Dawn Patrol at The Hook in Santa Cruz

6am.  It seemed like a normal time to wake up, get some nice tea brewing, eat a banana, and wake my son up.  My son and I were willing to wake up early, even on a Sunday, to beat the crowds.

If I had checked the temperature, I would have seen that it was 34F.  We were going surfing, prior to sunrise, in the cold, beautiful twilight beween night and the sun breaking above the horizon.  Unfortunately, I didn't check the temperature.  Unusually cold air had settled on the coast.

My son and I put on our wetsuits and neoprene boots inside our house.  We arrived at The Hook, an iconic break in Santa Cruz, five minutes later.  It was still dark.  The parking lot was completely empty. The waves looked a bit weak.  "We're here.  We're suited up.  Let's go in and get some exercise before breakfast," I told my son.

We went in water, the only two people out at The Hook, catching any wave we wanted to.  The waves were small, slow, and weak compared the heaving lumps of power that we dealt with on the North Shore of Oahu the week before.  We had fun.  Three sea otters came close to us.  One otter seemed to drop in on my wave.  Startled, I fell off my board as I attempted to stand up.

There were long smooth rides, waist high, and inconsistent.  People would stand on the cliff above The Hook or even walk down the stairs to assess the conditions.  They all left without going in.  We were alone and happy.

I knew the moment wouldn't last.  We would get hungry and cold.  In a moment of inner reflection, staring out at the moving lumps of water rolling in from the horizon, I also knew that my son was growing older, stronger, and farther away from me.  But for one morning, with frost on the ground and cars, the wind chill down to the 20s, and waves that were mediocre, I felt that I had all that I needed in life.

We walked to the car.  Our hands were numb.  I had great difficulty opening my car door, unable to hold my key in fingers that were frozen up.   I opened the car door in triumph and turned the heater on full blast.  Although feeling started to return to our hands, we decided to drive back home in our wetsuits.  We eventually were able to get out of our wetsuits inside of our house.  The pain in my hands subsided after a half hour.

I thought to myself that our dawn patrol was a good start to a wonderful day.

Going Beyond Social Media - Paid, Owned, Earned Media

Three and a half years ago, I wrote about simultaneously using a number of different social media and PR channels to support product launches.  Back then, we had some pretty spectacular case studies for Cloudera, Appcelerator and Zend that showed massive gains in web traffic up to 3,000 percent.

The biggest comment I received from my peers in marketing was that the launch seemed like an overwhelming amount of work.  When I described our work in 2009 - 2010, I listed out individual activities such as vision video on YouTube, newsletter, direct email pitching, and Twitter influencer management.  We ran a dozen activities in parallel and were constantly scrambling to accomplish our activities for the launch.

Today, I was happy to read a report from Jeremiah Owyang and Rebecca Lieb of the Altimeter Group titled, Paid + Owned + Earned = Converged Media.  The report is freely available.  It categorizes marketing activities into three simple buckets:

1. Paid Media;
2. Owned Media;
3. Earned Media.

I like this taxonomy quite a bit.  It's better than my earlier attempts to categorize our services at LEWIS Pulse into product marketing and customer marketing.  

One of the problems I've faced at LEWIS Pulse over the years is how best to divide our services into content creation services and community interaction services.  For example, although we list Twitter or blog management as activities on our service contracts, these descriptions do not accurately capture that there is a big difference between writing a series of Tweets that link to products and working on a campaign to get the online community to Tweet about the products.

The problem was especially challenging three years ago because almost all of our social media contracts were coming from marketing groups and run by managers that were experts at paid media and owned media.  Since we came from a PR background, our focus was on earned media and we viewed Twitter results as the impact of the influencers from the community.  The different perspectives on how to view social media results was exciting because it made us think about the big picture.

Although it would seem that there would be confusion and frustration, there was actually a huge amount of excitement when we spoke to the marketing managers that hired us to help their groups at Cisco, SAP, and Google.  We were different from their traditional advertising or brand agencies.  Our perspective and ideas revolved around influence and earned content.  There was collaboration.  It was great.  We all felt that there was something happening, not just the rise of social media marketing, but something bigger.  In the back of our heads, social media was just the beginning of something bigger.  We just didn't know how to describe what we felt.

I now realize that we sensed that we were on the cusp of figuring out how to break down the silos of marketing, advertising and PR.  The Altimeter report does a great job of describing these silos and the problems that vendors and marketing managers face when trying to get outsized marketing results.

Today, many of our social media contracts are with the PR groups at big companies such as Cisco and Microsoft.  We are also implementing more and more social media services for our standard retained PR accounts.

The silos still exist.  Marketers have evolved, but we still haven't figured out how to converge media toward a common business goal.  

We're right in the middle of a time of change, bigger than digital media, social media, SEO, bigger even than Facebook.  It's exciting that within my the lifespan of my career, I'll see the convergence of media, new campaigns that simultaneous use paid, owned, and earned media.  

To the world of marketers that I'll need to work with, bring it on.  I've been waiting a long time for this.

Fear in East Side Santa Cruz

I walked up to the lifeguard tower and Saturday morning and told my son, "holy smokes, I'm not going in."

My son excitedly pounded his fist into his palm and shouted, "let's do this."  

He was excited to face the challenge.  I was afraid.

I didn't notice the sign that said, "warning aggressive white shark attack."  I was staring at the waves that were way overhead, bigger than the week before when my son got pummeled at The Hook.  I watched the boards flying straight up into the air, buffeted skyward by a wall of white foam.

Young boys ran on the sand, talking about wanting to see the shark.  I still didn't stop to think that there might have actually been an attack.  There was a more immediate danger in front of me.

Son at The Hook last week before the swell got bigger.  Using fear to improve performance.

Fear is one of the things I love about surfing.  Being an aging surfer with limited skills, I am cautious.  I don't enjoy being afraid.  I enjoy the process of analyzing my fear and facing it.   There are days when fear beats me and I back down, feeling diminished as a man.  On other days, I beat fear clumsily and pay the consequence.  Over the years, I've learned that brash, reckless assaults on fear often lead to injury or a bad session.  It is the elegant dance with fear that I enjoy, a tango, not a slam dance.

It came together successfully on Saturday.  My first ride was a happy preview for the day to come.   I started paddling for the wave early, saw my son to my right and thought about giving him room even though I was in the better position.  He pulled out before the drop.  I took it, banked right and angled up the face to pull into the pocket.  It was my best ride of 2012.

There were many other awesome rides for me and my son.  We also had some spectacular falls, including a ride where my son came off the bottom of the wave, pumped up to the top, then got his board stuck in the top lip of the wave as it crashed down, pushing him off the board for a mid-air over the falls drop.  When he landed, the whitewash pushed him into the impact zone, where he suffered under the force of another three waves.

We ended the session giddy with excitement, no injuries, no shark sightings.  We spoke about the fear, laughing, knowing it was a not an average day.  It was a day we danced with fear, using it to sharpen our focus, amp up our reflexes, and concentrate all that we had into the drop, the first dig of the rail into wave face, and the race along the smooth glassy surface.

Hype Cycles for Big Data and Software Defined Networking

Big Data is overhyped and about to fall from media attention.  Software Defined Networking (SDN) is on the rise.

The media is looking for actual Big Data deployments in the enterprise.  With a pack of companies pitching the vision for Big Data, media are looking for real-world examples that aren't at a humongous company like Google and Yahoo.  These are great examples, but they're too big for the average enterprise to relate to.

In the meantime, the new kid on the block is SDN.  It's hot with tremendous potential, but limited numbers of deployments, even less than Big Data.  However, the vision is seductive and the media will pay attention to the great change in data center networks that SDN will one day bring about.

A friend of mine recently pointed me to a presentation that John Vrionis gave at the Open Networking Summit in April.  John's a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and pays attention to things like hype versus value.   John's presentation contained a slide on the Gartner Hype Cycle for Big Data and Software Defined Networking (SDN).   I included his slide from Gartner above. 

While John may deal with value and valuation, I love to talk about hype, the ebb and flow of public sentiment and attention placed on technology trends.

Three years ago, I started to track the hype around Big Data.  We launched the poster child of Big Data, Cloudera, in March of 2009.    Since that time, Big Data, Hadoop (the main big data technology in the media) and a growing number of other companies have been hyping up the promise of Big Data.   In a casual meeting last month with John Kreisa, the VP of marketing at Hortonworks, we discussed the possibility of the press getting "Big Data fatigue."  We agreed that Big Data is about to cross the chasm.  The players in the space need to help it through the Trough of Disillusionment as quick as possible.  Companies with the momentum and vision to guide Big Data to the Slope of Enlightenment will see the benefits.  These are the companies that will get more sales and a higher valuation.

Earlier on the radar are companies that focus on Software Defined Networking.  These are companies moving from a technology to a product.  We've already seen a range of popup announcements from companies like Nicira and Dell related to SDN.  The hype wave is just getting started.  It'll be exciting to see who comes out on top.   Nicira came out of the gates strong, but there are dozens of companies that are ramping up to push the SDN hype up in the next two years.

This is definitely a hot space to watch.

Community Engagement

Silicon Valley's hottest marketing service in 2012 is community engagement.  This is what I've been hearing from my clients like Jon Toor of Xsigo and from people in the venture capital community like Christina Lee of Kleiner Perkins.

The challenge is that the community for Silicon Valley B2B technology companies is difficult to define.  Many technology startups in Silicon Valley have a limited number of customers that have purchased complex technology products that cost more than $100,000 per deal.   If the target audience for community engagement is less than 500 active customers, the marketer needs to use techniques that go beyond setting up community infrastructure such as a Facebook Page or a message board.  These types of companies of companies cannot rely on the faith of "if you build it, they will come."

To help define the community. which needs to extend beyond the limited customer base, I have created a community engagement grid and that identifies four groups of people:

1. Customers (the gold standard, but in limited supply);
2. Technology Influencers (active bloggers on technology trends that have a full-time job in technology);
3. Market Influencers (industry analysts, even if they are one person working at home);
4. Media (business, IT trade, and paid bloggers).

The important thing to understand is that in a B2B technology product, customers are often the only group of people that actually has access to the product.  With the decline of test labs, most people will never  be able to get access to a $100,000 piece of enterprise technology. 

Due to the constraints of busy schedules, traditional media writers often have the least amount of knowledge of the product.  Because they have more time to spend on understanding a specific technology and market, the analysts and bloggers often have a deeper understanding of the technology.

There are dozens of activities that can be used to engage with the community.  I generally organize the activities into these categories:

1. Paid;
2. Self-Published;
3. Influenced.

Running Free

A boy ran barefoot through the park.  He laughed.  He enjoyed the feel of the ground beneath his feet, the wind in his face, the jarring throughout his body.  It was fun to run.

Thirty-five years ago, the boy was me.

Unfortunately, I grew up.  Until January of 2011, I was a middle-age shod runner plodding slowly through the bike paths of suburbia.  Well, runner, may be too grand a term to describe me, an aging office worker in Silicon Valley who used to run about 3 miles several times a week.

Last Christmas, I received a pair of Vibram FiveFingers shoes (VFFs) from my sister, an extremely nice woman living in Hawaii.  Like many people trying out minimal shoes for the first time, I put them on, ran 3 miles and had sore calves the next day.  The pain was so intense that I hobbled, feeling more like an injury than a case of tender muscles.  At that moment, I did something that surprised me.  I made a smart choice.

Instead of changing back to my normal running shoes or easing into the VFFs by running a mile at a time, I decided to run completely barefoot.

Many minimal shoe runners suggest that the best way to prevent injury is to run barefoot, not with a shoe like a VFF, but with skin on pavement.  The logic behind this is that the sole of a person's foot will become sore before the foot or leg muscles are injured.  I made a commitment to press the flesh to the trail.

I've spent 9 months running barefoot, primarily on asphalt trails.  I'm up to 6 miles for a typical run.  It's fun.  However, it wasn't easy.  I never cut my feet, though it often felt like I did.  There were many times that my soles hurt, especially when I stepped on small rocks.  I burned the bottom of my feet on black asphalt during the mid-day sun, got blisters from running too far, and got pebbles embedded in my skin.

Initially, I had to run much slower for distances as short as a half mile.   Why did I do this?

Well, like most people over forty, I was getting injuries from running in normal shoes.  I now realize that I have an incorrect running form, something I never knew.  Most people never learn a good running gait.  If I consistently ran distances over six miles, I would get blisters on my feet, a sore knee, and lower back pain.

Running barefoot started as an experiment.   I kept it up because I enjoyed the feeling of putting my bare feet on the ground.  It was a liberating experience, something nostalgic, something free.

I may move back to the VFFs.  My foot and leg muscles are now accustomed to the new gait.  The VFFs enable me to go faster on rough terrain and to run on rocky trails of the Palo Alto Baylands.  Without rubber on my feet, I am stuck on asphalt or concrete trails.

I watch my kids play at the park or the beach.  Without any discussion of running barefoot, they naturally take off their shoes to run.  Even when I suggest they put shoes on, they often run barefoot.   The look on their faces is one of joy, of freedom, the thrill of running free.

Long Term Marketing Strategy and Facebook Problems

Facebook Page management is the most popular service I sell.  Along with Twitter management, it is the engine that drives our business forward.

Thus, I am often disturbed when I read articles about Facebook once again blocking tools that help with the exportation and organization of Facebook friend information.

The Facebook terms of service states:

“you will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.”

Although this policy doesn't impact current Facebook Page campaigns.  It does reflect the generally philosophy of Facebook management to keep Facebook a closed system. This philosophy will create problems for marketers over the long-term and will push marketers to create communities on their own web sites, communities that are distinct from platforms such as Facebook. 


While the most innovation is currently happening on mega socialization sites like Facebook, we'll see another shift back to innovation on the technologies that help companies build communities on their own web sites.  


Companies like SAP and Salesforce that have technology to manage customer data have the most sophisticated approach to date of integrating online communities into their web sites.  These communities were developed before the big Facebook boom.  They lack many of the aggressive networking features that Facebook pioneered.  However, I believe that these features would technically be easy to add.

Teaching Young Children to Program

I recently tried an experiment to teach my 11 year old son to program. The experience has been wonderful. I began the project with an expectation that he might have problems understanding concepts such as variables, data types, conditionals and while loops.

Well, to my surprise, I had the concept of "children learn fast" thrown in my face again.

He's using Python and IDLE now. I originally evaluated Alice, Pharo smalltalk, Logo, Ruby, and other systems designed for teaching. Although his school in Palo Alto uses Alice, I didn't think Alice would provide the necessary experience with data structures.  I have a bias against too much graphics in the basic courses.  Although graphics help to get children excited about the technology, too much emphasis takes time away from the basic programming constructs.

My first Python curriculum was based on a modified version of MIT's Open Courseware and free textbooks. I started there because it came up on a Google search of courses to teach python. It was also free.  Another interesting resource I found was a set of videos on computer science programming paradigms from the stanford engineering everywhere (see) group.

I moved away from the MIT Open Courseware after about 5 lessons.  I actually spent money to buy Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python.   Fortunately, this fine book is also available for free in PDF and HTML.   I think that Al Sweigart is a generous guy for making this resource freely available.

I mixed in basic concepts of graphics and sound using pygame to keep my son's interest up. I also gave him an overview of HTML and basic concepts of web applications, using the google app engine python SDK.

Subsequent to starting off with Sweigart's book, I've purchased Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner, 3rd edition by Michael Dawson and Head First Python by Paul Barry.  Both of these are good books with similar learning steps.

Dawson's book makes use of the LiveWires package for the graphics in some of the chapters.  This makes it a bit easier to make games than with pygame.   However, I would prefer if the examples just focused on pygame since the LiveWires package is that that widely used.

Each course lasts between 15 and 60 minutes.  I've found that my son's attention drifts a bit after 45 minutes.  It's been a great bonding experience these past few months.  However, with the bass fishing season in full action, I'm a bit worried that his interest may swing back to fishing.