Best of Everyman Links #3

Competition For One

Excellent ideas in this New York Times piece on PayPal founder Peter Thiel in The Creative Monopoly. We often shouldn’t seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists. Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too.

#career, #innovation

Sony’s Fall

Insightful points from Brooke Crothers who lived in Japan between 1983 and 1993 on why Sony and much of the Japanese electronics manufacturing industry is barely in the game. Reasons for Sony’s fall include issues like embracing incrementalism over disruptive technologies, arrogance, missing the PC revolution, and no grasp on the importance of software and on software/hardware integration.

#innovation, #business, #competitiveness

Measuring and Marketing

The post title says it all, If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.  Several good takeaways on the value of measuring, on tracking options and putting them to use.

#marketing, #analytics, #metrics, #business

Screenularity

This is a brand new concept for me.  Screenularity. I hope I’m not too far behind the curve on it. Let’s call this future moment the “Screenularity.” It is the moment in the future when, as a consumer, there’s no distinction in functionality between the various screens we interact with. Much like Matt Thompson’s “Speakularity,” this will be a watershed moment for how we consume information and, therefore, journalism.

#mobile, #convergence, #tv

The Definitive Article on Gamification

Smashing Magazine with one of their definitive works on a subject, here on considering, defining and implementing gamification techniques in website design. I plan on reading through this article several times to spawn ideas on my own sites.

#ux, #gamification, #applicationdesign

First Visit

FeverBee with his usual good community advice, advocating first visit engagement for new members. The next page immediately after registration should be a discussion or activity members can participate in with other members. They do this and enter the notification cycle. If you get this right, your ratio of newcomers to regulars will skyrocket.

#engagement, #community, #applicationdesign

At Social Business Core

Stop Think Social post on the true value of Enterprise Social Networks, which is knowing who has the answers for any situation. A company that is socially connected is not just going to be more effective and more efficient, but it’s going to have a knowledge reach spanning the entire company that any employee can tap into and make use of. This is the Power of the Enterprise Social Network and the heart of any Social Business. It’s not important for you to know all the answers, but it’s key that you know someone in your employee network that does.

#socialnetworks, #esn, #enterprise

More than a Game

Some good takeaways on Gamification from an interview with marketing firm Big Door CEO Keith Smith. Websites want to reward their users and say thank you for engaging. And they want to recognize you when you are a fan of a particular site, they want to recognize you for that and reward you for that. The marketing technique is called gamification.

#gamification, #marketing, #engagement, #applicationdesign

Flexible e-ink

“LG just announced that it has begun mass production of the world’s first flexible, plastic e-ink display. This is opposed to the hard, heavy, prone-to-cracking glass-laminate e-ink displays found in devices such as the Kindle and Nook.”  Great photo of the technology in article.  This is cool, but what’s really exciting is what comes next and then what comes after that in display technology.

#futuretech

Enterprise Social Networks Defined

Excellent SlideShare presentation on Enterprise Social Networks. Enterprise Social Networks Defined: A set of technologies that create business value by connecting the members of an organisation through profiles, updates, and notifications. (Source: Altimeter Group) But ESN’s are not simply Facebook behind a firewall. Every enterprise has distinct needs and nuances that require a reframing of a social network. Altimeter found that there are six elements of a social network that are similar, and yet different, between public and enterprise social networks

#esn, #enterprise, #socialnetworks