Isabel Walcott Draves

Changing your Facebook Privacy Settings

As I wrote an email about this topic to a relative recently I thought I would post it on my blog as well.  If you're not someone who lives and breathes social media, you probably need to change your privacy settings.  Here's how.

Go to Facebook and find your own profile.  Under account, hit privacy settings.

At the top it says "basic directory information", some text, and a tiny link that says "view settings".  Click that link.  The first 2 are fine to have be everyone: search for me and send me friend requests. The rest, if you'd like to be more private, could either be friends and networks, friends of friends, or friends only.  "Networks" means, if you say you went to a college, anyone from that college can see it.

When you're done there, click "back to privacy" at the top.

Under "sharing on facebook", click "custom" and find the little blue "customize settings" link.  For each piece of info you have, you can choose who can see it.  I have "friends only" for most of it but i let "friends and networks" see some things and for my website URL, which is how I advertise my services, it is set to "everyone".

Suzanne Fiol Rest in Peace

We just met Suzanne this year, but she was such a vivid life force and I can't believe she is gone at only 49.

Through sheer force of will she created Issue Project Room and grew it and grew it and brought a bunch of committed, creative people in to join her.  

IPR, also known as Issue, is a space dedicated to avant-garde performance, video, visual art and sound and music.  They will only continue to grow as everyone gets together in her memory.  Learn more about Issue: http://www.issueprojectroom.org/

Cover Girl!

Just had the surprise of going to Confabb.com to check out some upcoming conferences, and seeing myself on the cover (in pink, natch).  Too bad it is not such a great picture.  Hey, at least I'm not making monkey ears like Micah Sifry! Shout outs to Chris Herot, Robert Tolmach, Bob Frankston (back turned), David Spector, Greg Elin, Stepan Pachikov, and Jerry's Mom.

Ev's New Company

As I learned during my stint at the Research Board, large companies with many different working parts and subsidiaries spend millions oscillating back and forth periodically from centralized to decentralized and back.

Nobody has cornered the market on knowing how to keep the organization and practicality of a centralized structure while still benefiting from the speed, innovation, and flexibility of a decentralized organization.  The downsides of bureacracy (centralized) and rogue behavior (decentralized) haven't been conquered either.

Evan Williams proposes to change all that, with a new company he's forming called Obvious.  Obvious will be formed the way a social network is formed, so it will have a networked corporate organization rather than decentralized or centralized.  The idea is based on a concept those of us working in Internetland for the past 10 years have come to know well: software development and content are becoming commoditized and traffic (users/customers) is the really difficult asset to build.

All subsidiaries, or divisions, units, or companies, or whatever they are to be called, will get their basic sustenance -- technology and infrastructure -- off the same teat.  Each subsidiary brand can leverage the traffic of the whole. The difference between Obvious and an incubator is that not all the new initiatives will be expected to become companies.  (Presumably the difference between Odeo and a company like P&G is that value will be placed on entrepreneurship and the occasional big win as opposed to careful R&D followed by big, targeted market plays).

Ev's instincts have obviously been honed by his experiences at Pyra Labs -- a small start-up that created Blogger -- and Google, a large start-up that acquired Pyra.  It's enough to make anyone want to sell their Google stock, since it's clearly an indictment of Google's inability to spread their traffic purposefully to any of their subsidiary groups.  Hopefully he'll be joined by folks with experience from large and small companies that aren't start-ups.  He'll need that background to make sure this one will work, since it is more about successfully remaking broken corporate structure than building any product in particular. 

Based on his description, there's a lot that still needs to be thought through, but knowing Evan, he's on it.  It's certain that lots of entrepreneurs will find his idea appealing -- I certainly do.  At the very least, it's a graceful way to remake Odeo.  Theoretically, Obvious's new "networked" organizational structure will, organically, show a more thorough understanding of the market than Odeo did on its own.

Building Communities Online

Who's building communities online?  A broad array of companies provide different online community services.  If you're looking for an idea generator, feedback loop, and loyalty builder, you can try making a private community of 300-500 handpicked contributors.  Hire a company like my client, the Boston-based Communispace.  They've been running private online communities (as a hosted, turn-key service from recruitment through data analysis) for the Fortune 1000 since 1999, and have a startling 100% client renewal rate.  Lately, others have seen the potential of this space and have started to jump into it, including San Francisco's MarketTools with their new product Insight Networks, which appears to have worked with one client so far (Del Monte).

If you prefer something short-term, Socratic Technologies, a San Francisco based Internet research, survey and panel firm, offers Socratic WebBoards, a recruited and fully moderated virtual focus group that takes place over a couple of days. 

If you'd like to share a large panel of consumers with other companies (as opposed to recruiting your own custom community), P&G has just begun to implement online communities to enable conversation among members of their Tremor and VocalPoint panels (teens and moms respectively).

Liveworld, formerly TalkCity, has repositioned itself as a private label online community builder and is now 10% owned by WPP.  They've been around for a long time, delivered over a million hours of moderation, are fully international, and build and host large public communities for the purposes of loyalty marketing and customer support.  I'm not sure whether they offer small private communities and data analysis or not, and anyone who has any more information about any of these providers or their competitors should feel free to add their comments.  I've only gleaned most of this information from reading their websites.

Lots of other application providers and software companies exist that will build a public community for you online, but few of them have learned to provide recruitment, moderation, and analysis services as well (Lithium out of Emeryville CA is one of the few as far as I can tell).  I see great potential in the online community-building space as soon as the technology companies learn what ad agencies know, or vice versa.  Affinitive, Neighborhood America, CivicSpace, iUpload, and Jive Software all have terrific potential to expand and meet a full complement of corporate online-community building needs in the near future.

Dozens of other market research firms and marketing firms also offer what they call "communities" for research and brand advocacy - Informative out of San Francisco is one that has a collection of great clients and seems a step ahead.  However, perusal of some of these companies' marketing materials indicates that in many cases they don't value, highlight or enable the many-to-many nature of community, where the point is people are talking to each other.  They host adaptive surveys or send e-newsletters, which are both fine methods of communication, but they are both one-way: participant to company or company to participant. 

True communities are participant-to-participant -- this is what the companies that started out on the web understand, that the agencies that have a background in offline marketing and messaging have such trouble learning.  Additions, questions, complaints, feel free to comment here.