Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom to Close Doors

On May 21, Disney is closing down Virtual Magic Kindgom. Launched to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Disneyland in 2005, the virtual attraction saw strong enough numbers to keep it running for three unexpected years, but, as producer Seth "Yavn" Mendelsohn explained in a newsletter earlier this week, "the game has lived well beyond the originally intended time it was planned to run."

"At Disney we're still committed to building communities and online virtual worlds – and we're looking forward to providing you the opportunity to enjoy other exciting new experiences," Mendelsohn continued.

That's readily apparent. Disney plans to invest up to $100 million in 10 new virtual worlds, including one based on Cars to tie in to themed physical park expansions. Likewise, at the same time that Disney launched the virtual world, PIxie Hollow, for the Disney Fairies brand, and an accompanying series of toys, Clickables, it announced a new team dedicated to addressing virtual worlds.

Disney set to launch mobile 'tween' social network

MATT HARTLEY

May 15, 2008

TORONTO -- Walt Disney Co. wants to take "tween" social networking mobile.

When Disney launches its new Prince Caspian video game for the Nintendo DS today, it will also unveil DGamer, a kid-friendly mobile social network that will allow users to create avatars, chat and share high scores with friends over a WiFi connection.

I can't believe they aren't offering something else that is at least comparable with this many members who enjoy playing every day. How is this not considered a marketing tool for people to plan trips to the parks? I don't know what to even tell my kids. Thank goodness they still have Webkinz and epets, but they will miss VMK a lot. (Krystal Rose)

What Accountants Can Teach You About Using Social Media

H&R Block Cast a Wide Net With a Campaign That Included Profiles, Videos, Twitter and Widgets

By Megan McIlroy and Abbey Klaassen

Published: May 14, 2008

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Tax software isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of marketing in social networks or on YouTube, spaces dominated by movie trailers and goofy viral videos. But H&R Block proved that it, too, can be successful in the space, but it's about matching content to the social community and then making that content valuable to consumers, said Amy Worley, director of digital marketing for H&R Block.

Amy Worley

Photo Credit: Jonathan Fickies

Ms. Worley was speaking at the latest installment of Advertising Age's Digital Bites breakfast series yesterday and shared successes and lessons learned from H&R Block's most recent social-media campaign. The campaign cast a wide net in the social-media space, with MySpace and Facebook profiles, YouTube postings, a Twitter account, widgets and even a virtual tax office in Second Life.

Most companies, she noted, wouldn't dive into all the tactics at once but her product is very seasonal and "anything we didn't learn in one season, we would have to wait until next year [to try]."

The recent social-media blitz to market H&R Block's digital tax solution produced a 171% lift in internet ad awareness among the targeted audience and an overall brand awareness lift of 52%. H&R Block devoted about 0.5%* of its total marketing budget to the effort. (more)

• H&R Block Facebook
• H&R Block Twitter
  
• H&R Block MySpace (fake blog or flog - Truman Greene)
  
• H&R Block Lulu.tv
  

8 Apr 2008 09:22 AM

Great job impersonating a human & good luck with your goal of world domination!

Some of you may have read the original Enterprise Octopus post, which introduced the icon and explained the difference between The Enterprise Octopus (people-centric work) and The Enterprise Filing Cabinet (file-centric work). I wanted to take this further by turning on the x-ray and giving you a look at what’s inside both scenarios. First, let’s start with “the two Me’s:”

Old me vs Me

The Enterprise Filing Cabinet

Most companies live and work in the Enterprise Filing Cabinet. They live in a pile of documents, with only a personal typewriter, calendar, mail, flip chart and calculator as tools for working with others. People receive tons of files, paper-clipped to tons of emails. Then they have to launch lots of applications to read those files. It’s not clear where to find anything, what’s happening, who knows what, and if it’s been done before. Like your co-workers, customers and partners are walled off in a completely different universe from you.

The Enterprise Octopus

The Enterprise Octopus turns things right-side up. It introduces a geographic head to the Enterprise and it’s in the head where all the improvement occurs. First and foremost, note that it’s a mix of all stakeholders occupying the head. That includes employees, partners, and customers. They’re all in there. They can see each other. Connect to each other. Work with each other. And since the “new me” has a radar for a head, I know how and where to focus my attention with any of these people. The head is where the real future IP is (both the “me” head and the Octopus head). It may be hard to think of this in future-terms now, but I can imagine all sorts of new innovation in the head.

For you octopus-knowledgeable, the arms of an octopus literally have minds of their own and The Enterprise Octopus is no exception. The arms are not in the head but they are an important part of the system. They’re utilities. They connect to old and existing systems. In this case, they know where to reach to accomplish three different activities:

1. File. The Octopus knows where to reach to grab the right file and retrieve it for socialization. Equally, it knows just where to deposit something now that it has been created by the social group. The filing cabinet can then do what it does best, manage files.

2. Compute. There are times when the The Enterprise Octopus needs to use an arm to crunch numbers. Particularly to analyze what’s happening within the head. But sometimes its purely to deposit important data into other number crunching systems (e.g. an ERP system).

3. Deliver. This arm sends and receives. It can receive email or other inputs and it can equally send out important notifications from the head to other systems or people working in Enterprise Filing Cabinets.

COLORS

I rekon you could call this my version of Andrew McAfee’s SLATES, by that I mean a framework where future people-centric innovation needs to occur. You could call it “Enterprise 2.0″ but then you’d be using a buzzword. You could think in terms of existing tools but then you’d be looking backwards. The industry needs to evolve to value COLORS more than they do today, to think bigger, to solve the people-centric problems of the Enterprise. Doing so means better/faster/more agile companies who produce better products, services and revenue. Yes, I understand that there are cultural ramifications to all this “co” stuff. But it’s happening bit by bit, as much as we think it may never get there. And the key is to make all this so friction-free-usable that people actually want to participate. That said, it’s pretty easy to be a Norman on this stuff.

co- Creation

At the heart of most of the early value has been the notion around co-Creation. For example, we’re both working on a doc or a spreadsheet. But we need more obvious places to be able to co-create based on our current and/or missing behavior. There should be easier ways to identify when creation is already occurring and easier ways to jump in with your half-baked ingredients to help make that creation more valuable. Along with the other parts of COLORS, adding this value to my network ends up being how I’m measured as an employee. Are my contributions valuable and easily measured? Am I helping my network create? There’s a lot more room for innovation for enabling this critical part of the head.

co- Operation

Fertile territory are tools for helping people-centric management. Literally, there’s a new set of skills that managers need. How will they measure the train yard? How will they make decisions? What operations should be collaborative? I imagine new KPIs cross functional managers can use to help drive the business. Whatever new operations tools could emerge, they should be part of the head. Perhaps they are things like reputation scoring, the quality of co-created deliverables, or “repair” rate. Who knows. These could have scores. They could have visibility. They could help managers understand how effective their socially-driven team is and help them manage their own effectiveness at making the situation better.

co- Learning

There has to be better ways of surfacing real learning and having it be absorbed by the geographic center. Millions are wasted when institutional knowledge walks away and it’s too hard to find what really matters. Company “universities” are siloed off. Project learning never makes it back into the system again. The wheel is recreated. We need easier ways to demarcate important scar tissue and have it be super visible. I can save tons by immediately learning what we’ve learned. We can grow much faster as an organization.

co- Ordination

Think of this is way more effective baton passing. Formal workflows don’t work. People need to know where things are and when it’s right for them to engage. They even need to know how other people like to be engaged. Making sure the trains run on time is big business and things like social workflows and much easier coordination of work can make big gains for companies. I’d like to look into the head of the Octopus and know where the batons are, when it will be time for me to add value and how I can keep things most effectively moving.

co- Respect

Human Resources is the trump card in people-centric collaboration. Behavior is an often talked about critical ingredient to the evolution of the social productivity market. HR needs much better tools to be able to measure and enable a behavior-positive environment. They can help folks learn what’s working and what’s not working. How to be proficient, where to utilize their talents. How to engage more effectively. They can tap the reputation of the network and employ those resources where they’re needed. They can provide intelligence to the execs they never had before. Reputation, behavior and network intelligence are yet-to-be-serviced aspects of the Octopus head.

co- Solve

There are a whole slew of solutions that we can develop around how we work with employees, partners, prospects and customers to jointly respond to and solve their problems. I think of this as MDRM (market development relationship management). It’s a new collaborative layer on top of CRM that provides a way to respond to and engage with the outside world in a way that makes sense for product development, sales, marketing and operations.

This is merely an idea, meant for refinement.

I don’t mean any of this to be overly prescriptive. It’s merely a framework for how I think of future innovation within the Enterprise Octopus head. I welcome folks to refine, blow up or otherwise improve any or all of these notions.

Credit: Huge thanks to Michael Sigler and David Carrol for taking the sketches I did of all this and turning it into art, worthy of being on a poster. Hmmm. A poster! For a behind-the-scenes look at what went into this post’s creative process, be sure to check out Sigler’s blog.

Get in your head

Whenever I talk about the new enterprise collaboration I always imagine an octopus. The big head of the octopus is where we gather. Sometimes it’s a team, sometimes it’s the whole company, but all of us are in the head of the octopus. It’s where we live. It’s where we unify and freely interact. What’s great about being in the head, is you get to leave all your stuff behind and just get to the point.

But sometimes we need stuff

That stuff could anything. Stuff is just old information we may need to look at from time to time. Typically it’s inactive and stored. Most stuff isn’t that important but some of it is. Here’s a list of stuff:

• Documents
• Data
• Quarterly plans
• Files
• Past meetings
• Information from other applications

The Enterprise Octopus has arms that can get the stuff

Want some stuff? Your arm knows you want it. That’s what it’s there for. They can get stuff while you stay in the head. No need to go anywhere else. Don’t run off now! If we were having a conversation about Q4, we should be able to immediately suck all the relevant stuff from Q4 into the Octopus head so we can talk about it and keep the work going.

Most companies are headless

The problem is, there’s no central place for the people. All we have are file generating machines. Email machines. Calendar machines. Word processing, spreadsheet and presentation machines. And many companies purchased even bigger, complex machines to manage the output of all those other machines. In the meantime, we just work around those machines and wonder, “which way to the head?”

The head

The new people-focused enterprise wants its head back. They want the place for the people to easily unify and get to the point. You can call this “Enterprise 2.0″ you can call this “social productivity,” it doesn’t really matter what you call it other than it’s going to turn things right-side up. And it’s about time.

The Enterprise Octopus has a nemesis. His name is Norman Naysayer. You might think the Enterprise Octopus’ nemesis would be a boat propeller but Norman is the real deal. You all know Norman. He’s the guy who sits across the table and throws obstacles at you.

Quotes that reveal you’re dealing with a “Norman”

• I’ve seen all this stuff before
• Sounds like a lot of employees wasting a lot of time on frivolous stuff
• We already have collaboration software
• Social is what you do outside of work
• Show me the financial justification for this investment
• How does this help employees do their job better
• Show me a business process this improves
• What if people post bad stuff?
• We can extend our CMS to do this
• We have a wiki for collaboration
• It’s a security risk
• It’s too early
• This doesn’t work with our policies
• People will say inappropriate things
• Why should I allow other people to edit my content?
• People will goof off
• This is a fad
• This is a feature
• It’s not relevant to my job, it’s just a distraction
• I don’t want to have to learn a new system and new tools
• You want me to post my opinions publicly?
• Our (my) reputation will be damaged
• I’m not the expert therefore I shouldn’t be the one who comments
• Social what? sounds like charity work to me.
• What’s the ROI

Headline generator

I would expect all these fears to be article headlines and topics of conversations just like they’ve been for other movements over the last 20 years.

Thanks to @michaelsigler for helping me bring Norman to life. Now lets kill him.

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Or heck, even Twitter for that matter? In the meantime, a little cottage industry of Twitter-focused services has sprung up. Noticeably absent is Google. I can’t tell if that’s some sort of Jaiku-in-the-waiting move, or no move at all. Perhaps they’re waiting for someone else to get it right so they can buy them. No doubt, getting Twitter search right is probably harder than it seems. Most of the sites I’ve found are pretty sloppy.

Frankly, I don’t use many of these since all these Twitter pieces are too fragmented and formative for me to remember to bother.

Still, here’s a quick review of the stuff I’ve tried lately:

Summize

By far my favorite search, Summize replaced the now-defunct Terraminds as my #1 Twitter searching buddy.

All my RSS Twitter searches are driven from Summize. It’s even got some other nifty features like showing threaded conversations, trending topics (memes), “nifty queries,” multilingual support, and an easy way to tweet your search results. I also love that Summize doesn’t use the word “Tweet” in it’s product name. It’s why I can’t remember most of these, they sounds exactly the same.

Outside of my iPhone client, Summize is by far the best Twitter search/stats app on the market.

Tweetscan

I do give serious credit to my old Twitter search engine, Tweetscan, for flaunting their eco-friendly toilet advertisement on their homepage but other than that, they lost me.

The site needs some UI love. The colors remind me of the 1990s Mint and Teal craze, which makes me want to shower. Upon closer look they display popular searches and upon looking again, I found the toilet even nicer than the first time I saw it. I mean, it’s pink and ecofriendly.

That’s one kick ass toilet. I might return now that I found that.

Quotably

I had high hopes for Quotably. It’s supposed to help you follow Twitter conversations but I find that it doesn’t work any more practically than Twhirl, which I use for my desktop client. There’s no doubt that following conversations on Twitter can be very hard but the results in Quotably are mostly inaccurate and don’t lend themselves to being any more practical than searching for your replies and using your memory.

I guess if you have no memory, Quotably could be ok for you. I’ve typed, “where are my keys” a few times in it’s search box but it didn’t help me remember where I put them. And there’s still no way for me to put an RSS feed on my keys as much as my wife would like to engineer one.

Tweetstats

I wish I had a need to use Tweetstats site more. It sure is purty. Friendly, too. And it makes some interesting graphs. How can you not like a site that says, “There be faeries” while you’re waiting for the results? And I believe that it’s powered by creatures, so don’t tell me it’s a lie.

Most of the graphs I find novel more than useful. Who cares which hours I’m most active? What am I supposed to do with that, amp up my activity between 4am-6am? I do like the graph that shows who I talk to the most. It’s the only one I find interesting.

I recently discovered that there’s a “tweetclouds” button at the top which shows you a not-as-pretty but still interesting rendering of your activity.

Tweetclouds

Anyone who reads this blog knows I’d like the Tweetclouds service. I was cut and pasting to create clouds before this thing came along.

I’ve noticed that they’ve fixed a lot of their instability problems (no one could get on the site for a white) and that they’ve added some of the Many Eyes features like two-word clouds as well as nifty things like “@” suppression.

I’m not sure why no one is yet doing trend-clouds. I want to see a living cloud over time. Imagine time lapse clouds which show if one word is growing or shrinking. I want to see the patterns. And I want to be able to have it as a living thing on my blog.

iTweet

While I’m naming off Twitter services, I might as well include a phone client. I’ve played a heck of a lot of iPhone clients and iTweet is my current favorite (with Hahlo a close second).

All that said, I still hate tweeting on my iPhone. The EDGE network is slow and typing is a pain. And all the Twitter clients on the iPhone fail to be able to page ahead on your timeline (supposedly that’s a Twitter API problem and not a phone problem).

I like iTweet’s way oversized buttons and easy menus. I have massive paws so having big targets makes me a happy boy.

As an aside, I recently learned from Shel Israel that he and I have both nearly totaled our cars while tweet-n-driving.

Update

Ironically, this article about Google working on social search hit Techmeme today.

Wouldn’t you know it, if I just would have waited a wee bit longer some smart people would have saved me hours of time. For those of you following I started cut-and-pasting some people’s blogs (male thought leaders and female thought leaders) into Many Eyes in order to create more accurate tag clouds of what they were talking about.

From there, JP Rangaswami asked me to create some Tweetclouds for him, so I did. But wouldn’t you know it, a couple of interesting website have sprung up so that will do all the work for you.

TagCrowd

My man Ken Burbary (@kenburbary) tipped me off to TagCrowd. You can either simply type the URL of any website in or upload a file and it will create a cloud for you. I tried it on a number of site and while it did create a nice looking cloud, obviously the entire site isn’t crawled. The clouds I looked at were clearly limited to the one URL I pointed to. Here’s the one that got spat out when I pointed to this blog.

TweetClouds

Seemingly more accurate is Tweetclouds, which pulls the text from your Twitter archives and creates a cloud for you. I liked that there was an option to omit the directed comments to others so that the analysis was limited to only original statements. I was sorta surprised that “thanks” and “love” were words I used a lot. On the downside, I’ve tried getting to Tweetclouds’ website for about a week and it seems to always be down. So, as with anything, your mileage may vary.

This stuff should be built into blog software

There are two things missing from blog software:

• Auto generating clouds like this stuff.
• Auto blog rolls which show who you really frequent.

These sorts of clouds (and ultimately blog rolls) are so much more truthful and valuable. I hope there’s even more innovation in this category.

I just finished another cut-n-paste-a-thon. In February it focused on scraping out a couple of month’s worth of blog posts and pasting them into Many Eyes to create “real” tag clouds based on actual content instead of the author’s bookmarking.

This time, I was scraping a month’s worth of Tweets. You can blame my natural curiosity and JP Rangaswami, who’s idea it was.

I’ve said it before, someone needs to build an application that does this automatically. We need something that looks at our posts, tweet streams, and links and outputs things like tag clouds (based on what we’re writing), blog rolls (based on what we’re reading or linking to), and potentially parses things like resources. For example, Jeremiah Owyang barfs out so many links and stuff to read that trying to go back and find them when I have time is nearly impossible.

How I did it

There was nothing glamorous about this. Ultimately, it was tons of cut and pasting. I didn’t include timestamps, or other people’s names. Yes, including other people’s names could have been interesting in that it could show relationships but since I wanted to compare tweets with blogs, I wanted to focus on the substance of the conversations not relationships. So, I opened each person’s archive and pasted a month’s worth of tweets into a plain text file. That was then uploaded to Many Eyes. I must have forgotten that a month’s worth of tweets–especially for these people–is a hell of a lot of content.

Who I chose

Before some comes and slaps me with a gender stick–yes, these are all dudes. I chose three people because I knew it would be a lot of work. Obviously, I was going to include JP, since it was his idea. Dennis Howlett also raised his hand to be included. That left one more spot and since Jeremiah is a Tweet-a-saurus Rex and someone I know focuses on industry-focused Tweets, I arbitrarily chose him since I knew there could be a correlation to his blog.

JP Rangaswami

Interestingly JP’s blog (Jan/Feb 08) was very focused on the industry and his tweet stream was much more about his life. Although JP’s love of music appears in his blog, it’s front and center in his twitter stream. “Listening” refers to whatever music is playing while he’s at his computer. I liked how he had a lot of action words like “listening,” “watching” (typically Cricket), and “reading.” As well, his deep family orientation shines with references to “family,” “daughter,” “Hope,” (his daughter and her injury this month) and how happy he is to be “back” after a lot of travel. I found it apropos that JP’s tweet stream was almost musical–a bit like the pauses between his significant blog notes. It was interesting that there was less of a pattern in the two-word cloud. I think it shows that he’s posting a range of commentary. In comparison with the other two people I looked at, JP had the least Twitter conversations ( “@” replies).

Jeremiah Owyang

A month’s worth of Jeremiah’s tweets equals a full day of cut and pasting. Perhaps more if you’re not already a level 5 keystroker like I’ve become. Jeremiah’s tweet clouds were incredibly consistent with his blog. I’m not sure I’m surprised, though as someone who reads his stream it felt like there would have been some deeper perspective. Jeremiah’s insane curiousity and enthusiasm did pop out, however, with words like “interesting” and “great” clearly poking out. A hint of his power of promotion was also evident in his two word cloud with “blogger dinner” taking prominence. It was interesting that unlike JP and Dennis, Jeremiah actually did have a pattern in his two-word cloud. I think it shows how topically focused he is. Jeremiah had a balance of content and conversation with “@replies” composing about 50% of his tweets.

Dennis Howlett

Dennis wins the award for the most conversations. Nearly 100% of his tweets were replies so they guy is very much a part of the conversations. I found it interesting that his tweets were laden with opinionated words like “good,” “crap,” “dead,” “hell,” etc but that his two word could revealed the most with “optimizing efficiency” and “personal productivity” as examples.

Today marks the major annual release of Clearspace, Jive’s collaboration platform (as well as a completely new website). Version 1.0 released in Feb 2007 and version 2.0 ships today. Jive has two components of the platform:

• Clearspace. Used as a company’s UI for collaborating with coworkers.
• Clearspace Community (formerly Clearspace X). Powers
  company’s online customer or partner communities.

The 2.0 release is focused primarily on Clearspace (though Clearspace Community profited, too). There are 5 new things added to the platform, plus we’ve acquired Jotlet, a kick-ass calendaring company. You can read what Dave and Matt had to say on JiveTalks, the company blog.

Since our software is on an annual subscription model, we’re highly motivated to ensure that things are actually working for our customers. This keeps us very engaged with them which is cool because we get to see how they’re using our products and what we need to do to make significant improvements. The new things we’ve added were chosen based on collaborating with our customers.

People

One thing came out loud and clear. It was the people-centric aspect of Clearspace that companies craved. And they wanted to see us make that even more powerful. Sometimes we heard customers say they wanted, “Facebook for the Enterprise.” We weren’t sure what that meant, exactly, but after a lot of customer conversations we figured it out:

• While you add friends in the social web, you’re paid to be friends at work. So friending wasn’t something they wanted.
• Fast ways of seeing the activity of relevant coworkers. More insight on how conversation and information flows through networks of people.
• Much faster access to who people are and how they’re connected organizationally and relationally.

Focus

The most consistent feedback we got was that while Clearspace was great at bringing people to engage with each other, it was almost too good at it which made staying on top of what was important critical. While we have inboxes for email, there wasn’t a place in Clearspace to keep track of all the people, collaboration and content most important to each individual in the Enterprise. Clearspace 2.0 offers every employee an easy way to set up their view of their company so that it makes the most sense for them.

Work

Projects
New in Clearspace 2.0 are projects, which anyone can easily set up. They’re 100% widgetizable so that you can see your work the way you want to. This makes it great for people who are more visual, more tick-list oriented or document-centric to set things up exactly the way they want.

Share pieces of Clearspace with those that don’t have it
Now people can invite folks outside the company who don’t have Clearspace to work with you. Temporarily move documents into a cloud and invite others in. When you’re done, pull the content back inside Clearspace and keep moving.

Expose and socialize content in Sharepoint
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