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| Thursday, September 28, 2006 |
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Elementary, my dear reverend... 
| | I don't know precisely what Doc means when he talks about gestures (or Steve, when he does), and they talk about "gestures" in the context of marketing and economics (rather than the Queen of Sciences, Theology) — but in my wrestling with hermeneutics over the past few years, I've found the problem of communicative gestures to constitute one decisive fulcrum for my reasoning. |
| | Okay, here ya go. Gestures are expressions of intent. |
| | [Later...] AKMA responds with Darn You, Doc!, a thoughtful missive that's like, waaay deep. So I'll skip the stuff I'm not sure I understand in Paragraph 2 and go with what I'm sure I mostly understand in Pagagraph 3, which reads, |
| | I see a possible usefulness in talking about “intent” in the marketing context: we want to offer advertisers something to work with, and if (on Doc’s account, still haven’t gotten to Steve’s) we can get advertisers thinking about their interlocutors as maybe “intending to buy something,” they’ll be more likely to pay attention. Of course, Doc can just stipulate that when he says “gesture,” this is what he means. But what about this: what if we opted for “Gestures are expressions of interest,” or “are interested expressions” (using “interest” in the sense of “interested parties,” “people whose interests are affected by X”)? Does that advance the cause of precision in our use of this term? (I have no particular interest in making it more salable to marketers, though if the discussion helps Doc gain traction for his arguments, then so much the better.) |
| | First, I like "Gestures are deliberate expressions", mostly because it's emphatic and very much what I mean when I talk about Vendor Relationship Management and the Intention Economy. Think "deliberate economy" and maybe that helps somehow. |
| | Second, my emphasis on intent, as opposed to, say, attention, is that I want to get marketing out of the room. This isn't about reforming marketing. It's about creating something else entirely — something you can't see when you stand on the sell side. You have to be on the buy side. You have to take the customer perspective. And to appreciate how utterly fed up we are with marketing's guesswork about what we might want. |
| | We need to serve market (not marketing) relationships that arise from decisions customers have already made to buy something. They have money in hand, and the intention to book a hotel, rent a car, buy a basketball backboard. Whatever they want, marketing's job is done. Sales needs to show up now. But how? That's the question. And the answers that work can't come from the sell side. We need new means to the buyer's ends, coming from the buyer's side. |
| | What I want is for vendors in an open and free market (not a proprietary silo like eBay or Amazon or Travelocity or some other intermediator with a walled garden) to respond to the intentions (or gestures, or expressions, or whatever) of the customer. On customers' terms. I want to turn the tables on the lame customer management systems every big vendor has, and which have no idea how to relate. Especially to humans who would rather not be "managed", thank you. |
| | To be fair, until now the full burden of customer relationship management fell on vendors. They had no choice about being lame, because they had to relate to everybody, and to limit the variables involved. I want to change that, from the customer's side, with a Vendor Management System under the customer's control that is so richly useful, and capable, that vendors have no choice but to relate to it — on customer terms that will prove mutually beneficial out the wazoo. |
| | We don't have that yet. I want to develop it. Which is to say, I want help developing it, because I'm not a programmer. |
| | It's not about me, or any business intentions on my part. I want whatever-this-is to be free to the world for the taking. Like RSS or XML or Jabber (XMPP). |
| | This is about fixing something that has been broken since Industry won the Industrial Revolution, and we began applying the "market" label to demographics, appetites, categories, regions, metaphorical beings (bulls, bears, invisible hands) — and forgot about the real place where people meet to do business and make culture. A place we continue to forget even though the Net came along and gave us a big fat virtual one. |
| | In Cluetrain we called markets "conversations". I'm going out on a limb here and calling them "relationships" too. (They're both. Also transactions. But it's the relationship part that has become impoverished in the Industrial Age. It's the relationship part that I want to equip with the means to fix itself.) |
| | As for gestures, I'll punt the topic back to Steve Gillmor. I want to support his goals just like you want to support mine. That's my intention. Call it relationship at work. |
A Way for Wendy
| | Craig Smith reports a 33 to 6 vote by News-Press staffers in favor of union representation. "A substantial number of the newly hired employees joined long-time newsroom employees in voting in favor of unionizing," he says. |
| | So I have some free advice for Wendy McCaw, who owns the News-Press. |
| | That's what ball team owners do. Why not newspapers too? It's a great out. |
| | Barney Brantingham, the News-Press veteran of 46 years who became one of 23 departed staffers in recent months, said he told co-publisher (and Wendy's fiancé) Arthur von Wiesenberger that Travis Armstrong (under whose leadership all these people left, and against whom remaining employees are now voting for union representation), "was a growing cancer" on the paper. That was back in July. |
| | Well, "malignant" doesn't cover what's happened since. If the News-Press were a baseball team, Travis Armstrong has managed to take it from first place to the terminal ward in a matter of months. |
| | Even if he were blameless, somebody's head has to roll. |
| | If Wendy is worried about finding another animal-loving libertarian to express the paper's politics on its editorial page, I'm sure there are plenty out there. Have Arthur call around at the Wall Street Journal, or the San Diego Union-Tribune. |
| | I'm serious here. If Wendy wants to restore the community's faith in the paper, and to repair the enormous damage that's been done to the paper's reputation, she needs to make cuts as close to the cause as she can, without firing herself. |
| | [Later...] There was nothing in this morning's paper about yesterday's pro-union vote there. |
| | By the way — for anybody at the paper who may be reading this — I am neutral on the matter of union representation at the paper. Since this story started breaking in July, I have not been contacted by anyone working at the paper, or from any union. I've only attended one rally, on September 24th, where I spoke to almost nobody and mostly took pictures. |
| | In fact, I have to confess to being a bit creeped out by the workers' choice of the Teamsters for union representation. I'm old enough to remember when the Teamsters' "brand" was synonymous with organized crime and corruption. While the Teamsters union has worked hard to bury its old reputation, I can't help wondering why the workers didn't choose, say, The Newspaper Guild, which is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO. My guess is that the Teamsters took the initiative. But I don't know. |
First hose of fire news
| | DayFire News is (to my knowledge) the first River of News page for the Day Fire. I can no longer get the Web worth a damn on my Verizon Treo 700p (and at $30/month it's hardly worth it). But the Day Fire river looks good on my Nokia 770. Big thanks to David Sifry for hacking that one together. |
| | By the way, you'll notice a character there named "Firehose". That's me. Right now I'm just experimenting, but the long-term goal is a news river called "FireHose" that flows news about every fire in California, and not just the Day Fire (which we hope will be out in the next few days). |
| | Fires are serious business here in California. This picture here shows the aftermath of the Sycamore Canyon fire in 1977. Where we now live isn't far from the edge of this photo. In fact, the Sycamore Canyon fire burned the upper half of the street where we used to live. That fire and the Coyote fire each came within a few hundred feet of the house where we used to live in Montecito. Here's a map, from the Montecito Fire Protection District, that shows the perimeters of all the major fires, going back to 1964. |
| | [Later...] I'm writing and thinking a lot more about this, and also appreciating everything people are sending my way, or pointing me to. I'll get to it ASAP, but meanwhile, I have meetings to get to and furniture to help move. (We're still between houses here. Don't ask.) |
| | Inspired by Dave W, I built a UK Political Blog aggregator[1]. It's not strictly a mobile friendly River of News page, but it still has that River of News feel about it. I'm now up to ~700 blog sources. Link. |
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