I've been involved (and invested) in the formation of a new bank holding
company for a while now. It's time for a new bank, because the existing
banks are up to their ears in bad loans and no one who needs a loan can
get one. The concept of the bank was interesting to me from the get-go,
because it is a holding company for a bank that will operate in four
states: California, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas. This regional concept is
one of the new ideas that attracted me. As an angel investor, I like to
have a portfolio, rather than a single investment. Four banks sounded
good. We have named the overall entity Ventana National Bank, and the
siblings Ventana Bank Arizona, Ventana Bank Nevada--you can figure it
out from there. Ventana means "window" in Spanish.
The California bank (in San Diego) is the furthest along, and we expect
our California Charter approval in the next three weeks, which will take
us to our public fundraising. Right now, we have our seed funding --
from nearly 100 founders and organizers of the three banks already in
formation.
By becoming a founder and accepting a board position on Ventana Bank of
Arizona (in formation)'s board, I have become able to influence the
direction this bank goes in -- not only in Arizona, but to some extent
across the franchise. I thought I would never have this opportunity in
my life, so I'm totally stoked.
Here's what I'm thinkin', and what the bankers have so far agreed with.
These are activities that I hope will be part of the core fabric of the
bank.
On the community relations side:
1)Classes in financial literacy and consumer financial education
2)Workshops in entrepreneurship
3)strong commitment to minorities, diversity, and microlending
4)involvement by and for women
5)partnerships with schools to teach financial literacy
On the "real" (financial side):
1)strong commitment to entrepreneurship
2)strong commitment to smaller businesses
3)raising money to open the bank by allowing a broader base of smaller
investors
4)having women and minorities as shareholders
5)having the people who invest in the bank be customers of the bank
6)creating a TRUE community
Most of the banks in formation that I've known about recently have been
backed by a small group of guys (just a word) who threw in their
personal capital to open the bank. That makes most new banks "private"
banks, often concentrating on concentrating to a speciice niche (in
Arizona often real estate). The units of investment are so big that
"ordinary" people can be shareholders in the bank. So when the bank is
sold to a bigger bank (this is the "exit" strategy most often), a small
number of people make money.
But my travels around the world have taught me that true community
lending can make lots of money and still be a service to a larger
community. We don't really have an entrepreneur's bank in Arizona right
now, or even a bank that understands the unique needs of small business.
I do.
Fortunately, banking is tightly regulated, so I can't get too dreamy.
But stay tuned. If I don't participate in the formation of a bank that
is trully different and inclusive, I'll feel like a real failure.
The new favorite tool for startups that want to get up and running quickly is Drupal, an open source content management software platfrom on which you can build social networks. It has become popular because it has lots of possibilities and features,and also because it is free.
In my role as strategic advisor/blogger/social media consultant, I am working with two sites that are up and running, and I have just gotten the news that a third initiative, aimed at creating low cost web sites for non-profit organizations under the aegis of NPower Arizona is under way using Drupal.
Let me give you my humble opinion, after I tell you that I am not a developer and not a geek, but I'm a pretty experienced content creator across many platforms, among them Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Utterz, Twitter,Seesmic,UStream,.and Kyte.tv. I am an early adopter of anything anyone will let me try, and I approach everything with a desire to integrate the new tool into my life.
I'm a business person, and I am a writer. As a matter of fact, I blog on FastCompany, which is also built on Drupal. So I have lots of experience with it, especially with creating content beyond just comments.
And here's what I have to say:
1)Unless they are architected really well, which seems to be a matter of trial and error, especially in a startup, these sites are not easy to navigate, and as a result they're not easy to search either;
2)As an example, it's not easy to find my blog on this site
3) My friends at RealSelf.com, which is VERY popular, change the site practically every day to make it easier to find information, but the're not quite at the place where they can have a group blog. Beauty bloggers are not technologists, and it takes me quite a while just to get the formatting right on my own posts after six months so they come out in the right places. Nothing's intuitive. It's still "work" to post. (Disclaimer: they do pay me) And RealSelf.com is far and away the BEST of the sites I use.
4)On this site, it's perhaps easier for the user, but that's because I have no privileges. I can't even change the font size that I compose in, which means I can hardly see my own drafts :-) (Yes, there's a littl ageism here) And I don't have the ability to upload more than one piece of multimedia or photo
5)Both Fast Company and EmpowHer.com, another wonderful social network for women's health information, are hard to grasp when you land on the home page. I just tried to ask a question of the site about the best books for newly-diagnosed breast cancer patients, and if I had not been familiar with Drupal from RealSelf.com, I would have given up. Drupal uses a lot of pull down menus that force you to make choices about the subject of your post, the category, etc.
6)Design. Drupal forces you to make choices between design and usability. In order to make the site better, less is more. Check out both Empowher.com and RealSelf.com to see how Drupal encourages minimalism, but not beauty. And in fact, both of those sites, and this one, use similar colors.
Conclusion: Drupal requires a lot of thought and a team that can constantly fine tune the user experience, both for the casual visitor and the content creator. For a nonprofit or a company without developer support, I don't think it's an option. And even an experienced Drupal development team had best have a good requirements understanding with the marketing team or the client before getting under way with this complex product.
Want to create a social network anyone can use and get it up there quickly to see if the market accepts it? Try Ning. Most other product have too many bells, whistles, and bugs.
Geeks live in a dream world -- a world of Twitter-Twhirl-Friendfeed-AlertThingy-Seesmic.
And if you think most people reading this can identify any of those
things, think again. Moreover, if you think there's a chance of any of
those crossing the real chasm in the next ten years, think again.
Why? Because the rest of the world just isn't ready. We live in a
rarified world of social media consultants and early adopters. Where is
the rest of the world? Well, I hate to tell you this, but it's back at
YAHOO.
Why does Microsoft futz with buying Yahoo? Because the rest of the
world is still there. At least it is from a social media standpoint.
This morning on Twitter, Scoble asked why CNET still existed, when all he read was Tech Crunch. None of those names mean anything to the people I meet in Phoenix.
I have been facilitating technical assistance groups for SLHI, a foundation in Arizona that helps non-profit organizations collaborate. This is my second group.
The first group was called "social media," but most of the people
who signed up didn't know what social media was. They signed up because
we marketed the group as "free web site tools."
These were non-profit executives who had built websites (or hired
someone to do it for them), but a few years later, the sites were out
of date, the designers out of business, and keeping their sites current
is impossible for them. Most did not even know who owned their domains
(not usually their charity) or hosted their sites (often the owner of
the domain).
What tool did I use to teach them to build web sites? Blogger. How
long did it take? Six weeks. Why? Because most of them had to be taught
how to log on to a computer, launch a browser, and find a URL.
The second group is quite different. This group is called simply
"free web tools." I started off by asking people what they needed in
their organizations. From their answers, I selected a group of tools I
thought they could use. In this group, I had to start by teaching
people Yahoo Groups, so they
could communicate with their constituencies and I could communicate
with them. I answered questions like "if I join Yahoo, will it put a
virus on my computer." Once I had them signed into Yahoo, I went down
the entire left navigation bar to show them how to upload photos, post
files, and use the calendar.
These were half a dozen people who can use Microsoft Word and answer
email. One woman even carried a thumb dirve with her church files on
it, and knew how to upload from the drive to a computer -- but then not
how to post a photo on a photo-sharing site.
What I've learned is that computer training is all over the map.
While almost everyone who works in an office can now use email and
perhaps word processing, the level of competency after that is all over
the map.
These are not people in undeveloped countries; they are not
residents of the barrio; they are professional people who have been
taught a small piece of a very big puzzle, and don't have a sense of
what the completed puzzle should look like.
We hold this program in the Phoenix Indian Center, a building full
of resources for urban Native Americans. I've been told that most of
the Center's clients do not have access to computers at home, so they
come to the resource room in the Center to use the computers. There,
they can check the things they already know, such as job listings or
email, but there's no systematic training for them here, either.
What this means to me is that it will take a generation for the kids
who may be growing up with social media now to be comfortable with it,
as it has taken ten years for the current generation of employed
professionals to get comfortable even with the amount of collaboration
and transparency represented by Yahoo.
I am so grateful for my life, because I have the privilege of
experiencing both ends of the spectrum, and therefore getting some
perspective.
I just posted this comment to Tyme's blog, but I was the 102nd commentor.I was asleep when this blew up. Who will ever see my comment? So here's what I wrote.
"I think I'll pull the age card here, I grew up WITHOUT television.
The first shows that came on TV were exactly like these online
videos--weird experiments that were good and bad simultaneously. If you
look back at Howdy Doody today you would think it was incredibly
amateurish. It was all they knew how to do.
Online video is in its beginning stages. If all it is doing is
replicating broadcast TV quality and quantity on a monitor, it's not
worth it. Scoble and Shel and Loren are ALL pioneers. They make moves,
some good some bad. But they make moves. All 3 of them.
Both FastCompany.tv and Seagate couldn't have paid enough to get all
this advertising and page views. Shel is personally hurt, but will no
improve his program; Robert takes criticism unbelievably well and will
improve his program. FastCompany.tv is already vastly superior to
FastCompany.com, on which I blog. So everyone here is a startup. We are
all beta testers.
Here's my take on it. Business requires compassion. There's no such
thing as "just business." That's so naive. That's how people thought
about employees in the 19th century factories or in third world sweat
shops.
For the past year, Earth911 has been undergoing a big re-launch and re-positioning from its former not-for-profit status into a real tool for sustainability -- a social venture. When it was founded by my late friend Chris Warner in 1991, it was 1-800-CleanUp, a hotline to find places that would accept used motor oil.Over the years it morphed into a trusted site upon which the environmental compliance people relied. Public officials responsible for enforcing environmental laws would contribute information about recycling locations to Earth911's database, and citizens could (at first) call 1-800-Cleanup to find out where to take stuff, or later come to the online site.
Very tricky to position a site that doesn't sell anything. Earth 911 gives away information, which is the business model for the new marketing.
So now the site's about done, to launch again on Earth Day (April 22). It is in the midst of several large partnerships, one with the United States Post Office, and two others to be announced. These paartnerships should be a triple win: a win for the USPS, which wants to let everyone know that it takes paper for recycling, a win for the consumer, who now knows this because we will publicize it for them, and a win for the business, which gets to continue.
As part of the launch, and because I'm such a fan of social media, we decided to hold a video contest called "Make Every Day Earth Day." We put the contest up on the site. But I thought I would try to reach out by advertising on Facebook, where we already have a page. Y'know, integrated marketing? Y'know, go where the conversations are already happening about your product or service? In this case our "product is Earth Day, and I thought that, since most of the people on Facebook are young, they'd 1)be interested in saving the environment they live in and 2)own a camera or webcam and be into putting their ideas on video.
So I drafted an ad for Facebook. All I said was, "Earth Day Thoughts? Enter the Earth911 video contest." And you clicked through to the entry page on the site.
It was very easy to create the ad, target the audience, and price the ad. I went to bed thinking I had it done.
But when I awoke, I had a message from Facebook saying my ad had been "disapproved." WHOA. Why?
For improper punctuation. Every line of an ad has to be followed by some type of proper punctuation according to Facebook guidelines.. Hmmm. I actually have a Ph.D. in English, and taught it in college for ten years before starting my own business. In my long life, I've corrected more punctuation than Facebook has ever seen :-)
Some algorithm was off doing its own thing, and my ad didn't fit its parameters. This strikes me as quite interesting, since Facebook is presumably trying to sell advertising. It didn't give me any suggestions, didn't fix the ad. Just pointed me to a page on best practices. I very nearly gave up, except I'm not that kind of gal.
I made a second ad, pretty much the same, and posted it this morning. Still waiting for approval. This is a big experiment for me in marketing via social media. Will you let me know if you see the "ad"for Earth911 this week. http://twitter.com/hardaway or francine.hardaway at gmail.com. Thanks!
What's the value of social media to the creator? Charlene Li at Forrester has a social media "ladder of participation" that points out the small percentage of people who create content compared to the much greater percentage of people who collect it, or consume it.
I think more people should aspire to be creators, because the barriers to creation using social media tools are so low and the rewards of Web 2.0 are so rich. I've come to the conclusion that if I were teaching English now (as I did about twenty-five years ago), I would have every student at least create a blog. Why? Because blogging and learning are so powefully interrelated. Blogging not only showcases what the writer knows, but forces her to keep on learning in order to keep on blogging in order to keep on learning. Do I have to go on?
Example: I've been beauty-blogging for RealSelf.com as i try to contribute to its increasing success. As a beauty blogger, I've been trying new products and reading about things I would never do (butt-lift) or wish I had done years ago (breast augmentation). Wow, am I on a steep learning curve.
I never realized how hard everybody is looking for the Fountain of Youth. Since the year 2000, the percentage of the American population having cosmetic surgery has dramatically risen. According to a study by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, this is not a phenomenon confined to 90210: a million Hispanic women had "procedures" last year, and the number of Asian-Americans having cosmetic surgery has increased 246%.
I also never realized that every dermatologist and plastic surgeon on the planet has started a skin care line, because it's the best "marketing" tool for surgical procedures. Start taking care of your skin and you are looking in the mirror. At some point, those creams stop working, and you might opt for the laser of the knife.
Actually, this is a cynical view, because I've tried about six products so far on my own face (so I could write about them, but also because I'm not averse to turning back the hands of time) and many of the ones I have tried work VERY well. (Go visit Beauty Cred at Real Self to see what Nancy and I really like). The non-invasive treatments are amazinglyg effective. And if something isn't effective, the RealSelf readers will let us know!
My last big lesson (for now) is that people are remarkably willing and able to share their experiences to help perfect strangers. At Real Self we see the horror stories about cosmetic procedures, topical skin conditions, and inexperienced aesheticians. And we see the cost differentials for the same procedure in different geographies.
I find this experience incredibly rich and fulfilling. Would you like to see a "before and after" photo?
http://www.Earth911.com has been around for fifteen years. During that time, it has developed an extensive, nationwide database of recycling sites. We know where all the recycling sites are in any zip code, and what kinds of products they accept. It's all user-generated data, coming from municipalities, states, and other organizations who have environmental coordinators. It's up-to-date and accurate.
Because we have all this data, we get a lot of hits. Sometimes as many as 200,000 hits a day.We have people who have been coming to the site since before it WAS a site -- since it was 1-800-CLEANUP. It is trusted. These are good attributes.
But in Internet years, Earth911 is a venerable domain. It has had content for as long as most of us remember being on the Internet. So it has a unique problem: the company is fifteen years old, and Earth Day, our big holiday, is thirty years old. How do we bring something NEW to Earth Day this year?
Not many destination sites have this problem. Most of them sell a product, like http://www.Amazon.com, or sell information, like http://www.WebMD.com, or http://www.NYTimes.com. The sites that sell information change automatically as new information is discovered or reported. Some of our content does change, but much of it is perennially useful -- like where to take your old car battery if you live in 85018, or how to safely dispose of your old computer and monitor.
Not to mention the fact that Al Gore put the plight of the planet on everyone's lips this year. So how do we stop Earth Day from being "white noise," something in the background that people don't really notice?
In our case, we have decided to use social media. We are sponsoring a user-generated video contest. We want videos that show how to make every day Earth Day, which is what's happening now that we are -- as a planet -- finally thinking of our own sustainability. Here's the link to the video contest:http://earth911.org/blog/2008/03/17/your-world-your-vision/.
The more people who enter, the happier we will be. We're not selling anything but a concept: sustainability. Our sales force, however, should be our visitors.
Moving this domain into social media is happening on all fronts: our site's platform is Wordpress, we have a Facebook page with fans, and a Twitter presence. What else should we be doing?
In 1998 I met Robert Johnson, who ran a small software company out of a dark office in Mesa Arizona. I think he had five employees.
The company, then called Environmental Support Solutions, was producing a diskette with software that helped businesses track their refrigerant emissions, and Robert had gone into this inglorious business because the EPA had just changed the laws about those emissions and forced people to keep track of them. What's more, the new laws were not consistent from state to state. And companies couldn't keep up with the changes.
It's only a slight exaggeration to say that one person in the company wrote the software, another one shrink-wrapped the software, another marketed it, and the last person went around to customers and trained them on the new regulations and told them why they should buy software to keep track of emissions.
But Robert Johnson had a white board, and on the white board was a vision. It was of an integrated platform of software tools that would help large companies track everything they had to track--not only refrigerant emissions, but also indoor air quality, waste management, health and safety, even toxic chemicals. You would access this platfom over the Internet. He explained the vision to me, and I fell in love with it, even though the world was still using modems. I had just left Intel, and I knew how big companies had begun to use the Internet.
The problem was, nobody really cared about the environment in 1998. Sales of ESS software were merely compliance-driven.
Fast forward ten years. Now the Internet has come into its own and so has concern for the environment. ESS has over a hundred employees, a global client base, and a web-based, fully integrated Enterprise Suite for managing governance, risk and compliance. In April, it will be hosting EXPO 2008, a best-practices conference for people in the enterprise who are responsible for sustainability initiatives.
These initiatives are no longer driven by compliance, but by stakeholders who care about sustainability and by CEOs who see it as an integral part of the bottom line, if not an actual business opportunity.
Robert is off to Asia today, helping developing nations avoid making costly environmental sacrifices as they industrialize. Still the visionary, he sees ESS's solutions being used in the future by companies on every continent. He still has the whiteboard.
Do
you belong to any online communities, and if so, what are they and why
do you find them useful? Online communities are not as easy to form as
you would think, although we all hear about Facebook and MySpace and
Twitter as if it took nothing to build one.
As part of Stealthmode's mission, I've been helping some sites
develop their online communities lately, and I've been studying the
issue to try to find out what makes them work. The four sites are
completely different. To give them all a little plug, they are:
Real Self, a beauty site on
which users evaluate beauty products and treatments, mostly having to
do with anti-aging. I love it because the users tell us "what's worth
it" and share their stories.
EmpowHer, a newly launched
health information site for women, where women are encouraged to
exchange information in the hope of receiving better treatment for
conditions such as post-partum depression, heart disease, and thyroid
disorders. I love this one because the founder started it to help other
women avoid things such as unnecessary hysterectomy, which is still
very prevalent in the US.
St. Lukes Health Initiatives, a foundation that is trying to help Arizona better its health care. I am part of a group blog at Arizona Health Futures..
You can become a blogger there too, if you have an interest. SLHI is
also developing an online collaboration among the not-for-profits it
funds. This one I love because it's mission is capacity building for
nonprofits and public health.
The fourth is Earth911.org, a
national database of recycling sites that is fifteen years old and very
successful, but has not had an online community before. We're trying to
launch a year of product stewardship information and idea exchange for
small business as well as individuals.
Now a bit of history. For ten years, I've had a primitive online
community at Yahoo Groups. It's the Stealthmode Group, and it sends one
email a week about what I'm doing to a group that now numbers close to
2000 people. About 1-2% of the recipients write me back, and therefore
I call myself the community manager for this group, which cannot write
to each other (I do that to hold down the number of emails). I would
call this group successful, because people also pass around these
emails to their friends.
Most of the recipients of these emails don't read blogs and don't
understand RSS. They just think my life is interesting enough for a
weekly email.
My business partner also runs an online community that's ten years old. Its called The AZIPA List,
and it consists of an announcement list for Arizona Internet
Professionals Association and related events in the community, and a
discussion list in which people can ask for help with technology
problems. There's a separate jobs list, and a separate local tech
newswire.
This list is also run through YahooGroups.
OK. Now to the buried lede.
Two of the sites I'm now helping are built on Drupal. They are
loaded with features. The other two are built on Wordpress. A little
difficult to manipulate.
Conclusion: what makes a successful online community? A single,
easy-to-use feature. Click here to participate. Do only this one thing.
After you get your participants "addicted," go ahead and add another
thing. Most of us are too busy to learn how to use all the features of
a full-featured online community. For me, an experienced software user,
and a very transparent person, it's still easiest to Twitter. It's easy
to Utter, but it's not so easy to listen to the Utterz of others. Video
adds an entire other layer, although Seesmic is about the simplest video I've found.
I've led you through this entire analysis to make you understand
that it's all about KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid). You can always add
when the people are willing to learn because they see the value in the
community.
Hat tip to Jeremiah Owyang and Guy Kawasaki
for the tweets that helped me collate my thoughts this morning. The
Dawn Patrol. These guys are always awake, always aware, always online.
For the past four or five months, I've been helping out my friends at RealSelf.com by writing blog posts about beauty products and treatments. I blog under the pseudonym "A Natural Beauty," the somewhat inappropriate name I inherited from a predecessor who must have been a lot younger than I am.
Well, for the first time today I met the founder of RealSelf face-to-face: I flew up to its offices in Seattle for a meeting.
And there I learned the bigger picture. Although I am writing a small daily blog, the site itself is becoming gi-normous. Tom and his team have built a database of more than 150 different anti-aging beauty treatments, 6000 products, 10,000 providers, and 150 different topics. Users come to the site and find out information, and then they can review treatments and products. The main question a reviewer has to answer is "was it worth it?" and the treatments are evaluated for cost, pain and benefit.
I got involved with this company because I loved the idea of dispensing good information in a market so saturated with product hype and emotional overlays. I love what Tom is doing. Disclosure: I get paid to blog for the site. But there's no chance I would do it if I didn't believe in the cause. I think of RealSelf as a valuable consumer service, especially since many of these products and services are very costly, prey on someone's fear of getting old, and may not be as effective as the marketing materials say they are.
