Deliberate Ambiguity

The PR Blame Game

A friend recently was complaining to me about having trouble with her PR firm.  "What's the problem," I asked.  "Well," she huffed, "They just aren't getting me the coverage I want.  I just don't think they're working hard enough.  At Powerset, SHIFT must have had it so easy.  Your story just told itself."

I didn't have a decent response at the time. Powerset did have an amazing story. To convince someone that natural language is a better search interface than keywords is a piece of cake.  Additionally, our product was cool, innovative, and solved user problems.  We spent a lot of time getting the message right, but it was more about perfecting the words to communicate our story than perfecting the story itself.  On the other hand, our PR team worked their butts off, turned around some from doubters to believers, and got us an insane amount of coverage.  What was the secret sauce?

After reading Julie's post about firing a client, something important struck me: she was just playing the PR Blame Game. My friend's company had a mediocre idea and a lame product.  It's not the PR firm's fault that coverage was spotty.  Instead of jumping down the throat of her firm, I think she should have taken the following steps.

First, maybe it's not your product that's the problem, but the way you're telling the story.  Instead of pitching more reporters, go back to your product messaging basics. Figure out who your audience is. Understand what their problems are and articulate how your product solves those problems.  Communicate that message in crisp, clean, simple language.  This kind of strategic PR can be time-consuming, but it's something that your PR firm should be able to help with and will make subsequent pitches much easier.

But, there may be a deeper problem.  If your product sucks, no amount of product marketing will fix it.  Make sure that you're getting feedback from your PR firm about your product.  And, ferchrissakes, listen to it.  Your PR firm is on the front lines talking to experienced reporters who can give valuable suggestions for product enhancements.  Empower your firm with the ability to bring this feedback to your company and then act on it.  Obviously, don't forget your core strategy or your users, but you'd be remiss to ignore an expert opinion. 

Finally, if your PR is stagnant, the feedback you've been getting is largely negative, and you can't find an easy way to improve your product, maybe it's time to take a drastic measure: shift your monthly PR budget to product development.  This is kind of like "firing" your firm, but done with an "it's not you, it's me" realization. Your PR firm will appreciate the honestly and will likely be ready for you in 3-6 months after you've produced something marketable.

My friend was absolutely right that Powerset did have it easy. But, that's only because we had a cool product and a compelling story around it.  So, next time your coverage report isn't as rosy as you'd like, take a step back and don't play the PR Blame Game. If you haven't armed your PR firm with a great message about a killer product, you only have yourself to blame.

n.b., this post is a response to Julie Crabill's Fire a Client Today post as part of our ongoing dialectic.

The Feedback Lacuna

la-cu-na [luh-kyoo-nuh] (n.)

a gap or missing part, as in a manuscript, series, or logical argument; hiatus

Much noise is made about the way that social media will influence products.  Whereas social media is beginning to collect huge amounts of customer data, this feedback is not yet making it to the right people: the product managers and developers.  Though I don’t have a simple solution to this problem, I hope to convince you that there is indeed a lacuna that needs to be bridged.

The Playaz

On one side of the lacuna are social media gurus and marketing types, who cheerily proclaim “Feedback from customers through social media will cure your product woes!”  They imagine that Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc. are channels to listen to users in a brand-new way. They're sick of putting “lipstick on a pig,” and believe they have access to a feedback stream that will connect the organizations directly to users in a way heretofore unimagined.  The products resulting from this feedback will delight users.

On the other side of the lacuna are the product managers and the developers, who groan loudly upon hearing this advice.  After years of usability studies, user-centric design, log-analysis, and countless other techniques to get into the mind of the consumer they wonder, “What now?  They’re always cooking up something useless in that marketing department.  Why don’t they just focus on what they’re good at instead of trying to bother me?  I have a product to build!”

The Problem

Putting on my marketing hat, social media gurus are wrong if they believe that social media is the panacea that will solve all product development problems, but right in believing that they can deliver a new, important voice.  Putting on my product manager hat, I feel justified in being skeptical of marketing people who have never built a product, but I can’t deny that they have access to a fascinating new stream of data that I want to incorporate into my product planning and design.

The real question should be about how marketing/PR folks can get looped into the product development process and how product managers can partner with marketers to create the right product and inform the market about what they’ve (jointly) created.

Bridging the Lacuna

Assuming that we all agree that there is some signal in the noise of social media (right?) and that products could benefit from listening to it (yes?), the question is: how do you get that information to the right people in the organization?

Therefore, I propose a few questions that I’ll follow up with more detailed posts:

• How can we tell the difference between a prominent, whiney customer, and other problems that affect the more subdued masses?
• How should feedback through social media channels be communicated to the right people in an org?
• Why should product managers think about PR/marketing while they’re writing specs?
• (and the flip side) Why should PR/marketing demand to be involved in the spec writing process?
• How do marketers walk in the shoes of product managers without stepping on their toes and vice-versa?
• How should product management use social media to communicate with customers?
• How should marketers get more in tune with the product to be even more effective with social media?
• Why should PR people know about the product development process?

This list is really only the beginning and represents my product manager-focused view of the world.  I’d love feedback from marketers, developers, PMs, CEOs, and social media experts. As with any process, this is an evolution: techniques will be tried out and some will survive, some will fail, and others will be amended with improvements learned from trying.

Let’s work together to bridge this lacuna (see Julie's "Mind the Gap" response) so our products benefit from this phenomenal new source of customer feedback.

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How *not* to rate a search engine

While demoing Live Search at the Web 2.0 Expo, people continually asked the same questions: “What makes Live different?” or “Show me some features that will make me want to switch from my search engine” or the extremely confrontational “Why do you think you’re better than Google?”

My first instinct was to dive in and show people the coolest features in Live Search (e.g., demoing  Virtual Earth with an Xbox controller) or to let them play around with their own queries.

However, given my experience working for several startup search engines, I’ve come to realize that it's extremely difficult to convince someone that you’re better than another engine with words, features, or few carefully chosen queries.

So, after awhile, I started my demos with a caveat about the nature of a search engine: I implored my audience to try out Live Search for a week so that, in the words of the immortal Lavar Burton of Reading Rainbow, “But, you don’t have to take my word for it.”

Is this a cop-out?  Why is demoing search so hard?

Search “Features”

When showing off a new version of Microsoft Word or Typepad or Yahoo Messenger, a good product marketing person will not just demonstrate features, but analyze their audience and demonstrate benefits that help users accomplish specific tasks. (This is just product marketing basics.)

A search engine, by contrast, has an extremely simple interface: you type in some words and hope that the engine will cough up pointers to helpful Web sites or give you a direct answer.  The inner workings of a search engine, i.e. how those results were produced, are completely opaque to the user.  Hundreds of features are used to rank results so that the right Web sites and answers show up on a page when you type in some string of words.  Those features don't surfaces as demonstrable chunks that can be easily summarized or understood.

Common mistakes when evaluating a search solution

 Which brings me to the biggest mistake people make: judging a search engine by typing in a few queries and analyzing the results. There are many interrelated reasons that this methodology fails:

• A few good/bad results don’t mean that all results will be good/bad – even if you try out five searches and all are good, how do you know if your sixth is also going to be good?  That is, since you don’t know what is going on under the hood, you can’t make any predictions about the quality of future results.
• It’s hard to select a representative cross section of queries – people usually try out a few navigational queries, a vanity query, and a few queries that are either damn-near impossible or extremely obscure.  None of these sets represents an accurate cross-section of your monthly query log.
• What you think is “good” may not be good for the majority of users – for navigational queries (e.g. “CNN.com”) the top result is clear.  For more complicated queries, the top results are rarely obvious.
• Queries are out of context – we had this problem at SideStep all of the time.  During usability studies, users who were simply evaluating the look-and-feel of the product and scanning for cheap flights without any end-goal were never as good as users who were actually trying to buy a flight for a real trip.  A search engine should help you complete tasks, not just give you a pretty page or have links that look useful.
• People tend to focus on the first result – some queries just require one result.  But many queries should be judged by the diversity of interesting results.

There are probably countless other mistakes that are made during solo evaluations of search.   Therefore, search engines big and small realize that problems of ranking and relevance – the core of any search project – are solved only by lots and lots and lots of data from lots and lots and lots of people.  To solve this data problem, we need to collect data from real users.  For example, we run many thousands of queries past human judges and look at mountains of click data from the production site.  After applying apply advanced statistical techniques to this data, we get the information we need to create algorithms that turn your few (mispelled) words and turn them into a useful page of results.

As one of my colleagues at Powerset always likes to remind me: this is rocket science.

User Studies find problems, not solutions

When a usability professional is making a presentation to a homogeneous group of executives, developers, and designers, the following questions/comments often come up:

• "Oh, since that feature tested poorly, we should take it out"
• "Since users had a problem with feature x, we should do y."
• "Hmmm, so the feature didn't like that aspect of the product.  What would they have preferred?"

All of these statements presuppose that a user study should find product solutions.  Users are not product designers and the most you can reasonably expect from them is that they'll articulate (with the right coaxing) their problems. 

Sure, useful suggestions often come out of usability tests, naming can be refined, and features can be tweaked.  Whenever that happens, it should be counted as serendipity, not a core outcome of the study.

User studies should aim to discover user goals and understand problems that arise when a user tries to reach those goals.  Usability tests should uncover feature-specific problems.  Once all of these data are amassed, it's up to the creativity of the design and product folk to use these constraints to create a new solution and then test the improved solution with more testing.

Users are your customers, not your designers, so don't overwork them.

Product Messaging Document Basics

Creating a product messaging document shouldn't be that hard.

Even assuming a world of conversational marketing where the masses shape your message, it's important to seed that conversation with something coherent.  A tight message shows why your solution is unique and useful, what your competitive position is, and what problem you are going to solve for a group of users.

Messaging discussions tend to fall on two sides of a spectrum.  On one hand, nebulous high-level jargon and endless wordsmithing of simple phrases can create a jumbled, confusing message.  On the other hand, slapping a few sentences together in a press release can sound unfocused and unclear.

A product manager's job doesn't end with creating a great product.  It's also our job to tell the world why they should care.  So what's the best way to create a messaging document?  And what should the document look like when it's done?  There's no one-size-fits-all messaging document or process that will solve every situation among different companies, products, and situations, but here's a few guidelines that have helped me:

1. Stick to basics - One of the classic formulations of messaging goes something like: "For [target user], who needs [reason to buy your product], [product name] is a [category] which [benefit], unlike [main competitor], which [differntiation]."  You should be able to rattle off something like this statement about your product without thinking twice.
2. Don't spend all of your time fixing words - Don't confuse messaging work with copy editing.  If you've a clear message conceptually, then the words can always be honed later.
3. Find a great template  - Whenever I do messaging, I e-mail a few of my marketing colleagues at other companies to see what they're using.  My favorite template is the Marketecture from Practical Product Management.  It starts off with a problem and solution statement, which helps you to frame how you talk about your product.  Also, the product statement is supposed to be short (under 25 words!) and I recommend making that an absolute upper bound.
4. (But adapt it to your needs) - Don't take the template as fiat.  Feel free to absorb the spirit of the document, even if you don't accept all of the details.
5. Run it past someone non-technical - this is certainly true in the consumer space, but even in enterprise software.  I realized there was a problem with "natural language search" when I had to explain it to my well-educated hair artist.  Powerset's About page now contains almost no technical jargon (and I'm happy to entertain ideas about how to make it better).
6. Avoid meaningless words - This is a corolary to the above.  Even if you think a word or phrase has meaning (e.g. "best of breed" or "highly scalable") think about a simpler way to say it that makes sense to a person on the street.  Your product is not so complicated that you can't explain it to someone else.
7. Write something functional - This could be your About page, your press release, or even try your hand at the article you'd like someone from the press to write about your product.  Some might argue that you need your messaging in place before you effectively write a press release, but I think the two are informed by each other.

I'd love to hear from other people about other general guidelines and great templates of messaging documents.

What's in a name?

Every company hits an inevitable point where it decides to think about picking a new name.  So many freakin' considerations: is the URL available?  Is the name spellable? Does it accurately describe the product/company?  Does it evoke positive images?  Does it have good "mouthfeel"?  Does it make our company serious/goofy/intellectual/consumer-friendly/etc.?  Is it already being used?  Does it look too much like our competitors?  Will it last?  Is there a racial slur in the middle of it?  Can it be used as a verb?

All in all though, I find a lot of these discussions meander through meaningless sessions of creativity.  Look at some of the biggest internet companies.  I can only imagine the conversations with these names:

• Flickr - it's too trendy, hard to spell, and sounds goofy
• Google - is an incorrect spelling of an existing term, suggests that the company is huge and powerful, and look at those damn Crayola colors
• Yahoo - another goofy name and what does that say about our directory?  And what about the people who have actually read Gulliver's Travels and know that a "yahoo" isn't a good thing to be?
• eBay - there are too many companies "eEverything" and we'll get lost in the noise.  And what the hell does a "Bay" have to do with auctions?
• Amazon - shouldn't we get "books.com"?

Brands that succeed get all sorts of retrofitted praise.  "I love the playful colors of the Google logo that comfort users even though they're using a complex technology."  The reality is that young companies should spend more time thinking about their messaging and positioning and less time thinking about their brand.  The time spent in considering how to talk to the press, how to have a conversation about your product in the blogosphere, and how to frame user problems is much more valuable than establishing an over-thought brand with no market traction. 

Sure, if you're P&G, brand-management suddenly becomes important.  But let's face it: what the Hell does a name matter for an unknown startup?  I remember back when Kosmix was being renamed from its old company name: Cosmix.  For all the time we spent looking at alternatives, we just changed the "c" to a "k."  The time was well spent, however, in that thinking about the name forced us to consider how to position Kosmix against our competitors.

Has anyone else been involved in product or company naming discussions?  I'm curious to know if there's a good process or good experiences out there.

What I learned from the Social Networking Toolkit

One must approach an alleged "geek" breakfast taking place before 10:00 am with a hearty dose of skepticism.  Especially at a "world famous" diner in Union Square (tourists will buy anything).  Nonetheless, I trudged over to Union Square with Julie Crabill of SHIFT at 8:30 a.m. this morning for a Social Media Club Breakfast.  Was actually a bit fun, though the pancakes were unremarkable.  The crowd consisted of a strong faction of PR peeps, flanked by hi-tech marketing slaves, and social media wonks.  However, my favorite part outside of the excellent chatter was certainly the Social Networking Toolkit, thanks to Mr. Jeff Pulver.

The SNT contains a pen, two Hello tags (for one's username/message and one's bio), stickers for "tags," and Post-It Notes for a "wall." This simple formula schooled me in social media:

• To find out if a person is interesting, talking to them is quicker than reading all of their stickers.
• Those with the most stickers were usually the ones that gave the most stickers.
• A corollary to the above is: the more stickers on you, the more you're expected to stick other people.
• Attractive people attract other attractive people; but loud people get the most attention.
• Birds of a feather tend to flock and form cliques.
• People tagged me with words that would only be helpful to that person.
• At least 50% of the total stickers were written by their owners.
• The more tags you have on you, the more you look like a MySpace page.
• Usernames are ridiculous and conceal your identity.
• I mostly talked to the people I knew.
• And, most importantly: it takes an offline metaphor about stickers to teach me the fundamentals of social media.

Sincerely,
philosophygeek (photos @ Flickr)

tags technorati : blogpost markjohnson smc socialmediaclub breakfast thingsilearned socialnetworkingtoolkit snt jeffpulver cliques bymarkjohnson thispagehasalotoftags

Expanded Groundswell Continuum

Whenever I see a linear scale, I'm reminded of the liberal/conservative dichotomy promoted by the Democrats and Republicans.  Socially liberal, fiscally conservative citizens like yours truly have to turn to the second dimension to get our views included, cf. the Nolan Chart.

Because of my bias towards a diversity of opinions, when I saw Josh Bernoff's description of the Purist-Corporatist scale and Shel Israel's complaints that he's not a pure purist, I tried to conceive of a more inclusive graph.  My guess is that the misunderstanding between these two fine social media theorists is disagreement about the classification system, not a disagreement about the fundamentals.

First, my interpretation of Josh's original scale. 

After reading Shel's commentary on being labeled as a purist, I sensed two forces at work here: the influence of users and the effect of the marketing department.  My expanded version of the scale has two axes.  The x-axis is defines who in the corporation should control the message; the y-axis describes the impact of users through social media.

I took a stab at defining the quadrants:

• Purists believe that users are/will be extremely influential and that marketing departments should be abolished.  The message will grow organically from the conversation between the individuals within the corporation and the users.
• Corporatists believe that the marketing department just needs to spend more dollars to control the effect of the groundswell and that, in the end, their message will prevail.
• Grounswellists are in the middle: they believe that there's a place for the the structure of the marketing department and the authenticity of individual conversations.
• I jokingly referred to quadrant 1, where social media and traditional marketing both rule, as the land of PR Flacks proclaiming to be experts in social media (not my PR firm, of course).
• Quadrant 3 is also somewhat of a joke, in that engineers hate both marketers and suggestions from users.  Am I a funny guy or what?

My definition of the axes here surely isn't the only one.  Did I pick the right axes?  Is there a better way to describe the groundswell vs. corporate marketing?