For a long time, I have been a fan of the “ecosystem” thinking with regards to product concepts and business practices, and it will undoubtedly become a consistent theme in this blog. My affinity towards ecosystem thinking comes at least partially from the frustration of working quite a while in an industry (digital music) where a healthy ecosystem is both lacking and desperately needed.  The core concept of the “Business Ecosystem” has been around for over a decade, and while the concept may be overused a bit, the logic behind it still rings especially true for media and the internet. Many of us in the digital media world have often found ourselves in a position of “explainer/evangelist” of the concept, due to the lack of a cohesive ecosystem – sometimes its hard for those at or near the top of the food chain to understand “balance” in a healthy ecosystem… but I digress – - different post.

4 Currency Explanation

Eric Ries’ well-crafted post, titled “Business ecology and the four customer currencies“, explains the “4 currencies” of money, time, skill, and passion and how they influence customers’ decisions. He does a fantastic job of illustrating the currency concepts and how important realistic customer segmentation is.  Eric has lots of good posts on Freemium concepts, and the ecology discussion is closely related.   He also pointed me to this DEEP article by Andrew Chen that goes into some interesting underlying economic concepts behind creating a successful freemium model – - definitely worth the read.

I have been thinking a lot about business ecosystems lately as I’ve been working through product concepts, and I think that as a “product people”, we ought to consider that our customers self-segment based on their mix of “customer currencies”. Ries provides currency definitions using gaming as an example, wherein the different user types achieve success using different currencies.  The basic concept is simple to understand (I”ll paraphrase here): players with money can buy success, players with lots of time can slog out success, and players with skill are good enough to achieve success quickly and cheaply. The players with a lot of passion are put into a special category, and he argues that while it may not seem like they have “what it takes” to be successful, they are often the hidden reason for the success of the game (and thus the ecosystem) overall.

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay” for services from a company. And this is true outside of games. Constructing a working business model is a form of ecosystem design. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

Ye Olde MRD

Customer Currency and Engagement

Applied 4 currencies Process

Recently, I’ve been trying to sort out my social media universe (insert joke here). Anyway, the last time I really thought about this stuff (maybe a year ago?), there a few and options, and now the bad news is that there are endless  options.  What I’m really talking about is managing multiple services and identities,  and  figuring out which service does what the best and how it all comes together.  I’ve come to a some conclusions for myself on how all of these pieces fit together, and it might be helpful for others to see one persons’ approach.  The first one to figure out is the two big ones, and how they should or should not interact.  Basically, I’m getting tired of seeing status updates posted twice in FB because people have their accounts linked, and I’ve stopped it, but for more reasons that just the annoyance factor.  I think I’m violating some kind of twitter etiquette by blogging about it – which is what Fast Company said Scoble said, but the post they link to on Scobelizer doesn’t actually say that… but really, I couldn’t care less, but you know there are rules, I guess.

Facebook vs. Twitter

The first real issue I had to resolve for myself  was to understand the relationship of these two services for me, and how to change my social networking behavior to match an optimal usage of each.  What I discovered (after 2 weeks in a sensory deprivation tank) is that Facebook = Fun, Twitter = Work.  That’s really an oversimplification, but its accurate.  Ultimately, it boils down to the nature of how each network is built, and the fact that I’ve been on Facebook much longer. The reality is that I like to use Facebook mostly socially to engage with (and joke around with) my friends.  Some of the things I say and do on Facebook I wouldn’t necessarily want broadcast to the world, which is what Twitter does best, IMO.

For me, Facebook is (or at least I’d like it to be) for friends, sharing links photos and videos, and frankly, for joking around.  I have discovered that my Twitter profile is, in a way, much more important for me as a public communication tool and identity.  Anyone can see my Twitter account and follow me (spammers aside), and I like it that way. As an internet professional, I must maintain a discipline (much as I must on my blog) to not divulge or say anything that would be harmful to the company I am working for (and as a result myself), but also, as an internet professional, I believe its imperative for me to share information and be an active and integral part of the internet. I would guess that more people will see a Tweet from me before they ever see my blog, my LinkedIn profile, or my Facebook profile. For me, Twitter is about acquiring knowledge, promoting what I do, and sharing ideas.  Those are some big concepts for 140 characters or less, but it seems to be the best platform. I think a lot of other people agree with me, and I see a lot of posts out there that share the same idea, like this one from Cogblog:

“Because Twitter is for sharing information with the world and Facebook is for interacting with friends, Facebook has an inherent virality that Twitter does not have in their current model. “

I know there are a lot of twitter fanatics out there who are adamant that it shouldn’t  be used primarily a “broadcast” tool very actively and dynamically, as is expressed in this post on Twittip.  For the record, they are right in that Twitter is a much more compelling service if used as two-way communication, and I’m starting to actually figure this out…  the “Lists” feature and the now intergrated Retweeting are going a long way to make the communication aspect more compelling.

I came to the conclusion that Twitter is really good at being a big part of and promoting my blog. Using http://Twitterfeed.com, I pull in items I have “shared” from in Google Reader, and now I have a very clean and flexible way of sharing articles via Twitter. Then, with the Twitter Tools WordPress plug-in (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/) I can auto-generate a blog post whose contents are a weekly digest of my Tweets Example: http://timjmitchell.com/2009/11/20/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2009-11-20/. This solves another problem… I have decoupled Facebook from Twitter, since I hated having to hit both networks with the same post. Once a week, I simply share my digest blog post on Facebook – - there is still integration, but its much lighter weight, and it promotes my blog and Twitter account in a much better way. I also display my Tweets directly in one of the side panels of my blog, I have a large “origami bird” follow icon always present, and every post has a “Tweet This” button provided by the “Tweet This” WordPress plug-in (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweet-this/). Twitter is now the primary way in which I promote my blog or communicate with other bloggers. I often forget to set up proper Trackbacks, and Pingbacks are becoming too un-trusted and associated with SPAM. Twitter is natural for not only promoting a post, but also for directly commenting or indirectly commenting via your own blog posts via @replies #tags, or even direct messages. I also simply cross-post to my Tumblr blog from WordPress, and again, I allow my entire Twitter stream to appear on my Tumblr profile… this is a no-effort way to promote my blog and Twitter profile to another online community.

The title of this post is probably a bit too specific. It should really say “why all people who build and work on web and software based products should blog”, but that’s a mouthful. In a recent post,  I alluded to some of the reasons I’ll discuss below:

…it behooves me to have a well organized site where I can not only express ideas, but where I can tinker, experiment, and otherwise play with whatever social media or web detritus I might want to understand.  A blog these days can be very technically sophisticated, and with all of the plug-ins, social media integration, and SEO capabilities now available…

I felt like it was an interesting enough nugget to pursue and expand upon.  The main purpose of my post isn’t to point out what I consider to be the “obvious” reasons for blogging, and these are, in my view:  sharing ideas, communicating with people in your profession, increasing your professional profile, scratching a creative itch, doing something productive while drinking, etc.  I’m sure there are many eloquent articles and posts out there espousing these benefits. My interest was in how blogging helps people in the “Product Management” world better at their jobs.

A lot of Product Managers DO blog about their profession and share useful information, and my blogroll has a lot of links that are worth checking out, but here are a few: Adaptive Path, Jeff Lash’s Blog, Silicon Valley Product Group, Derek Morrison’s Blog, and many more… I’m always on the lookout for new stuff.  Back to the task at hand, though — here are some reasons why I think Product Managers should blog.

You get to do it all.

As the blogger, you are a combined microcosm of all the departments and functions that you normally coordinate with.  You are forced to make cross-functional decisions across marketing, content, engineering, and product. This kind of authoritarian power is actually humbling, as you start to recognize your weak areas.  It offers great perspective on your “day job”, and it creates feelings of empathy for your design and engineering co-workers.  I also believe that it hones your ability to see forests and trees all at the same time. Also, for some of us, getting your hands dirty is fun.

Social Media Bootcamp

Creating, updating, and promoting a blog is, IMO, an amazing way to really get in deep and understand how the social web really works.  You get to see interrelationships and integration options that you probably never knew existed, since your regular work is typically focused on a few areas at a time.  I remember that a lot of people were confused about  @replies, early on , on Twitter, but the hardcore blogger weren’t … they saw them as trackbacks/pingbacks for micro-blog posts, which is, pretty much what they are.  Recently, I read a post in Dave Winer’s Blog, where he pointed out:

Meanwhile, TechCrunch has caught onto the idea I borrowed from Steve Rubel, almost. They noted that WordPress was growing while Twitter’s growth has (perhaps temporarily) stalled.  The phenomenon is not, as some have said, the “death” of blogging (I hate that word!) — rather huge growth in blogging at the low-end as NBBs discover its joys through Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps very few of them will want more, but even a few is a lot! Expect a huge surge in medium-range and high-end blogging in the coming years, with products like Tumblr and Posterous and WordPress perfectly poised to capture the growth.

I agree with him, and once you start to head down the rabbit hole of how you can integrate your blog across the social web and how you can intertwine your blog with all of your web identities and application, you become blown away by the sheer number of options, but also the abundance of quality solutions that are really effective and cool.  I was recently working for almost two months straight on social integration to an e-commerce site, and I did a ton of research and testing.  I probably learned just as much from tinkering with my blog.  Which leads to my next reason…

Tinkering

I’ll admit that I like tinkering with my blog maybe as much as I do writing for it.  Our world is now full of multi-platform capable, socially integrated, SEO’d, API using, user interacting products. With even a semi-sophisticated blog, there are a lot of interesting decisions youneed to make about what app, plug-in, widget, social aggregation service, RSS feed, or whatever is right for what you want to accomplish… and that’s after you figure out what you are trying to accomplish with is half the battle.  Since its just your blog, you probably aren’t going to go through the hand-ringing process of MRD/PRD/ Cost Analysis stuff… you are just gonna tinker and see what works best, which is a great exercise for those of us who are sort of paid to do all of that hand wringing, its liberating and enlightening to not have to. From a research perspective,  its really interesting to see how different plug-in developers, who all properly identify a particular need, develop so many different solutions to the problem that add value in different ways.  All of that tinkering really helps you to get grounded really see what the web is, how the software functions, and where is all comes together in the user experience.

Product Marketing

Blog promotion is a great exercise in Product Marketing. Your blog is the sum of all of its parts, and your users may be coming to your blog for a lot of different reasons.  Sometimes its other bloggers just checking out how you’ve done something, sometimes its someone searching for information you’ve covered, and sometimes its someone interested in you.  Your “mix” of advice giving, commenting on other blogs and articles, personal anecdotes, and everything else that can be slapped on a web page is all up to you.  You have to think about your “brand” and how your product choices affect the brand.  Believe me – - as soon as more than a couple of people check out your blog, you are thinking about it. If you are someone like me who is typically being hired for how I think perhaps more than anything, your blog might be more important that your resume to some people.

It provides freedom to look “outside” for inspiration and answers.

It would be pretty hard, and frankly, pretty pretentious  to casually mention that Locke’s Social Contract theory may have something to do a confusing user behavior being analyzed in a meeting; however, looking at other disciplines is really useful.  My personal “fetish” is economics.  This is partially because it was my major in college and I’ve stayed interested in the field, but its also because the more I think through economic theories (mostly micro)  that explain  people’s behaviors, the more it becomes relevant to my work.  When I can think through and view a problem from a different perspective that is grounded in an established theory, it can often yield really sound insight. I’ll be working on a post soon about how I think that Vincent and Eleanor Ostrom’s theories of rational choice might help explain why digital media piracy “seems ok” in the minds of piraters.  Not exactly something you want to throw out in a strategy meeting, but its useful for me to think about, since a lot of my career has been trying to figure out how to get people to pay for stuff they can easily steal.

There are lot of other benefits, but the downside is the time-suck, and this is where the discipline part comes in.  That’s good for you too.

I have to partially borrow the title of (my friend and former colleague) Eliot Van Buskirk’s article on Wired.com for this post:  Music: Too Expensive to Be Free, Too Free to Be Expensive.  I need to borrow it, because when it comes to the state of digital music business models, this phrase nails it more than any I’ve heard in a long time. I’ve worked on both the consumer and the “rights-holder” side of this business, and the institutional barriers in the music industry have always been, in my view, the biggest obstacle to progress — for all parties involved.

Advertising was supposed to be music’s magic bullet, enabling fans to get the free music they’re going to find anyway while contributing at least something to copyright holder coffers. That dream is fading fast. As legitimate sources for free on-demand music dry up, fans will likely head back to file sharing networks, which is bad news for everyone involved in music — except for, perhaps, hard drive manufacturers.

That paragraph elegantly sums up what I see as a summary of the core institutional issues of the music business. The revenue generation happens so far away from the consumer experience that the two don’t recognize each other anymore. This model worked for a long time while the entire creative, intellectual property, manufacturing, distribution, and retail channels were in the control of a few large entities, because, well, that’s how oligarchies are. The industry’s bent towards “rent seeking” models, however,  grew old and tired and then the internet came along and put them all out of their misery.  Understand that I lump labels, publishers, and performance rights agencies together into the word “industry”, and rightly so, because this disaggregation of rights is a big cause of their woes.  I’m going a bit beyond the scope of Eliot’s article in discussing the various rights owners and their motivations, but it applies when you are a consumer company who must consider the cost of entering a business involving music (and I ‘m not even talking about up front costs and guarantees).

In a recent MidemNetBlog post titled “A Delicate Balancing Act“, Ted Cohen is sympathetic to both sides of the   “music industry vs. tech start-up” predicament, and he alludes to the cultural differences between tech entrepreneurs and industry types:

Having been on the label side, I understand the desire AND need to extract value from assets. In my current ongoing work with start-ups, I appreciate their passionate desire to do something innovative with music. These two goals shouldn’t be at odds with each other, and yet they are. The ‘asks’ by the rightsholders are frequently substantial, the expectations from the start-ups are often unrealistic. Neither side is really listening to each other, they are each focused on their own immediate concerns. Understandable, but not very productive.

The expectations for start-ups are often are unrealistic, but innovation is like that, and ultimately, “explaining” the music industry to someone with a good idea and a grasp of the demand side of the equation doesn’t solve the problem. The cultures do need to understand each other better, but the institutional structure of the music industry and the high costs that it creates in comparison to the questionable (and perhaps, now, unknowable) demand is a really, really big problem.

Ok, so I’m getting my blog going again.  Or… rather – for the first time.

I’ve probably started and abandoned more than a dozen blogs in my time.  Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, Tumblr, and probably a few others that I’ve forgotten, are littered with the skeletal remains of various attempts to enter the blogosphere in a meaningful way. I really made my big push about a year ago when I chose WordPress as my platform of choice, and even went so far as to register some domains, including my vanity “timjmitchell” moniker. Although, as much as I like to hear myself talk, I really had a hard time getting posts started and even a harder time completing them.  Part of that inability is simply life (work, marriage, social, music, etc.) taking up time, but part of it was really  not really understanding why I was doing it in the first place. A quick search on Technorati can yield for you any number of other people’s reasons , but I think I’ve finally come to my own conclusions.

The practical and “hard” answer is that given what I do for a living, it behooves me to have a well organized site where I can not only express ideas, but where I can tinker, experiment, and otherwise play with whatever social media or web detritus I might want to understand.  A blog these days can be very technically sophisticated, and with all of the plug-ins, social media integration, and SEO capabilities now available, a good blog can be a real asset to one’s career. As a product management type, it’s really an interesting experiment to have one property/destination/whatever where there is no “cross-functional-ness” at all – it’s just me, some tools, the web, and my own good, bad, or neutral decisions.  I’m working on a post now that goes into this in more detail, so I’ll spare you more discussion. Ultimately, given what I do, its almost a problem NOT having a blog – - whether or not that says something positive or negative about web-working I’ll leave to others.  At the very least, I own a domain with my name in it and an email address that goes along with that – frankly, that was the main reason I set it up in the first place.

A more metaphysical and “soft” answer is that it allows for a certain type of mental exercise that falls outside of work and/or normal social discussion. Never mind my predilection for using Facebook http://www.facebook.com as mostly a container for funny links and videos or snarky comments on other people’s posts  – - I mean, isn’t that what its for? Ok, Ok, I know that there are meaningful ways it can be used for business, but that’s for another post – - I think Facebook should mostly be for fun, and that’s just me.  My blog has got to be a sincere attempt at expressing sincere ideas. I think being able to post about subjects that I am not an expert on, for example, is a really productive way to remind yourself how to acquire and analyze new knowledge.  So for me – yeah, my blog is professionally focused. You won’t see posts about my vacations or good meals or movies – - there’s nothing wrong with that, but for me, it just wouldn’t keep me interested and blogging.

Oh, I changed the design, too — i had this really frothy japanese-themed look that just wasn’t pro enough… I wanted slick and so forth, but you can be the judge.  I’ll post a screenshot of the old interface and explain later.

Now for the snarky comments back from my friends on Facebook when I start promoting my sincere (and to many, probably extremely boring) posts.  I can take it.  I can blog about it, I guess, too.