I know it is a little odd to do a blog post linking to another part of your own blog, but that is the sort of iconoclastic blogger I hope to be.
As some of you may know, I just finished teaching a course at Stanford on B2B social media.
I’ve put all my slides and student reviews up, along with a short intro. So here you go. Feedback is always welcome.
The inherent global discoverability, linkability, sharability of the web is what first made social networking social.
Apps made social more portable, and that is a great thing, but the easy ability to find and share content is what will always make the web the ideal social platform.
At first, the social web was all about friending and sharing cat videos, but the social web has grown up and is a daily part of our lives.
As highlighted on the Firefox Apps blog:
Mobile social media extends our reach and lets us engage with the world immediately, wherever we are—whether it’s keeping up with the news, booking somewhere to stay on vacation or listening to music.
Here is lecture two from my class “The Company is the Content.” The case for this lecture was Hubspot, which provides inbound marketing tools for business, mainly SMBs.
Hubspot is pretty a pretty fascinating company to me and I was happy to find a case study on them. They are really one of the innovators in helping companies create and distribute content for marketing purposes. Not only is the content of the case really great, it is particularly well written so it was fun to teach and discuss.
The rest of the lecture looks at examples of what companies are doing to create and distribute their own content. It must be noted that the content here isn’t just marketing content, but also original content created and distributed to educate the market (not necessarily to sell to it.)
The best example in the world is Cisco. Their online newsroom “The Network” runs like and actual newsroom and draws on the expertise of professional industry journalists to research and write stories. The journalists are given considerable leeway to cover the stories they want, and in the manner they want.
Here’s the lecture
Here’s an amusing video from Hubspot explaining “inbound marketing”:
Amazing piece on HubSpot’s blog by business journalist Dan Lyons entitled Why I’ve Left the Media Business.
It is a great, if somewhat damning, quick insight into the media business and how it is holding on to a failing business model, namely advertising.
The money quote is here:
OK, so we don’t know what the “better results” are so we can’t calculate a clear ROI (that was just linkbait), but the point is made: Running with your own content and drawing people to your company is rapidly replacing the shotgun approach of trying to reach everyone, everywhere with advertising.
Here is the first lecture to my Stanford course Company is the Content. The course looks at how social media has impacted the marketing strategies of B2B companies.
This is the second year I’ve taught this course and I really enjoy it. Although I’m no longer in marketing (I’ve moved over to business development and partnerships), I still enjoy dabbling in the discipline.
The focus on B2B is because when I first pitched the course over two years ago, there was very little about how B2B companies can use social media. The focus in everyone’s mind was B2C so I thought the course was an opportunity to contribute to a new area of marketing.
I say this of course despite the fact that Cluetrain Manifesto was written in 1999. This is and remains the seminal work on B2B marketing. It is absolutely brilliant and it anticipated the social media revolution that was to come some ten years later.
The central point to my teaching is that markets are a conversation. If you understand that… if you *really* understand that… then my course if of no use to you. Because that is the single concept I start with, explore, and then end on. So brilliant!
And there’s been a lot of other great thinking that has come along since I first put my course together. This is the second year I use Gillin and Schwartzman’s Social Marketing to the Business Customer as my textbook. It is pretty good.
And, of course, by teaching about B2B marketing, I like to think I make some contribution to the overall marketing discipline, however small. I enjoy teaching and I always get great students at Stanford Continuing Ed.
So here’ the first lecture, thoughts and feedback welcome!
As for bringing actual commercial products to market that are based on these techniques, Best noted that Mozilla is already working with the likes of Disney, Electronic Arts and ZeptLab (which already brought an HTML5 version of Cut The Rope to the web after working with Microsoft). When Mozilla talks to potential new partners for this effort, Best told me, most of them are pretty skeptical at the beginning, but “by the end of the week, we usually have quite an excited partner.”
Yep, that is pretty much how the conversation goes.
1) Disbelief at what the web can do
2) We show in real life what the web can do
3) We have another excited partner on FirefoxOS
Mozilla And Epic Games Bring Unreal Engine 3 To The Web, No Plugin Needed | TechCrunch.
One meme that will happily be put to rest at the upcoming Game Developers Conference is if HTML5 can handle gaming.
The answer will be a resounding “YES”! Whether on desktop or mobile, HTML5 has made great strides and is at a stage where it will be able to support the most challenging game experiences.
Gamers are a notoriously demanding bunch. And that’s understandable. You don’t want any hiccups or stutter in game play when you’ve got compounds to storm, races to win, balloons to pop and ropes to cut.
Firefox is working hard to make the browser, on desktop on mobile, faster and able to run high intensity graphics. Have we succeeded?
Yeah, I’d say so. For example, we’ve done benchmarks with our new OdinMonkey JavaScript engine that will ship in upcoming versions of Firefox and have seen a performance boost by about 1000% (yes, that is three zeros) over anything else out there.
Want to see what that boost in performance can provide? Check out the future of web-based 3D gaming on our totally awesome (but goofily named… wasn’t my idea) BannanaBread demo, an incredible 3D first-person shooter running on nothing but web technologies.
But never mind the technology, let’s talk game experience. As EA’s Rich Hilleman points out, games are about magic and pushing the limits of imagination. One potential the web offers is the possibility of a single, contiguous gaming experience that carries with you wherever you go.
In a multi-device, multi-platform world, the consumer won’t accept playing their game in only one environment. As they move about their day, they’ll want to access their game, at the right state, on the device they have handy. The ubiquity of the web provides for that.
Also, by extending games to different devices and different form factors, the web helps open up gaming to the casual user, who is a great new customer for the gaming industry.
How else can the web help the gaming industry?
- Massive reach: It isn’t called the World Wide Web for nothing!
- Marketing and discoverability: Developers aren’t restricted to marketing a game in the confines of an app store. The expanse of the web and all of its inherent linkability and shareability are available so developers can reach new customers
- Payments: People have been doing payments on the web for years. With the web, developers have the flexibility to charge what they want, and use the payment processer they want
- Easy updates and analytics: The game is on your server. Developers can update when they want without having to bother with store approval processes
- Easy analytics: Again, the game is on your server so you don’t have to wait for analytic reports from an app store, you get all the analytic information you need, in real time
- Customer relationship: Distributing a game on the web means the developer owns the customer relationship. The developer doesn’t need to go through an app store or any other third party to manage payments or updates. You own the customer. No one is in the middle.
But ultimately, as Chris Ye of Uken Games says, gaming is about spreading happiness. If a developer is getting the performance they need from the web (and we think they will), then HTML5 lets them spread happiness across multiple platforms without the unhappiness of needing to maintain and upgrade multiple code bases for multiple devices.
The web still has some work to do to live up to its full potential as the ultimate global game platform, but it is getting there. And realizing the benefits the web provides, the industry participation in building out a game ecosystem is closely tracking the improvements in web game performance. That’s a trend we’ll see at this GDC and across the game market.
