. During the meeting you realize that it has only 7 minutes of content, which somehow due to bad cell connections, random questions and content “cat walks” closes at a bloated 47 minutes.

Fast forward 2 weeks – you dial in cuz you have space in outlook and are looking for some corporate current events. Remember there could be a corporate quiz at the appreciation day on the hardware upgrade project and you want an iPod for your 6 year old.

The content is still at 7 minutes, but there is this 9 minutes of awkward small talk as only 3 people plan on attending as the host gives folks a “few more minutes to show”. The host slowing plod through the agenda building out the content on the fly with situational overviews dragging the meeting to 27 minutes.

So please reduce the [tag]meeting noise[/tag] and do project updates every 2 weeks or only reserve 30 minutes for a weekly meeting. A tight time box will encourage tighter questions, more organization and increased value through directed project content.

September 15, 2007 by
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