I hate to pile on Microsoft, who seems to be struggling with finding their place on the Web; but one would think that Microsoft, who’s been at technology marketing longer than most, would get how to do a product launch. I’m talking about the launch of their new Bing search service.

For starters their home page, the one linked above, is a cobbled together DNS forward: http://www.bing.com/ComingSoon that points at http://www.decisionengine.com/Default.html, however, when you get to that page there’s nothing but a perpetually loading video (that never quite loads on both Firefox and IE7 with the most recent Flash plugin), and while trying to keep this Web 2.0 is a noble effort with the video piece, the “Find us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter” and “Share this Page” links seem to be a superficial allusion to being Web 2.0-minded, which is what Microsoft folks purport to being at this page here: http://www.decisionengine.com/Letter.html (note that they’re again using the decisionengine.com domain, rather than bing.com, so much for branding the URL and product name)…

From a Web launch point-of-view there are quite a few things that Microsoft should have done differently. Perhaps there was a rush to get to market, but with a cumulative total of six pages, max, I’m not sure why they couldn’t have done a better job than they did. The URL as product branding is huge, how could this have been overlooked?

Unfortunately, the shoddy approach that was taken to launching this new product taints my expectations of it. If the rush to get these pages up and posted was so great that they overlooked significant details like consolidating the URL used, as well as getting the homepage video to work on their own browser, then what else wasn’t worthy of taking the time to do it right with regard to the product? If it’s great, I’ll eat my words, but based on this launch I’m not holding my breath.

On the flipside I can’t help but think that with all of the expertise and R&D, to say nothing of money, with which they could just buy good ideas rather than try to create (or replicate) them, Microsoft has tried to create their own flavor of Google. It’s sad, really, because think of what Microsoft could do if they weren’t playing catch up.

For me the lesson taken away from this and the lesson I would share is:

If rushing sacrifices the integrity of your strategy, don’t do it.

Closed… that’s how many companies today think they can operate their business and successfully employ a digital strategy.

In a world where the lines between what’s work and personal become more blurred, and folks are reviewing message on their Blackberry’s in bed at night, or doing more and more work from home, how can any organization expect that there won’t be some blurring between not just the work into the personal portion of life, but also the personal part of life bleeding into work. They’re hand & glove, and in a world where business wants to leverage social media, transparency and openness for business gains, that doubled-edge sword cuts both ways when social aspects of the business can’t be contained in quite the same way they were in days of old.

This makes businesses very uneasy, and this Business Week article: Web 2.0: Managing Corporate Reputations serves to illustrate this. While a fair journalistic effort, at least from the model of closed, and old model business communications, the story offers very little in the way of what it means to be open, and how openness and transparency can transform corporate reputation, and in some cases define it (Read: The truth will set you free… or when there’s nothing to hide, there’s nothing hide from). However, we’re in a transitional phase, so it makes sense that an open and transparent perspective can be lost especially when you’re talking about big businesses who’s business it’s been to keep things cloaked in darkness.

It’s not fair to think that business can expect employees to be on Blackberry, Facebook, or Twitter dealing with clients, customers, reputation, etc, thus leveraging these new outlets… and that somehow the personal aspects of people’s lives won’t enter the fold. The human experience is messy business, and if you don’t want those lines being crossed then make those lines very clear, and eliminate these pieces from your strategy, because they’ll just be inauthentic in a forum where authenticity rules. Otherwise, the fact that humans can have off-days and make bad decisions is inevitable, and it’s also inevitable that some of that may bleed into business. It happens to everyone, all the time, let’s just be with that, and move on. If a company is authentically open and transparent, nobody will care about an employee’s drunken mis-step or other unsavory details of their life getting out.

An organization with a successful digital strategy embraces openness, transparency and the reality that we’re operating in a world that’s forever out of our control.

There’s a great Wall Street Journal article here that talks about how Google is using an algorithm to track and identify which of their employees are most likely to quit. Taken from Scott Morrison’s Wall Street Journal Article:

“The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.

“Google officials are reluctant to share details of the formula, which is still being tested. The inputs include information from surveys and peer reviews, and Google says the algorithm already has identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.”

This is a really interesting article that illustrates Google’s ability to be proactive, and really ahead of the curve. Imagine if most companies cared enough to not only see how their employees felt, but to actually take action to do something about it. A lot of folks in HR and management pay lip service to trying to help the employee out, but when the rubber meets the road that rarely comes to pass, either because the organization is too busy reacting, or because the pro-active and dynamic nature of employee engagement and internal communication is something that’s shuffled about into a communication purgatory that many managers believe falls outside the scope of their responsibilities and/or daily business. Leave it to Google to have their pulse on this.

It’s no secret that I am biased towards Google. I’ve experienced first-hand their openness and generosity while attending a Joomla conference that they hosted at the Googleplex in 2007. In fact, Google is a company that absolutely embraces the idea of the gift economy that has made the Web great, and to some extent, I would say made the Web happen at all, and also they are totally indicative of the openness that I’ve talked about here before. Google’s not going anywhere. They get the joke about what it takes to be successful; they understand, holistically, the requirements of that success. We’re sure to hear about more great and innovative ideas from them.

This morning I was reading Seth Godin’s blog, catching up on items in my reader, and came across the post: “What kind of open are you looking for?” Basically, this is an explanation of some of the various flavors of what it means to be open. I refer to this a lot when talking about electronic communications and the Web, specifically open source technologies, or the LAMP flavor of Web, but also the broader context of egalitarian nature of the Web, so I thought it might be helpful to others to see some other examples of the open philosophy.

I’m actually writing this post out of sequence. I just composed a post based on an article I read at Seth Godin’s blog, here, but I intend to publish this one first, and then follow up with the initital post that I wrote. I’m doing this because writing the initial post, Open, et al… actually got me thinking about what it means to be open. I’ve referred to open source, or the open, egalitarian nature of the Web here, and elsewhere many times over the last decade (yikes, time flies!) and it’s always been a bit of an abstract concept. Tech and Web folks could get the gist of what it mean to use open source software, like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) and others, but when referring to the philosophical nature of open on the Web, as a communications platform, many folks just kind of gave me a funny look. So I started to do some research on the philosophical foundation of open source, with the hope that I find some information that pointed to the open nature of the Web.

Most of the information that I found pointed to open source software, doing a search of open source philosophy on the Web via Google, this wasn’t surprising. However, after some digging, I found this page, Philosophical Tenets of Open Source, and close to the bottom of the page I found what I was looking for, I’ve taken this bit of text from the page:

Open Source Is a Gift Economy

To understand open source, it helps to make a distinction between a commodity economy, to which we are accustomed in a capitalist society, and a gift economy. In a gift economy, gifts are exchanged, forming a bond based on mutual obligation: In the simplest form of gift exchange, when one person gives a gift to another, the receiver becomes obligated to the giver, but not in a purely mercenary way–rather, the recipient becomes very much like a member of the giver’s family where mutual obligations are many, varied, and long lasting. A person may give a gift with the realistic expectation that someday a gift of equal or greater use value will be received or that the recipient will pass on a further gift. In an open-source project, the gift of source code is reciprocated by suggestions, bug reports, debugging, hard work, praise, and more source code.

The commodity economy depends on scarcity. Its most famous law is that
of “diminishing returns,” whose working requires a fixed supply. Scarcity of
material or scarcity of competitors creates high profit margins. It works through
competition.

The gift economy is an economy of abundance–the gifts exchanged are inexhaustible. Gift economies are embedded within noneconomic institutions such as kinship, marriage, hospitality, artistic patronage, and ritual friendship. A healthy Western family operates on a gift economy. In an open-source project, the status and reputation of individuals depend on the quality of the gifts they contribute.

The distinction really is that of the gift vs. commodity economy. It’s funny because as I write this I remember what it was that attracted me to the Web. I was a musician/composer, and I was working on a recording. After having played guitar for years, being in bands, playing shows, and trying to sell music at venues, I saw that the Web had the power to change everything for me as a working artist — the playing field had been leveled. On the Web, in 1999, Mp3.com had just launched, and it was skies the limit for artists to get out their, hang a virtual shingle, and let the world know about their work. However, it wasn’t about huckstering your product and bombarding folks with spam to inform them about your work (though there was some of that); rather there was an openness that permeated throughout this new platform. There were new channels for sharing what you were doing, as well as for folks, from all the over the world, to share with you. I’m sure at some point I’ll go into this story in greater detail, but for now, suffice it to say that the openness of the Web brought me in, and it was the openness and the economy of abundance on the Web that made me want to stick around, even forgoing my musical ambitions to see what a Web-centric world could look like. More to come, on what it mens to be open…

Just because you presented the better solution, doesn’t mean that the client will always take that route. Somehow, this defies good sense, but on the other hand, people are not always using good sense when they make decisions. There’s an emotional piece that equally defies good sense, and there’s nothing related to good sense as far as feelings are concerned, only what is and the hope that one will learn something from the experience of those emotions. Still, though, in the service of the client, you have to research and present the best option for them, and hope that there will be an intersection of what the client wants, what the client needs, and what the best solution is.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as author Robert Pirsig put it, had little to do with Zen Buddhism, and in the early 1970s, when the book was published that might have been true. However, in the nearly four decades that have passed a new definition of Zen emerged. While Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a discussion of what quality means, the sub-text of the book pointed at a non-controlling, and mindful approach to life and the universe where things were allowed to unfold without resistance. This is what makes me think of the title for this post, Zen and the Art of Web Strategy.

In my mind, the egalitarian nature of the Web and Web strategy has always been closely linked to Zen. With the Web, like Zen, anybody can get started any time. The barriers, if any, are few, so everyone has an equal opportunity to become a Zen or Web master. The Web, like Zen, encourages openness, because sharing isn’t a means to an end, it is the end itself, and that’s what has always driven the Web. The Web, like Zen, is allusive; when you think you’ve got it, either the next great business idea or the riddle of the universe, that’s precisely the problem and serves to illustrate that you don’t.

This is an unorthodox perspective when viewed from the traditional business paradigm because it seems as though everything is out of control, and just out of reach. To some extent it is, but that’s what makes the strategy fun, challenging, and quite a bit like a Zen koan.

I’ll use the concept of viral marketing to illustrate this point. Viral marketing is a relatively new spin on a concept that’s surely as old as time itself. Marketing 101 would say that anything that gets passed on by word-of-mouth, through email forwarding, or other comparable means of person-to-person dissemination qualifies as having gone “viral”. Viral marketing, on the other hand, is the attempt by marketers to manufacture this kind of response through the use of a variety of media, media platforms and sometimes unethical means. Sometimes it works, but mostly it’s hard to replicate.

Case in point, with regard to the Grateful Dead; it was unprecedented, and nobody could have ever foreseen that thousands of people would be trading tapes of Grateful Dead shows. In the earliest of times, we’re talking about badly reproduced and noisy recordings that were nothing more than an allusion to the music being played; nevertheless, it took off. Eventually, many live shows were put up for sale and Grateful Dead tape traders have become Web file traders who use the Web rather than the outmoded media of tape, and surely that will evolve into something else, but nobody could have bet on that, nobody!

Another great example is YouTube. One of the things that has gotten YouTube off the ground is the proliferation of clumsy and silly videos, some well-intentioned, some not so much that have made their way around the Web. YouTube has created something special and greatly diminished the barriers for getting video (and yourself) on the Web. With the amount of video that has been posted to YouTube it makes sense that some of these have taken off and gone “viral”, whether it is because of foolishness, incredibility or just because of the hilarity factor; and with 10-65,000 videos per day being posted it only increases the likelihood that something is going to go “viral”. YouTube has grown because of these “viral” videos being passed around. However, YouTube’s growth (and probably existence) would have been doubtful if it wasn’t totally open; YouTube’s parent company, Google, really, really get this.

In the examples above neither could have happened if left to traditional business paradigm means. And, anybody who you have believed that they could would have been laughed out of the room. However, in an open environment that fosters quality, and is willing to be patient, and let things unfold, naturally, anything can happen… frequently nothing happens, but while nothing is happening something is growing out of the stillness… Truly, this is Zen and the art of Web strategy… I’ll be talking about this more…

The thing about consistency is that you can plan for it, you can intend to do it, you can even develop a strategy for being consistent; consistent in message, consistent in approach, consistent in action, whatever, but if you’re not consistent, it won’t matter. Consistency is tough because it takes presence and discipline; presences to be mindful of what is and discipline to face it even when it’s more comfortable to turn a blind eye… especially when it’s more comfortable to turn a blind eye.

Do you what needs to be done, and do that every time.

That’s what it means to be consistent.