Doc Searls, one of the Cluetrain authors, wrote recently that:
[H]ere’s the challenge: make the Net personal. Make relationships personal. Equip individuals with tools of independence and engagement.
About the same time, Hugh McLeod wrote a post that caught my attention, especially this:
[A]s we all know, human beings don’t scale. Michael Dell can’t have a friendly game of golf with EVERY PERSON who wants to buy a $450 laptop. Maybe if your company is buying 25,000 servers off him globally next year, he’ll free some time up in his diary, but…
Doc Searls brilliantly quipped in the Cluetrain, “Markets are Conversations”. But markets are also about getting stuff done. Often by lots of people at the same time. In the real world. Harder than it looks.
. . .
The good news is . . . that “Marketingspeak” doesn’t work very well on the internet. That acting like a drone doesn’t work very well, either. That human beings respond far better to other human beings on the internet, than they do to faceless, corporate spokesmen. And as more and more of large businesses’ communication moves to direct, two-way online conversations with their their end-users, companies will have no choice BUT to act increasingly human.
. . .
Sure, corporate conversation may never scale to the level of intimacy some of my crazier blogger friends hope to live to see. That being said, today there’s still a tremendously large opportunity for the people who can lead the way, who can, like the cartoon above implies, keep pushing the edges
What do these ideas have to do with Thanksgiving? Being thankful isn’t just a thought but should be brought to life through our conduct. As Hugh says above, “markets are also about getting stuff done.”
I’m very thankful for all of our customers and want to engage with each and every one at the highest possible level. I know that’s true for all of our employees. We also want to grow our business and serve more customers.
That’s why the “good news” in the quote above is intriguing. Is it possible that the web is creating opportunities for us to remain human while engaging openly and honestly with more people? The web creates an opportunity to share more information, more easily, and what customers want is to know where they stand, what to expect from you.
This same struggle exists in the real estate space. Kris Berg recently wrote about her and her husband’s decisions to go independent from their big brokerage, quoting Seth Godin:
I’d replace the expensive sponsorships and buildings with something more valuable, quicker to market and far more efficient: people. Real people, trustworthy people, honest people… people who take their time, look you in the eye, answer the phone and keep their promises.
With all of the above as a backdrop, over the last several days we at FBS have been discussing whether or not to use a site like UserVoice to engage with our customers about what they would like to see added to flexmls Web. On the one hand, we want to exchange ideas with customers and believe such a system could be a good way to do that. On the other hand, we don’t want to create false expectations that the suggestions entered into such a system are going to be implemented any time soon.
The reality is that we’re always in the process of developing new features and, in many ways, we need fewer ideas, not more. On the other hand, the wisdom of crowds has a great deal of appeal and just the process of creating a list of ideas and sharing it could communicate the reality that there are a lot of ideas and only the best ones can be implemented.
The main question is how do we best engage with our many customers on a human level? How do we balance between working with our customers to implement the best ideas without drowning in too many good but not great ideas? I’m very desirous to answer these questions correctly, because I’m truly thankful for our customers and my co-owners here at FBS and want to put that thankfulness into action.
In the meantime, I wish all of our customers and employees a joyous Thanksgiving holiday!
Both Inman News and Brian Larson announced recently some new efforts to create vibrant discussions that could have a big impact on the future of MLS.
Brian has created a new blog called MLS Tesseract, with the goal of “looking for a multi-dimensional conversation on the MLS and organized real estate industries.” Brian’s first few posts are delving into the new VOW policy following the settlement of the NAR/DOJ litigation. A great example is his post 100,000 VOWs by the end of 2010. Backing up Brian’s argument, Jim Duncan recently wrote about the limitations of IDX in his MLS and I commented that a VOW feed could help correct that problem. Brian is one of the smartest people I know when it comes to MLS issues and his new blog could be a great place to advance the future of MLS.
Brian also has created an excellent and exciting resource he’s calling a VOW Clearinghouse. The VOW policy contains a lot of pieces that are going to require interpretation over the years to come and Brian has created an excellent forum for doing that collaboratively. If, indeed, there will be 100,000 VOWs by 2010, then understanding the policy as best we can is critical, so head on over to the VOW Clearinghouse and get to work.
Inman News also posted an editorial today entitled a “Roadmap to Recovery” with one aspect being a new forum on the future MLS. Given our position as an MLS technology company, I found the “technology” branch of their project of most interest:
Technology: New innovations will lead the housing market out of its current mess. The Web brings transparency to the process through the publication of listings, the addition of related information, and through new applications. Core to this new future are better real estate analytics. The market desperately needs better information on the pricing and the sales trends in micro, regional and national markets.
Analytics. Yes, absolutely. Especially the “micro” part. As I wrote a few weeks ago, neighborhoods are difficult but this is a problem that needs to be solved so we can truly embrace the maxim that real estate is local. Standardizing this process will allow better data to be aggregated and indexed and provide more transparency into the true real estate values as opposed to the distorted aggregations that exist today. There is no national or regional real estate market — real estate is local — and we need better data aggregation practices to reflect that. Data aggregation is one of the central purposes of MLS and so I can’t think of a better topic to explore.
I’m excited about these opportunities to engage on-line in an extended discussion about MLS and hope you join in the fun.
There’s been quite a bit of controversy over whether Realtor.com is now accepting FSBO’s or not, which means it probably wasn’t the best day for Move, Inc., and NAR to announce that Move has been hired to build the NAR’s “library” or “archive” or whatever it’s being called today. That Move was selected some time ago hasn’t been a big secret but I wonder how agents and brokers in the field will take the news that NAR is investing even more with Move?
From my perspective, if NAR really is intent on building a library, hiring Move is a reasonable decision. I know several of the technical people at Move and they are some of the best in the business at massive data aggregation. Many will complain, no doubt, that the Realtor.com web site hasn’t kept up with competition, but the library or archive project primarily is about data aggregation. Of course, buying Zillow might have been a better investment, but that was probably too expensive.
ForSaleByOwner.com is promoting a new way for sellers to get their listings on Realtor.com with “[n]o need to be listed in your local MLS or work with local agents.” Further, they are claiming this has something to do with the settlement of the VOW litigation between the NAR and DOJ. (I suppose one could argue that some of the FTC and other litigation involving limited service listings is relevant here, but the claim above is regarding the VOW litigation settlement.)
I think this is just a gimmick, and really has nothing to do with the litigation or anything other than an attempt by ForSaleByOwner.com to make more sales. Their web site says, “You will work with our partner – a broker affiliate – who will help you complete the paperwork.” And Realtor.com’s FAQ (PDF) regarding “Showcase Listings” makes clear that only REALTORS are allowed to participate. So, this is just another version of a limited service listing, not some revolution in policy regarding FSBO’s.
Worldwide economic concerns are not the usual fodder for the FBS Blog, which is focused on the narrow vertical of the MLS industry. However, another topic of interest here is employee ownership, as FBS is a 100% employee-owned company. We’re a small company, with just 40 employees. Fortunately, we’re also a successful company. So it is with detached concern that I, as the CEO of FBS, watch the economic calamities of the world’s gargantuan companies unfold in ever widening waves. I ask myself: Why should stupid decisions of a few executives and bureaucrats impact us, whether it be the result of the failure dragging down the economy as a whole or as a result of “bail outs” requiring more and different taxes from government?
The mantra is that these companies are too big to fail, which, for me (and others), begs the question of whether they are simply too big. Markets are efficient only when there are many buyers and sellers and information about the market transactions is readily available to all. In the case of the current crisis, both of these pillars of efficient markets were missing. The credit risks were continually repackaged until only a few very large institutions were carrying huge amounts of risk and the information about those transactions was anything but transparent.
Now, as the dominoes fall, we’re continually chasing after them trying to prop them up. We’ve gone from insurance, to credit and now onto auto-makers and auto-dealers, local governments, and who knows what else. We seem to have forgotten that failure is critical to efficient markets so that pricing can adjust. Tim Bray, a technologist at Sun Microsystems, writes today about his “severe anger at the financial professionals who paid themselves millions for driving the economy into a brick wall at high speed, then walking away while we pick up the pieces.” I’m not feeling angry but I am concerned.
How is it that we’ve entrusted our money to people who’ve created systems so complex that they allow us to delude ourselves into thinking that only experts on Wall Street can understand them? Nothing should be so complex and if the so-called experts cannot make them transparent, that likely means they are not the experts they claim to be. In his post The Visible Hand on O’Reilly Radar, Dale Dougherty makes a similar point:
Wall Street hired the best and the brightest, paid them handsomely, and gave them unlimited resources and technology. It turns out they were building enormously complicated castles made of sand. A great wave washed them away, astounding all the smart people who devoted their lives to speculation, not production. Their models based on historical data predicted future profits, not collapse.
Dougherty is making another point in the quote above with which I don’t quite agree, but it does lend toward something useful. By differentiating between “speculation” and “production”, Dougherty is suggesting that one has more value than the other. I disagree with that. Speculation or risk diversification, if you will, is as much of a product with value as a building or a car.
On the other hand, the idea that we, as individuals, need to be making more stuff is important. We need to be producers, not just consumers. We need to be capitalists (those who own and create capital). At the core, much of the economic crisis at hand is due to the separation of risk and reward. The folks selling the mortgages to whoever could sign weren’t responsible for the failure in payment, that risk was shifted off to others and ultimately onto the tax payers. When we start considering shifting the risk of the poor decisions over decades from the American auto-makers and their stakeholders onto the American public, we know that this separation of risk and reward is going too far.
The issue here is one of being a country of independent creators, owners and risk takers-absorbers, or infinitely dependent consumers. Over the last many decades, we’ve succumbed to becoming so segregated into areas of expertise that we are forced into more consumption than production. We no longer understand the specialties and expertise of anything but our little niche, and so we’re dependent to an unhealthy degree. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that specialization is a bad thing or should go away, but rather that each of us needs to be more responsible for ourselves. Each of us can insist on understanding enough to make independent and informed decisions.
Tim O’Reilly also wrote recently in A Critical Choice Regarding Innovation that he “believe[s] that the choice is stark: just give people want they want, leading us deeper into a consumer culture whose very financial fabric is wearing thin, or seek out big, hard problems that other people take for granted as unsolvable, and remake the world.” He concludes the post with a call to arms of sorts, for individuals: “[T]he Knights of the Round Table were the archetypal myth of Western civilization, the idea that each of us, alone, must go off into the deepest, darkest part of the forest, populated by monsters, on a quest to make the world a better place.”
Indeed, what is missing from our economy and culture today is individual responsibility and creation and ownership. We need to be owners, each of us. No more bailouts, for anyone. The freedom that Martin Luther King spoke about so eloquently was the freedom to fail as much as to succeed. If someone or some thing is “too big to fail”, then it simply is too big. We need our failures to succeed.
Doc Searls, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, has a must-read post on the election of Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States. Regardless of your politics, this is a noteworthy moment in the history of our country as we watch two great leaders in John McCain and Barack Obama put our country first.
Doc Searls quotes Martin Luther King’s “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech and I do the same:
But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a away that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — “We want to be free.”
. . .
And that’s all this whole thing is about. We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.
Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity.
I wrote a post tonight on our company intranet saying a fundamental truth for me is that “we all matter and that’s what matters.” Put more simply, we all want to be free. The struggle of each us together for our individual freedoms is what makes our country great, and participating in the peaceful transition of power in the most powerful country in the world is a magnificent testament to the enduring truth of a society based on freedom.
I’ve seen some interesting political blog posts this year, including some controversy over guys like Tim O’Reilly posting about politics on their otherwise tech-oriented blogs. Mr. O’Reilly makes the point, though not exactly in these words, that airing such personal views is exactly what the Cluetrain is all about: bringing a human and personal voice and face to an otherwise impersonal corporation.
All corporations are run by people and the fundamental premise of the Cluetrain is that those buying products from the company want a conversation with those real people, not the fiction the corporate marketing department wants to put forward. The web enables interpersonal conversations on a new level, whether it’s blogs or Twitter or Facebook or forums or one or more of the many other opportunities.
Yet this very act of personalizing the corporation raises all sorts of interesting issues, most especially who is involved in the conversations? In our (FBS’s) case, I’ve very much enjoyed engaging in discussions online. In that respect, I guess I am the social media director for FBS. Another approach is to try to hire a social media director. Regardless of who is involved in the conversation, however, the reality is that these are real people involved and that raises two inter-related questions: (1) if the person is successful in engaging in market conversations, is or should that success be transferrable to others in the organization; and (2) if not, how does a company prepare for the hit by the bus risk?
Put another way, how much is being invested in the people at companies best able to engage in the market conversations in a real way? One of the reasons companies are valuable is because they can transfer skills and processes to others over the long term, building brand equity as a result. Is that investment now all of a sudden only in the people who become the real face and voice of the organization?
The answer to these questions may be to give voice to as many people in the company as possible. Those doing the work have the most to say. That’s easier said than done. Some great talents prefer not to have market conversations. Is the Cluetrain suggesting that such jobs are dead? Everyone must engage? Or is the focus now on new roles like social media director or some other title? Personally, I believe the former is more likely than the latter. What do you think?
In re Bilski (PDF) is the name of a recent patent case that could have significant impact on software patents. Before you click away thinking this has nothing to do with you, consider that a recent dispute over a software patent almost took down the entire Blackberry network. Or consider that there is litigation pending now over software patents involving real estate map search. Software patents have the potential to impact all of us.
There’s a lot of controversy over the Bilski decision, with some arguing that it means the end of all software patents and others arguing that the case changes little. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek have all weighed in as well, heralding the potential sea change afoot. What seems clear is that otherwise unpatentable ideas cannot be made patentable simply by implementing them on a general purpose computer, which provides some needed clarity to the area of software patents.
I’ve written before that applying 20 years of patent protection to software fundamentally ignores the nature of software development, and so I’ll be watching to see if Bilski goes up to the Supreme Court or not and I’ll try to keep you up to date as well.
