Apple doesn't talk - people talk about Apple

Jonathan Salem Baskin drives a big nail confidently into the heart of business social media theory with the neat observation that Apple doesn't bother with social media - because society is acting faithfully as its media already.

Picture this

John Sviokla's piece on data visualisation is timely - and well illustrated with some examples from the insurance industry.

New Unknown Knowns: You'd Better Listen To The Crowd's Pain

All right, so I'm not entirely sure if I'm using the famous "known unknowns etc etc" formulation correctly here, but bear with me. This is a short cry of existential pain about the connected world we live in, and how our reliance on it has introduced a whole new level of risk to business and anxiety to our personal lives.

Here's the thing: I had an email outage last week. (It may even still be going on, for all I know.) I didn't know I wasn't receiving emails until someone asked me over the phone why I hadn't responded to something. And you know what? I immediately thought that the problem was theirs, not mine. Because there's no symptom in my environment telling me my email's down - or, worse, intermittently down - and because I'm one smug, self-satisfied, savvy citizen, I just motor on, assuming that any glitches I notice out the window are nothing to do with me.

I only realised that I did indeed have a problem when I idly punched in the name of my ISP into the search box at Twitter. And, oh boy, was I enlightened. I am not alone! Also - I'm learning some really filthy new words.

Then I noticed that my spam filters aren't quite so clogged with the rubbish that normally accumulates in them. This gives me, if you will, a scientific observation that could have backed up an outage theory if I'd had one in the first place. But I didn't have an outage theory at all: the whole realm of service failure hadn't once occurred to me.

So, what should I do in the future? Become more paranoid? I'll certainly be leaping on Twitter ahead of Google next time something doesn't smell right in my environment.

As for customer support: well, who needs it? My ISP grew to prominence by embracing self-service as fully as possible to keep its prices down. The company had to improve its live agent customer service as competition increased. But now Twitter's here, it's absolutely inundated. Basically, everybody in the world can see every single complaint that's being made. You'd be a fool to go the normal customer service route and get a ticket in the closed system, wouldn't you? You're better off @-ing these guys on Twitter and getting some marketsquare attention.

My conclusion is that, after years of predicting this kind of live-action public-humiliation scenario for businesses, I missed the actual arrival of this era. I missed the moment when Google's real power over business passed to Twitter. Don't you miss it too.

Erase this belief from your memory circuits: "What I don't know can't hurt me." What you don't know could be destroying you.

IdeaPaint

Courtesy of Fast Company, here's one of those products that's so simple and obvious it's hard to believe no one saw it before. Cover your walls in IdeaPaint, and they turn into a whiteboard.

Is IdeaPaint an innovation, or just an invention? That depends on whether people want to switch to the new technology, which is cheaper and more flexible than conventional whiteboards, but which does need some extra prep work. It also depends on who fits out your office (or, gosh, home), and whether they'll go for the new process they'll need to apply, rather than install, this whiteboarding solution.

I like the idea of whiteboard paint, and I note that blackboard paint has been available for many a year. I also notice that despite the growth of online collaborative tools, most creative group work still gets done in rooms with pens. I guess the committed handyman could combine IdeaPaint with Johnny Lee's Wii whiteboard hack to create a physical/digital collaborative environment - or, at the least, a self-recording whiteboarding room.

Do Or Die? Do A Dyson

Jennifer Harris mentions the "Semmelweis Effect" in a recent Management Today piece. Semmelweis discovered that getting maternity ward doctors to wash their hands regularly cut the mortality rate of mothers from 18% to 1%. This was in 1847. He was ignored and ridiculed.

Harris says that successful people can become resistant to innovation because they begin to see success as a right, rather than the outcome of work and thought. "The way to prove them wrong is to do a Dyson," she says: that is, go off and do it anyway.

For organisations to establish innovation as a process, they need to question their own complaceny, traditions and superstitions. Change is as much, if not more, about loss than gain. Loss of status or hard-won expertise in the face of innovation is a very real, if rarely articulated, fear.

Leaders need to remind those around them that successful organisations practise rational decision making. They move forward on the basis of sound analysis of good data. If a new process demonstrates the kind of performance benefit that Semmelweis achieved, then it gets implemented - no matter how cherished the theories it displaces.

How is it, then, that so many organisations seem to survive on a mixture of irrational decision making, poor innovation and luck? The truth is that they're either burning off a stockpile of good will, market momentum and inherited assets, or they're working some kind of monopoly. Everybody else gets found out.

Deep Restaurant Maths

"GBK [Gourmet Burger Kitchen] is set to launch a new style of restaurant featuring smaller-sized burgers in an effort to encourage greater frequency of visits from customers."

I've been pondering this snippet from PR Week ever since I first read it a few days ago. Much as I love GBK, I don't buy the idea that offering smaller burgers will make people go there more often. I suppose it might work on a planet where the only source of sustenance was GBK.

Mobile entertainment apps: state of play

Neil Robertson has written a very useful summary of the current state of mobile entertainment apps, via Mobile Monday.