Mar

13

Marketing Nightmares in NYC

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Was it the sandwich or the service that sparked the bad dream? And does it matter? After the sandwich episode I cannot recall indigestion, though it is certainly true that anger was one of the emotions in play. You see, having ordered in the coffee shop of a top of the range global hotel group (pastrami and salad on rye, if you must know), and having waited 20 minutes to get it, I was saddened and incensed when the wait staff (glorious American gender obfuscation), moved my untouched plate to one side, placed my bill where it had been, and asked me, politely but with a not-to-be-refused firmness, to pay immediately since the wait staff in question was going off shift and needed to close my open account through the till. When I weakly moaned that I was going to ask for a cup of black coffee, then it was pointed out that this could be most easily ordered from a wait staff coming on-shift. This made me cross, and in no mood to eat a sandwich with due care and deliberation. Nothing could have been more in contrast with the attitudes that the hotel was trying to encourage, yet it was the gap between that aspiration, and the routines imposed on staff for performing process, that led to the problem. A problem that was not diminished at all when I quietly said that I was a foreigner, and wait staff must understand and humour my own national customs, which included paying for my meal after I had consumed it.

After I left this shoot-out at the sandwich corral, I reflected on the passage of arms that we are currently engaged with online in terms of of our marketing manners. In a recommendation-based world we would expect as friction-free buying process. We could craft our name and reputation online without the wait staff getting in the way, as long as we can be in reasonable control of our reputation. This probably involves supplying high quality goods at fair prices with great speed and admirable customer service. In other words, there will still be problems, and we are as prone to being let down by third parties as anywhere. But, actually, if we can create an immaculate reputation and maintain it, then many users will view the odd lapse with sympathy. Amazon above all others has succeeded in doing this. Goods do come quickly, you do know what is going on all the time, and while I sympathize with real booksellers going out of business, when you ordered a book from many of them you could wait 3 weeks or 3 months and had not a clue what was happening at any point.

All of which drove me to Badgeville (www.badgeville.com), because it promises me that it will “boost loyalty and conversion across the customer journey”. As so often happens a good word (“gamification”) has fallen amongst thieves here, and instead of meaning the turning of processes (like learning) into game-based routines which can speed information and knowledge acquisition, it now seems to mean reward systems for ensuring that recommendations are positive and posted. So after the initial distrust of recommendations on travel sites – are hoteliers writing their own? – we now have well-regulated sites, but recommendations and feedback supported and encouraged by rewards, points, grades, stars dished out by the product or service vendor. So, after almost 50 years, we come back to Green Shield Stamps! And Badgeville is an excellent site of its type. It appears to be strong on anti-gaming logic – no one can fiddle with the rewards structure – and it is a PaaS (platform as a service) play which runs across all of the vendor’s web exposure points – resellers, Twitter, FaceBook, etc. But it worries me all the same – is human psychology so basic that just by moving a reviewer from one level to another or giving them more points for posting on Pinterest, you can, as Badgeville so delicately says “re-inforce valuable behaviours”. No room here then for quirky old folk who won’t pay for their sandwich until they have eaten it.

But if you believe in the power of recommendation, pop in and see GlassDoor  www.glassdoor.com). This new take on the jobs board allows existing and former employees to post their anonymous views of the pros and cons of a company as a place of work. I checked Forrester. Very enlightening. You would need a raft of points and levels – a Platinum Ego Stroke – to even create some valuable behaviours for some companies here. When people are fed up with the job, they are quite explicit. If they feel blocked or taken advantage of they also say so. In current global jobs markets this will not make much difference, but one day this interesting idea will have a market. Or maybe by that time we shall have fragmented work altogether in such a way that we will all be self-employed problem solvers. Last week I met a sensible man running a tech unit in a major company who told me that he used Mechanical Turk all the time to source expertise and solve problems outside of the reach of his current team. So I was not surprized to find myself looking at GigWalk (http://gigwalk.com), a way of using the smartphone to divide jobs into small pieces and spread them across different geographies, all the while avoiding full time employment or the tax and insurance implications of staff. How will we handle the marketing messages when we do not even know who did the research or developed the answers?

We have a lot of learning to do about the future of work, which probably means more three letter acronyms. Meanwhile I award points and prizes to the man last week who described his product development mantra as 3D (Discover, Design, and Delight), and his friend who described a V3 product plan (Velocity, Volume and Variety). Getting down to two letters is a behaviour that I would like to encourage!

Mar

5

MOOCs Mood

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

I have been rumbling silently about MOOCs for a long time, but it was only when I read a report on the Domain of One’s Own experiments that I realised what it was about Massive Open Online Courses that gave me a sense of disquiet. MOOCs have had huge publicity in the last six months, and as always we seem to be convinced that a single initiative is going to Save education / universities / educational content / publishing / Life on Earth. Yet clearly not all MOOCs are alike. And their shooting to prominence is no accident. If you look up the history then you find that you can relate them to Buckminster Fuller, Douglas Engelbart, the Khan Academy, and a group of Canadian educators (I am now a Canadian Nationalist by Marriage, so underline with pride that the term was created by a faculty member at the University of Prince Edward Island!).

But I cannot claim much else. A whole raft of MOOCs are simply instructional materials online presented much as the Open University did in the UK from the 1960s and its South African equivalent from a decade earlier. OK, techniques have changed a bit and Instructional design has improved a s a workflow model, but this is essentially distance learning as of old. Course members have no connection with each other and while I am delighted to see distance learning updated and to see it re-promoted I am at a loss to find a revolution in what many major universities, and people like Udacity and Coursera, are offering. It is good, in a networked world, to see the internet used as a delivery mechanism, but the pattern of development in a networked society has been for the network to change the way we do things, as well as deliver it more effectively.

We are on safer ground, I feel, when we look at so-called “connectivist” models around MOOCs. Cast your mind back to those early network diagrams, and move away from star network models and one to many thinking. Long term network impact comes when everyone is connected to everyone equally, and in a MOOCs environment this pre-supposes that all learners and instructors are equally so connected. Elsewhere we have learnt about the powerful nature of educational change through collaboration in small groups – as a class or a project group. We know that groupwork styles are no bar to effective assessment, and that for many they speed learning processes. And we know that what we desire are learning outcomes that are reliable and certificated, not the importation of real world learning environments into the network for the sake of it. I see us then as re-iterating the break-out from the school/classroom nexus at very many levels. Second Life was clearly one attempt: in true network fashion it has ceased to be a fad, is being re-absorbed, and virtual reality learning will come back again, perhaps alongside connectivist MOOCs, in a new synthesis before long.

But for all of this to happen something must happen at the learner end of things At present learners have no way of managing their educational experiences online, synthesizing their learning, keeping their own record of what content impacted with them and constantly collecting and reframing successful knowledge breakthroughs. Well, its all on a hard disk somewhere, but it is not educationally or network portable. Just as the Electronic Lab Notebook, as a Cloud service, and developments like Mendeley and ReadCube, will emerge as a vital researcher tools for both productivity and compliance purposes, so the Lifelong Learning Portal will remind you of what suddenly made Pythagoras clear to you, that you can always rehearse that key video on the Theory of Relativity, that the papers you have written and the certificates you hold can be auto-matched with job requirements, that you can allow limited access to recruiters seeking to match job needs, that your qualifications open up these opportunities for you in terms of more specialized education , and that whenever you learn you are sitting next to someone who can help you – as you help them.

So far I have seen nothing quite like this (and may never!) but I was very intrigued by the work of the faculty at Mary Washington University (http://bavatuesdays.com/domain-of-ones-own-faculty-initiative/) who are working on creating a Domain of One’s Own development. So far this seems to be a faculty-only initiative, and so far it is as much about faculty awareness of the need to place themselves in the network as anything else. But I liked the enthusiasm and the phased development of the faculty immersion – an important reminder that while the network nature of our society and economy is what sustains us, there is still the possibility for whole cadres and classes of people to imagine that their daily lives are not network-orientated – and, amazingly, educationalists have been less network orientated than many others. Certainly their students!

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